Fortress Fights & Zone Domination

With the recently introduced zone domination system (ZDS) slowly more and more people feel compelled to jump to their capitols rescue. One aspect of the system is to make it easier to flip zones if no defenders show up. In addition to me it looks like it makes it also easier for smaller forces to play a vitale role in defending a zone. Of course if you're getting steamrolled by a huuuge zerg, there is not much you can do against it. But walling yourself into a keep/fortress you can prevent a takeover for quite a while even with a smaller force, if done right. If you want to read a good sum-up for the ZDS, read How To: Zone Dominate at lagwar.

Part of the intended change was so there would be more capitol city raids and players could experience the "endgame content" (quotation marks as Mythic still needs to work hard on this) more often. Well.. this change did it, there are city sieges happening much more often. On Karak-Azgal they are happening more frequently as well now. But one major problem was not adressed by Mythic with the latest changes: What happens on the servers where there is a huge faction imbalance (talking about active RvR, not player numbers) due to whatever reason? With the capitols now losing city rank, some server factions are basicly locked out of the rank 40 city instances six days a week. The capitol needs rank 2 for guild tavern and lower of the two rank 40 dungeons (in IC thats BWE) and rank 3 for the higher rank 40 city dungeon. How would you feel if your capitol gets bombed back to Stone Age and the assaults keep coming so you can't rebuild it fast enough? Doing a lot of city PQs just to be able to get rank 3 again to enter the dungeon, next day your capitol was attacked again. Reads nice on paper, but try to imagine how you'd feel about that with only very few options to access proper dungeons for endgame content. This needs to be adressed. Every time a city is pushed into a contested state it loses a rank is a bit too much if the enemy is inside your city every night and the city dungeons are the only shot at Sentinel gear. My personal focus is Lost Vale, so I'm not bothered that much about it - but others are. Read: The Darker Side of Zone Domination at Knights of the Feathered Hats.

Interesting tidbit i found on the US forum: Victory Points from empty city siege instances are worth less to overall Zone Control. Reads to me like more power to small organized teams that beat the crap out of an instance full of n00bs. Question arises tho: With this change, what happens if no one would show to defend their own capitol, could the attackers gain zone control at all? The zone control system is another example at how Mythic fails to communicate such details to the players. I know people should read patchnotes & forums, but they don't. There needs to be a proper RvR guide at the official websites to spoon-feed peeps those important systems.

On Monday (?) evening we were defending the Inevitable City against a larger Order force. Not really the city, but the Maw fortress. Despite having much smaller numbers, we were able to fend the attackers off by walling ourself properly in, inside the fortress, and preventing another zone lock. While the whole thing was fun, there are a few things that are still not working like they should. The lag was awful again, seconds until your skills hit, sometimes attackers not rendering properly on your screen, etc. When my respawn timer went out it took a minute or longer until i did respawn. I know the EU servers had some trouble these days, so hopefully this was the cause and will improve fast, but others say their RvR performance went much worse with 1.2 patch. One more thing *very* annoying was that the fortress lord was constantly jumping between upper and lower floor. Mythic said they fixed the lord pulling down, but apparently they did not properly yet. If Order could pull him down by intention or his leash was just wacky, i can't say. In addition the guards he spawned behaved in a similar way, teleporting up & down and also were behaving pretty braindead, their AI was a major fail.

Like i wrote in another post already, I'm a bit disappointed to see many guilds only running certain combinations (3-4) of classes as they can use their skills together to a rather overpowered combination. IMO that's something Mythic should look into as well, feels weird not only from the immersion standpoint.

EDIT: Just saw a good recap at the US forum about some of the primary complains concerning AoE is out of control.

Because it fits the context somewhat, also read Things To Do and Not To Do in Scenarios at Wizard & Wenches if you haven't yet. Now read it again.