Altdorf burns... again! (Averheim server US)

After the first raid on Altdorf, where players supposedly used some bugs to get the deed done, yesterday happened the first large scale raid that managed to control Altdorf (1, 2). Apparently around 300 members of the alliance Retribution (guilds: PRX - The Professionals, Cadre Quietus, Xen on Onslaught, Dusk Till Dawn, Isolated, Sinners and Misery) started at 7am EST to take keeps and around 12am they were fighting in Altdorf. Most of the alliance were organized very well with voice communication from the looks of it and the whole raid was setup a week in advance. During the five hours of preparation to raid the capitol, they did not meet much resistance. While on the one hand it was early hours and less people online, there are also voices from Order players that complain - again - that not enough people care about what's going on in open RvR. When it comes to the "important" fortress raids, every player gets an onscreen message once the battle moves over to a fortress and also gets notice of one is captured. At least then people should start to move towards the battle zone quickly.

On a sidenote: On Karak-Azgal the Maw was under attack by Order yesterday night. It was a battle 50:20 in the beginning and from those 20 defending Destruction around 50% was from Thirst. When i noticed what was going on i headed over as well (and I'm only rank 28), but the battle had moved on already. It was nice to see that a few more Destruction showed up at the Maw to help to defend it. When one of the fortresses is under attack, do care! Shout inside the capitol for more people to come and defend. If the capitol is under direct attack there is a bottleneck and it's harder to help defend the city then to help defend the fortress before.

From what the participating Destruction players said, it was no cake walk as the upgraded NPC defenses can't just be zerged but also require some tactics. Most participating players were around rank 30-34, they took the T3 keeps and also guarded the altdorf gates later on as only approx. 40 players from each side could enter the city instance per scenario. They took down the head priest of the sigmar temple, but the master wizard (Lord, rank 48, 4 skulls) in the BW college did provide some serious pain. Quote: "He oneshot me (a chosen with 600+ toughness, 700+ elemental resist, 8500+ hp) with a crit for 8721 damage (1962 mitigated!)."

The Destruction players never made it to the Altdorf king tho. The PvE content inside the city seems to be rather challenging, at least players should be rank 40 to have a better shot. Looks like Mark Jacobs announced some tweaks to the zone capture system, that will make early morning raids much harder to pull off, when he commented on the first siege (on KEP) earlier, but MJ said he'll look into all the data from the raid and will announce his finding about system working vs. needs more tweaks later on.

When the players are done plundering the city i hope we get more info and pictures - the warband was in Altdorf for about three hours, should have gotten plenty. Check Dusk Till Dawn for some more pictures. In addition i found a video from the raid on the last T4 Dwarf keep. I also found a photstream by Isphet on flickr with pics. The most interesting part of info from this so far was a sidenote from Mark that how well your raid is doing with the PvE stuff inside the city determines the length of the city capture. So there is no such thing as to capture the city and leave it alone for 24h. Just saw that Andy clarified the capture process here:

# You must capture two fortresses in tier 4 within 12 hours of each other.
# To capture those fortresses, you must seize and hold the neutral tier 4 and your opponent’s zone in two of the three racial pairings (after which you only have 60 minutes to capture said racial fortress).
# After all of this you fight in a contested, not captured, Altdorf/Inevitable City for control of the city, much in the same manner as a regular zone would be. In the case of Altdorf, after you have secured the city and the defending force is ejected from the city you have one hour to complete the Bright Wizard College and Sigmar’s Temple public quests. In the case of The Inevitable City,The Monolith and The Sacellum. Should you fail to beat these two Encounters within the hour, the city will be reopened to the defenders and they will be allowed to wipe out any attackers left in their City.
# If you complete the two Encounters as an attacker however, you lock the city down for 20 -24 hours and get access to the King Instance..
# Contribution points towards the capture of a city are scaled based on the population of both sides, not just one lump sum. This ensures that a defending force with smaller numbers has a fighting chance to hold off the invaders. However, you can overcome the scaling with a sufficiently large force.

Toe-to-Toe: Claiming a Keep

Yesterday night Thirst, with the help of Rigor Mortis & Da Meanest an' Greenest, took back the T4 keep "Ironskin Skar" in Black Crag from the filthy hands of Order. I did not participate personally, but will use this as an example how to claim a keep and what it costs. Before you can claim a keep, of course first you have to conquer it. So gather a strong warband and find one occupied by the forces of Order, preferably already claimed by an Order guild. ;)



You can check which realm owns a keep by looking at the mouse-over window. It will also show if a guild, in this example Thirst, has claimed that keep. So after you conquered the keep and slaughtered all the NPCs (including the Keep Lord of course) in there, you can claim the "empty" keep. If you just leave it, NPCs from your realm will repopulate the keep by themselves. If you want to claim the keep (Note: Your guild needs rank 14 to be able to claim) for your guild, after the fight you'll have to head to the top of the structure. IF you are a standard bearer for your guild, you'll be able to interact with one of the banner poles on top and you can place your banner there, claiming the keep.

It's important to note: The claiming standard bearer won't be able to carry a standard as long as the guild keeps that keep, because he "uses" his to claim it. Once your guild claimed the keep (your guild can only have one keep claimed at a time), the banners will transform into your guild heraldry, showing colors, patterns and emblem depending on your guild rank. In addition the Keep Lord will be hired by your guild and will show the guild tag as well.

But of course such service does not come for free. If you intend to claim keeps, you better fill up your war chest in advance with gold. The costs for keep maintenance are:
T3 Keep Maintenance =  6 gold/hour (144g per day)
T4 Keep Maintenance = 10 gold/hour (240g per day)

Maybe a good idea to talk about guild tithes & taxes or how guild members donate money in advance. We did not really plan for the keep claiming and had to realize our funds inside the guild vault were not enough to hold it for long. Next time then... ;)

So you wonder what the benefits are for paying maintenance and defending a claimed keep? Well, should someone attack "your" keep you'll get a warning in chat - so better make your way over quick when that happens. The benfits of a claimed keep include, that your guild banner tactics (the ones "equipped" in the banner used to claim) will be applied to the specified RvR area for ALL realm members to benefit from. In addition your guild will earn experience over time while holding the Keep. If a Keep (that is claimed by a guild) is captured, then the Standard associated with the Keep is considered captured.

Raid on Altdorf Capitol (on Karak Eight Peaks)

Wow, while reading some other blogs, Book of Grudges pointed me to the fact that on Karak Eight Peaks (KEP) there was a raid on Altdorf main city (1,2) going on tuesday. That's pretty fast, after we heard it would be such an epic expedition to gain control about the enemies capitol. O.o
Apparently around 19:00 Destruction players started to raid T4 Keeps and did not meet much resistance, either because not enough higher rank players were online or simply because still too few people care. The taking of keeps continued until around 23:00 and after midnight Altdorf was open for an assault. Some people claimed that there was a bug that did let players enter the last fortress through the postern door, while some say a few classes (anyone know more about this?) will get skills to use these doors later on. Apparently it's enough to capture two racial pairing, so taking over two T4 Fortresses is enough to be able to move forward on the opponent's capitol.

From what i could research the following happens once a capitol is under assault: The city becomes contested (which will result in the loss of one city rank!) and invaders can enter it. The whole city becomes an RvR zone and everyone inside collects victory points. The points are collected by participating in one of the two public quests (with opposing goals) that show up inside the city, involving killing enemy players & citizens and burning down tents and stuff (for the attacker). A new scenario will open up as well - in Altdorf it's called Altdorf War Quarters - plus there are battlefield objectives inside the city to capture as well. During these activities, both sides will collect victory points. Once one side can accumulate enough points to tip the scales, one of two things happen: If the defenders win, they attackers are pushed out of the city and all T4 resets to neutral. If the attackers win, the capitol is captured (will result in an additional city rank loss!) and the opposing side is pushed out of the city and the winner locks it down for 36 hours. During this time the PvE content (PQs, dungeons, King encounter - if the king is killed the city will lose two additional city ranks!) are open for the attackers to enjoy. After the time is up the city and T4 will reset.
We pillage, we plunder we rifle and loot Drink up me hearties, Yo-ho.

One important thing to note: Apparently you need to be rank 32+ to be able to help defending the capitol! If you're lower rank, you can't enter the city in a contested state. While the city is contested your new "hub" for bank, etc. will be some black market at the border of the city. Question remains, if Altdorf is only rank 2 at the moment of the raid, would it be possible for Destruction to raid the king's quarters as the leader's hall is not open before rank 3? I assume you'll need to conquer the PQs & dungeons inside the locked down capitol before you can attack the king? The decrease of the captured city rank will not affect the current capture and only take effect after the city resets.

Some issues stay with the attack on KEP... the attackers did not capture the city as apparently the control bar was barely moving. Was this a bug or because the defenders did better? As there were so few defenders before, this seems doubtable. The question in the first place should be: If one faction manges to level up faster then the other (two hardcore guilds would apparently be enough), there is little the defending realm can do if they got not enough players rank 32+ online during that time. I know this will even out later on, but at the moment it poses a problem. I also hope this city raid will raise awareness for every player to bother should there be T4 keep attacks going on. I know many don't bother as renown points are better in scenarios - at least that's the impression i gained when i see how few bother to travel to an assaulted keep quickly. As a last sidenote: Once the enemy city becomes contested you can pick up a quest at the T4 warcamp to capture the enemy city - reward 3k XP and 30s. Yay!

Attack on Keep "Stoneclaw Castle"

Yesterday night a larger warband from Thirst members plus some randoms gathered in Hellfang Ridge to assault the RvR zone in High Pass. As we did not have many healers with us, after a small visit to Stoneclaw Castle, we decided to take Battle Objectives first. Usually those are guarded by one Hero and a bunch of other NPCs, which are not hard to take down with a larger group. I don't know if it changes with different ranks/renown, but i got 400RP for capturing battle objectives. Once we started taking over objectives we were opposed by a large group mainly from BOON Control and Vengeance. Fun!

The best battle was in and around Ogrund's Tavern, which has one small entrance with a door you can open/close. Due to the collision together with some skills this makes for a very fun combat experience, trying to break in or hold a building like this. If you don't have enough healing power its very hard to take over such an object tho, when you got skilled players holding the doorway. Even with a squad of Black Orcs using Raze and Hold The Line! The battle went back and forth, we took this battle objective, they took that. Some great open RvR action.

In the end we wanted to assault the keep despite our lack of healers. This is when the strange stuff started to happen: Some of us, including me, could not see the keep anymore. We saw only a few walls or parts of the towers and the rest was gone. The funny part was we could just run inside, as there were no walls for us. If "inside" most NPCs and players were "out of range", only maybe 20% could be attacked. I can only imagine how this must have looked for the players inside the keep, using a knockback and send someone flying through the wall. Butler was hit by the bug as well, think he frapsed it - so i might post a vid should i get one. This bug (probably due to server lag?) was really annoying and due to queues you did not really want to restart the client. First time i have encountered something major like this.

On a sidenote, phunqe on Karak-Azgal used the search function some during prime time and came up with estimated server population caps: Refering to his thread it looks like the population caps are 1500 players per side, 3000 players per server at any time. Feels about right, tho i can't say that all the zones on my server feel populated, sometimes you can walk for quite a while until you meet someone.

Tip of the Day: Did you know the sergeants at battle objectives will give you a 30min buff, when you talk to them? The type of buff you get differs per objective and you can see those in the "small print" when you mouse-over the battle objective on the map.