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.

Ragbag and Saint Valentine's Day Massacre

This morning i stumbled over the Picasa Web Album from Josh Drescher. Some funny pictures in it, check them out. The latest quirk from the BlackBerry-Generation seems to be using social networks like Twitter, posting short lines online about what you're doing right now. Paul Barnett and Josh Drescher are no exception. ;)

Warhammervault posted news about my Lost Vale map. They did not link to my blog from the news, but directly to the map graphic tho. Better bookmark my blog, in case the map gets updated later on.

Magnus says Karak-Azgal is the largest server in Europe, and also well balanced.

The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre will come to a Twisted Tower next to you soon. A bunch of bloggers located in the US got mysterious love letters from Mythic. Regis over at Wizards & Wenches sums the whole thing up nicely, he thinks the poems hint towards Death Night as a live event in February. The interesting thing are the numbers and letters on the back of each card. So far 10/13 cards have been posted by bloggers. A nice marketing stunt from Mythic and I'm sure many of the bloggers feel happy about a fun hello from Mythic.
BTW Regis, now you outed yourself as a Lost (TV series) fan... saw what you did there in your blog header.

Brew that puts hair on yer chest

I'm still working on two longer posts to write, one about exploration in WAR and the other about my personal view about the state of the game. For the exploration one I'm still deciding about how much in depth i want to go, as i don't really want to post my secret traveling routes across zones but on the other hand want to give my readers at least one or two smaller things to explore themselves. I have tons of screenshots for that one tho. The state of the game writeup is getting longer and longer. Right now I'm tending towards just taking parts out of it and write about certain aspects/features from time to time, as i think a complete writeup will result in a wall of text no one will read.

The patch 1.1c notes state there have been some improvements for the blurry textures issue. Hmm... for many the issue just recently surfaced, what is so hard to check the code before and after to find out what got messed up? The patch fixed the ground texture flipping in IC for me, but not the NPC/Player textures or from the doodads. Luckily i found this thread and the advice seems to fix it for me. Basicly you change the \Warhammer Online\user\UserSettings.xml by yourself (change it to texture_Cache="1.00") via text editor and then make the file read-only so WAR can't mess it up again. This works for me, maybe it helps some of you as well. Don't forget that you can't change/save any options as long as the file is read-only. Apparently the "messy" patch can't decide properly about the RAM for some gfx-cards and that causes the problem. Seriously Mythic, you must be kidding me... i still hope one day we'll get proper advanced video/graphic settings for WAR.

The Keg End event started today. Again a lot of tasks & things to do. All over the land are camps with Brew-Thirsty Ogres & Drunken Gnoblars and beer kegs. After the intial bonus a full camp will yield 90inf (10 per mob and 5 per keg). Be careful not to use AoE skills while fighting close to the barrels. While you can't target them initially, you can still destroy them very easily with AoE damage. Once you killed all the mobs you can drink the kegs. There are also camps of Explosive Snotlings around the world. Once you tagged the Snotlings it does not matter if they explode, you still gain the 10inf and can loot them. Inside the RvR lakes (close to the keep entrances) you'll find lvl 38 heros: Massive Ogre Butcher & Massive Ogre Irongut (those take away morale, nasty). They yield solo 600inf and drop 3-6 of the event items. They have a massive amount of HP tho, takes me around 10min to solo one. The Keg End mobs drop Dwarf Beer Keg (need 100 for event task and each yields 5inf), Common Firework (screenshot, random color), Impressive Firework (screenshot) and Magnificent Firework (screenshot). IMO the event is a bit too much Stunty focused, but heh.. what better reason to stomp an extra stunty along the way. If you want to check out more possible events according to the warhammer lore, check here.

Basic reward is the title "The Drunkard", if you complete all tasks you'll gain the title "Keg Slayer". There is a rare world drop as well: Battle Brew Backpack. While i don't have one (yet), i found the above screenshot of the stats from the T4 version (there are again 4 different cloaks, pending on tier dropped) and it looks pretty decent. Again, if you want to check out the event go to the US website, as GOA didn't even manage to link all screenshots right. They really should start to pay some proper people to update their website... and while they're at it fix the Realmwar Pages. Did i mention the player statues inside the capitol cities are not working for EU either? GOA still adds one fail to the next, if it was GOA developing the game i would have canceled my subscription already.

Some of the new loot from the city dungeons and bastion stair looks really good. Especially some jewelry from the city dungeons looks appealing to me. We found a few pices during our latest dungeon crawls... it will be interesting what more there is to discover. Trash mobs inside the dungeons have a small chance to drop those as well from what we discovered.

City Dungeons
of the Warden
of the Watcher

Bastion Stair
of the Bloodborne
of the Bloodcry

As a last note: We had server transfers towards Karak-Azgal from three different servers. The influx of new players is very welcome. Finally the Inevitable City feels alive again and as the "new players" with their guilds & alliances are out to try making a name for themselves, open RvR activity has greatly increased. A warm welcome to all those who recently joined our server! Oh and btw, Thirst is still recruiting, should you search for a new home. ;)

The Maw Fortress under attack on Karak-Azgal!

Yesterday evening came down a well planned attack from the Order forces who took two zones in a short time span and then moved over to the Maw. The good news is, zone locking works - we have been trading zones back and forth for some time now on Karak-Azgal. The way it works:
a) Take control over Battle Objectives & Keeps, b) Grind the PQs in that area, c) Have people win scenarios connected to that zone, d) Kill people in open RvR inside that zone

The zone control system is not working very well atm tho. Why do you have to grind PQs? I can cope with the scenarios as they offer a balanced environment, but PQs? c'mon... its also a problem right now if a) no enemies show up (no idea how long the victory points over time mechanism will take) or b) if you have some unorganized idiots from your realm feeding the attacking realm "free" kills. If the fight is very balanced it's a problem as well, you have a full evening of nice RvR, but nothing is happening in the end and you don't have the feeling of accomplishment. Should there be maybe a very small attacker advantage of some kind? At least there should be something happening... and be it some kind of big ass Commander spawning when you fight the zone for several hours - does not need to be too powerful but at least give you a show, if you know what i mean. RvR is fun, but after hours and hours of it and nothing happening... you will get bored.

The bad news: Right now the servers can't handle large scale RvR. That simple. My guess is we had around 250 players fighting in the same area yesterday and it resulted in a very instable server. The lag at times was immense, you could not use your mount or any skills as the delay was around 20secs. There was a bunch of players standing in front of the Fortress door, as the lag prevented us to use it. One time i was alone and de-synced from the server... could run around wherever i want but not interact anymore. Frequent crashes were there and when you tried to log back into the battle zone the game kicked you back to the character selection screen - not once, but like 10 times in a row. Also the campaign was acting a bit crazy, resetting zones back and forth and also resetting the defense timer. Mark Jacobs announced Mythic will try to implement some fixes that should help with the Fortress fights and large scale RvR. Well, they better deliver and not just talk about it. If Mythic won't be able to fix these issue during the upcoming month, IMO many more will quit WAR. It's a crucial part of the game - worst case scenario, if they can't fix their server/software to handle it, they'll need to instance those fights. But let's hope their technicians were able to find some solution... a few people from beta say it was running better back then. So maybe its not due to limitations of the game and can be adjusted.

Especially for tanks/melees a lag zerg fest is not much fun at all. Beside all the "ghost" players (they are not there anymore but the server still renders them at their old position) you try to attack, if you charge the enemy often the enemy player rendering kicks in again and what you thought were just a few Order standing there ends up being a full warband - with you right in the middle of it. It's a trap! Overall i have to say Order did very well on the attack and without all the server problems they might have posed a real threat. As we had the shorter way into the battle zone and got organized quickly we could utilize that due to crashes and such their warbands got split up. We made a large excursion when we saw our chance and it worked, we annihilated their attacking forces in the end. But kudos for that attack, very well done!

Our alliance had a bunch of warbands going and beside some minor communication flaws defense worked very well. Once the Maw went under attack and the call to arms went out people did abandon *everything* they were doing and came to help - even the lower level ones to eg. pour some oil and such. It was quite cool to see the guild chat/system messages... once the situation went serious everyone jumped on their mains and were riding into battle. The atmosphere really felt like something big is going down and everyone was eager to participate. That's the feeling Mythic need to capture for those large scale events. Thirst created a warband together with our friends from Rigor Mortis and we had a lot of fun during the evening. We laughed a lot on vent and in the end, when the fight cooled down we started some tactical training to run in an arrow formation and charge the Order warcamp, like you can see on the picture. We also tried to write Order some messages, but did not have enough people to write in a way that could be seen. ;)