Finished another guild night, the T2 Seige Night run by the Gaiscioch Family. We are all still figuring out the best way to hold and complete in 1.4, and last night was no different. Personally, I feel that 1.4 has hurt the ability of a smaller force to hold out against the odds. The inability of smaller warbands and groups to adequately defend keeps has led to the "round robin" effect in zones. Order will push Empire, while Destro closes Dwarf. They meet briefly in Elf until one side realizes they can't roll the other side...they then move onto the now unlocked zones in Empire and Dwarf. I realize that this dynamic is most obvious in T2 and T3 due to the fact there are fewer places for Warbands to move to, as well as, the small delay from a fully locked down pairing to an unlocked pairing.
Right now the strategy is to ignore the enemy as much as possible while getting resources to your keep quickly. Sounds obvious, but this does force a warband to split its forces which does provide the opportunity for a smaller defensive force to move in and grab BOs. There is one dynamic that I believe needs fixed, however. Right now if Order holds a BO (Kinshels), and we leave for a minute to cover the resource carrier and a Witch Elf comes in a grabs the flag. We have three minutes to get back, kill the WE and recapture the BO, which now LOCKS the BO for a full five minutes. What should happen is we get the BO back and its moved directly to the generating stage but the BO is still recapturable. The only time a lockout timer should be engaged is when the other side takes is and HOLDS it for the required five minutes.
Now last night the Destro in Empire did show the validity of small group tactics that may hold some promise. We had one full WB and a second with just over a group spread between three BOs (Kinshel's, Crypt and Morr). We continued to hold the BOs, but what looked like a full WB of Destro floated in the middle taking out the Resource carriers and looting the remains. For the twenty minutes they did this they were able to keep up with us in increasing their Keep's rank...even though they only held one BO. Eventually, we got Mandred's Hold to four stars and pushed to the Destro keep.
The key to T2 and T3 keeps right now is twofold. One, you MUST have the single shot siege equipment setup to kill the oil and siege guns that spawn on the keep. The increased damage of siege will kill people in one to two shots and therefore must be eliminated. Second, careful coordination of the griffins to ensure people with the siege engine buff can rapidly reach the keep and set their equipment up before the their timers run out. I wish that the timers were moved from three minutes to five minutes as it takes a large amount of time to move to the keep in certain pairing.
In our case the warband leader called out the targets and we quickly removed the siege cannons on the wall and broke down the door. After that it was a easy issue to kill the two groups of Destro in the keep. Although there was a bug that kept the lvl 55 Champions on the third floor at the top of the ramp protecting a shaman, they Champions are supposed to despawn when the door goes down, but they weren't until the FLAG was pulled. This leads to my last point, that the removal of keep lords have removed the ability of smaller groups to hold keeps in the face of a larger numbers of attackers. Now, if there are equal numbers of defenders and attackers then not having a keep lord is a good thing and the keep changes hand because of the actions of equal amount of players. However, a small group that forgoes the easy way of leaving the zone and fights for defense is getting screwed. Perhaps if the AAO of an area is 150% or 175% then the keep lord spawns might be a viable solution.
All in all...a great night of fun.
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