Brainwave: Keep Sieges!

Just an idea I had to make keep takes more interesting and less of a stalemate dependant on numbers. I mentioned before that there needs to be other ways to get to the Lords room so that defending players can't swamp the stairs and make taking it impossible. The problem with this is balancing it so that when there aren't many players defending they can still put up some reasonable defence, but gives less advantage to the use of far superior numbers.



This one's a bit of a puzzler. Any advantage that you give to the attackers will inevitably make it a hell of a lot harder for a small (say 2 parties) force on the defensive. The fairest way to work this would be for the server to monitor the number of defenders in the lords room and the number of attackers and alter the keep accordingly.



For example, if there was 2+ WB defending the keep and only 1 attacking, extra siege pads for towers to be placed on would spawn or Maybe the level of the champion guards would be lowered. This would stop the keep being an almost insurmountable challenge for the attackers, and hopefully they would stick around for longer. I've no idea wether this would be possible to implement or how it would affect game performance but it seems like the most logical option to me. Obviously though, it could be abused. I'm sure you'd hear some arsehole WB leader telling people to "GTFO or the attackers get another siege tower!!". On second thoughts perhaps not then.



Failing that, how about different options open up after a period of time. Say the door takes 20 minutes to respawn once its broken. After 10 minutes, if the keep hasn't been captured, two siege towers can be constructed. If after another 5 minutes the keep still isnt taken then a third siege tower (or maybe some other option- like an orcapult!) becomes available. Hopefully this would encourage attacking WB's to stay the duration instead of sodding off as soon as they see a mass of tanks and healers at the top of the ramp. This still would mean making alot of changes to the game, I hope that mythic are working on something like this but I've got a feeling it might be a while before we see it.

Finally, the easiest change to make to help break into a well defended lord room would be a battle standard like the ones I suggested for capping keeps in this post. Perhaps there would be one available to buy at the rally master that granted the carrier, and only the carrier, a large bonus to toughness and resists. It would also have an ability on a long cooldown (say 60 sec) that was just a massive AoE knockback. Get this guy up the stairs and take apart the tank wall then everyone else can leg it up and wreak havoc. Then it would be up to the defenders to really defend.

Just some random thoughts that were going round my head today. feel free to comment on them.