LFM Healers pls. K thx bye

Last night was a frustrating (but still pretty fun) night in Empire T2. A full destro WB was running round trying to take keeps, a full warband with 4 healers in total. Thats 2 DoK's, a shammy and a zealot who left early on in the night. I didn't realise before how much of a difference it makes to have a good amount of healers, we tried for close to an hour to take mandreds hold. The oil and door went down fairly quickly but once we were inside we just couldn't clear the lords room of their WB+ of players. I counted at least 3 Archmages, 3 or more Warrior Priests and a couple of Runepriests. As fast as we could kill them they were being healed or rez'd. Our healers, who did a grand job considering how few of them there were, just couldn't keep up and many of us ended up having to run back from the warcamp.

With so many healers up there I knew there wouldn't be any point in going 2 handed, even the minor increase in damage output would still have easily been out-healed. I just stuck with S'n'B, kept guard up on the real DPS'ers and kept on twisting my auras. 15 minutes or so of fruitless hacking and it was obious that we weren't making any headway, every time we pushed there was still as many order on the second floor so we decided to take a couple of the BO's and see if that helped us any.

Then came the order counter attack. As soon as the door of Mandreds was back up the all piled up to Stontroll, by the time the noble defenders had started arriving the door was nearly at 50%.
It wasn't long before it was us defending the keep lord and we managed to hold them off for a while but they just kept rezing and coming at us. Our poor healers were having a hard time keeping the people still fighting alive so most of us ended up having to run back from the WC, which is a hell of a long way. Inevitably we were eventually cleared out of the second floor and most of the players just gave up and went their own way.

It's a shame that something like an unbalanced number of healers on each side of the fight can have a massive effect on how easy or hard it is to take an objective. It's also a shame that healers seem to be quite rare for Destro in oRvR, perhaps healing is too noble a proffesion for any self respecting Destro player? Well, I went and played my shaman after the WB fell apart, hopefully if I get him into T2 and we're in the same situation again I'll go log him in and see if it helps.

Movin' on up...

T’was a sad day yesterday, for it was the day I finally had to say goodbye to Tier 1 and move on up into T2. I guess now I’m going to have to get used to being flattened in oRvR and scenarios a lot more often, but at least I can get involved in some keep takes, I’ve been looking forward to those for a while!

Athekkhar is currently Lv 13 RR 12, since reaching T2 I’ve been doing some PQ’s and questing to get his level up a bit before I start going all out RvR. Reflecting on Tier 1, it seemed pretty balanced between order and destro, in both scenarios and oRvR. Scenario wise we would occasionally steamroll order, sometimes they’d steamroll us, or we would reach a stalemate and it would finish with both scores quite low but very close.

RvR in the Empire has been great. Every night there was at least 1 WB each side fighting over the BO’s, with each side having the upper hand for a while before loosing it to a well timed push from the other side. Like with the scenarios, sometimes we would be able to hold all the BO’s, sometimes order would. The other racial pairings seemed a lot quieter oRvR wise; the few times I went to the HE/DE pairing it was in a smaller group of 6 or so players and if there was any order about it was usually another small group which actually made a nice change from the more zerg-like empire areas. The one time I ventured into the Ork lands for some RvR there was 2 parties of us and we didn’t see any order at all. I didn’t really bother going back again, I’m not one for the PvE of BO capping with no opposition. I’ll have to get a better feel for that pairing when I level my choppa up (yeah, I gave into the temptation and rolled another alt).

The only thing that I can really complain about in T1 was that the PQ’s in the dark elf lands rarely had people doing them, so maxing the influence bar involved a lot of just completing the first stage of the easier ones. It’s not too hard to do this in T1, but is kind of annoying just for the fact that you don’t get no “phat lewt bag”.

Towards the end of the tier I decided to forcibly make myself read the text for every quest I took, and to my surprise, I’ve started reading it because I want to instead. The text is actually very well written and I enjoy getting a bit of background and following the general story of WAR, it seems to give the quests purpose. The Salzenmund quests were probably some of the best so far, I love how you’re sent not just to slaughter all the defenders/women/children etc. but you’re asked to subvert and manipulate some of the characters of the town in true Chaos style, I thought that was great.

Farewell for now Tier 1, I bid you an emotional adieu. Here’s to T2.

The Silent Leaders

After reading an couple of interesting articles on leading a war band over at Waaagh and Knights of the Featherd Hats, I thought I would share my own experiences on the subject. Granted, I've never led a WB outside of T1, and even then not done it that often but my over-riding expence was that no one actually seems to listen to you. I'll use one incident to illustrate this:

Fighting in the Empire RvR zone I was leading a PUG group of 3 parties, we had just capped festenplatz and were fighting order around that area. I decided to go and scout the docks which was just about up for taking and found that it was undefended. Another DoK was already there killing the guards. I helped them finish off the champion and before I could say anything s/he had scampered off to claim the BO. I immediately asked the WB to come down to the docks to defend it untill it was secured. No replys. Looked at the map, they were all still at festnplatz fighting around an objective we'd already taken, even the returning players were running straight from the warcamp to the rest of the WB. I asked again. Again no response, no movement. By this time an Order Engineer was just off the docks, most likely telling his WB that there was only 2 DoK's defending the BO. By this time I was slightly annoyed and thinking we were about to get a whole WB pile in on us to re-take the objective, so I tried again, this time trying to make it sound a bit more like an order- "everybody down to the dock now or we're gonna loose it!"

Nothing.

Fortunately the order WB never did turn up and me my fellow DoK capped it ourselves, but I left the group pretty much straight away. What the hell's the point? It's like trying to organise a drunken rabble in a brewery. I know I'm not a natural leader and I've got a way to go before I would class myself even as a good leader, but I'm reasonably intellegent. Enough to see an opportunity and decide what needs to be done, but communicating that to 20 other players and getting them all to act on it sometimes seems like an exercise in futility, which kind of leads me on to my next point:

Leaders that just dont talk. I used to get frustrated when the WB leader was utterly silent, the WB needs direction and some form of strategy otherwise its just a huge brawl with the winner being the side who's players don't get bored first. When I did find myself in one of these PUG's i used to try and suggest stuff without seeming like I was usurping them:

"Lagoon's up for capping, send someone to scout it?"

Most of the time I never even got a response though, the guy just keeps swapping people into different groups to keep balance but doesnt do anything else.

I can understand now why people may not want to try, but if you're not going to, please, give the role of leader to someone who will. You never know you might be in one of the WB's where some people actually do listen, and that makes it more fun for everyone. Don't get me wrong, I know its T1 and people are new to the game or learning a new class, and I've been in several PUG's that have been organised with a good leader and they've been tremendous fun! (I'm going to have to add some of these guys to my friends list!). I'm also sure that in T2 it will get better as people realise the inportance of working as a team, and I'm looking forward to it.

So, things everyone should remember:

• Listen to the WB leader (been said before, but it can't be stressed enough)
• If you are the leader and dont want to give out orders, find someone else who will.

Here endeth the first lesson.

The low level tank and PvP

Well I'm at work and nothing much is happening at the minute so I thought I'd share my experience of scenarios and RvR from my first 8 levels at a tank. Overall I've been enjoying getting the good old adrenaline rush of proper PvP, and the fact that the Chosen doesn't die nearly as often as the marauder I played during open beta is rather enjoyable. My only gripe is that it seems tremendously hard to kill anything apart from squishy RDPS and odd MDPS. If theres a healer around Im pretty much screwed as it seems to be impossible for me to out DPS their healing.

It's this apparent lack of DPS ability in T1 that's led me to try to find some other roles that the tank can fulfill, here's what I've found so far:

Auras: whenever I'm in the thick of it with plenty of enemy players and my party members close I usually focus on cycling through the various auras so that (ideally) all 3 of them are active at all times, I'll usually use the more group oriented abilities as well. This seems to be more usefull when it gets crowded than trying to straight DPS, even if it means less kills and killing blows. Oh well, I'm an altruistic team player, I dont mind!


Disrupting the Backline (i.e. suicide): This one seems to work best on the Nordenwatch scenario, but is applicable anywhere where you have a melee scrum in the middle with each sides RDPS and Healers further back on each side. DPS classes might be good for getting in and quickly taking down a healer or Bright Wizard but they get killed almost straight away (I got this alot as a marauder in the open beta) and then the healers are straight back to healing and the BW's back to BBQ'in Destro. Hence occasionally, when I see an opportunity like this, I will sneak (yeah, Chosen can sneak) roundthe side, quaff a HoT potion and charge recklessly into their back line and go for a healer. Usually panic will ensue as the healers focus on keeping the one you're targeting alive and the RDPS will try to take you down a.s.a.p!. The object of this tactic isnt to get easy kills, its to try and distract their damage dealers and Healers long enough for your team mates in the big scrum in the middle to chew through the opposition. That 15 or so seconds that the healers are more concerned with me then healing their team mates is sometimes enough to swing the skirmish in our favour. This works even better if there's another tank that comes along, or if you manage to get some resto from a friendly healer.

Leading the charge: Seems that most of the softer DPS classes, when there's two large groups facing off against each other, are reluctant to take the risk of making the charge into the enemy ranks. Quite rightly so, chances are if they're at the front they will be dead before they get to do much damage. Usually to galvanise the troops into action it'll take a tank to make that initial push and draw some of the fire while the MDPS classes pile in behind you. If you've got a decent healer or two in your party its not too bad as they will generally out-heal the damage you're taking untill the enemy players start switching to targets that go down easier. Of course, good healers are in high demand and sometimes it doesnt work out as you'd hope!

If anyone has stumbled onto this blog already, welcome :) and what are your thoughts on tanks and their role in low level scenarios?