 Well, I have to say my vacation was fairly decent. Spent a lot of time drinking, made my way down to Key West for their Fantasy Fest, went snorkeling a handful of times to check out the various sea-life. I spent a lot of time out of the sun though, you can get burned pretty easily down there if you're not used to the light. Coming home to WAR was disappointing at first. The first night I logged in guildies were absent. I think there were about 5 online. I solo'd my way through scenarios to rr55 on my Engi and finally polished off my full Invader set. Yay 10ft range bonus! Alas, no one to share it with. Monday was another disappointing day as I logged in to find 5 people yet again, which dropped of to just me and one other within minutes. Where had everyone gone? We usually field at least 20 on weekdays! This was probably when I noticed that Altdorf was sitting at two stars...I found out some time later that City Sieges had been more than rampant, but the defenses had been solid... during prime time at least. The de-ranking of the city came from late-night/early morning sieges. Somehow, Destro is able to field 4 warbands at any given time of the day, and used this to spank Altdorf silly. I kinda understand where everyone went. The same place everyone goes when they're losing against a force they can't fight on even ground, somewhere else. Well, at least last night our glorious guild leader returned from about a week of the flu and pushed the buttons to get us into the premier alliance on Badlands. Ah, what a fresh change of pace. Immediately we went from 5 online to about 20, and out alliance numbers changed from our guild plus one or two other members, to around 90. There was a huge RvR push as we started coordinating multiple warbands, we pushed out of Kadrin Valley and Eataine (Empire had been locked down previously to this), and even took the Elf pairing all the way up to Caledor before the Destro zerg was summoned. I found a new addon earlier called Whom. It gives a count of how many players were online for each tier and spits out the totals for you. At the height of our push, Whom was reporting 112 r40's and 34 T4 (r31-r39) players. At the same time however, the keep spam was showing 130 Destro, and they were also flipping a second zone at the same time.
What are we supposed to do at that point? When it's taking us every available player to fail at defending a single keep, and another zone is dropping almost uncontested, morale drops VERY quickly. Sure, the fights were good and hard, but there was no progress, and very little in the way of slowing down the opposing side. While Order on Badlands can show up and rock it out when we really try, it didn't take more than an hour before Destro could outzerg us and flip the tables. I believe Altdorf was under siege shortly after I logged out for the night.So it's a mixed bag for me. New alliance, lots of people to run with on one hand, then getting outzerged and consistently losing on the other hand. It's a breath of life for our guild, and Order on the server that we settled into a much larger alliance, I just fear that that breath may be getting knocked out of us awfully fast. I don't really mind being outnumbered to be honest. Scenarios pop faster, there's always a fight waiting for you, typically the amount of bad players on the opposing side far outnumbers the good. For the sake of Order as a whole however, I get a little worried.Highlights last night include soloing a Chosen, Sorc, and Marauder at the same time in Dragonwake with my Engi. Getting pulled off a keep and dying in mid-air to a zerg. Killing off a line of 20 Destro that were running up to defend a Keep we were attacking. Soloing multiple Witch Elves that kept trying to gank me (thank you 3s KD on self-destruct). Still racking up top damage in most of the scenarios that I run, without any specific assistance... The list goes on, I enjoy my time in WAR very much, even if we are losing as a whole. Then again, that's the real issue isn't it? This really is a Realm v Realm kind of deal now. If your faction isn't playing up to par, no one is going to survive. You might be the biggest badass on the field (not saying that I am, plenty are better), but it's still just a drop in the bucket when facing a hoard that outnumbers you by at least 20. WAR has very little room for meaningful personal achievements, everything is overshadowed by the fact that if your realm is losing, than everyone is suffering. This is something that I really don't have an answer for, some sort of balancing for an outnumbered realm is obvious. The feeling that one man does not make a dent however is a product of design. If it were intended, it was done very well. So a breath of life for my guild, and myself to a degree. I'll always enjoy being a wrecking ball on the open field and being crafty enough to solo classes that I probably shouldn't. There's plenty of opportunity to enjoy the game, but also enough to get tired of it. RvR isn't everyones cup of tea, at least not out on the battlefields. Too many people in one area and it just turns into a sea of bodies dying back and forth until one wave crashes over the other and victory finally rushes in. I am content. We're on a losing slide at the moment which causes more people to disappear, but at the same time, it's just another crash of the wave. The tides rise and fall, winning comes and goes. It might end up being like this for a month or two, but it won't last forever. It never does.
 Alright, so for one, Altdorf has no chance in hell of ever looking this cool...
As I've come to understand, not everyone is having such a great time defending and attacking cities. After about 6-8 sieges in a span of a few short days, people start to miss things like scenarios, RvR, hell even having time to do instances, or crafting! Yes, two hours of being stuck in your city to defend can be something of a nuisance. Getting stuck with the same group of players that holds a death grip on the objectives while they casually melt your face can get a trite irritating. The cute little tactic of having a Chosen stand at a choke point, guarded and focus healed while spamming all of his auras to lag out anyone nearby while the backline casters nuke the general area... ah, that was fun to deal with. So I suppose there's a time and place for City Sieges. Everyday is a bit much for the average end-gamer in WAR. Way too much for the R30-39 crew as well. Then you have the rest of the T1-T3 players that watch from the distance as the sieges take place.
I've posted on City Sieges before, a really long time ago actually. Some of the points I made there eventually snuck into our current experience. Some of them haven't. I'd like to take a moment while sieging is on everyone's mind to refine and refresh what else I'd like to see. (Then cross my fingers and pray that it happens...)
One of the major differences between a siege and RvR is the lack of Scenarios. Some would liken the City to it's own hugely scaled scenario with a 2 hour timer, but it's not really the same. The beauty of scenarios is what drew people to WAR by the boatload. 15m skirmish action that gave you objectives to complete or let you kill to your twisted black hearts content. You never needed to be in any particular place to queue for them, and they popped frequently enough that you could make for a full night of enjoyment. Some players absolutely lived and leveled on scenarios! So now we have semi-regular city sieges and all that falls to the wayside. Why should it?
First off, we have The Undercroft and War Quarters for each city to defend. A while back now they were tweaked so only non-T4 players could join them. This makes no sense to me at all as T4 players are the only ones that would survive fighting over the city to begin with. Is there not enough demand for scenarios when the city pops? In the past, perhaps. Cities were sieged very rarely on most servers, so I would imagine most players that could, certainly would take part in the actual siege. However! Things have obviously changed! With the increases in sieges, I believe this would be the perfect chance to re-introduce Scenarios to the city for players needing a change from the same 2 hour long grind.
This of course, gets you nowhere fast. What else then? Well obviously you would need multiple scenarios, lest people get tired of playing the same one over and over again. How about the Twisting Tower and Reikland Factory? Oh, but people love the hell out of those, and they should! The Twisting Tower sits atop Chaos Wastes and has a great amount of detail put into it. It's a rather large population scenario that has some GREAT mechanics (like turning into Skaven). Reikland Factory is also an epic scenario that people go absolutely NUTS over. I know it was one of my favorites the few times I managed to play it. These are shining pinnacles of design that Mythic has decided it needs to hide away and play on their private servers (I know you do, you dirty bastards!). They fit seamlessly in the concept of a city siege, Twisting Tower supporting the Inevitable City, Reikland Factory supporting Altdorf. Both of them important for strategic defense and supply of their respective capitals. Brilliant!
 
So great! We have scenarios back in action for the city siege, what now? Well, Mythic in their strangely wise decision has left VP's entirely to the players actually fighting in the city. I don't mind this actually, not one bit. It makes a lot more sense for the ground troops to affect the ground war more than the backline support troops. Instead, the two scenarios should affect city instance buffing! For Order defending in the city, a War Quarters win would equate to a defensive bonus. Adding 10% to armor, resists, and HP. A win in the Reikland Factory scenario would be an offensive bonus granting an additional 5% damage, 5% armor penetration, and 5% crit, vice versa for Destruction capturing these locations of course. Let the buffs persist for 5 minutes, making them temporary but useful, and not applied 100% of the time. While you're at it, have each instance of a scenario only apply for a single instance of the city siege so you don't have multiple scenarios effecting multiple sieges at one time. Say we have Altdorf 10, 15, 20, and 25 running, there should be a War Quarters 10, 15, 20, 25 as well as a Reikland Factory 10, 15, 20, 25. Allowing people to queue up for the City Instance# they know their alliance or guildies are in would be another great move as you could then have your skirimish/RvR groups working hand-in-hand with your elite Scenario groups to win out the day.
City Sieges are one of those things that really focuses down hard on one single aspect of the game, but with proper tweaking embracing what people love about Warhammer, they can become the epic sieges we all fantasize about.
One other thing, for the love of all that is sacred, can we remove the Invader Belts from the damn gold bags already? Make them rare drops off players in City Sieges, but getting one in a gold bag is really GD irritating... Rawr...
 Hoo boy! Last night was an EPIC battle in the streets of Altdorf! TWICE! Thank you 1.3.2 for the performance improvements, helluva nice job done there. I went from averaging a slideshow of sub-epic proportions to about 15-20fps. Of course, once I realized that I had my game set to Highest Quality I manage to squeeze out another 15fps on top of that =D. A few niggles here and there to work out, but all in all this patch is definitely the smoothest implementation to date! The night started out buggering around with my UI, a little pissy that my Backpack wasn't working ( but you can find a fix for that right here). Ran a couple scenarios and ended up getting rolled back to back, of course, my Slayer had all his points refunded. Ha, no tactics, handful of abilities missing... Yeah, slight oversight there. I went back and specced him out again. I little miffed that my Doomseeker was moved to a Morale 4 and got replaced with Deadly Determination (albeit now at 300 damage per hit for 8 attacks). All set and ready I ran back out for a few more scenarios with my usual parry/disrupt build at 30/18% each, loaded up on a spirit resist pot, and my corp resist tactic, only to find a melee train chewing on me face =O. Ah well, this is why I use ClosetGoblin after all. Quickly switching tactics and gear makes for a game changer! Back to my standard 40% parry, 4500 armor, and Riposte tactic. Things went a little smoother but I just wasn't dishing out nearly as much damage as I was hoping for. The new M2 was NOTHING compared to the awesome that Doomseeker used to be... It didn't take much longer than that for Altdorf to become sieged the first time. Off I went! Finding a pug-band didn't take long and the initial siege was under way! The puggers didn't do half bad, unfortunately I was the bad one. It made me feel bad. Possibly because the narrow corridors of Altdorf left tons of opportunity for AoE spellcasting of doom and I couldn't get close enough to unleash my own fury, also perhaps because I built a new UI and was having a hell of a time adjusting to it. Once I found the fix to my backpack bug I did a little better. Without a healer and no guard, I was just meat for the grinder. Still, we defended succesfully, snagged a handful of invader crests, and went on my way. After finishing up with that, I ran my Archmage though a couple scenarios and actually had a much better time. Of course, whenever I run my healer, there's always a half dozen other healers, but that's what Murphy's Law is all about I guess. Kiting Witch Elves and slowly draining the life out of Chosen was more fun than usual. Stagger makes it much easier for squishes to get the hell out of the way I think. Eventually I had a group ask me to do a Helm run (I already had it, but hey, why not?). Uneventful, simple, easy. Helm has got to be the easiest one to do by far. Except when you get two of the same helmet drop for a class that isn't there. Thank you Magical Salvaging. I'll take those. Nice, r200 purple wounds frag ftw. One of the guys on the run was playing an alt, and asked me if I wanted to come to Vulture Lord to take a crack at boss #7. He knew I had a rather angry Slayer that could DPS with the best of em.... Naturally, I couldn't refuse. I specced back out of Skaven and into a great-weapon build something like This, using a Scalebreaker Waraxe. I've tried going the big hitter great weapon style before, and it just never really suited me. I didn't feel like I did enough damage, but for single bosses, that's what would work best. So we get to VL, do the PQ outside, clear the trash up to boss #7 where this group had left off, pull out a standard, pot up, go over the strat, and BAM! Server crashes. Ah well, at least it was considerate enough to do it before we got halfway through the fight. That could have been a lot more frustrating. I expect things like this to happen on patch days, everyone else in the group did too. No big deal. I snuck onto Dark Crag for a quick scenario on my Choppa Rumpfinga Smellsfunny. Hehe... Dirty little secrets. I hardly ever play the guy, but I get tells all the time about how sexy my name is. Yeah, that's right. People like the smell of my... ah, right. Anyways, Badlands was soon up again and unfortunately we were tossed out of VL just long enough for Destro to take LotD again. Expedition Resources flow like rivers of blood in City Sieges. Still holding onto my 2h axe, the group I was with decided premades would be the way to go. This time, I had a guard, dedicated healer, and was specced for the most damage I've ever done. I didn't know Slayers could crit for 2400. O.o Hell, just hitting Chosen for 800 made my day. Suck off ya Ravage spamming sods! Taste the fury of Grimnir! An hour of total domination just let Destro pave their way right back into Altdorf for the second time. Bloody hell! Is no one doing RvR? Is this part of some grandiose plan to embarass their attempts to take our city? No matter, into Altdorf our fearsome 6-man goes. A dozen alliance members later and our 18 person warband took these foolish invaders to town. THERE WAS A FIREFIGHT! (If you haven't seen Boondock Saints, you're not a man yet. Go watch it. Now.) Plenty of high RR Destro showed up to play with us. I managed to sneak a Warlord Crest, three Invaders, win a gold bag (stupid belt...grr), and rack up a load of kills. Granted, we had one particular Bright Wizard who absolutely took the cake, but I felt quite effective anyway. Eventually, we griefed these guys right out of the instance. Hilarity! Of course, we couldn't let well enough alone, and with 45m left on the siege, we hopped over to a different instance on good word that they fled there. More of the same! Lots of killing to be done, and at a framerate that could make angels cry. Or bleed tears. Or rip off their wings and beat someone to death with them. Silly angels. 1.3.2 is a welcome change in my book. After months on Badlands I've only seen a handful of City Sieges, and they were lag-tastic beasts at best. People constantly hopping around trying to find the least populated instance to farm for gear. This time however, we were on the hunt. I like hunting. Be it Altdorf or the Inevitable City, the changes from this patch are probably the best we've had in a long time. I was excited, invigorated, and thoroughly enjoying myself the entire time. Here's to more to come!
 It will come to no suprise when I tell you all that the end-game content in WAR is a bit... lackluster. I'm not normally one to gripe, and really I'm not. I have tons of fun running around IC killing destro at every turn and doing my best to win the PQ. However, every single time I get into IC, there's half a dozen people on the verge of /ragequit because it simply isn't the shining jewel of bliss they expected it to be. This really sucks when there's a significant force to fight against, and you really need every last bit of support from the players around you. Being the Engineer on the right, I really do not survive well when it comes to mass scale combat unless there's a wall of melee in front of me causing chaos. Please people, stop with the uber-hate when in a City Instance. Save it for afterwards if only to be considerate for the rest of us playing to win. Cancerous /ragequit in region kills morale for everyone, and takes the focus off the task at hand.
However, I digress. Speaking on /ragequit isn't truly my point, but rather what can be done about City Instances to make them feel more like a siege than a sandbox.That's the problem at the moment. You have a handful of objectives on a timer spread across the damn map. Typically this means everyone runs around all crazy to finish things, or just balls up in the middle and ends up bitch slapping each other for two hours. Destruction has horrible horrible spawn points on both sides of the map in wide open positions, like the flightmaster in IC, or the gates of Altdorf. This is actually good for them since their 55 Champions wftpwn anything in a 150' radius, but bad for Order when their Lord spawns right next to their entry, and the 55 Champs continue to wtfpwn as an attempt to kill the Lord fails over and over. I've seen a chest drop off a Lord 5 times in the dozen times I've been in IC. These were 2 underpopulated instances where we rolled the opposition so hard they left and gave up. The other 10 times were solidly defended, and killing 4 Heroes and a Lord simply wasn't going to happen.
/startrant #1
I really have no problem with that. Defenders should have the massive advantage in my opinion. Cities should be an epic task to complete with a warband of fully geared guildies in tight Ventrilo communication, working together in perfect harmony, and killing in such epic style that the defenders leave with their heads hanging low in shame. Pug warbands, should not, and should never stand a chance against another pug warband on the first stage. Just listen to some of the EU players that managed to capture the Kings on each side (albeit bug-laden and glitchy). They didn't randomly happen to show up in the same place and get lucky. They were premade. With sieges getting fixed and balanced, you're not going to see any more underpopulated instances. No one will get past the first stage unless they are incredibly organized, and efficiently deadly to a sickening degree. All the better, you want to see the TRUE end-game, then fucking act like it. It ain't gonna happen rolling around solo and jumping into pugs. This ain't about YOU, it's about the REALM. Everyone can work together (or at least large groups of us), or you can crai yourself to sleep about how "borked" end-game is.
/endrant #1
Moving on, there are ways to change the game to sedate the hoarde of players that can't get past rant #1, still leave the game intact, and possibly make things more fun. So, without further ado, what does the majority think the most fun part of the game is right now? SCENARIOS. 80% of my guild will play the game solely for scenarios, and admittedly take Keeps and BO's for the inf/gear. Personally, I prefer the open RvR of "ganking" players my level in their PvE zones, but it's a trial of patience more than anything. Scenarios are where WAR makes their money and players get their jollies. There's a scoreboard, objectives, and a tightly focused direction. Groups are automatically formed and most players respect this. I love PQ's, the concept is amazing, but not for a city siege. It's too sporadic, giving players a sense of random death at every turn, instead of a focused offensive with a true goal in sight. This isn't to suggest turning the City Sieges into scenarios, but using elements from scenarios as part of the siege. This is END GAME. This should be a culmination of all the amazingly cool stuff you've seen throughout it all!
Remove all the random trash mobs, and add in the Scoreboard. This will give all players an idea of who is effective and should be targeted, while letting players ignore those who do little. Doubly effective in allowing high ranked players attack each other, and low ranked players to survive/enjoy the setting a while longer.
Choke points! You can't tell me that if you were defending your city, and knew it was coming, you wouldn't block off some of the streets to force players into one place.
The great thing about this, is a style of play more akin to Battle for Praag. Add in something like 9 objectives through each of the cities, and treat them like a hybrid BO/capture point. Spawn defensive terrain, single target siege weapons, defending champs, and a hold to claim capture mechanic.
Have a wizard send you to a claimed BO when you get killed, reminiscent of Dragon's Bane.
Add in a Bombing Run type of objective to blast open alternate paths through the city, and let defenders repair them by holding the point for a short duration.
Picklock/Bypass Defenses through the Bombing Run points, giving MDPS a reason to fight and assassinate their backlines. Or, alternatively, snatch BO's from them if they can spare the forward forces. How many MDPS does it take to gank a BO? More than they would want to spare I'd bet, but at least they get the option.
On top of all this, make it point based. Typical scenarios go up to 500 over 15 minutes. I'm thinking, remove the time limit, and up the points to 2500.
Capture points - 3pt per 5 seconds
Player kills - 5pt each
Bombing run sucess - 15pt each
Repair sucess - 25pt each
At the end of a "Win", the winners are dislocated to face off against the Lord in a isolated area with a no-rez zone up on a 7 minute timer. Have the siege reset via "magical forces", a PQ chest drop at the spawn point provided the Lord was defeated, and let everyone /roll for 3 minutes on grabbing their gold bags. This, in a perfect world, would equate to a 30-40 minute battle, with 7 minutes of downtime for the losers to restrategize, and a 3 minute headstart on zone if the winners take that long to grab their bag.
But wait! There can still be more!
Why the hell don't we have an influence bar for the final city? Simple enough, make it a high amount of influence, but the rewards being a choice between two pieces of gear!
~ inf requirement : 2 city atk or def
Reward 1 - Invader gloves or boots
~ inf requirement : 5 city atk or def
Reward 2 - Invader shoulders or belt
~ inf requirement : 12 city atk or def
Reward 3 - Invader chest or helm
I have all kinds of variations on how a city siege could work better, and I post my suggestions in the Warhammer forums when I come up with them. This is one of my favorite variations on things. I've even got pictures below of what the proposed changes would look something like, imagine the scribbly orange lines to be new barricades/gates.
 
You can find all kinds of suggestions at the Developers Roundtable - Future Features Suggestions . Some of them aren't half bad, some are half-baked at best. I tend to roam around there and the bug report section to keep fingers on the pulse of WAR. One thing that I might have to touch on later, would be the Pros and Cons of Cross Server Scenarios.
Until next time!
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