Recent changes to Keep lords

[georgehabadasher]

Your previous statement of NPCs in pve? They had them in WAR when it was at its best and they serve as to prevent crapbags from ninjaing keeps at the expense of their own realm and to punish mindless zerg tactics. The more intelligently you approach them the less of an impact they will have. If I didnt think they brought benefit to the current state of the game I wouldnt have done them.

Actually, I meant this statement:

People need to engage their brains in PvP, since that actually requires thinking. All the buffed (not uber, fair point) lord does is make a few people use their brains to figure it out and then everyone will copy the pattern. Then it'll be the same old mindless zerg/tank and spank. You'll just need to bring a bigger zerg than before.

To elaborate, requiring more thought and strategy to take a keep is a worthwhile goal, but buffing keep lords doesn't really further that goal in the long run.

[bloodi]

You dont need to get good, its not a masterclass to take down a keep lord and I have faith that most of the players of this game have, at the very least, the capacity to make semi rational decisions and that this is not too painful for them.

Its not a masterclass to play anything in this game and most of the playerbase, me included a lot of times, fail horribly at doing so.

People zerg so they dont have to make semi rational decisions, this is a choice they make, if you remove that option from them, they are gone.

PS: I personally couldnt care less for people leaving over such matters. If they werent willing to improve in the first place, then they're not being missed as a good realm-asset either

This is all cool and we can high five each other over it but when the server is empty and there is only premade groups going around ala Uthgard, you will say otherwise.

I mentioned it a bunch of times, i play quite a bit of fighting games and this is an issue that plagued them for a long time. We can act all mighty about it telling everyone that we didnt want them on the first place but games suffer a lot when the only ones left to play are the ones who already know everything about it.

ITs specially dire for new players, they have no places to learn and the opposition they face has a gap in knowledge that is way to huge to bridge easily, go to steamcharts and check populations for Kof XIII or Street fighter 4/5, 90% of their population is gone after the first month or so when they realize thaat just pushing buttons at random isnt going to cut it, they dont suddenly adquire a vision and get good, they just stop playing. And the game suffers a lot for it.

[Atropik]

Recent changes are awesome, thx Devs.

But we need to fix this bug https://github.com/WarEmu/WarBugs/issues/6711 as soon as possible.

Buy "we" i mean PornFactory guild warband. Anytime someone dies in a keep area, or get invited from another zone, frames get totaly bugged. So we need to retreat, regroup and reform warband any time keep lord uses one of his amazing abilities. I guess, anyone who leads even pug wb in orvr can confirm my words.

[FrzrBrn]

It seems that we need to kill the guards in the lord's room first and then fight the keep lord inside where the knock-back doesn't punt everyone past the outer walls. I think the concept for the new abilities is ok and everyone will adjust, but the power of them might need tweaking.

One thing that may need to be looked at is the damage type. As our mostly-pug warband wiped several times in Praag's southern keep last night, our Chosen was complaining that even in full tank spec and gear he was getting hit for 3500 damage a pop on normal attacks and not seeing any mitigation numbers in the combat log.

[georgehabadasher]

I'll second what bloodi is saying. The elitist attitude of 'We're better off without those scrubs' isn't something that's conducive to a healthy game.

People zerg because they're not skilled/geared/connected(have good friends) enough to win on even footing. There are always going to be weaker players, and they should have some option for progression.

Note: I'm not saying that the current keep lords are going to make people quit en masse. Personally, I think people will figure them out and just bring a bigger zerg when they take keeps. However, the attitude expressed by noisestorm and others is something that'll damage the game if embraced by the development team.

[Crazyboss]

Remove PVE (Keep NPCs) from RVR.

Flag system much better.

[Luth]

full tank spec and gear he was getting hit for 3500 damage a pop on normal attacks and not seeing any mitigation numbers in the combat log.

Afaik the boss has a 50% armor reduction debuff, maybe torque can explain it in more detail.
If it's the debuff, the people have to watch for it and a second tank should be ready to taunt him, or more easy: just x-guard.
Just like already mentioned: taking down the bosses shouldn't be rocket-science.

Edit: sorry for snitching.

[NoRKaLKiLLa]

Since we're breaking down eachothers posts condescendingly:

1. I cant help your lack of ability to figure out the mechanics or an effective counter. I could tell you how to easily approach it but wont.

Please tell me more about how much more intelligent you are but how you won't substantiate your claims in the next thread that pops up, I look forward to it.

2. Abilities were specifically added to prevent certain small groups running off and grabbing undefended keeps from empty zones. Previously they were able to be taken by less than 4.

Ok ok, so you're saying three people were capable of taking a keep alone, in T4? In that case 3 people on a ram do less than or equal to 1% per swing on the door, no less than 120 swings to take down the outer. That's at least 10-15 minutes. Then they need to damage the door to less than or equal to 99%. Then a tank specced MDPS needed to infiltrate and pull the lord to a wall where he could be healed by 2 dedicated healers and spend 10-15 minutes solo killing the boss for no bags, but for 1k renown and the opportunity to unlock and endzone. In that 30 minutes had one defender showed up and dropped oil or even applied a dot on the MDPS trying to tank the lord, or even said in T4 chat "hey, theres 3 people trying to solo our keep" they would've been faultered.

So what is the acceptable number of people defending a keep to consider it "not empty," what is your approved number of people required to attack a keep?

Would you prefer an even numbered fight in T4 to sit in a single zone for hours on end, incapable of any progress being made by either side besides BO flipping? Should the defending side in an even fight always be the one being rewarded for sitting and and easy-moding a keep? That's exactly what this is doing.

3. It should take a WB or more to take a keep anyway.

Your idea of whats "should" and other players seems to vary quite wildly.

You dont get punted off if you have a tank approach the situation intelligently, there havent been too many situations in war where a mindless blob just runs in and succeeds, seems the same case here.

With mobs that dont hold aggro to a single tank within any form of logic or reason and randomly decide to switch targets and displace themselves, then AOE punt at an angle you couldnt have predicted- unless your entire warband is sitting on single spot or you have a terrain advantage such as the north keep in KV in which you'll only be punted into a cliff wall, the lord is going to spastically bounce around and switch targets. Have you played the current system yet?

Blatantly false hyperbole and never happened.

With mobs that aggro through walls and floors, chipping away at the warbands health and a lord that does 3.5k unmitigatable damage, this is exactly what happened.

The current situation discouraging smaller groups from taking a keep encourages only a win for the faction with the most players pushing an outnumbered enemy in a single keep. This is great for players who only log in to defend and kite at a postern.

[Grumpbot]

I may well be wrong about this, having not actually played the content, but the more I read in this thread the more it sounds like the fight mechanics may not be all that simple. Positioning the boss, avoiding getting knocked off walls, interrupting a dangerous AOE attack, monitoring debuffs and doing some sort of multitanking thing (either having multiple tanks in front to split damage or tank swapping when a debuff appears) are all relatively simple mechanics for a PVE context. This is stuff that most veteran MMO players should be relatively used to.

That said, mechanically sensitive fights in a PvP context are VERY dangerous, even if the mechanics are ones that should be easily handled in a PvE setting. If there are competent players defending, they can very easily ruin your ability to properly respond to the mechanics. Boss facing is easy to screw up by punting the tank into the group. Similarly, if the boss dps is enough to seriously threaten a tank, then there is no way that your tank is going to survive both the boss and being focus fired by enemy players. Tank swapping is easy when everyone is on comms, but when you have a pug group it's much harder for healers to pick it up quickly, particularly in the midst of actual PvP.

At the end of the day, I think that contested keep battles should be 99% about the players and the NPCs should factor in as little as possible. That means that the lord needs to be tough enough that it can't just be rushed by attackers and killed without the defenders getting a chance to fight, but it also means that the lord itself shouldn't help the defenders that much either.

At the same time, I'm completely sympathetic to the idea that small groups should NOT be able to take uncontested keeps.

Ideally, I'd suggest a system whereby keep lords in undefended or sparsely defended keeps are basically like a minor raid boss that actually requires some strategy to beat and is not realistically beatable by a small group. When a keep is defended adequately though, the keep lord should not pose any threat to the attackers but should be tough enough to take down that the attackers must actually fight the defenders rather than just bum rush the lord.

I'm not sure if the technology exists to implement such a system, but if it does I think it would be good for the game.

[Gobtar]

I feel that a city push and keep tanks should be an endeavor, I think it would be cool to have Pitch battle "zones" PQ style that could have enticing rewards as well for having players fight in certain changing areas of the map, just an example off the top of my head about how we can make this game reach it's potential

Nothing about the campaign is set in stone and there is so many possibilities. Making the endgame content a bit more challenging is a step in the right direction even if I live in NA.

AAO based buff on keep lord might be interesting from what I understand these modifications have put the keep lords in the same vein as there were on live T2-T3...I remember having to tank the keep lord carefully in T3 on live because his AOE could punt half the warband off, you had set positions etc. Even now in T2 you can defend a keep with a couple of good players if you play the lord correctly.

This should scale with tiers, as tier 4 is the dedicated endgame, the lessons and strategies learned in the lower tiers should reach an apex in tier 4. Why should a tank need to know about aggro, position and guarding when dealing with a tier 2 keep lord but not a tier 4 lord?! I can definitely empathize with Torque's frustration.