Recent changes to Keep lords

[georgehabadasher]

For all the people saying "now people have to use their brains" that could just as easily be applied to the defenders. Before, defenders had to use their brains and their advantages to defend, while now they just mindlessly wait for the lord to do their work for them. Before, motivated and smart defenders could defend a keep and it was done on live even after keep lords were completely removed. Here's a 20 minute video example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4hzEKZCRUY

Even without keep lords, smart defenders can coordinate a tank wall as the door goes down with oil and rift/magnetize while the mdps defenders swung in from the postern (or front door) and hit the back lines. That's using your brain and strategy in a PvP game. Sure, if you were outnumbered 2-1 the fight was over the minute the door was down. But is that somehow unwanted or unreasonable? IMO you should tend to lose a fight if you're outnumbered 2-1 and addressing population imbalance is a better way to solve that problem.

We've had huge crossrealming zerging attackers on this server because that was by far the easiest way to get rewards. When there were defensive bags we had the same problem with defenders. All the keep lord buff has done is swing the rewards back to the defending side.

[Dabbart]

Only thing I would ask for, is to lower the respawn rate of the Champs... When there are any defenders in the keep, it gets bat-**** crazy downstairs with even a moderate push.

But I just started:P

[Grumpbot]

I shudder to think how the general reception to Dungeon Bosses is going to be....

I just want to state for the record that I CAN. NOT. WAIT. for this. While I loved the PvP in WAR, I thought the thing that really made it better than WoW for me at the time was the PvE.

I was in a progression raiding guild in vanilla WoW and it was AWFUL. 40 man raids were just so horrible. Even when you run a full "premade" it was like torture when one or two morons could easily wipe the entire group. In contrast, single group instances were a cakewalk.

WAR, on the other hand, was amazing. Lost Vale was a single group instance that had a ton of interesting and challenging fights. My wife and I loved progressing through it, and the fact that we only had to find a couple of rock solid people to attempt it was a breath of fresh air compared to the 40 man horror show. The design which allowed you to take it on in bites over the course of a week long lockout was also absolutely incredible. Get your team on, spend an hour or two dungeon crawling and then call it a night 3x a week vs. 6-8 straight hours of nightmare.

PvE SHOULD take effort to figure out as the challenge is entirely in that aspect of the content. I still contend PvP is a wholly different animal.

[roadkillrobin]

We have ran into probobly 4 Keep defences the last 2 days with pretty big amount of defenders Defending while WE have something like 50-100% AAO. And the challange atm isn't really worth the rewards or the free give away renown to the defenders. We're talking having something like 1/50 of getting purple bag wich what moast people need atm. And even then you might just get a Genesis that you allready have. Also the zone lock renown are just rridiculous low and not an incetive to attack. I can do scenarios for 10 min and get just as much renown.

I'm all for the Keep Lord changes, I think they make the Keep Seiges much more fun and intreasting, but the rewards proboly need to be tweaked to match it or else people will just stop attacking the keeps if there's any chance of getting a decent defence.

[Azarael]

For people complaining about the aggro system: It's not the aggro system. It's because NPC pathing is primitive, and lords just have a Z-axis check to determine where they can go. The knockback attack causes the lord to path off the floor into the sky to hit the punted aggro holder and that resets the lord. I've relaxed the check for the next patch.

The aggro system does have defects (missing detaunt reductions, missing heal aggro) but it is not fundamentally wrong.

[georgehabadasher]

your theorycrafting has lost its allure, the fights have been large and keep lords falling, all I have seen is an increase in large scale combat and a reduction in people running off to take empty keeps. Please amass some evidence to back up your point from RoR post change because you have made your standpoint clear, repeatedly, now I need evidence not hearsay, that is if you want me to take notice of your point.

oh and vids of stupid, overpowered RR100 geared groups defending a keep on one occasion means literally nothing, to reiterate, this is RoR not WAR.

Preface: After reading this (my) post, I think its tone is bit more combative than I wanted it to be. I don't want to take the time to edit everything, but keep in mind I'm just trying to discuss this casually and not denigrate the hard work of the you and the dev team.

I'll take your word that T4 has been popping during your playtime, but T4 has been even deader than usual at NA playtimes. No one has managed to lock a pairing (as of this writing) since locking High Elves vs Dark Elves about two days ago. It looks like destro is finally going to lock Dwarves vs Greenskins with a 66-34 population advantage and no significant defense.

The video was just meant to show that people can and do defend keeps (plural, they defend several throughout the video, and it's certainly not a comprehensive list of all keeps defended on live) without any NPC assistance, you just need the motivation and skill. RR100 was certainly broken when fighting lowbies, but they were fighting plenty of other RR100s in that video as well. It doesn't mean that the old PvP system was perfect, far from it, but it's not the cancer fest some people are making it out to be. After all, we all liked it enough to keep playing and come back to RoR after experiencing it.

However, most of that is tangential to my (admittedly poorly expressed) point, which is: Trying to promote pvp with NPCs is, in my opinion, a suboptimal way to develop the game. It takes agency away from players and puts it in the hands of non-player characters. Now, I understand you've worked very hard implementing these new lords and I'd like to say you've done a really great job. The encounters are interesting and require a certain amount of wakefulness and attention to detail to navigate. The new keep lords might even be an improvement over the old system. However, I think it'd be much more effective in the long run to focus on giving players agency instead of using NPCs to achieve development goals in RvR.

[Gobtar]

@Geni I love the Bizarro Torque.

@Torque <3 I love you buddy.

I feel that we (NA) shouldn't be entitled to Keep takes if we only have 100 people on during our time zone for the entire game, it's is unfortunate that it is causing gathering annihilator gear to be difficult. I had a really fun time trying to take and defend keeps last night (anecdotal).

Speculative: Maybe with more enhancements to the campaign these worries will eventually be resolved, maybe not in the way you think or want.

[roadkillrobin]

I'm all for the Keep Lord changes, I think they make the Keep Seiges much more fun and intreasting, but the rewards proboly need to be tweaked to match it or else people will just stop attacking the keeps if there's any chance of getting a decent defence.

I dont disagree, Im planning stuff, I need time.

Thats very sweet to hear, gonna be awsum.....

[magter3001]

I am all in for the new keep lord changes... making it a challenge to take keeps is a good thing in my book. However, I feel like the rewards for taking a keep should then be increased. Maybe more bags should be added (especially purple ones) to the siege as to encourage people to continue attacking keeps instead of x-realming to the side that is defending.

We've had this problem since t2... if the game rewards you more for defending than attacking, people will defend. If the games rewards you for attacking a keep more than defending (and defending seems to be a lost cause) then more players will zerg in Orvr.

I'm glad the devs have changed their stance from t2 which was, "just do scenarios" to actively trying to fix the orvr system since t4 was released.

[georgehabadasher]

your theorycrafting has lost its allure, the fights have been large and keep lords falling, all I have seen is an increase in large scale combat and a reduction in people running off to take empty keeps. Please amass some evidence to back up your point from RoR post change because you have made your standpoint clear, repeatedly, now I need evidence not hearsay, that is if you want me to take notice of your point.

It's been a month and a half since the change to keep lords, so I think it's fair to comment without it being hearsay or theorycrafting. The result is the the complete devastation of the NA timezone population. An already low population wasn't able to deal with the overpowered keep lords and a negative feedback loop resulted in fewer and fewer people logging in. Now the only people who bother to play are SC players because it's literally impossible to accomplish anything in RvR with these low population values. I hope the dev team will reconsider the keep lord implementation.