Debate about why Order is how it is.

[Foofmonger]

Maybe.... we should set an example for our realms instead of perpetuating the problem? Maybe we should do some introspection and think about how we as individuals influence the community. It seems a little silly for the highest RR Bright Wizard on Order to make a post about how Order has too many RDPS.... why don't you start maining a pure healer or pure tank and streaming that? Why does everyone else have to play tanks/healers but it's ok for you personally to be one of the "too many RDPS"?

I started focusing on my WP "Orderling" several weeks ago. But I dont really play outside of guild events, so my contribution would not help the pug vs pug general balance of the game.
I do see your point though. As I have BW rr 89 and Engineer rr 77 on order, where as I have Meatball and Choppa in full invader on destro plus a vanq zealot. So I am by nomeans helping the RDPS situation AT ALL.

But that is because of my personal dislike for how the mdps feel on order, and if i dont really like their class mechanics and on top of it find them unattractive plus i know my leveling and pug exeprience would be heavily based around losses due to lack of guards in the pug enviroment, then i just simply chose not to

That being said though, I think my BW guide and my stream very clearly show that I only play my RDPS classes in closequaters gameplay and only in a semiorganized setting. with little to no pugging

There's no doubt at all that you are a great Brightwizard, that your guides are great, and that you've helped out a ton of players learn and become better. I would never argue against this.

Nor do I want to even say "you shouldn't play what you like", you should absolutely play your BW/Engie whatever class you like/feel comfortable with. This is a game and the goal is to have fun, and all players should be able to have the freedom to play what they want without getting grief for it.

I'm not attempting to criticize you at all, what I'm trying to do is get us to think in broader terms here. I would guess that the answer to your main question has 5-10 actual components. It's probably just not "one thing" but a combination of factors and variables. Looks, as you state, may be a factor. Class composition, another factor. Psychology, another factor. Player skill, another factor. And so on and so forth. Do we have any data on the disposition of "veteran players" versus "brand new players"? It's entirely possible more "brand new" players are drawn to Order than Destro, and Destro is getting a lot of people who played on live. Again, I don't have that data but it could be yet again another factor.

[Sarnai]

Now if we really want to get into the psychology of the playerbase and potential biases towards good/evil duality we could always go in that direction. There's a host of potential reaons why players who are drawn to "the good guys", may have different aspects of psychology that impacts their overall organization. We can't necessarily link causality here, but it could be an interesting line of thought. Maybe people who are drawn to being the "good guys" have higher levels of egotism, entitlement, and self importance and don't work as well with others? Maybe people who are drawn to being the "good guys" have absorbed the narrative of the "heroes journey" where the "good guys should always win", and then make forum posts when they don't always win because of their own inflated sense of entitlement?

I agree without the underlying insulting tone. Across all media the 'good guy' has always been outnumbered, outgunned, faced overwhelming odds, ect ect ect yet usually still somehow come out on top. From LotR to modern-day fantasy/sci-fi RPGs it's always been that cliche 'rag-tag group of heroes against all the forces of darkness.' Casual players coming to Order with that mindset are quick to find out that being in that situation pretty much always ends with your **** getting stomped in. There is no dues ex Machina, no forgiving author to save the day. But that 'good guy' mindset says 'If the fight is even then it's not heroic and by extension, nobody will care or remember.' Sticking to my guns that the psycological appeal of the two factions in regards to aesthetics and pre-conceived notions of 'role' play a much bigger part than people think.

[dirnsterer]

But it brings me back to my initial question, WHY are Order so heavily stacked on RDPS and lack the archtype spread we see on destro? Can the community fix this, or do we need bigger dwarves, more armored slayers, and Witchhunter hats for all melee classes?

Plenty of that what you said there affects it. Also the fact when someone lets say asks "What about slayer" the answer is rightfully as follows "You need a full group support to be effective murder machine". "What about brightwizard?" - "You will murder yourself when you spellcast so you rely on heals". This goes for tanks too, and healers. With a big influx of new players, I bet a lot of them that came do not come with a full group support into the game, most likely solo. Then they go "What is good solo" - "DPS AM, WH, DPS shaman, WE, WL..." or in other hand they just go with whatever they like aesthetically as people have noted. And even if you are a good player that looks for team aspect from get go, it is really really hard to decipher from anywhere what classes are and you need to do a lot of detective work for a newbie to figure that out. Like nowhere reads clearly "Slayer - Best career in 6vs6 and Warband as melee choice".

What comes to guilds being stacked, you have to find the good players, or decent at least which you can upbring to be a good player. Then have the good players to share their information with everyone, theorycraft even between careers together, try things out, challenge yourselves as a guild. You will never improve if you wait after 10 instances have popped up to queue against pugs or semi organised destro in a city.

[Greenbeast]

Spoiler:

Alright.

Some good points, some thick bias, a little bit of derailing, and quite a lot of good posts so far

First of all,
@TUP I respect the input and it does prove a point that you guys made it happen on Orderside, but you are either fishing for bragging or completly ignoring how stacked your roster is in your guild. No other Order guild can come close to your results. As most Order warband guilds have atleast one clicker, and over 50% fillers who 6man heroes would lable "warbandshitters" because they would only know how to Hold the line and dont know what to do in city against a melee comp, and proceed to hold the line hopeing for the best. This is simply just the result of an overall casualmindset on a small private server. All the decent or beond average warbandplayers are spread in two-group-guilds on Order. CNTK, Beavers, VII, French guy + other natinal guilds. If they all merged their best players together, sure they could over time give TUP a run for their money. I played in VII and it was close to being good with alot of hard work newcomers were trained and brough up to speed, for the few that wanted to put in the work. But still couldnt break the "3fullgroupcurse" Now in TC things are even worse because people remain in their old guilds and the core of the solid warbandplayers are sticking to their old guilds instead of pursueing the toplevel no matter the cost. Yes TUP have absorbed pretty much all active DnD members apart from me, because those toptier players wanted to play with the best so TUP was an easy choice (credit to you Wam) But building a warband roster on Order is just... Not happening it seems.

But as of right now, Order is limmited by feeling like Scotland witheveryone stuck to their "Clans" and not united into a powerhouse.
Thats it for the top MinMaxing guild vs guild.

Now Dan brough up a few cases of how Fenryls lfg/5 warband would lose to a FMJ none 2-2-2 warband. That does bring attention and proff to the case of Destro having more flexibility variability. I dont think anyone truely want to contest this. Yes Meatball is bringing more than ASW, yes there are more tanks on destro who can do moraleselfpump and throw out a very impactful M2 bellow to swing the fight in their favor. But it doesnt take away from the fact that Order has some overtuned and directly stronger classes and setups. its just rare and far between that they get to run them, and probably why we see bigger win rate for destro in city. As all the rest of the average pug vs pug matches are going in destro favor, in a mix of having more flexibility on their class setups, more spread between their archtypes, more organization, but also more impactful pug winning tools- such as aoe knockdown, faster morales, and displacements. When theres a pug vs pug warband and Order's only plan is to do damage and healing, a sudden %50Bellow will do amazing work, just like a 10man aoe knockdown or just a couple of chosen standing with 25% incomeing healdebuff aura if the order puggies dont have the perfect setup of knight+wp+rp to outscale it.

So WHY are Order so disorganized?
Well the few citywarband leaders all have their discords filled up with players tagging them soon as a city is happening, they dont need to dive into the ingame lfg channel to fill their needs and rosters (same on destro i perssume?) And on a realm where the archtypes are this uneven on the spread with RDPS being too heavy to make up for the lack of tanks and pure healers, we will see these ragtag order instances with 5engineers some shadow warriors, maybe a tank and a healer for each party. But you get the idea.

Sure a snowball effect can be a result of this, people accept their faith on order and just continue to grind royals on their engineers who is now 30%winrate and only a few months more away from sov. Where as destro puggies are loving their 2-2-2 pug life facing 60% free win instances.

But it brings me back to my initial question, WHY are Order so heavily stacked on RDPS and lack the archtype spread we see on destro? Can the community fix this, or do we need bigger dwarves, more armored slayers, and Witchhunter hats for all melee classes?

But Wam is right telling you that there are ways to play around destro self pump.
The marauder's morale drain is nerfed and order rdps ball have an advantage in morale game now. Mind you that almost nobody is playing this morale drain ability from the middle tree anymore. Morale stop tactic is broken.
If a destruction warband is playing around a morale drop as their only win condition and the fight lasts more than 30-40 seconds they will lose it. With default "Lets kite for half a minute and morale drop them" tactic enemy knights will have M3 and M4 that are far way superior to BO M3 for example(because it pins enemies to the ground/drain morales) and there are no analogs to SF on destruction.
The only class that can counter morale on both sides is WE/WH and I don't think that there is any warband out there right now that can/want bring more then two.

The zealot heal debuff is single target now and WOI can be interrupted as well so an order death ball has an easy life stacking now. So I sincerely fail to understand your argument about chosen being a hard counter pick for wp/rp/kotbs combo especially if you take in consideration that order have an access to heal debuff on BW and Slayer even tho I'm not sure if it's usable on the least. Where destruction have to bring a choppa/we for that.
Since there is already quite hard to even morale drop full stack of WP's with siphons ready.

Order has a very strong melee train with WL/SL/WH that can erase enemy healers in seconds. Slayers alone give that they know what to do can do almost true damage to any stacked warband.
So the problem is the knowledge of a class these people are playing and the ability of leaders to explain strategies to their members in a comprehensible way. So waiting room for a melee train that sometimes is happening on a both sides are in no mean an indicator of how useless these classes are.

The problem is the players. The inability of order organization to recruit, teach and maintain stable rosters. I don't know reasons for that since I've never played on order side. Maybe this inability takes its roots in very rigid meta of order warbands however there are examples of order warbands that still can be very effective while bringing classes like WL/Engi/WH.
Yes IB and SW are falling out and I belive that SW/Engi/Magus/IB need attention of dev team to become a role in drafting.

[Marawo]

Destro just has the better memes, Gtdc, the whole meleesquiq concept, homerun batting BG, overall displacing or messing with your enemy is just more fun than bigger damage numbers.

Also nobody can match greenskin RP.
Even the most sophisticated,dedicated insults or rites stand in the shadow of "ME IZ GREEN ME IZ BEST, WAAAAAGH YA GITS"
I am sorry but bread in a can and fat babies can't even compare, no matter how hard they yell they are from ekrund. : P

[Hypernia]

Essentially there are 4 levels of commitment available in terms of grouping:
- WB from single guild (Same players each time)
- WB from alliance of smaller guilds (players vary, but lots the same each time - harder to run specific class setups)
- 2/2/2 WB from /5
- pugs / soloq

There aren't any guilds on Order big enough to complete the top level atm as far as I know, maybe 1 or 2 at most? But they usually have to dip into /5 to make up a couple of spots at least. There are a few alliances that can hit the second level, but these don't always manage optimal compositions - it's not regimented enough to enforce players playing specific classes etc (which is a good thing, let people have more choice). And the third level is far less prevalent on Order compared to Destro with more soloq / random pug wbs without 2-2-2 setups running.

There aren't really any fixes for this - but I do think having fewer viable WB classes does impact on the ability of alliances and /5 WBs to bring stronger groups and compositions without mandating which classes people play.

It would be nice to remove some of the order dependency on specific setups caused by the fact that many of their group comps work by stacking specific classes together, and removing one piece dramatically reduces the effectiveness of the group as a whole. For example, KotBS + Runie healing buffs improving WP group heals. On Destro side the classes feel slightly more self-contained and not so reliant on pure stacking of stats and buffs to maximise their effectiveness. Not really any easy answers here - but some food for thought.

[Specialpatrol]

I'd look at hard data.

If one side consistently wins the overall score in City sieges (which is the best arena to judge warband vs warband play), then I'd look into possible class balance issues - instead of brushing it off with vague arguments, like "Order only plays rdps" or "Destruction tanks are cooler" or "Order lacks organization".

I don't know what that score is currently - but it at least seems like Destruction is generally pulling the longest straw in overall City wins. As an Order player, I personally can't recall the last time Order won a City overall, at least. So it would be interesting to some factual data on this.

If balance is fine, then the overall score should hover around 50-50, when viewed over time - irregardless if this or that specific fight were pugs vs organized etc.

[wonshot]

But Wam is right telling you that there are ways to play around destro self pump.
The marauder's morale drain is nerfed and order rdps ball have an advantage in morale game now. Mind you that almost nobody is playing this morale drain ability from the middle tree anymore. Morale stop tactic is broken.
If a destruction warband is playing around a morale drop as their only win condition and the fight lasts more than 30-40 seconds they will lose it. With default "Lets kite for half a minute and morale drop them" tactic enemy knights will have M3 and M4 that are far way superior to BO M3 for example(because it pins enemies to the ground/drain morales) and there are no analogs to SF on destruction.
The only class that can counter morale on both sides is WE/WH and I don't think that there is any warband out there right now that can/want bring more then two.

The zealot heal debuff is single target now and WOI can be interrupted as well so an order death ball has an easy life stacking now. So I sincerely fail to understand your argument about chosen being a hard counter pick for wp/rp/kotbs combo especially if you take in consideration that order have an access to heal debuff on BW and Slayer even tho I'm not sure if it's usable on the least. Where destruction have to bring a choppa/we for that.
Since there is already quite hard to even morale drop full stack of WP's with siphons ready.

[/quote]

I dont disagree Grunbe. But that respons seem to be catering more towards organized play, where as my last part of my post you are quouting I directed at what is happening in 24pug vs 24pug instances. As that is probably the main reason why the destro city isntance winrate is higher.

There is NO DOUBT that Order as a Realm in geneally speaking is not playing well enough though. Sure Destro might be easier to pug on, and have the advantage in archtype spread. But if the pug mentality (and **** even premades on order) were actually better familiar with assisting, some of those rag-tag rdps sw/engineer pug order instances could actually see some kills atleast instead of 5 napalms in one spot

Recruiting on Order is HARD though, and you will just have to trust me on that if you want The quality of engineers is terrible and they have no idea about reading a battle or focusing on controling a fight with their amazing toolkit, instead theyr have all been reading the Bitterstone guidebook and only know how to drop kegs and hug their turrets. I shouldnt had been able to revolutionize the class after dusting it off after I havnt played in back in DnD days, to show the current order population what engineer can do and everone being amazed about how a single engineer can win a fort push, let alone bring control and utility to orvr for orderwarbands. But none of the 1000 engineers on the server seem to know how to use the class, at all.

So have fun recruiting on Order, I DARE you to try it

[courtsdad1]

I'd look at hard data.

If one side consistently wins the overall score in City sieges (which is the best arena to judge warband vs warband play), then I'd look into possible class balance issues - instead of brushing it off with vague arguments, like "Order only plays rdps" or "Destruction tanks are cooler" or "Order lacks organization".

I don't know what that score is currently - but it at least seems like Destruction is generally pulling the longest straw in overall City wins. As an Order player, I personally can't recall the last time Order won a City overall, at least. So it would be interesting to some factual data on this.

If balance is fine, then the overall score should hover around 50-50, when viewed over time - irregardless if this or that specific fight were pugs vs organized etc.

Except group make up is a major factor that has nothing to do with an imbalance. Balance is not a good metric in this case. If opposing groups were set up exactly the same then it would be more telling but thats not going to happen. Tanks who guard melee plus using assist and good organization will beat half of the tanks guarding ranged DPS and a general lack of organization all day long. Until Order gets organized and learns to listen to good leaders and bring solid groups who play the right rolls and know those rolls then there is always going to be a disparity.

Right now, far too often, its like a bunch of kids with ADD vs a group of disciplined old-timers although Order has been showing some good signs lately. Time of day can have a lot to do with it as well.

[dirnsterer]

I'd look at hard data.

If one side consistently wins the overall score in City sieges (which is the best arena to judge warband vs warband play), then I'd look into possible class balance issues - instead of brushing it off with vague arguments, like "Order only plays rdps" or "Destruction tanks are cooler" or "Order lacks organization".

I don't know what that score is currently - but it at least seems like Destruction is generally pulling the longest straw in overall City wins. As an Order player, I personally can't recall the last time Order won a City overall, at least. So it would be interesting to some factual data on this.

If balance is fine, then the overall score should hover around 50-50, when viewed over time - irregardless if this or that specific fight were pugs vs organized etc.

You need to organise first even on the most basic level. On destro you might not even get in as soloq so it is safer to join wb or 12-man etc. So you get pug that has a proper setup vs a pug that is solo queuers from order. On destro you will have 2-2-2 setup, on order you have a group lets say 5 engis and 1 AM in it with this roll of a dice. Now, both are pugs, who is going to win? Nothing to do with classes at all. Like today I queued with my WH solo, got pop in like first ten seconds into complete order pug instance, Altdorf **** 1. Instance 1 from order is pug instance, how does this happen? On destro if you solo queue you will get pop after 20 instances have been populated if even then.

Recruiting on Order is HARD though, and you will just have to trust me on that if you want The quality of engineers is terrible and they have no idea about reading a battle or focusing on controling a fight with their amazing toolkit, instead theyr have all been reading the Bitterstone guidebook and only know how to drop kegs and hug their turrets. I shouldnt had been able to revolutionize the class after dusting it off after I havnt played in back in DnD days, to show the current order population what engineer can do and everone being amazed about how a single engineer can win a fort push, let alone bring control and utility to orvr for orderwarbands. But none of the 1000 engineers on the server seem to know how to use the class, at all.

So have fun recruiting on Order, I DARE you to try it

Here you pick the promising ones of the 1000 engis, teach them the way and now you have couple of more good engis.