City sieges a frustrating letdown

Interestingly enough, in the last few days since Mythic implemented a few changes to the difficulty of capturing zones and fortresses in patch 1.1.1 (in addition to the real-world beatdown Mark Jacobs has been taking in the press regarding layoffs and earnings), I’ve seen Order on Skull Throne get into the Inevitable City twice. This is twice more than I’ve seen Order make it into the opposing city since the game launched. Both times, I logged in too late to participate in the initial keep/fortress taking, but this time I actually made it into the city siege itself. I came away disappointed and frustrated, and with a bad taste in my mouth about the whole affair. I was left wondering if this was all there was to the so-called “end-game” that I’d spent the last 40 levels of PvE and countless post-40 dungeon raids ranking up and gearing up to attain.

I apologize in advance, but this is definitely going to be a bit of a rant. And it’s going to be long. Please bear with me, though, as I do have a few important points to make.

My frustration stems from several factors, but it boils down to this:

• Having shown up to the party late, it was actually tougher getting to and into the Inevitable City than it was once you got inside. Once inside, it was a laugher as you could see immediately how many Destruction players were in each instance, and hence most people jumped into instances where their side was favoured, except for those looking for a good fight.
• Half of the problems I ran into this afternoon were due to either broken contribution/persistence bonuses on Public Quests, crappy itemization, wait lists and queues, or generally poor encounter design.
• I spent a good 4 hours trying to participate in the city raid; an hour of which was spent getting into the damn city in the first place, and the middle 2.5 were spent running the same lame PQ over and over with nothing to show for it, and the last half-hour was spent trying to find a decent fight in one of the multiple city siege instances that were happening simultaneously.
• In the entire time I participated in the siege (which was pretty significant — 4 hours of an afternoon is a whole lot of time for me to invest with zero returns), there was almost no RvR and almost all of the issues I faced were unrelated to PvP/RvR in general.

Can you see a trend here? Let me break it down a little more. I won’t go into massive detail, but giving a little background info should help to understand the situation.

What? There’s a city siege going on?

I started off in Altdorf, noticing that most of my guildmates were in the Inevitable City. I had never been in a city siege, so I was pretty keen on participating. I asked around and looked for an open warband, joining the one most of my guildies were in. Then it was a matter of getting up to the city entrance in the Maw. I flew to the Chaos Wastes, and ran up solo (yes, I realize this was dumb, but no one else was nearby) to the entrance to the Maw sub-zone, then managed to get ganked by a Witch Elf camping the road. Frustrating, but I don’t mind losing that kind of fight as (a) I was full Salvation spec at the time and (b) I used to do the same thing with my stealther in Dark Age of Camelot. :) So it goes, no biggie.

I respawned back in the Chaos Wastes, and this time grouped up with a couple of others who I found running the same way. We grouped up and ran together, making it past the stealther unhindered, getting to the gates of the Inevitable City. Of course, we found a full warband (and more) camped outside the gates. We figured we’d at least rush it and try and make it in, but we all got snared/rooted/stunned/knocked down within a second or two and ended up back at our bind point.

Third try’s the charm, right?

Resurrect, re-spec and retry

Back to Altdorf I went, slightly depressed that I was too late to get in on the siege. In the meantime, I respecced back to Grace/Wrath, as the very one-sided fight with the Witch Elf had left me desiring a more melee-oriented spec (and I had always done well against WEs while melee specced.) I swapped over to my 2H hammer and then decided to give it one more shot. This time, thankfully, another warband had come back outside and had cleared the entrance to the city of all Destruction forces, so they were now inside and defending inside separate instances instead. I got to the front gates, then realized I’d have to queue to enter the scenario my guildmates were in. Sigh. I queued up, then after about 10 minutes of talking to the other people standing outside in the lineup, decided to disband from my warband and go into a separate instance where Order wasn’t max’d out at 48 people. No dice. No matter what I tried, I was still in the same queue. Finally, I had to relog just to be able to get into a different queue. I got back into the game and was able to get into a different instance where Order was somewhat outnumbered.

I entered one such instance, but the warband was a total mess and everyone was spread out all over. It was definitely exhilarating, those first few minutes inside the Inevitable City, as there were Destruction players and guards all over the place, slightly outnumbering our disorganized force. I mucked around for a while, killing a couple of lowbies, then one or two rank 40s, then getting ganked by a large group. I respawned at the entrance, then decided to zone out and try once more to get into the same instance with my guildmates. This time, I got lucky; there was a single spot available in the instance my guildmates were in, so I jumped in and joined them.

Entering the Inevitable City

There’s very little direction once you zone into a city siege, other than the vaguely familiar Public Quest notice in the top-right corner of your screen telling you to kill, kill, and kill some more (I think one of the quests from the NPCs near the entrance to the city where you zone in is actually entitled “Kill Them All“ — gotta love a good Metallica reference thrown in for good measure.)

After running around a bit near the zone-in at the south end of the city, I was told to head north, which I did without question, good soldier than I am. I then ran into our entire warband of 47 other people killing 150 “defenders”; these are rank 41 mobs that die in about 0.005 seconds when there’s a metric ton of melee and DPS killing them, repeatedly. As a healer, there’s very little to do other than buff your teammates once and then just sit around and try and hit a mob before it dissolves into a pile of goo before all of the massive amount of firepower being laid down on it. This is pretty rare. And again, as a Warrior Priest, I have a single cone-AoE attack on a 5 second recast timer, Smite. I spammed this as much as possible, and with luck, I tagged a mob here and there. Woohoo.

Let me add that there was zero defense to contend with, as there wasn’t a single Destruction player in our instance. Yawn.

During this debacle, there’s a parallel PQ stage going on, where the attackers need to burn boxes and knock down various glowing thingamabobs throughout the main city area. It’s unclear which objects are part of the PQ and which aren’t, as there are a variety of destructible and grabbable objects in town, like the sentry skeletons that are strewn all over and don’t seem to count for anything. What they do is a mystery, but after getting insta-gibbed not once but twice by a hero mob stealthily placed next to a grabbable object, I gave up trying to pick them up and stuck with the initial 150 mobs.

Once this first two-pronged stage is complete, there’s 4 champions and a hero mob that go down in short order. And that’s it. That’s the end of the PQ. What’s worse, you’re going to have to re-run this PQ over, and over, and over, until Order has gained enough Victory Points to move on to the next PQ in the campaign. Suffice it to say, after 4+ hours in the city, Order did not make it that far, although they were dominating 4 of 6 instances open in the city, and drawing even in the other two. I bailed out after running the same PQ (and going loot-less, of course) about eight to ten times. They had already run it at least a half-dozen times before I got there, if not more. I stopped counting after the first five or six repititions I was present for, so I’m not sure how many it was at the end.

Boredom + creativity = profit contribution ($$!)

Out of sheer boredom, I tried buffing my group with Sigmar’s Grace and healing them repeatedly as my contribution from regular healing and/or DPSing was horrible as I was surrounded by tanks taunting and AoE damage classes. Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly?) my contribution went up significantly as I buffed/healed my way through the last three scenario attempts, ending up in the top 12 (and once, first) for contribution each time. This seems like a bit of a hack, but considering I didn’t win anything better than a blue bag (which gave me a rank 33 blue hammer — simply awesome for a rank 40, eh?) the entire time, I didn’t feel too bad about it.

What was even better was that out of all of the gold bags I saw drop from the PQ, tanks and DPS classes pretty much took all of them. Three different tanks from my guild group of 8 or so people managed to win gold bags. Two of them won twice, winning two Invader set pieces each. Even more galling was that one of our Ironbreakers won the same Invader Klad chestpiece twice (!!) and had to salvage the second one. Our other Ironbreaker managed to pick up both the chest and shoulders, and our Knight of the Blazing Sun picked up at least a set of shoulders while I was there. None of them were high enough in renown ranks to wear any of the items they won, however.

To top that off, I noticed some chatter on alliance chat in the meantime and looked up to see our alliance leader telling others that we weren’t making any real progress in the city siege (due to Victory Points being so slow to accumulate), but at least we were gearing up our tanks for the next stage of the fight. Of course, only a small percentage were over renown rank 50, so that gear is just going to sit in a backpack or vault for a while until their renown ranks catch up. Great. Stage two of this siege — if it even exists, and I have my doubts — wasn’t looking too likely today.

Okay, rant complete. Whew.

So, class, what did we learn?

Let’s sum up what I took from the experience:

• That was 4 hours of my life I won’t get back. I would have been better off running scenarios; or better yet, playing my Swordmaster or Engineer alts, who are likely to rank much higher in contribution in these city sieges down the line than my awesome-in-PvE-and-scenarios-and-dungeons-but-crappy-in-RvR-PQs Warrior Priest. Bleh.
• After the initial fun of getting into the city (which was difficult in a small band of players) and killing a few enemy players (fun, but fleeting), we quickly settled into a PvE grind (easy). Of course, in this case the PvE grind consists of nearly 50 players, which means the odds are much worse of moving up in the loot progression than if you were to run Lost Vale for Darkpromise gear (which has the same Superior Wards as the Invader set) in a 6-man group, assuming you can deal with the 5-day lockout timer.
• Even in the RvR game, tanks are the ones who need to be completely geared first; it’s the inescapable raiding mentality of World of Warcraft translated over to a PvP game. Except that many of them can’t even wear the gear they won. Is that worse? I think so.
• Persistence appears to be broken past the first run of the initial city PQ.
• It takes an amazing amount of repetition to make it through the first stage of a city siege. There’s no skill involved in completing the same PQ repeatedly in a totally undefended instance. I still don’t know how much longer it would have taken to get to stage two (even though Order was winning in almost all of the instances running), and I didn’t have the hours in the day to sit around and find out. I understand they’re trying to make stuff seem “epic” here, but anything over 3-4 hours is just ridiculously long.
• Instances inside city sieges are just plain stupid. I understand that Mythic needs to throttle the volume of players involved in city and fortress fights, but having 6 separate instances running inside a single city siege really degrades the entire “realm war” feeling they’re trying to create. Not only that, offering players the option to choose one instance over another almost always creates imbalance as players seek the path of least resistance. If you’re going to have multiple instances inside of city sieges, at least hide the number of players in each. Sure, let people go in together with the rest of their warbands, but it’s way too easy to pick and choose where to go right now; all of the attackers funnel into the instances with the least defenders, and all of the defenders go into the instance with more of their own side. It’s self-defeating. And as Skull Throne is one of the top-3 most populated US servers, I find it hard to believe that situation will be any better on another WAR server.
• Healers and hybrids are relegated to a backseat role in the city PQs. When farming the first PQ involves repeatedly AoEing easy mobs, and tanks get a bonus for taunting the champions and final hero, there’s very little for a healer to do. Getting better than mediocre contribution involves borderline cheating, if you can even manage it at all (since it all depends on your spec.)

I left the whole event feeling demoralized and depressed about the end-game. I’m sure there were some of the folks there who enjoyed the event (tanks and DPS, most likely), but it’s really just no fun having nothing to do once you’re inside a siege. Having to wait for endless hours, doing nothing of import, in order to simply progress to the next stage of the city PQ is even more boring than WAR’s PvE grind, if that’s even remotely possible.

Maybe I’m just not the target player that Mythic had in mind, but I think that giving up an entire Sunday afternoon to participate in what is supposed to be the epitome of WAR’s end-game should be enough to at least enjoy myself. At this stage, I was left wondering if I should even continue playing the game at all, if that’s all that’s in store for me. As a working professional with a life and a fiancée, I don’t have 12 contiguous hours to commit to working my way through what essentially becomes a drawn-out, repetitive PvE grind. This was something I was trying to get away from with WoW, and it just seems to have come back in a slightly different form with WAR, although thinly veiled as RvR.

So I’ve experienced WAR’s end-game… and I wasn’t too happy with what I discovered. At the end of the day, I think I’ll probably just stick to running scenarios and leveling up my alts the next time a city siege is under way. Sigh.