Return of Reckoning

footpatrol2 wrote:

T4 by design is about morale 4 bombs. It is designed to be the main course. Its why a lot of morale 4's cost 16 points to get. There is a Reason those morales cost so high. There is a reason they are on the specific classes that they are on. There was a reason why the racial morale gain tactic was in the game. It wasn't for some fluffy purpose.


I can go into detail on how all this stuff breaks down. But I won't to keep it short.

This is a hefty assertion. Your premise is that T4 is designed around the M4 morale, which may have an idea in theory but the game they crafted has left such notions long in the dirt.

Keep in mind that morale pumps for the most part had been seriously nerfed and for good reason, they skewed the balance of power on smaller scale encounters. Sprout Carapace and 1001 were nerfed for the betterment of group play not warband play. Mythic clearly shown that it's interest of balance was party first, and build from there.

When you work in game design, you throw a lot of things at the board, see what sticks, some ideas get more fleshed out than others. Racial tactics seemed like a cool idea at the time, so did having races start in their own pairings, so did having a billion different types of CC. Sometimes these idea are not well received and you make changes, sometimes for the good such as immunity timers, and sometimes for the worse, like standardized KD.

If you desire to create you own Vanilla server and rebuild the game from the sky-down, that is your prerogative, but if you are going to claim that the game was based around these assertions please render the proof that you are now burdened with to show.

I did not video tape the dwarf groups I ran. I wish I did. I wish I could have shown what we were working on. I would have been able to show proof there. The morale 4 bombs are the capper. If you have ever played in a high competitive environment in AoR you'll notice it is nearly impossible to kill the opposition. I suspect thats because your suppose to use morale bombs to defeat your opposition. The previously stated post is just a guess like always but it points in that direction.

We are working on greenskinz at the moment. We are already doing morale bombs but not morale 4 bombs due to the extreme slow morale gain that this server provides. Greenskinz can rapidly get to thier morale 4's probably faster then any race collectively. We'll have to hang back a bit and build morale because of the extreme slow morale gain this server provides. Give us back the correct morale gain rates and we'll show you what racial groups can do.

We'll happily show video of it when we get to a higher organization/coordination level.

we won't be doing it at the 6 man level. We'll be doing it at the 12 man level. Do you want to participate gobtar? We are looking on expanding for the 2nd 6 man. We are literally doing this now. You'll see the groups in NA time if you play. We are building a 12 man WAAAAAaaaagh group. Which is a rapid morale 4 bomb at the 12 man level.

How would you show me morale bombing be proof? You wont be providing proof of your claims, Correlation does not imply causation.

Thank you for your request, but my guild needs me.

In the same way many of us would be quick to parrot the line "Balance should be at the highest level of play" for 6v6 or smaller scale fighting such as scenarios, shouldn't the same also be said for RvR?

While the server has in no way shape or form atm to facilitate actual competitive RvR, it really impossible to test or even see the impact footpatrols theorycrafting or claims on morale being centric to the meta, but it definitely would look that way on paper at least to me.


I think anyways, we have a situation were we have an arena of play (large scale RvR) which is played mostly if not exclusively casual or incorrectly (6 mans) leading to something else being meta because morale dumps/cycles as footpatrol is laying out require heavily coordination on at the very least a warband level to pull off.

I have played in a few of the zerg guild/alliance warbands on both sides here, been in this voice comms whatever that may be and have listened/observed how they do things. While there is a much higher level of communication/coordination compared to pugs it is no way near approaching the level of things discussed in this thread. That's not to say these guilds or players are incapable of doing so, but i feel like they fall prey to the same thing 6v6 guilds on this server do.

To elaborate on that last statement, our guild old school formed in t1 with 6 man competitive gameplay in mind. However aside from a few small periods in time mostly in t3, the competition wasn't there, just not enough guilds participating in real 6v6 to create a healthy scene. So we just reroll alts / play for fun instead of building a meta group and playing around it constantly. We end up just **** around, running clowny groups, playing both sides... having fun by having fun instead of having fun by virtue of being competitive if that makes any sense.

In the same way I think these guilds like phalanax/PF old guilds like TW etc... all run into little or no opposition aside from a handful of 6 mans who don't have the numbers to really take part of this morale centered meta, and this allows them to get lazy and stagnant where they are now. There is no pressure on them to get better, like a weight lifter who never scales up his routine.

This is of course all speculation straight from my ass


Edit: also @ the devs, if this holds any truth to it... how exactly are you going to go about testing changes to morale that you want to push (based on the comments in the bugtracker post) when the servers pop would need to be much larger than it has ever been to really get a good feel for balancing such things. I think morale changes are going to have a massive impact on balance and obviously need to be pushed out before individual class balance is even looked at.

As a Phalanx member and sometimes leads our warbands
I can explain a bit how we opporate. We have around 20 core members who play almoast every day and about 20 more that i woudl classified more in the cassual range that logs in every other day or so and don't really respec to fit their groups properly etz.
The 20 people of the core group is pretty much always in the optimal specs, have moast optimal tactics slotted and moast optimal morales. When we have a really good setup we have a really strong morale drop and very good defenceive morales at the same time. The times when our warband is filled with more of the casual players like tanks who's not really paying atention to his guard, or dps not stacking on our main assist and not having the right morales slotted and such we don't performs very well. But when people actually pay atention and stop playing selfish we do really really well.
Morales for ORVR are crucial for the Destruction realm to get any sucess. Without the increased morale gain from tactics. Destro would be a complete **** realm to play in ORVR. The game is defintly ballanced around Syncronized Morales.

People keep referencing me as a warband guy.

I am not. I am a 12 man premade organizer from a time when AoR had a very intense 12 man scene.

Tbt imho we should move away from morale bombing it's not fun


Losing a fight becuse people stood around and pumped their morales then dropped AoE unmitigateable damage is not fun


People call you the warband guy b/c just like how you claim people only see things in terms of 6v6 we see you see things in terms of 12-24 players and potentially blind to the implications of your changes in other threads to small scale gameplay

Jaycub wrote:Edit: also @ the devs, if this holds any truth to it... how exactly are you going to go about testing changes to morale that you want to push (based on the comments in the bugtracker post) when the servers pop would need to be much larger than it has ever been to really get a good feel for balancing such things. I think morale changes are going to have a massive impact on balance and obviously need to be pushed out before individual class balance is even looked at.

I'm very iffy on Morale. Conceptually, I do not like an element which charges based on time alive, is very powerful at the higher echelons, and also has passive tactics available which charge it even faster.

Were I to consider morale, I would make it into more of a Limit Break concept, specifically looking at Crisis Level from FF8. Conditions of desperation increase the Crisis Level. How would this translate? Check more stringently to determine excellent performance against difficult odds, in large-scale combats, and reward higher level morales ONLY in these cases. It's quite weird that you can pop something like Immaculate Defense, which is an ability presumably requiring incredible energy and determination, simply because you had the Combat flag set long enough.

Azarael wrote: Check more stringently to determine excellent performance against difficult odds, in large-scale combats, and reward higher level morales ONLY in these cases.

so tie morale to AAO? or somethign of that nature?

There is more then just morale's vs other morale's. Morales are tied to the direct abilities and the balance of the game such as:

Am get a ranged 20ft AE AP drain which drains 92 ap over 9 sec but they have to use a tactic.
Shaman's get the same thing but it is tied to thier morale 3 ability and is Base but the drain is not ranged.

You weren't using dat 30 ft AE AP drain that instantly drains AP.

Warrior priests get to group cleanse but it is tied to a tactic.
Dok's have to use the morale 2 ability to get their cleanse. Any spec of a Dok can use thier m2. Not any spec of a warrior priest can use the group cleanse.

I showed earlier the hard decisions of having a dark rites dok to pop group cleanse in this thread.

There are more examples that could be brought up.

When your running these racial groups the racial morale's will make a lot more sense. Mythic tried to push us in this direction with the racial morale renown tactics.

If the server screws around with the morale gain system it is a direct kick in the nuts to racial groups because they are highly dependent on it.

Racial groups really don't need that much love at all. Just some key rollbacks as I suggested earlier and the correct morale gain system. DE specifically got ruined hard by the 1.3.5 patch change.