Zanilos wrote:At the moment I see a lot of uninformed discussion related to RvR. Especially attacking/defending keeps. As a guild on Sunday we 'tested' whether or not you could actually take a keep. Allow me to elaborate on some of the issues we encountered.
The main concern with keeps is that it takes 1 WB, 3. Yes, 3 hours, to take both doors down. (without ram) That time scale does not include time for fighting counter attacks/pushes from inside, or even oil killing all your melee in cca 3 seconds. It even depends on relying on other people defending BO's. This is calculated by my WB taking 1 minute 3 secs to take down 1% of door health. (Shock Horror the BWs were specced ST
)
When it comes to taking keeps. We should definitely be rewarded. No question. My personal feeling is that you should get a lockout timer from receiving bags/tokens. 6 hour one. If you take an empty keep... Well. No, no you shouldn't get loot or lockout. When we talk about BO's, rewards should scale effort. If you cap an empty BO, gg thanks for helping the zone. If you defend/attack a BO and there is some fighting. Hand out an AAO scale RP bonus for kills. More kills, bigger the tick. I feel we now have enough GMs that after a few incidents of kill swapping (guaranteed to happen), It will get reported and cleared up.
With the current system (yes, I know its going to change.) You can spend all that time taking a keep, take all the BO's push the zone, only for the opposition to lock the BO's in the next zone and you are back in the zone that you spent a lot of invested time capturing. Then you go back and take the BO's only, you keep the keeps, then it locks. <<< This Paragraph explains why you can't have medallions for locks.
I'm really not sure what some people talk about when they mention undefended keeps. Honestly, I have not seen people initiate attacks. Defending is the easy part. Attacking will only get harder the more people on the server. I'm 100% sure that even with the order zerg on Sunday if PF+Pug was defending that keep, the hour to get the first door down would of been wasted. (If they had oil up.) With no counter at all to get in. The only way that will change is if we can somehow add more entrances to keeps. Or a cheesy Knock back aoe cannon, but I really don't like that.
In conclusion, I don't think you guys need to fiddle with too much. It's always going to be down to players to not zerg, or join guilds, or make WBs. If they don't, well, not much you can do about it. Dropping the door HP by X% and maybe make attacking siege weapons X% more dmg to doors would be a decent interim fix to try to get zones moving again. Even if rewards are just kept as they are for now.
P.S wipe merc gear to piss Ade off please.
Let me just say, your testing event was very valuable to us, and we were able to get some solid information about it. At the same time, this was when I had the facepalm realization that calculating the ram spawn position based on the oil position was stopping them from spawning even after I quadrupled the size of the keep PQ radius.
For some transparency, the door HP worked like this (and there are definitely errors in this process that will be fine-tuned. Expect some adjustments when we deploy the ram spawn point fix):
1. A rough napkin test was run to calculate the amount of DPS a warband should be able to put out. This essentially involved a BW in T4 gear throwing fireballs at a door with a DPS meter running. The DPS was recorded as around 900.
2. The above DPS calculation was multiplied by 18 to estimate the DPS that 24 people could put out (assuming half are healers and tanks). I'm sure you can see some errors here - half of an ideal warband couldn't hit the door anyway between oil and collision, and BW/SO DPS is higher than average for an RDPS. The next tweak will probably be to turn the above multiplier down to 12. On the other hand, to be fair, direct-damage cannons can also damage doors.
3. It was determined that a warband with a ram should take about 7-10 minutes to destroy a single door. This is the average time for a scenario, and was deemed a decent amount of time to spend for the quality of the rewards. It also gives defenders enough time to leave another zone, fly to the new zone, and run to the keep to defend.
10 minutes * 60 seconds * 900 DPS * 18 characters-multiplier = 9,700,000 damage in 10 minutes.
4. Ram damage was calculated as an arbitrary number. At 95% swing power, a ram does about 25,000 DPS in T4.
9,700,000 + (10 minutes * 60 seconds * 25,000 DPS) = 24,700,000 damage between the two, combined.
The door HP is currently about 70% of that figure.
Obviously, like I said, there are problems with that whole calculation, and the door HP will be tweaked around corrections to it in the near future. But here's where the KO data is the most useful:
Without a ram, under the above assumptions about DPS, the doors should take 20 minutes each to destroy. Instead, it took all of the people assembled about 90 minutes per door - 4.5 times longer than expected. Part of this is going to be from the bad assumptions about DPS mentioned above, but a good deal of it probably comes from door regeneration from BO ownership.
Many people forget that the defending realm's doors regenerate at a faster rate for every BO the defending realm holds. This is to help an underdog realm defend a keep easier, by sending small parties to cap undefended BOs. The attacking realm must hold these BOs, or get mired in a long siege at the keep. It requires 2 BOs minimum to be able to attack the keep, but with only 2 BOs held, the keep doors will regain 2% of their health every 8 seconds. If the attacking realm holds 3 BOs, the doors will regenerate 1% of their health every 8 seconds, and with all 4 BOs held, the doors will not regenerate at all. However, if the defending realm manages to grab 3 BOs, then not only will the keep door no longer be attackable, it will start regenerating at 4%, or even 6%.
Now, this might not have been an issue, because I have since identified a bug where the BOs would not contribute one way or another to the regen rate in Tier 4. This might have caused a random value to be used,
or the doors might not have been regenerating at all. It's just something to consider. In any case, these values might be too high in T4, with the amount of HP doors have compared to the DPS a warband can put out - even with a ram. These will be tweaked as well.