Return of Reckoning

Introduction
This topic will be focusing on the perspective of competitive teamplay of Warband-sized warfare and/or several warbands.
I personally have the go-to approach of seeing things from an openfield point of view, but will also include funnels and keepsieges.
If anyone disagrees and have some good counter arguements I would love to see them well presented and formulated, try to keep oneliners and emotional outbursts out of this thanks.


From an organized Warband vs Warband point of view, where the Order setup of stacking Brightwizards pretty much shaped the Meta as the strongest AoE-dps all the way back on Live in 2009 or so. Assisting is good, kiting is excelent but in a largescale game you eventually reach so high playernumbers that singletarget eventually stop functioning before the masses will overrun you, and this is the birth of AoE stacking also refered to as "bombing".

In order for effective AoEing to shine you need to stack enough firepower on top of eachother also refered to as Critical Mass. Simply put, one solo aoeing DPSer will not be able to kill his targets and you need to stack more "bombers" dealing area damage on top of the same group of enemies to create damage pressure. Either to make the cosistant damage unhealable or bursty enough to grant kills.

With the current gear, available stats, Time To Kill, and meta on RoR 3full groups of a warband will struggle but it will not be impossible to do effective Bombing in oRvR. Full warbands will do much better due to the added 2 DPSers in a 2-2-2 setup. And with the target cap of 9players it pretty rare to see bombing take on massive forces while being super outnumbered.

The Win-conditions!
Following the assumption that Order warbands are running 2-2-2 mostly for organized warbands. With the cookiecutter setup looking something like this:

4-8 BWs
1-3 Slayers
4 Woundsbuff +healing WP in each group for mucle-healing and fastphased movement
4 Healing RP with AP-rune and amplifying the healing of the WP with the +25% healing tactic procs on crit
4 Knights for auras, aoe staggers, Stay Focused etc
4 SMs for Whispering Winds to counter any potential Cooldown increase from Meatballs, or just more spam for the partymembers.

RPS Runies, pull engineers, Twohanded Knights for Wounds debuff can all be found in Party4, a Morale-pump AM for MoM snare can also be slotted in here but it will be at the cost of healing in this group as they dont have group buffs compared to the RP+WP healing or stat-buffs. But the core of the warband is the Brightwizard ball with 2-2-2 coverage.

On the other side of the fence the Destro warbands are way more versitile and has many more variations:

Drain Maras, AoE Choppas, AoE sorcs, are the most common DPS'ers. You will find more Shamans in the Destro warbands over AMs in the Order warbands, due to the Morale group pump and aoe Snares to start snaring and controling the very standard Order dps-ball
The only archtype that is about as locked in stone on Destro side, as it is on Order realm. Would be the tank archtype. You dont really want to bring too many, if any? IBs and BGs. These tanks simply have too little statbuffing for their entire groups and function much better in a smaller scale sitiuation where they become higher priority pick for setups.

So how come Destro have more availability than Order does? Cant sorcs Bomb just as well as BW?
Yes and No.
Funnel power is a huge part of the difference between Sorc and BW aoe output. And without diving too deep into what makes either classes better, both have the capability to become the only DPS class you slot for a 24man Bombwarband. However...

Since Order dont have a functioning AoE build that is competitive on the Meleedps classes apart from slayers (WH, WL, ASW) Order competitive compesitions will 9/10 times look heavily stacked with just two AoE-dps classes: BW & Slayer.
Since this is the Meta and Go-to for Order, is now becomes fairly Easy for any competitive Destro Warbandbuilder to put together a counter setup, and that leads me to the actual winconditions.

Order winconditions:
Higher Wounds, healingoutput and AoE-damage output on paper.
Morale 2 BW wincondition (outdated due to Sorc Mirror!?)
SolarFlare drains in funnel situations
M4 defensive morales routated one by one between tanks and WP (mostly keepsieges and super rare in the open)
BW heavy warband hug a WC or keep and build M4 and do coordinated M4 Burninghead

Destro winconditions:
Race the BW M2 drop with the Mirrored M2 drop on Sorc
Morale draining Maras sitting on top of BWs to drain, while building towards M2 and dropping morales first
Blackorc self-morale pumping and reaching M3 to aoe silence the BW ball for 5sec (can be combined with Shaman grouppump)
Zealot Winds of Insanity no knockback immunity displacement on the BW ball.
Mara AoE knockdown on the BW ball to stop the BW-selfpump
Undefendable choppapulls (can be mixed for great destro amusement after a full Zealot channel)

Ofcause is neither of these a garenteed instantwin, and there is room for recovering, turning the tide and making a comeback. But many of these winconditions are on a daily basic followed up by well executed cleanups and therefor secure the victory.
With city sieges coming out soon and more fights hopefully being based around 24v24 instances. I think its about time we have a talk about the realm-balance.

Remove the unnecessary Sorc M2 mirror. Massively Nerf Solarflare or remove it. And put a knockback immunity on the last tick of Winds of Insanity. Something like this would make for much more enjoyable even numbers competitive fighting both in the open but also in keepsieges. While I do know I have some Order Bias, I have also done my fair share of playing against really good Destro premade guilds, and played some Destro warband comps myself. I am no expert, but ive been around for quite some time and seen what works and what is just anti-fun.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/495021343?t=01h04m05s

Thanks for reading.

I'll just leave this here While it's true that things changed, order is still the dominant faction.

I don't understand how destro wbs are more versatile. If anything, they are actually at a disadvantage because they mostly have to go into melee range. Sure you have choppa pulls, but order has so many ways to kite it's not really important (it's not destros fault that order doesn't kite effectively, they absolutely can if they try, granted it's hard against all these huge zergs that plague the game now). Destro has good abilities in melee no doubt about that, but again it's not like order can't avoid such contact, at least for a bit to build morale. It's true that that kind of gameplay gets rather boring, but if we talk tryhard it's what you have. Kite and build morale, turn around and boom. Although you don't even have to do that in a pure 24v24, but it's possible against bigger numbers. The tools are there.

Also while we are talking about melee, you make it sound like destro has so many more options than order, which just isn't true. Choppa is good, but if you want competitive you go mara. So basically the amount of actual proper melee classes is the same. Choppa has a spot for sure, but it's not like you want more than 1 or 2, which pretty much function as a more mobile rift magus. Slayer is a very solid melee class, I would say stronger than choppa. Oh and also, shatter limbs is a thing. You won't see that like ever in destro wbs anymore cuz sh is trash tier now.

And btw, mara drain becomes useful when you go with at least 3+, but that means less sorcs.

Shaman pump is fine, but if you want to be effective you need 2 tactic slots. That significantly affects the groups survival capabilities. But if the shaman is high rr with good gear it can work, tho I really don't find it necessary. Am st pump is actually more versatile, since you can choose who to pump. Ask TUP what it's like to play against full bw kiting wb with burning head. In proper hands it's devastating.

I agree that sorc didn't need that m2. Focus should've been put on classes like sh and sw, who were completely gutted and never fixed. But alas.

I read your points, disagree with some, agreed with others. Without diving too much into it I absolutely agree that there is a place for sweaty tryheart WC or keep kiting and building Burning heads. But when city sieges comes out, things become more instances and narrow its the head on confrontations I was focusing on since that will actually be the endgame, and the future fights and now 1year old fights where Flashfire was different, gear, distrupt rates, moral gain etc were all different.

But once again an other toptier guild who have played on both sides, who simply agree on Sorc Shatter M2 just never really should had been mirrored, so thats hopefully something the Devs will take from this. TUP members have said it, Phalanx have said it, PnP now says it.

I always wanted to run 8 BO's 8 stabby SH's built kinda tanky with m4 wind up da waaagh's and 8 double morale pump shamans.

(1200 x 8 deafening belows = 9600 30ft) + (2400 x 8 Wind up da waaagh's = 19,200) = 28,800 instant morale damage all 30ft. Granted that's not all in one location but should wipe out a lot.

BO's run morale pump. SH's run morale pump. Shaman's run double morale pump. You'll get to bomb condition fast. You got kite for days if you want it. You got large area affect cycle of bad gas and disorients. Da greenest bellow... blah blah. Lots of tricks.

Problem is it takes a hell of a lot of organization/coordination. But endgame is pvp so all you got is organization/coordination at the end of it.

Instant damage M2 and “competitive” game play don’t realy map to each other in my opinion and hardly map to fun,
The solution you propose only solidified the BW place as only only DPS on order which I hope devs do not adopt.
The solution I prefer is still to remove all instant M2 damage from all classes especially the lead damage producers to give space for wb flexibility.
The removal of instant damage M2 from Soc and BW, removal of solar flare, tone down rampage and I would say the game is going in the right direction

We see how players adopted for dev's restrictions and balances.
Return SW vanilla 1s cast for Lileath's Arrow (with tactic) with 100% buffed damage output M2 and we see new variations of WB's setup...

In short, Order set the standard for the meta years ago. Destro adapted to it and Order never really tried something new cos it still kinda works. And thats were we still are.

Having run warbands in both sides I thing I think Order bombing is much more effective than destro bombing warbands.
1) DPS: choppa damage is not even close to be compared with sorc and bw dmg. The choppa pull is of little importance in the battlefield since only pug warbands may actually die from that. Organized warbands will power through massive choppa pulls easily. I have witnessed dealing 300-400 dmg per aoe spam with my choppa on BWs numerous times. The armor, guard, challenge mitigation is crazy even on casters. That damage is a joke and really close to SW joke aoe dmg. Slayers on the other hand are much more effective due to shatter limbs and 50% block and parry bypass (btw it can only be dispelled by Black Orks, no other tank can dispell it).
2) healers: WP vs Dok. Kinda the same amount of healing with WP providing the wounds buff. Still Order has the upper hand on this comparison. Runepriest armor buffs also make BWs much resilient to physical (choppa) dmg. AM morale boost works just on grp heals for the whole grp while with shammy morale pump you have to make a hit to get the morale bonus (healer dont really benefit from that, tanks also some times)
3) Tanks: the greatest imbalance between Order and Destro warbands comes from the KOTBS. The party buffs a KOTBS provides are nowhere to be matched. +15% healing on grp (while chosen can only have +15% healing for himself), +5% crit on grp, and self buff on block (and not the inferior parry buff that chosens have), -10% on block parry dodge disrupt aoe on 2handed spec, solar flare. This class is way too buffed regarding what Destro tanks have to offer. Thats why you will see VII recruiting Only KOTBS. You dont need anything else tbh (maybe SMs for the cooldown decrease but you can win without them easily). They are beasts.

mrrocks wrote: Wed Oct 16, 2019 7:30 am We see how players adopted for dev's restrictions and balances.
Return SW vanilla 1s cast for Lileath's Arrow (with tactic) with 100% buffed damage output M2 and we see new variations of WB's setup...

Devs hate SWs mate you should have known it by now... haha I guess they got killed a lot on live by SWs.

roadkillrobin wrote: Wed Oct 16, 2019 7:53 am In short, Order set the standard for the meta years ago. Destro adapted to it and Order never really tried something new were given anything else cos it still kinda works. And thats where we still are.

FTFY