Tier 3 scenarios have been rather a mixed bag. For a while, when queuing for everything it seemed Tor Anroc popped 9 times out of 10, a Destruction Dude would always pick up The Thing, and you’d have to slog it all the way over to their base and fight your way up the hill under a withering barrage of fire in an oft-doomed bid to Kill The Dude With The Thing. Then different scenarios starting coming up more frequently, and Order were winning Tor Anroc more often than not, but losing most others. This was from a fair mix of the Temple of Isha, Doomfist Crater and High Pass Cemetery, an occasional Talabec Damn, and almost no Black Fire Basins. Conclusion: the best scenarios are those that involve Killing Dudes With Things, or Killing Dudes Standing Next To Things. Picking Up The Thing And Running To Another Place Without Being Killed, not so hot.
Last night, after a few days of general exploring, questing, dungeons and the like, I thought I’d go scenario crazy again, queued up five or six times in a row, and Order won everything, convincingly in most cases. It might’ve just been the luck of the queue, but glancing at the summaries at the end, Destruction’s levels seemed a bit lower on average than they had been. There are a couple of pretty dedicated Order guilds on our server, with several players who’ve been level 40 for a while now, probably more than Destruction (from anecdotal evidence), so I have a suspicion that Order players have tended to start on Tier 4 scenarios as soon as they can, whereas Destruction had been staying with Tier 3 as long as possible; I’d often see four or five level 30/31 Destruction players in a scenario, and very rarely see an Order player over level 28. Now it looks like a wave of Destruction players who were on that cusp have either outlevelled Tier 3 entirely or chosen to head for Tier 4, and coming up in their place are some lower level players, tilting the Tier 3 level advantage in Orders favour. Or I could be reading way too much into random scenario queue matches. Either way, it made for a nice haul of XP and renown, huzzah!
One thing I’m noticing more and more: the biggest single factor contributing to scenario victory is level imbalance. If the other team has a group of 6 rank 40s and your team only has a couple, the odds are stacked massively against you.
I also noticed this when playing my rank 11 White Lion alt in Nordenwatch yesterday. Me vs. a rank 5 Black Orc, I may as well have been attacking a Sorceress in the time I chewed through him. A bit later I came across a rank 11 Black Orc, and this time I was the one getting chewed.
I’d like to see an improvement to bolstering to either bring all players closer in power to those at the top of the tier, or to scale the rank 40s/31s/21s/11s down a couple of levels. The current system is simply unreliable and ineffective for providing balanced fights.
Yup, definitely, the three level gap at the top end of the level range can be a killer (most literally); at least PvP XP means you can’t have twinks like in WoW battlegrounds, but I think I’d be happier with bolstering to level 10/20/30, rather than 8/18/28 (or “un-bolstering” at the higher end, though that might be slightly more problematic).
I’m not sure who has most level 40s but I wonder if what you are seeing is the next wave of Destruction alts being slightly ahead of ours.
Fwiw, I know we’re looking forwards to grouping with some of the guys who are at the top end of T3 when they move into T4, so… you know … get cracking :)
What I mostly see in T4 is that although organisation was always an important part of winning scenarios, because dps gets totally over the top in T4 it can be a very very fast whitewashed if the other side is rigged for it. And marauders and witch elves are very overpowered.
Mmm, could well be next wave of Destruction alts just coming into Tier 3. I’d love to see some stats on levels of scenario participants over time (and their relative contributions, also broken down by class and race, and times to level, and population density in the different zones, and… and…)
Anyway! The burst of scenario-winning XP meant I hit Rank 28 last night, so T4 here we come! (For some open-RvR stuff, at least, might stick with T3 scenarios for a bit, not least ‘cos I’ve got loads of quests in Talabecland still. Though I might never be able to look at the Temple of Isha map in the same way after Arbitrary’s post…)