In a game where size matters (at least as far as the size of your zerg!), it might seem counter-productive to purposely bring less than you can to a fight. In the proverbial case of one who brings a knife to a gun fight, the question is: does the guy with the knife have any fun?
Last night we rounded up 6 people who’d shown interest in something like this, hopped into Vent to horse around (with occasional actual strategic discussions), and began queueing up for scenarios. Destruction were once again pushing to lock zones and force open the doors of Order’s capital, leading to massive zergs of Destruction and Order in the contested zones. Incidentally, however, this has the opposite effect on scenario queues: since winning scenarios is a major way to swing the lock to your side’s favor, many will ‘defend by not defending’ and abstain from queues altogether.
Undaunted by the dearth of scenarios, our group set out to do Open RvR without being a part of the larger Destro force. We studied the map, tried to determine where Order would go next, and kept tabs on the larger group of Destruction. Doing this we would attempt to get between an already-invested objective/keep and the Order warcamp, or attempt to get behind the larger Order force as it moved. This gave us plenty of chances to find smaller groups of Order, sometimes just in 1’s and 2’s, who were either lost or late to the party. We instructed them harshly on the drawbacks of being lost or late!
Inevitably, of course, we would find the Order main force. Sometimes we were able to flank and take a few down with us; sometimes we were able to do a, uh, ’strategic retreat.’ Sometimes we were so good at these strategic retreats that we were able to retreat all the way to our warcamp in a matter of seconds…somehow!
Scenarios would pop, sure, and we did maybe half a dozen. Often enough, though, they would pop and we’d simply cancel out–because the action we were getting in Open RvR was far more enjoyable. Although we had many pitched battles of varying success (and odds!) over the night, there was one fight in particular that stood out from the evening:
We were in Thunder Mountain, probably around 12:30 am EST. The main push to lock the last zone was in Eataine, so the Order and Destro numbers in TM were around 30-40 each. Order capped the far east Battlefield Objective, and so our group of 6 headed there. By coincidence another small group of Destro, probably 8 or so, arrived there at the same time. This BO was recessed into the side of the mountain; a single entry point cave with a small flat ‘band’ of land outside that sat above a small ridge. As we came around the curve and looked into the BO we found around 30 Order waiting inside–fully twice the number of Destro outside. This had the potential to get ugly fast.
We quickly pulled out of line-of-sight of the cave interior. Because Order were waiting for the second tick from the BO, they wouldn’t fully leave the cave in force. Instead, their tanks and some mdps would venture out to attack those of us around the mouth of the cave–backed up by their healers safe inside. But this was a two-edge sword. Through a combination of knockbacks, marauder pulls, and their own zealous pursuit of our healers, we slowly started to kill the tanks and mdps outside the line of sight of their healers–which meant outside of resurrection LOS as well. Meanwhile our healers were excellently positioning themselves to make tanks have to commit to get a shot at taking them down–and most were content to simply punt them off the short cliff, only to have them come right back.
The second tick of the BO hit, but now the Order were in a different position. Despite having twice our numbers, they had lost most of their front-line fighters, so there was no force they could use to charge our position. The cave went from a place of safety to a deathtrap. Emboldened by their hesitancy we plunged full into the cave, and with our mostly-melee group, quickly stormed past the few remaining front line fighters back to the softer healers and casters. The situation got ugly fast–but for them.
This BO-standoff lasted a full 15 minutes before the last Order died, and despite facing a numerically superior force, the tactics employed and usage of geography allowed us to prevail. We coordinated our attacks to drop their exposed tanks quickly, and to protect our softer members when they came under fire. It was a huge success in a game without the CC tools to control a larger force–and doubly so with a group that lacked any real AoE attacks.
And so, after staying up probably later than many of us usually do, we called it a night close to 2 am. Everyone had enjoyed themselves quite a bit, and we quickly decided that making this a regular thing would greatly improve everyone’s enjoyment of the game. Even though we had to dodge zergs many times, and although we failed to dodge them often enough, it turns out there is enough space in these zones and enough traffic for a smaller group that sticks together to do some real damage. And having an alternative to joining the mega-zerg is probably a great thing for everybody.
WAR may be a gun fight, but the guys with knives might end up having more fun.
