I still don’t quite have a grip on the schedules of the various kinships and tribes on Arkenstone yet, but apparently Wednesday is Immortals night. The Immortals is the tribe I was invited to, and one of the two biggest and most well-known tribes on the server. I run with the other big tribe, Bloodthirsty, all the time too and between the two I’m learning a bit about PvP strategy and tactics, among other things. It’s also PvMP night for two kinships that I have friends in, so the Ettenmoors was quite busy for awhile this evening.
Tonight I logged in my orc defiler, Severakth and saw the Free Peoples (“freeps”) had captured Lugazag, the keep closest to Gramsfoot, which is the uncapturable “home base” for the Monster Players (“creeps”). I popped onto the Immortals Ventrilo and immediately got an invite to the Immortals raid. Bloodthirsty had their own raid (mixture of Bloodthirsty and creeps from several other tribes) fighting there as well, and for awhile we coordinated between the two tribes as to which would hold the entry hall and lower floor and which would handle the stairs and upper floor. We were pushed totally out of Lugazag once when someone in the other raid made a bad pull on the NPCs and the freeps took advantage of it, making a massive push downstairs and fragmenting our forces badly. We regrouped outside Lugazag and slowly pushed back in, holding the foyer and began pushing upstairs once more. This time we all made it upstairs only to find only a couple freeps. Suspecting they’d jumped out for either a flank maneuver or perhaps to attempt to take another keep (that’s what we would have done) while we were pre-occupied at Lugazag. Turns out the freeps were just hiding in the flag room, which is a separate part of the keep only available to the controlling faction. When we engaged the Captain-General NPC, the freeps rushed out of the flag room. Unbeknownst to them, we had no intention of actually taking the keep, we just wanted to feast on soft, juicy freep-flesh! We immediately dropped the NPCs and turned all our attention to the freeps, killing them all very quickly. Since we’d already aggroed the Captain-General, we went ahead and killed him, which puts the flag room door into a neutral state allowing us in to capture the keep. One of our spider weavers ran up to the flag as if to perform the capture while the rest of us stayed back. To our delight, the freeps made a heavy push into the flag room to prevent us from controlling Lugazag, and again we slaughtered them.
After a few minutes, the Captain-General respawned which resets the flag to an uncapturable state as well as making the flag room door unusable for us. We were trapped inside and unable to take the keep — which we didn’t want to do anyway or we would have already — but did the freeps know that? Whether they did or did not, they made continued pushes into the flag room where we hungrily awaited them! From the discussion over Ventrilo, none of the Immortals had ever heard of this particular tactic (which we admittedly discovered by accident) being used before, at least not on Arkenstone. Our raid alone had enough to split into two forces, one staying in the flag room to farm the freeps who continually entered, the other going downstairs to help hold the lower floor against respawning NPCs as well as to weaken and funnel the freeps up to us. Despite being on different floors and unable to heal anyone on the lower floor, each group was still considered in proximity to each other and so everyone still got the Infamy points for each freep kill regardless if they were upstairs or downstairs. We were pretty safe upstairs since the freeps kept coming in 2-5 at a time, otherwise we just had to watch every so often for when the flag room NPCs would respawn. Finally the freeps made a coordinated push but the downstairs group followed them up and once more we stood victorious! Fearing the freeps were catching on that we were unable to flip the keep on them (it would have been amusing to see all the NPCs switch to orcs and trolls with the freeps in a position where there was no escape) we planned a new attack. There’s a ledge on the flag room overlooking the entrance to the upper floor. The freeps had previously had hunters up there shooting at us. One of our warg stalkers snuck down and aggroed all the NPCs then kited them away while the rest of our raid jumped down en masse into the freeps! It seemed they were surprised by that maneuver; it took them a few seconds to start fighting back.
Wondering if the freeps would learn from their mistake, we took down the Captain-General again and re-entered the flag room to try the same tactic again. Sure enough, the freeps put themselves back into their previous situation of disorganization, entering the flag room in small fragmented groups that were dealt with very quickly and easily.
Gotta give the freeps a lot of credit though for actually putting up a good fight for a change though. All in all, Severakth earned over 1,500 Infamy tonight, putting him around 7,500 or so, which is roughly 40% towards Rank 6! I’m really looking forward to getting Rank 6 where Severakth will get his final heal, but at 7,500/18,000 it’s still going to be awhile before reaching Rank 6.
Tags: LOTRO, PvMP
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