How do you beat a zerg? Zerg harder! Or carpet bombing… Or a healthy dose of napalm…

The battlefields of WAR can be quickly littered with corpses in all stages of rot and decay. When facing a hoard of enemies, what better way to even the tides of any battle than with the freshly fallen bodies of your buddies? Consider the current state of the lifeless lakes of RvR in the event of an unstoppable zerg, and the need for opposition quickly becomes apparent. I propose a few roaming Vampire Lords wandering these lakes seeking out the stench of death, and for each fallen player outnumbered by the enemy realm, a R40 champion zombie to spawn in his place. I’m not saying this should be an ally by any means, but his hate should be fully directed at the person who felled him. In the event these zombies DO turn the tide of battle, well, they should turn right back on the nearest living fleshbag. Too much AoE nuking would likely do the same thing as you fill up his hate bar.

Dynamically changing the battlefield during confrontation in favor of the losers by using their own fallen corpses may somehow effect morale. I think a further question would be how this should affect resurrection on the battlefield however. To keep things a bit closer to fair, as long as your zombie is up and fighting, a rezzed player should suffer some sort of Wounds penalty. The zombie is acting off his life force after all. It’d keep them tentatively out of combat until that proxy falls again to the ground. Oh, and one zombie per dead player please. If the same player drops again before the zombie is killed, no need to raise another one. We’re just trying to balance the field (and cause some chaos) a small amount, not overwhelm the attackers.

These mechanics are already in the game to some degree. In the Altdorf Crypts you fight a boss that summons a clone of your spirit during battle. I believe there’s a boss in LotD that raises a skeletal copy as well. So perhaps Vampire Lords are a bit of a stretch, but the random Necromancer or Tomb King would not necessarily be out of order. I think just more moving bodies out there would be a pretty cool thing to take part in. Knowing when you fall, as an outnumbered defender, that someTHING will take your place and avenge your death should grant some sort of comfort and boost morale. Hopefully to the degree that the outnumbered faction gets back into RvR on a regular basis and the need for this falls off the side.

Alright, so that’s my favorite idea for on-the-fly faction balancing. Yeah, it sorta reeks of more RvE, but there’s only so much you can do with a system that depends on player interaction. Sometimes RvE is necessary… unfortunately. No, I don’t think these zombies should be worth any renown or XP, or even drop any good loot for that matter. Just another speedbump in rolling over your enemies. The point is to give them a bolster to bring some life, or undeath, and fighting back the the lakes. Myself personally, I’d love a third faction as a solution, but in lieu of that, gimmie zombies.

Too hard to code for our Mythic Dev brethren? Well, you guys could always start out small with some kind of battlefield specific buffs to an outnumbered force. Write in an RvR lake check for level disparity popping every 5 minutes, anything from 21-30% would give a 5% buff to armor/resists/damage/healing, 31-40% a 10% buff, 41-50% a 20% buff, and over 51% a 30% buff with a free 100 Wounds. Play with it for a bit, find out what gives a small group of defenders a fighting chance. It only takes enough that defenders can hold them off in the open field long enough for reinforcements to arrive. Using a 5m window will allow these mailbox lickers to get in on the action, still have a buff, and push back with more even numbers. When the check comes up again, and the buff fades out, the idea is to have enough people in the lakes to sustain a real fight.

You could even use that Rally Call to announce what buffs are active on the battlefield, I bet people would start pounding on that thing a lot more frequently.