Alright, so for one, Altdorf has no chance in hell of ever looking this cool…

As I’ve come to understand, not everyone is having such a great time defending and attacking cities. After about 6-8 sieges in a span of a few short days, people start to miss things like scenarios, RvR, hell even having time to do instances, or crafting! Yes, two hours of being stuck in your city to defend can be something of a nuisance. Getting stuck with the same group of players that holds a death grip on the objectives while they casually melt your face can get a trite irritating. The cute little tactic of having a Chosen stand at a choke point, guarded and focus healed while spamming all of his auras to lag out anyone nearby while the backline casters nuke the general area… ah, that was fun to deal with. So I suppose there’s a time and place for City Sieges. Everyday is a bit much for the average end-gamer in WAR. Way too much for the R30-39 crew as well. Then you have the rest of the T1-T3 players that watch from the distance as the sieges take place.

I’ve posted on City Sieges before, a really long time ago actually. Some of the points I made there eventually snuck into our current experience. Some of them haven’t. I’d like to take a moment while sieging is on everyone’s mind to refine and refresh what else I’d like to see. (Then cross my fingers and pray that it happens…)

One of the major differences between a siege and RvR is the lack of Scenarios. Some would liken the City to it’s own hugely scaled scenario with a 2 hour timer, but it’s not really the same. The beauty of scenarios is what drew people to WAR by the boatload. 15m skirmish action that gave you objectives to complete or let you kill to your twisted black hearts content. You never needed to be in any particular place to queue for them, and they popped frequently enough that you could make for a full night of enjoyment. Some players absolutely lived and leveled on scenarios! So now we have semi-regular city sieges and all that falls to the wayside. Why should it? 

First off, we have The Undercroft and War Quarters for each city to defend. A while back now they were tweaked so only non-T4 players could join them. This makes no sense to me at all as T4 players are the only ones that would survive fighting over the city to begin with. Is there not enough demand for scenarios when the city pops? In the past, perhaps. Cities were sieged very rarely on most servers, so I would imagine most players that could, certainly would take part in the actual siege. However! Things have obviously changed! With the increases in sieges, I believe this would be the perfect chance to re-introduce Scenarios to the city for players needing a change from the same 2 hour long grind.

This of course, gets you nowhere fast. What else then? Well obviously you would need multiple scenarios, lest people get tired of playing the same one over and over again. How about the Twisting Tower and Reikland Factory? Oh, but people love the hell out of those, and they should! The Twisting Tower sits atop Chaos Wastes and has a great amount of detail put into it. It’s a rather large population scenario that has some GREAT mechanics (like turning into Skaven). Reikland Factory is also an epic scenario that people go absolutely NUTS over. I know it was one of my favorites the few times I managed to play it. These are shining pinnacles of design that Mythic has decided it needs to hide away and play on their private servers (I know you do, you dirty bastards!). They fit seamlessly in the concept of a city siege, Twisting Tower supporting the Inevitable City, Reikland Factory supporting Altdorf. Both of them important for strategic defense and supply of their respective capitals. Brilliant!

So great! We have scenarios back in action for the city siege, what now? Well, Mythic in their strangely wise decision has left VP’s entirely to the players actually fighting in the city. I don’t mind this actually, not one bit. It makes a lot more sense for the ground troops to affect the ground war more than the backline support troops. Instead, the two scenarios should affect city instance buffing! For Order defending in the city, a War Quarters win would equate to a defensive bonus. Adding 10% to armor, resists, and HP. A win in the Reikland Factory scenario would be an offensive bonus granting an additional 5% damage, 5% armor penetration, and 5% crit, vice versa for Destruction capturing these locations of course. Let the buffs persist for 5 minutes, making them temporary but useful, and not applied 100% of the time. While you’re at it, have each instance of a scenario only apply for a single instance of the city siege so you don’t have multiple scenarios effecting multiple sieges at one time. Say we have Altdorf 10, 15, 20, and 25 running, there should be a War Quarters 10, 15, 20, 25 as well as a Reikland Factory 10, 15, 20, 25. Allowing people to queue up for the City Instance# they know their alliance or guildies are in would be another great move as you could then have your skirimish/RvR groups working hand-in-hand with your elite Scenario groups to win out the day.

City Sieges are one of those things that really focuses down hard on one single aspect of the game, but with proper tweaking embracing what people love about Warhammer, they can become the epic sieges we all fantasize about.

One other thing, for the love of all that is sacred, can we remove the Invader Belts from the damn gold bags already? Make them rare drops off players in City Sieges, but getting one in a gold bag is really GD irritating… Rawr…