Tier 5

It seems like an inevitability at this point. RR gain has been drastically increased, up to RR80 at least. Captains medallions (the blue ones with a big V on them) dropping off RR80+ players are a dead giveaway. The introduction of green gear for RR80+ as RvR drops, a little miffed there isn’t RR req gear for the earlier levels, but whatever. All that’s needed now is somewhere for T5 RvR to happen without taking away from the standard T4 RvR campaign. Oh, and without adding any new content since that might actually be work instead.

I’m looking at these Fortresses again, tears of sadness well up every time I cross one of those opened and abandoned thresholds. So much work put into these racial monuments has been wasted. If I were a dev or artist that worked on getting these massive pieces of landscape in the game I’d be sending hate mail daily until they were reimplemented. It strikes me that these would be excellent culmination points for a T5 campaign, or battle at very least. There’s surely going to be some work needed to be done, but nothing that the current handful of developers wouldn’t be able to handle. Well, provided the same team that did the City Siege revamp and Skaven Dungeon are still around.

Give us a solid point A-B-C-D-E objective train that frequently causes us to cross paths with red named purple number generators, and everyone can go home happy. Just because we’re fighting at the Fortress does not necesarily mean that it needs to be a siege situation. Raiding the grounds for resources, planting bombs at weak points, sabotaging war machines, destroying commander tents, etc. Plenty of things for us to do besides play whack-a-door for 30 minutes at a time. “Defenders” spawn at the top of the fort, “attackers” spawn just outside the walls at a Siege Camp. Mulitple stages of the PQ lead the fight around a few key objectives. Good times are had by all. Mythic, you guys have the talent (unless you fired them already). I think you just tend to struggle a bit on pulling the trigger sometimes. Wasn’t it Jeff Skalski who told us “It’s cool. Trust me” when referring to the plan for Forts coming back? I think those were the words he used. Trust. Ha. Yeah. What are you working on now Jeff? http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=892 (bullet point #1 for the 1.3.2 patch).

The next bit would be opening up a new set of scenarios for T5, now being RR81+ of course. I think people could stand a significant change after having to deal with Nordenwatch for the past bajillion levels. My T5 candidates are simple. 

• The Maw for the arena style PvP, although I think the spawn points need to change to more ground level random locations on the outer perimeter. Getting camped and having little choice besides falling 30% of your HP away is crap.  
• Tor Anroc. Lava is the great equalizer for any scenario. Whether you’re RR10 or RR100, chances are you won’t be surviving that well timed punt into the molten doom below. Change the objective into a three point capture system to mix things up a bit and keep the fighting spread out. 
  
• Highpass Cemetary is one of my favorites, the spawn points make it nigh impossible to be camped, and if they toned down the point accumulation (or increased the cooldown timer between flips) it could go significantly longer.
  
• Gromril Crossing is another good scenario that needs a few tweaks to become GREAT. First, more tunnels leaving the spawn, both sides suffer from the falling-off-a-cliff spawn camp because people aren’t really smart enough to take the secondary exit. Next, remove the two objectives closest to the spawn, and make the remaining three always capturable. It’s the reason Nordenwatch works so well, you don’t have to continuously run face first into the meatgrinder to score points.
  
• The Ironclad, but ONLY if it were possible to limit group healing to check LoS. Otherwise a fun scenario aside from that HUGE drawback.

I had ideas for other scenarios as well but those are really the best ones that I would want to play. Scenarios like Dragons Bane and Thunder Valley are just too far gone to really be workable. Twisting Tower is apparently too damn confusing, and the War Quarters/Undercroft are already being used for King battles. Grovod Caverns crossed my mind, but there so much wrong with that scenario it probably need a whole overhaul (which I half expected with the skaven update, but meh). Perhaps for a 6th scenario they could just add Thanquols as a queue-able scenario instead of the clusterfuck that it currently is. Has anyone had a good fight in there yet?

At any rate, every thing that’s point to a T5 coming into play could all be smoke and mirrors. Where one half of the game gets planned out and another half is actually executed. I think for now I would just settle for a roadmap of what 1.4 is going to bring us, or maybe what 1.5 would have in store for us. I really hope Bioware finishes up SWTOR and tosses some resources back to WAR, but at this point in the game that might be a pipedream as well. Good thing I like to get drunk, sorta makes a wash of all these thoughts. Bottoms up! Ha ha!