Quick Reflection on Open RvR.

Yes, I know. It’s yet another blogger going on about his own personal take on ORVR. Yes, I’m gonna do my own. Okay, for those of you who are still here, here’s my deal.

Since rolling a Slayer, I have been more involved in ORvR than I have ever been before. Normally, I PvE first, with scenarios added into the mix. My goal has always been to hit rank 40 in the most efficient way possible. This time around, I’ve been playing a LOT of ORvR. I’m glad my server has a nice healthy population that can support multiple wbs going around taking keeps and BO’s almost every night. I’ve been having great fun these past few nights running around and participating in lightning sieges or frantic defenses.

The other night, in Fangbreaka Keep, my warband was involved in an epic defense, we had capped the BO’s and sieged the keep as quickly as we could, but destro got into the keep just as the lord went down. What followed was an intense defense with our wb holed up in the lord room, trying to survive against what seemed to be 2-3 times our number of destro.

Amazingly enough, everyone followed orders, and we blocked up the ramp with a tank wall, while Slayers and other dps cut down any who were foolish enough to try to break the tank wall. This went on for a good 20-25 minutes, constantly beating off destro assaults. In the end, we were overwhelmed, and they pushed us out of the keep, but we made them pay for every inch of ground with their blood. It was very 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.

Enough about that, here’s my observation: ORvR is great. RvR Influence rewards are great.

Separating the Influence by tier and having rewards bound to that particular tier you have max influence in, not so great.

My problem with this system is that unless you have a lot of time to play, you will find that during peak times, the ORvR action tends to take place within the same pairing most of the time. Which results in you getting full influence in one paring pretty quickly, while struggling to get any in certain pairings. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems that by the time I max out influence in multiple pairings to get the items I may want from that pairing, I’m pretty close to leveling out of that tier, unless I start real early. My current situation is that I’m doing a lot of RvR in the Dwarf/Greenskin zones, but the elite reward is not something I particularly want. However, no one seems to want to do much in the Elf or Empire zones.

I suggest that instead of dividing the ORvR Influence by pairing, they could either consolidate all ORvR Influence by tier. So that instead of say, Dwarf T2 Influence, you would only have Tier 2 Influence. Also, this would allow Mythic to let you pick and choose rewards from all the pairings. So instead of grinding up three different bars, you would only have to do one, which would open up all the rewards, instead of having to grind out pairings individually. To balance this, I’d let them slow the rate of influence gain a bit, perhaps by 15%. Getting inf 15% slower would be a worthwhile tradeoff for having access to the rewards from every pairing.

That way, you could gear up slightly faster and still have some ranks left to actually use your new gear before you level out of the tier entirely.