It wasn't easy to figure out the "impossible" task of attacking TB without superior quality forces. I tried to calculate running distances, average death rates, response times, but nothing worked, because the playerbase of TB and random BGs is much worse than even the HC-puggers, simply because "i pwn lol".
So large part of the players who come to TB are utter morons, who simply act as primitive bots: they aggro on the nearest thing with red letters and attack him until it's dead or they are. This behavior automatically form zergs as the lone moron dies, while the zerging moron kills, and keep killing. Obviously in a game where 3 bases must be taken at the same time, a zerg cannot win.
Then I figured out that the winning strategy has nothing to do with running distances. It's about utilizing my own morons while creating a situation where the opposing force morons are useless. Behold the moron-utilizing TB attack plan. All you need is about 8-10 intelligent players, the rest can be utter zerging morons.
PS: there is a stupid way you can lose the attack. You queue up with your pre-made, look at the raid at start and say "hey, 80% of the raid is us, let's win in 5 mins" and abandon the plan. Of course, 5 minutes from the start, the raid is filled with utter morons who guarantee the outcome.
So large part of the players who come to TB are utter morons, who simply act as primitive bots: they aggro on the nearest thing with red letters and attack him until it's dead or they are. This behavior automatically form zergs as the lone moron dies, while the zerging moron kills, and keep killing. Obviously in a game where 3 bases must be taken at the same time, a zerg cannot win.
Then I figured out that the winning strategy has nothing to do with running distances. It's about utilizing my own morons while creating a situation where the opposing force morons are useless. Behold the moron-utilizing TB attack plan. All you need is about 8-10 intelligent players, the rest can be utter zerging morons.
- You open with a macro: "We are going to surprise the horde today. My pre-made will handle Warden's and Slag, all you have to do is holding IC"
- The morons scatter everywhere, ignoring your instruction. Your premade, the non-moron casuals and those morons who happened to converge to IC are holding IC. Since you are zerging there, you are killing the incoming defenders. The scattered morons die and sooner or later get to IC.
- After promotion your pre-made members destroy the towers.
- You are zerging IC for 15-25 mins. During this time the opposing force morons are obliterated at IC and either go AFK or keep following the 3-lines script in their head: res, mount up, go to IC, die. 15-25 mins are way too long for a casual-social player, even if he is not a completely useless moron. They either go AFK or attack IC too.
- From your premade 1-1 stealthers or far-seers go to Slag and WV, reporting to you how many defenders are in. Usually 3-3 or something like that. You send enough pre-made members to outnumber them by 2 and have a healer. These groups take the 2 bases at the same time. The defenders will split up, unable to send adequate forces to both bases, as half of their team is AFK or completely pissed at being farmed at IC and keep charging it with great rage.
- You press your recruitment macro, that informs everyone that your pre-made won the game.
PS: there is a stupid way you can lose the attack. You queue up with your pre-made, look at the raid at start and say "hey, 80% of the raid is us, let's win in 5 mins" and abandon the plan. Of course, 5 minutes from the start, the raid is filled with utter morons who guarantee the outcome.
14 comments:
Squishalot here, blogspot's comments are having issues.
There is another flaw in the plan - it's entirely reliant on the Horde not zerging a single base in the last few minutes. If they catch your forces moving to take out the defenders at the last two bases, they can choose to zerg just one of them, wiping you out, and then they can happily hold the last base for the ~5 minutes it takes to win the match (while they may get bored for 15-20 minutes, it's no different to guarding East in WG in the last few minutes).
You're relying on their forces not being able to cope with the fact that your forces are split. Perhaps that's the case on your server, but I think it's not a long-term solution - even SotA pugs are capable of deciding on and rushing a single set of doors on the beach.
The point is that significant part of the horde is AFK, a larger part is enraged lolkid who don't listen to anything.
The remaining should get to an agreement and either be dead (to resurrect) or able to leave IC (not CC-ed) That's are lot of ifs.
That's assuming that your lolkids at IC are actually CC'ing people. That's a bigger 'if', if you ask me...
Anyway, I acknowledge that it can work in the short term, right up until the Horde realise that the optimal defense strategy is to zerg a single base in the last 5 minutes. In that case, you're relying on the Horde AFK'ing for the entire match and not coming back.
Your tactic assumes that you can control your side and that other side are complete morons. As such, it can be successful if you can control your side and the other side are complete morons.
The easiest faults in this strategy is that people on your side will keep trying to attack the other bases before your order, and the other side's reaction speed (because they respawn in the middle, they have better reaction time if they're trying to run to somewhere other than where they died). But really, there are so many things that can go wrong they're not worth listing.
You can't win a dynamic iterated conflict with a competent opponent with a static plan. And if you're competent and the other side isn't, this really shouldn't be that hard to begin with.
Have you actually tried this out? How many times with what results?
Sounds to me like it relies too heavily on moron behavior being deterministic. It is not.
Most likely during those 25mins someone in your team will decide to go ninja a base, diverting some forces both teams.
Also, while you're destroying towers, there are huge letters flashing on the defenders screens. What these letters mean to them is "there are fewer attackers at the tower than there are at IC; we can take them".
If that's not enough, someone will scream in the chat to def the towers. And someone will answer.
And any number of other random things may happen. Expecting everyone who is not in your premade (on both teams) to stay in one place is just wildly optimistic.
@Grim, Korhaug: it does NOT expect my faction to respond to my command. It just expect a small premade and a few intelligent ones to do so.
The others are expected to do what they always do: zerg mindlessly.
The few intelligent listen to a successful plan. The morons are happy that they can pwn on IC.
Also, defending the towers is the dumbest thing and no one does it. If the defenders would ever try it seriously (meaning not just 1-2 random idiot), we could instantly take all bases.
@Gevlon
I'm not sure how often, since my TB time is rather limited lately, but I've seen people defending towers, have defended them myself and have won... in 15minutes, not 30.
Works especially well if attackers assume that "defending towers is stupid, no one does it" and just have one or two people attempt to take them down.
Seriously - the siege engines can always be seen on the map, are slower than mounts to begin with and can be slowed, snared. Its not that hard to hold one base (switching if it gets zerged) and have enough people on the sieges to keep towers up.
P.S. The most important word in my previous post was "deterministic". Morons will zerg most of the time, but not all of the time. They will do random nonsense every once in a while which while not leading to any end in itself, will disrupt the "everyone just zergs IC" part of your plan.
Defending towers is common thing to do even at cost of Tol Barad. Reason behind this is that there is achievement for destroying siege engine. Which can be done only if it is attacking tower.
Sorry for my bad english but just to clarify, is the strat:
1. zerg ic
2. Get promoted and destroy towers
3. wait for the final 5 minutes or so
4. Attack with your premade slag and warden?
I'll prove it this week, sounds pretty doable.
"Your tactic assumes that you can control your side and that other side are complete morons."
He's not attempting to control them at all. On the contrary, he's giving them exactly what they want - Tol Barads very own version of the ice field in the middle of AV.
The key is, by forcing the spawn point for his team to be in one place only, he creates the 'ice field' exactly where he needs it to be.
This seems to rely on the horde continuing to zerg a certain base even when losing. My experience is from the over populated faction so maybe they've just actually got a smart premade most of the time, but everytime the battle starts going sideways at a particular base, all the horde just start switching to another base on rez. The thing is they're just as motivated by the "not captured" map indicator as going to 'pwn'. It's why people keep staying behind to 'help capture' a base the enemy has been routed from, rather than move on and continue the battle (and why 5 people try to cap the flag at once in AB). So to me the plan seems to rely on the enemy being even stupider than I've usually seen them be (continuously zerging one base, being afk). But if it gets you success on your realm becauses the horde is particularly stupid there, then congrats, I just don't think it's generally applicable.
I don't see the tactic working on my realm either. A PvP realm US. It has become accepted practice to just play ring around the rosey.
Most defenders seem to just abandon the first base the attacker hits and just aim to hold 2 the entire time. Almost any M&S that has seen the fight can realize that the defenders don't need every point. Once the base trading starts it is amazingly hard to stop.
Also, I do not see enough AFK to make a difference for either side. Zerging a point is the tactic for both sides and is mindless enough that anyone will do it.
Is this your theorycraft or have this worked for you several times Gevlon? Once or twice sounds like a fluke.
The biggest flaw in the plan on my server is how difficult it would be to get my premade group into TB.
Since my faction vastly outnumbers the enemy faction, we'd have to queue 30-40 people to make sure to get 10-15 in.
Since the enemy can consistently get in their key players, and we're dealing with a scattering of server idiots, many of our quality pvpers are demoralized at the mere thought of 30 minutes of fail.
This tactic only seems to work for the underpopulated faction. If you play on the overpopulated side you can't gurantee to get your team into TB.
On Skullcrusher EU I'd say a horde team would call itself lucky if it signs up with a full group of 5 and 2 actually get into TB. You basically can't join as a premade but would have to build your team out of the M&S zerg, which usually fails.
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