Recollections of a battle for Thunder Mountain: Part 2

A and C are easily defendable by one force, since there's a speedy route connecting the two. B on the other hand, would not be defended unless a defensive force was explicitly placed there. We rode north around the west road as sneakily as we could, and tried to hit B. There was a warband just sitting in the cave waiting for us! It was incredibly hard to cap a BO with a choke point separating us, since our people were not able to get past the choke point effectively enough, and the defenders were continuously getting rezzed. Despite some intense fighting, we could not make any progress. Even when we could get through, we could not take the BO NPCs down. Furthermore, the people who died inside were out of range for a rez. Damn, the number of Order in the zone kept climbing.

The order zerg would have been cautious by then. They knew what kind of numbers we had and they knew we were trying hard to stop them. So we needed to try something different. Something sneaky. We decided to send 3 groups to A, and my original Scenario group would try to take D. The groups sent to A would be the distraction and they would try to catch as much attention as they could, for as long as they could. This was to try to drain their numbers toward the west. and hopefully leave D weak. We waited on the PVE road by D as long as we could, until we saw that the rest of our warband was struggling. Then, we charged at D. To our surprise, we found a warband sitting outside the BO, waiting. They looked like they had no intention to react to anything --- they were just content to sit there at the BO until the zone locked. Our group hit the Order wall and died. I asked for a report of how many people reacted to their attack on A. They said that they were close to getting it, but the numbers were even greater now.

Our estimates now were about 1 Order warband at each BO, vs our 1 Destro warband. Time was running out.

Change of plans. Since the warbands of Order were just going to sit at the BOs, we had to do something else. No sense hitting them head on where they have the advantage. Our final attempt to save the zone was to hit the west keep. Keeps take longer to capture than BOs, but with a warband we could at least take the outer door down, and pressure the Order zergs. If the outer door was down, Order would be forced to divert their numbers to defend the keep, or we could easily bust down the inner and kill the Keep Lord. This would also tie up some Order at the Keep since the outer door would stay down for a few minutes after it is destroyed.

When we arrived at the west Keep, there were a few defenders. They looked mostly like AFK'ers and scouts. Good. We wanted all the Order in the zone to know that we were slamming the Keep hard. Our top priority was to bring the outer door down. We burned through it quick. People in our warband kept screaming that more Order was coming to defend. GOOD! Our next priority was to repel the Order as long as we could, and we tried our best to take the Keep. Or at least, make Order think that we really wanted the keep. We killed many who were trying to enter the Keep by defending all the outer Keep entrances, while focusing most of our firepower on the inner door. Throughout the fight, I tried to keep motivating the warband, and telling them that this is a win-win situation for us.

If they didn't try to stop us, we'd have the Keep within minutes. Capturing the Keep would put 2 hours back on the clock. If they did try to stop us, I reminded everyone that it's okay if we wiped. We just had to take the front door down. If we wiped, it was actually a good thing because our whole warband would deathwarp to our warcamp, and we'd have a positional advantage. I felt that it was important for the whole warband to be in the same mindset for this, and to not have a morale hit after wiping at the keep. I knew I had a core of good people who understood this, so for the most part we should still have a substantial warband --- even if the zerglings got demoralized by the loss, or if they got tired of running around and left the warband.

We kept wiping packs of zerglings who tried to come defend the keep. Eventually the Order zergs started to feel the heat --- they responded with full force and wiped us at the west keep. We tried to get everyone to suicide as fast as they could, to regroup at the warcamp.

Continue to Part 3...