Keep Assault in the Shadowlands

We were hanging out in the Shadowlands warcamp last night, a bunch of us Night Elves shuffling our feet waiting for the next Phoenix Gate RvR Scenario to start. Meanwhile we noticed the latest map noted that the keep over the horizon was flying Order flags (pompous scum). We quickly headed over there to raise some temporary hell.

The fight at the foot of the keep was relatively easy; only NPCs guarded the entrance. We quickly dispatched them and started knifing the door. Well that was going absolutely no where fast, so I ran back to the Warcamp and grabbed a deployable battering ram from the Warband's Quartermaster.

Plopping this thing down was a breeze, but things still took a while. The mechanic was quite cool - anyone who's played a Golf of Football game will easily identify it as a Swing / Kicker mechanic. The bar periodically fills up as you and your crew strain to pull the ram swing backwards. As the bar fills up you have to click a button just as reaches a threshold line. Clicking early will give you a swing that doesn't quite provide the full force of the ram - say like 93% if you're overcautious, or 98% if your good. Hitting it at 100% is possible, but if you miss and the progress bar goes past the 100%, then the effectiveness of the swing drops to 50%.

Which is a bad thing, because it takes a good deal of impacts to batter the door down, and you can only swing it about 5 times a minute.

As time went on the NPCs were respawning and dealing us and the Battering Ram some hurt. A few folks had to put the ram down to deal with these bastages. If there were any Player Characters around who were whether attacking us from the ground, or even worse from above, then this whole process could get pretty freaking intense, and expensive.

But the NPC threat was pretty easy to deal with. We burst threw the door in a few minutes, dispatched the guards on the ground floor, and moved our way up to the second. That's when Captain Champion McGee and his 5 elite guards tore through our party of 5 in about 10 seconds. It was not a pretty sight.

Lesson Learned: Bring a freaking warband and a few tanks to take a keep. There ain't no way any sort of small squad finesse is going to win the day, not even with luck.