Eternal Citadel Thoughts

Well, for me the weekend is most certainly over.  I must say that I believe it was a rather productive one, I think...

The Eternal Citadel came and went by almost as quickly as the matches themselves within the new 6v6 Scenario.  Most were happy with it, but there were some who weren't to impressed.  Everyone can agree however that if you needed to farm Insignias, this was the place to do it.  With the average match lasting no more than 5 minutes, it was a prime time to grind out your Royal weapons.

I'm actually not to sure the designers of the map were able to foresee this though.  I feel like while the Eternal Citadel was a much welcome change of pace, it turned into a grind quickly simply because of the above.  People realized early on that they could take advantage of the new system, and blow through their Insignia collections.  It was almost laughable at some points.  I had instances where the entire team would do nothing but suicide upon entering the instance, and then afk for a few minutes to get their tokens.  I myself did this on more than one occasion.  If the new Royal weapons were supposed to represent a long and hard journey for the average player, why is it that after this weekend most everyone could obtain them (or take a HUGE step toward)?

When you actually got down to the meat of the new map, it was very noticeable that it was melee friendly.  With the heart of the map being an open square not much larger than a lord room, ranged were at a definite disadvantage.  Running in a melee heavy group was clearly superior to most all setups.  That being said, it definitely exposed the lack of balance involved in a 6v6 game.  There were several times when a premade of mine ran into a group of four Warrior Priests, and two Ironbreakers.  All were of high renown rank, and two WP's were melee.  There were just simply no good targets.  No amount of assisting or cc we could do, would burn down someone.  We had been running Marauder, Choppa, Melee and Heal DoK, Zealot, and Magus.  A pretty well mixed group capable of beating most.....actually all, other than the group above.  Could those players have been superior to us in skill?  Absolutely.  I don't think the core group I was with consider themselves the best of the best of the best, but it was definitely apparent that the issue in beating them was not one of skill.  Rather a flaw in the system that was being perfected by a group of knowledgeable players.  I don't blame them at all for running the setup, and I commend them for pulling it off with such perfection.  I honestly doubt that they even lost a single match. 

All in all I feel as if it were a nice map, but I think for a 6v6 map we needed something with a bit more substance.  Perhaps adding in a couple pillars and making the map a bit larger to help out the ranged and healer classes.  And although it was nice getting 500 Insignias this weekend, I'd like to see longer matches so it doesn't turn into a farming session. 

Oh yah, congratulations to Destro on Iron Rock for successfully capturing Altdorf.  It was nice being the ones doing the sieging for once, rather than defending.