Additional Bonuses/Dev Created Items For Multiple Raid Credit
In season one many people were frustrated with the gear grind. In my opinion, it wasn't that bad but certain changes made by the devs did make it better. Even with these complaints though, within 2-3 months it was getting decently hard to find BGs being set up, even during peak hours, for certain dungeons and even dragon raids. This definitely made it more difficult for more casual players to finish their first or second character templates.
My suggestion is to offer some sort of bonus(es) or maybe an item that gives boosts to people who do the raids over again after they already have credit. I would assume the best sort of offerings would be things that help in RvR like increasing RP gain or something but that could be left up to devs to puzzle out. I would also suggest that these don't have to be in the game at the start of a season, use them as incentives after 1, 2, or 3 months of a new season being live to help keep a healthier raid community for longer. How this might work with homeland invasion as discussed for S2, I got no idea.
Remove Siege Towers
I'm not a fan honestly, I think they made the PvDoor situation even worse as the speed to take a keep was pretty fast in far too many cases. I always enjoyed the sort of skirmish play that happened when holes were knocked into the walls of a keep, especially during protracted sieges when there could be holes on multiple sides. I think the speed of keep capture and retake was far too fast and was a huge plague on S1 RvR. Additionally, I think this change would be better for the combat meta in general after seeing the changes rolled out for the melee classes.
Holes in the wall provide many more angles and range for casters to play with and reduce much of the LoS advantage of the defenders, just as the siege weapons should. Without incentivizing siege weapons to make holes in walls and by beefing up many of the melee classes (better resistances/achieve them sooner in RvR and adding many great chase abilities to certain classes like insta snares ) the casters, and archers on walls will definitely be more easily overrun when a siege tower is put up. In contrast, the holes-in-walls meta is a good balance between casters and archers using this new LoS to creatively strike in/out of the keep and makes melee pushes in/up to or out of the wall even more meaningful.
Since there were lots of positive adjustments toward these off-tanks in the patches, this change helps us to not swing from a "caster-heavy earlier RR and a pure tank high RR meta" like S1 into a "melee bull rush up a siege tower" early combat meta in the low RRs for S2. (not sure how the new changes will affect high RR meta in S2). Essentially, siege towers hasten keep takes too much for little cost and with the new balance changes will dramatically harm ranged DPS effectiveness. It's also just not a fun meta to play in because it makes keep taking formula-based.
Take boat here, jump off, build a tower on closest point in the wall, bum rush up tower, build rams, take keep, 10-15 mins tops, no time for defenders to arrive to face threat, rinse repeat on the next keep
When you slow down keep takes by forcing the enemy to actually break through the wall and then fight to gain control of the courtyard before pushing on, you incentivize defensive play rather then BGs avoiding one another to PvDoor. You encourage more dynamic keep mechanics as new holes are opened up for defenders to sneak in through or the attackers to use to push defenders from the courtyard. These new access points act as dynamic points of interest in each keep fight, points of interest that need to be watched, fought over, opened/closed, etc.
Encourage BG Toon Templating & BG Focused Guilds
It would be a very interesting way to keep a lot of the PvE enjoyable ethos of Eden by fostering a BG-level templating community. It already exists for people who use their 50s to buy and craft the gear and make twinks so why not encourage lower-level dungeon raids by adding in meaningful gear designed for templating toons for Killaloe/Thid/Molvik/etc? One way to do this would be to create lower-level dungeon gear drops that are designed toward templating BG-level toons. Some of these dungeons could even be tweaked to need 2-3 groups to complete the content and defeat the boss, even get a chest of gear to roll on.
There are plenty of already existing dungeons and bosses across all the maps. If the gear was worth getting for these BG twinks compared to rogs and sc gear, there could be a real desire to put these groups together, to have BG-focused guilds, and to spread out the content of RvR from the frontiers into the BGs to keep things fresh for the player base. It would also incentivize the more active player base to play lower level content for longer helping more casual players to have more active groups. Maybe some of these more casual players don't enjoy the RR drift of level 50 frontiers and so having a thriving BG community would give them a more focused, easier-to-attain RvR play area.
Truthfully my big idea is actually to encourage more BG play and ideally to do so in a way that encourages full-timers to engage with the more casual player base. My idea for creating BG level gear grinds may not be the answer but I do think it is A WAY to offer more RvR and bring both types of the player base together. Many of my fondest memories of DAoC live were found in BGs because of their capped and simple nature where you found other opposing guild groups where notoriety and respect of your opponents could be earned. That doesn't happen as easily or as often in 50 RvR and we can all admit that the RR drift at 50 always and inevitably pushes casual players out of playing at 50 so why not give them some incentives to stay and just play at a lower level?
I know this last suggestion would be a large undertaking BUT I do think some solution sin the direction of encouraging more active battlegrounds would be a great way to keep freshness longer and keep lower-level activities alive for longer as well for more casual players.
Thanks for reading, genuinely curious about any thoughtful feedback.
