I finally decided to be brave and try out the 40 archmage again. One of the reasons I left WAR was the agony that was T4. This was a long time ago though, and there have been many changes since I last played her seriously. The archmage and shaman archetypes got a boost to make them less squishy. All the various forms of crowd control were toned down a notch. Fortresses went bye bye. And now, the new city siege mechanic has gone live.

So there I was on Iron Rock one evening, cycling through my alts when I got the notice that Altdorf was under siege. I logged into the archmage and rode to the portal. I fully admit that I rode up to that portal and away at least three times. Here I was, an unguilded, undergeared, RR thirty-something AM who admits she didn’t have much more than a clue as to what the new stages entailed. Sure, I had glanced at the forums, scanned over Gaarawarr’s guide to RvR driven city sieges. But I still wasn’t feeling overly confident. Then they put out the call in region that Order was outnumbered in all of the scenarios, so I finally decided to suck it up and jumped in.

Let me first say that I somehow lucked out enough to get in a group that I knew had a good leader who knew the new city mechanic (see aforementioned guide and its author). From there, it was easy enough to follow along. One of the good things about playing as a healer is that you can be somewhat clueless as to what is going on as long as you are following the group and healing. Stage I consists of objective control with the end goal of crashing the King’s house. If the attackers can gain control of the objectives, then they can bring down the doors of the King’s residence. I found this stage to be a pretty good fight and not as zergy as previous city sieges. The main thing I learned here is that if you die, clicking on the rally flag in your spawn point can be rather dangerous. I respawned in the heart of destro and died pretty instantly. Better to ride back, I found.

Stage II was a lot harder for me. In this stage, you are trying to defend your Warlords as they go from objective to objective. Here is where the warded gear comes back into play. You need wards to do damage to a warlord. I died here, a lot. This is where I noticed my lack of gear more than any other time. I seemed to die a lot more than my fellow healers. I can’t tell you much about this other than I was frustrated during this stage.

Stage III was a lot of fun and pretty awesome. This is where the champions are selected. They take a player of each archetype with the best wards (and the most wards) to help support their king. Tchar’zanek and Karl Franz duke it out. It’s an all out battle royale between Order and Destruction. In the end, we were routed by Destruction and I had to huddle in a shaky mess while I awaited Destro to finish me off. The loss aside, it was still a lot of fun. I haven’t had a lot of time to play since then, but I definitely look forward to getting into another city siege soon. If you haven’t checked it out, I recommend that you do. I think you’ll find this a great improvement to the game in general. Here’s hoping there are more such changes to come.