Relic Raid: Information Gathering

[Belomar]

Well, having covered the last successful relic raid, I feel I have an obligation to cover this one as well. Besides, I already heard people quipping over who would get a mention by me in my chronicle, so I guess I can't disappoint all these fans.

However, in order to make a good job out of it, I naturally need to get my facts straight. This is even more important this time, since SS was on keep taking duty and we arrived at the relic keep just in time to escort the relic carrier back to Odin's. Below I have assembled of the chronological order of events as I see them, please fill in the blanks and correct me where I am wrong!

(Much of this information is thanks to Alithiel Brightblade, aka indefatigable mercenary, btw.)

1. Keep take teams deploy to Jamtland (Nottmoor and Hlid targeted)
2. Hib zerg camps AMG
3. First Albion clearing force is wiped4. Second time, FC and HB
5. Relic army moves out from APK after hibs have released
6. Keep take teams assault their keeps
7. Relic army reaches Mjollnir (Parlain drove? along N zone border?)
8. Relic guards are aggroed (bah, you need a professional relic guard puller!)
9. Relic doors down quickly, few Mids start to arrive when on 3rd door (how many Mids?)
10. Relic is picked up and escorted back to Odin's along N zone border
11. Hib has suicided in Emain, zerg camping AMG
12. Alb groups arrive piecemeal at AMG and join the battle
12.5 Alpha leading an army from APK to AMG. Hibs cleared after an epic battle (how many hibs? I say at least 4-5 fgs, but was there late)
13. Relic reaches APK (carrier LDs and all that)
14. Albion forces escort relic carrier group to Excalibur

As ever, in-depth information welcome, including amusing anecdotes.

EDIT: point #12.5 about Alb army assaulting AMG from APK

 

[Khalen]

13.5 Dead forces at amg in Odin release and started clearing the road from Mids and Hibs in Forest Sauvage (about 3 FG of Mids)

There were a lot of hibs even when I reached amg doors I still saw people popping up in my screen (also a lot of AE nukers in the doorway)

 

[Glottis_Xanadu]

Khalen is right.
Also, I believe the decision was made not to wait till some keeps had fallen, but instead just to attack the relic keep.
Also, Albion had lost allmost all their keeps... so a valiant effort was made by numerous Albions to regain those lost keeps, so the relic would have more guards

 

[Belomar]

Yeah, Glottis, SS got into tremendous difficulties taking Nott after having camped in the woods outside the keep for 40 minutes awaiting the departure of the main relic army from APK. Within minutes of us pulling guards, we had 2 fg Mids defending the keep, and a 3rd (and 4th?) arrived a little later and attacked us in the rear. Amazingly enough, we fought them off successfully and even managed to disengage and withdraw in good order (IMO, one of the hardest maneuvers to pull off in RvR when both sides are committed).

 

[Tilda]

7. Tilda gets lost from relic army and carrying group with speed and goes direct without speed arriving before the relic army at Mjollnir.

8. Relic guards got aggroed by some people who arrived befor the main force, (not me) and then main force arrived and pulled propperly.

9. under 1 FG, i would say about 4 mids arrived, i didnt see any others

10. Tilda again gets seperated from Relic force and her own carrying group but finds her way back to amg before suiciding at hpk to clear out mids in sauvage.

Relic carrier was Arthwyr and Wildfire

Relic carring group was:

Tilda
Farek
Arthwyr
Strondor
Ambulance
Mazsola
Wildfire
Quicksilver

 

[Ambulance]

Second group who carried the Relic onto excal from CS was

Parlain
Alithiel
Tourmai
Cullyn
Killspanas
Arthwyr
Strondor
Wildfire

Just to make things more interesting of course


Ambulance <First Cohort>

 

[old.FIN]

And i MELEE Fight freaking Kobbos when i was oom =)

they didnt like my stick and debuff combo =)

 

[old.Wildfire]

Just going to flesh the points out a bit if I may...

1. The Dragon-Fighters were originally despached to take Bledmeer, but as it turned out (must have missed the keeptake message in all the chaos) it was in hib hands when they arrived, but they proceeded to attack nonetheless and subsequently had a pretty bad evening feel sorry for them, if I had seen it was a mid keep, I would have had them go elsewhere. Shadowlords Society went to Nottmoor and again, discovered fierce resistance. I'm pretty sure I told them to leave it though and take another one so... Ferus Legionis went after Blendrake, and Dark Prophecy knocked over Hlidskialf, with minimal problems.
2. Thanks go to Remi, Sst, Nibor and Gilannor for some good scouting and information relaying. Remi was called in at short notice (i.e. an hour before the raid) to sit in Mjollnir at no benefeit to himself, and was in the end uncovered by a blue-con kobold and executed by the guards, before we arrived. Sst and Nibor were moving around Jamtland and Yggdra before the raid too and were bringing in all sorts of reports of hib and mid movements. Excellent job there. Gilannor was more spontaneously helpful, relaying information from AMG just before we left, allowing me to co-ordinate FC and HB to clear the way.
3. SS were the first through AMG and found no hibs there, but then the hibzerg reports started to come in and FL were wiped as they tried to pass. FC and HB were then dispatched after reports said that the hibs had partly dispersed, partly moved to APK, and the way was cleared.
5. Relic army moves out from APK after hibs have released - no comment, not much to say really
6. Keep take teams assault their keeps - see point 1
7. Good job of driving from parlain, I will point out to all albs now that if you have problems with zergs, do not stick the driver. The plan was for everyone to move at caster speed, with regular stops for catch-ups, and this was done exactly as expected. You will not be left behind if your group has followed the plan.
8. This is one point I wasn't too pleased with. We had arrived at Mjollnir and were hiding in the trees nearby waiting for keeptake teams to finish, and I heard reports that KotL had pulled the guards for some reason... The plan had changed to "attack now" anyway by this point, but it was frustrating to see <xxx was killed by an Arvakr Jarl> when we hadn't even got to the keep... It also turns out DK had become separated from the force and had been wiped by the relic guards before we arrived... what happened there??
9. First door was the slowest to go down, due to GoL managing to lose all their rams (told you they were n00bs!) and having to move in spares, the rams for the second door were on the keep-takers (expectation was for them to be at the relic by this point) so the rams for the 3rd door were thrown in on the second instead, and everyone threw all the second door and spare rams (and there were a helluva lot) on the 3rd door. The mids that arrived seemed to only be 1fg and were dealt with cleanly as we were inside the keep by this stage. On a personal note I nearly got myself killed though with the lag by trying to jump onto the wall to nuke them, and flying straight over it, landing next to a skald and what looked like a zerker but I ran like hell into the loving arms of the zerg hehe.
10. I'm not quite sure which path we followed home, the order was for the fastest possible route and I believe the exact command was something along the lines of "GOGOGOGOGO!!!!!111"
11. Reports came in of mass hib suicides in emain, and of a very large hib buildup at AMG. Even Alpha by this stage had decided to pull his weight and was relaying on /as that there was a "huge" hib force at the gate. The plan was to let GoL go in first when we arrived as they're all worthless, sacrificial pawns, followed by FC with the relic. Farek however who was driving decided that he wanted to go in first which caused a bit of a panic but after the original plan of fighting the hibs didn't look like it was going to work out with all the AE spam, we managed to SOS through the gate under the most ridiculous DD/mezz spam I've ever seen, and run for home.
12. The deathspam continued for a good 10-15 minutes at AMG once the relic was back at ATK, so I imagine there must have been quite a pitched battle between the hibzerg and all the albs arriving from Mjollnir... kudos to The Dragon-Fighters for being the first on the scene after redirecting away from Mjollnir when the relic went neutral, and causing havoc.
12.5 Alpha was leading? wow I was impressed that as we SOS'd through the hail of fire, we found a force of albs (names that I picked out were Alpha and Aussie) on the other side putting pressure on the hibs, who covered FC's backs as we made our dash for victory.
13. The relic was sat on the pad for about 10 seconds before anyone noticed it was there thankfully no-one was stupid enough to pick it up, and I grabbed it as fast as I could. We waited for the next port, watching the AMG deathspam, and eventually ported back to find the path to excal cleared of mids by the people that had been ported the first time. Dammit I thought they'd increased the portal load for just this kind of thing?
14. Albion forces escort relic carrier group to Excalibur - nuff said job done.

 

[Belomar]

Originally posted by old.Wildfire
Just going to flesh the points out a bit if I may...

Great.

Shadowlords Society went to Nottmoor and again, discovered fierce resistance. I'm pretty sure I told them to leave it though and take another one so...

Yes, we were ordered to help DP at Hlidskialf. However, it was difficult disentangling ourselves from the keep (1st door was down and 2nd was 80%) , rezzing along the way, and it became even more difficult when a Mid fg appeared in our rear. I'm actually amazed that we survived that, Mids clearly outnumbered us and had the advantage of the keep. (Btw, when first encountering the resistance, we were told Ferus Legionis was coming to reinforce us, but this never happened. )

3. SS were the first through AMG and found no hibs there, but then the hibzerg reports started to come in and FL were wiped as they tried to pass.

We were actually amazingly lucky in dodging that zerg, we never even saw any Hibs as we moved past AMG. We then proceeded to camp a tree outside Nottmoor (16 Albs in a square meter, a healer's dream!) for more than 30 minutes.

 

[Bilf]

FL were told to go take Blend...
[Cue a mass wipeout by lotsa Hibs at AMG which unfortunately put us behind schedule]

Anyway... We went there, set up a ram and before hitting the door more than 3-4 times were told to go help SS at Nott which we trotted off to do.
Just as we got there we were redirected to Hild where we met up with (I think) DP. Once Hild fell we were then sent to Glen, so off we went once more. We got the doors down ("we" being all who were present, not just FL) but before taking the Lord were told to go to AMG to help with the slight Hib problem ( that problem being that they were there). The rest you know. Hibs die, albs get through, relic goes to Excal. blah, blah, blah...

So that was the night from FL perspective.

 

[old.Wildfire]

Keeptakes were not going smoothly last night definitely something to work on, on my part. When we got to Mjollnir I was so swamped with information and ram problems that I delegated command of the keeptaking guilds on the spot to Marrah. This should probably have been done earlier, and will go down in my notes as something to be taken into account for future raids.

 

[krysta]

On point 9 about a group of mids arriving, we were a group of 7 who were on the way to help at Nott but decided to swing past the relic keep for a look see though not really expecting anything.

Was a bit surprised then to find myself being chased by a whole host of albs around the keep wall and even more of a surprise when i ported through the gatekeeper to safety inside only to find more albs inside the keep than there were outside - I got a very quick sendoff!(must have set a record for the number of times a toon can be hit in a second)

We raised the alarm but it was too late.

Anyway, we had no idea you were there - well planned raid.

Farslayer.

 

[Treniel-]

Information Gathering...nice n all BUT GIMME MY SODDING ITEMS WIFFLE !!!!!!!

 

[killrake]

Why dont u albs go take the hibs relic, its sad what i heard in frontier after u took the last relic, many, i mean many said they either will stop play the game or delete character and gp over to albs side, because its to big differences in player on diffrent sides.

Whats the fun in that, also heard (just a roomer mayby) that NP will all go to PvP server, so whats left to kill.

Mids might no longer even wanna go to emain to fight anymore, albs have 45 % of all chars on execalibur. so its not so hard for u to take relics expecially not 01,00 at night.

Maybe i sound very depressiv but that¨s the way i feel, I am not complaining just tell facts....

 

[Arthwyr]

Yea the amg part in odins was hectic. Carrier group arrived togetehr with 2 gold groups and the 2nd fc group. Most of them engaged the enemy at amg while we stood in the back watching the action. The gap came we rushed forward but the lag was so bad i bumped into both sides of amg before finding the gap while the aoe was terrible. Health dropped to 30% , used FH to save myself foudn the hole in amg hit sprint and made a dash for it (thank god for sos). We arrived at apk, sat on the pad and when the wizzies came .... i went ld. Good thing wiffle picked it up during what must have been the most frustrating moments waiting for a computer to reboot in my life ever.

 

[bracken_woodman]

Killrake

The reason why we haven't bothered with the hibs relics for a long time is because our power relic keep (power relics being what they have of course) is in a damn stupid place for defending. So why don't you mids go take them? Atleast you'd have a better chance of defending them. As for 45% of players being on Albion, I'm not sure about that. What I do know is that we have a bigger proportion of idiots in our realm, which kind of defeats the numbers advantage. As for the 1.00 am thing, the raid actually started way before midnight

Chin up mate

 

[killrake]

I am sorry for looking pathetic and sad but for the moment my Daoc life Suxz, dont fel like exping dont feel like rvr....

I beg u pardon for that........sorry

 

[shilak]

Originally posted by bracken_woodman
Killrake

The reason why we haven't bothered with the hibs relics for a long time is because our power relic keep (power relics being what they have of course) is in a damn stupid place for defending. So why don't you mids go take them? Atleast you'd have a better chance of defending them. As for 45% of players being on Albion, I'm not sure about that. What I do know is that we have a bigger proportion of idiots in our realm, which kind of defeats the numbers advantage. As for the 1.00 am thing, the raid actually started way before midnight

Chin up mate

The 45% Albs figure most likely comes from the stats on Duskwave, check the following link and you will clearly see the that server population is 45% Alb, 28% Hib and 28% Mid. The numbers I have seen in Emain seem to reflect these percentages quite accurately.

http://www.duskwave.com/daoc/generalstats.php?PHPSESSID=31502ea8d840bb6583d7d00e741de40f

Also a much larger proportion of our players are not on GMT, therefore when you took our relic at midnight GMT most of our players were either offline or making preparation to do so. Once we realised that the relic had been stolen, most of the online population of Midgard over level 40 were on route to try and regain the relic. Unfortunately, by that point we were fighting a loosing battle.

Are you also saying that the Albs are afraid to take Power Relics as they might be difficult to defend?

 

[Tiarta]

Originally posted by shilak
Are you also saying that the Albs are afraid to take Power Relics as they might be difficult to defend?

not difficult, I M P O S S I B L E


Best regards

 

[Belomar]

Thanks, all, for the good information. I will try and compile all this into a nice and exciting chronicle. However, as I have some RL concerns taking up large parts of my time atm, this will take a while.

Lastly, Wildfire, do you have a complete list of the guilds who were invited on the raid?

 

[Draylor]

As far as population goes look at the numbers of RR3+ albs/mids/hibs. Any time Ive seen those the numbers are pretty even. The majority of Albions numerical advantage is in the RR0/RR1 level.

Originally posted by shilak
Are you also saying that the Albs are afraid to take Power Relics as they might be difficult to defend?

Afraid? Unlikely Reluctant to waste our time when we've no chance of holding them for more than a couple of days? Very

Saying that the most memorable relic defence so far was at Myrddin. Very few albs, the hibs were outnumbered only by their rams, and we were very very lucky

 

[old.Wildfire]

More guilds were invited than attended, but the attendance list was as follows, in alphabetical order:

Crusaders of Albion
Dark Prophecy
Defectu Virium Elite
Dragon Knights
Equilibrium
Ferus Legionis
First Cohort
Guardians of Light
Herfolge Boldklub
Illuminati
Keepers of the Light
Legion of Darkness
Shadowlords Society
The Brethren
The Dragon-Fighters
The Ministry

 

[killrake]

Originally posted by shilak



Are you also saying that the Albs are afraid to take Power Relics as they might bedifficult to defend?

I dont think no realm is AFFRAID to try to take a relic, nothing more then a failure is to loose.

I also wanna congratulate albs for a well done effert (even if i dont like what u did )

/salute

 

[Adralend]

Yes, well I think that we will be going for some Power Relics soon as they would be helpfull (and because they are the only ones left?) Anyway Brotherhood of the Wolf got an invite.. dont know from who thou, But we where told that the raid was not going to be. Otherwise all of our chars about 40 would have been there.. (3 chars over 40 + 1 lvl 39 )

 

[Flimgoblin]

Originally posted by Tiarta




not difficult, I M P O S S I B L E


Best regards

by 1.54 it'll be more than possible especially if people are using Hurbury for the 20% xp bonus.

 

[Vasconcelos]

Originally posted by Belomar
I'm actually amazed that we survived that, Mids clearly outnumbered us and had the advantage of the keep. (Btw, when first encountering the resistance, we were told Ferus Legionis was coming to reinforce us, but this never happened. )

Sorry for that but we couldnt be at 2 places in the same: helping DP in Hild n SS in Nort while we was taking Blend.
When we were told our help was needed we got the 2nd Nort door at 50%, then ran to Hild, help DP to beat the 2nd door n the lord, ran to Glen, destroyed both doors, started hitting the lord n told that relic force needed us at amg even if we were at lord.
Sorry but we tried to do our best n think we could have taken both Blend n Glen if we hadnt had to run all the time between keeps.

However it was FUNNY

 

[Belomar]

Originally posted by Vasconcelos
Sorry for that but we couldnt be at 2 places in the same: helping DP in Hild n SS in Nort while we was taking Blend.

Hehe, no problem, after all, this order was given by the raid leaders. I'm sure Wildfire was overloaded enough as it was, so the next relic raid will probably have a little more delegated chain-of-command, I imagine.

However it was FUNNY

I second that.