How to Dominate a Zone in Warhammer Online

With the release of patch 1.2 yesterday came the new Zone Domination system for Tier 4 RvR areas. As a supplement to my previous post about How to Lock a Zone in Warhammer Online, I present my summary of how this new system works...

First off, I find Mythic's mention of 'points' in the domination system is kind of misleading. There really is no accumulation of domination points. You can't save points for later nor can you gain multiple points from one objective. It's more of a binary system. You either dominate a zone or you don't. To dominate a zone, you have to have full control of ALL objectives and keeps in that zone. To gain full control of a keep, it has to be under your realm's control, and claimed by a guild for two hours straight. To gain full control of an objective, it has to be controlled by your realm for 30 minutes straight.

In short, to lock a zone via domination, everything in the zone needs to be controlled by your realm, and all the timers displayed on the map need to finish counting down. If an objective is under your realm control and has no timer, then you don't need to worry about (aside from stopping your foes from taking it from you). If a keep is under your realm control and has no timer, first off, check to make sure that it is claimed by a guild. If it is, then everything is great. If it's not claimed, then you need to get a guild to claim it ASAP if you're trying to lock the zone via domination.

Allowing the other side to take an objective adds a minimum of 45 minutes before you can lock the zone via domination (15 minutes until you can retake the objective, and then you have to control it for another 30 after that). Allowing a keep to fall adds a 2-hour minimum wait (not including the time needed to retake the keep) before the zone can be dominated and locked.

So if you're going for a domination lock, acquiring, claiming and holding the keeps is of primary importance. Objectives are more fluid and you don't have to stress out too much if they get taken while the keep countdown is still going. But, once the lowest keep timer gets to under an hour, you will want to capture all the objectives and keep them out of the hands of the other realm. This usually equates to stationing a few people at each Objective to slow down attackers and to also send out a timely warning. You'll also need a decent sized group at a central location that can respond to these attacks in a swift and brutal manner.

On the other side of the coin, to stop a zone domination, all you really have to do is take a single objective every once in a while. The difficulty comes when the opposing realm has enough bodies to follow the tactics outlined in the previous paragraph. You either need a warband that has enough force to quickly overwhelm an Objective and then hold off attackers for the three minutes it takes to capture the flag, or you will need multiple coordinated strikes and feints so that your foes aren't able to respond quickly and effectively enough to interrupt the captures.

Also, one very important thing to remember is that Zone Domination is not the only way to lock a zone. The previous system is still in place (IE, accumulate ~97 victory points). Zone Domination is simply an alternate method of locking a zone, and you can work on both paths at the same time. Zone Domination will likely have a larger effect on servers with severe population imbalances and off-peak times on all servers.