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.

How to Lock a Zone in Warhammer Online

6/22/09 Note: This post is about locking via victory points. If you are looking for information about locking a zone via domination, please see my other blog entry on the subject.

In Warhammer Online's RvR endgame, locking zones is the key to pushing the war front closer to your enemies and opening up fortresses and capitols to assault. However, the way this is done is not especially intuitive. So this post is my attempt to summarize what I have learned about the process over the past couple of months.


To lock a Tier 4 zone, one side needs to gain ~97 Victory Points in that zone. Victory Points are gained for controlling objectives and keeps, winning scenarios associated with that zone, completing Public Quests in that zone, and controlling the Tier 3 zones for that pairing.

Victory Points go as high as 97 and as low as 0 and will decay slowly over time if there is no action in the zone or its related scenarios (but the VPs will not fall below whatever the baseline is for the controlled keeps and BOs). Each objective is worth ~6 Victory Points, while keeps are worth ~15. So controlling all six points of interest in a zone will only give you about 54 total points.

Scenarios can contribute significantly to your faction's VP total, but the key is winning on points rather than having time expire. This makes the scenario objectives vitally important, something that many kill-happy players don't seem to understand. Winning a scenario with 500 points will grant your side 6-7 VPs for the appropriate zone. Winning because time ran out, on the other hand, only generates 2-3 VPs. Quite a difference!

PQs only give 1-2 points, which makes grinding PQs to flip a zone rather difficult and not especially efficient. PQ grind should only be considered if you just cant seem to get those last few VPs to lock the zone, or there is major overabundance of players on your side in the zone.

Skirmishes between players in the zone seem to contribute almost nothing to the VP total. Occasionally you will see a 1 or 2 point gain as the result of a large battle, but that's pretty rare.

The bulk pressure of locking a zone still seems to rely on scenarios. And as a result, scenarios are not always the casual, quick fun that they are in the lower tiers. And remember, scenarios only affect VPs for the pairing they are in, so if you're trying to lock a zone, it's best to queue for only scenarios in the pairing that you want to lockdown. Unfortunately, this relies of the other side also queuing for that scenario, but there are usually enough players choosing the queue all option to make it work. Supposedly, if the other side never tries to join the scenarios and you have enough people queued to get it started, your side will still get a few VPs, but I'm not exactly sure how this works.

In my experience, one of the best ways to lock a zone is to first win a bunch of scenarios to push your side's VP total up. If your opponents control the keeps, so much the better. It is unlikely they will notice your point creeping upwards unless you take a keep from them. If you can reach 40 or so VPs without controlling any objectives or keeps in the zone, then you're pretty much set. Run out and grab all the points of interest as quickly as possible, running a scenario or two at the same time to buffer your VPs and keep VP point decay from setting in too much.

To assist in your zone-locking attempts, I recommend installing an addon or two that will give you more information about the Victory Point progression. I use Realm Status and War Effort, myself.

War Effort is a nice addon that shows a window with basic info about all the T4 zones, including current VP count and keep status.

Realm Status is dual-featured. It has a window with VP info about every zone, and it also has popup windows that notify you about changes in VPs for the Tier 4 zones. I almost never look at the main window, but I love the popup notifications. By keeping an eye on these, I can generally get a good idea of whats happening in each zone without actually being there, which makes it easier to see when the RvR focus needs to be moved to a different pairing

Burning down Ahune

Last night I gathered together four guildmates to head into Heroic Slave Pens and take on the new seasonal boss, Ahune. Getting to him was easy enough, though he appears towards the middle of the first large cavern, which meant that we had to clear out a couple of extra mob groups.

I won't delve into his abilities too much since that's already covered elsewhere, but I will say that we had several wipes as we tried to figure out the encounter, each time getting him slightly closer to death, but the sheer number of little water elementals he spawns kept overwhelming us (and the ice spikes certainly didn't help). After seeing how little damage and hit points these little guys did, we decided to go all out offense. I switched out my tanking gear for my epic PvP suit, wielded a two-hander and spent most of the fight in fury stance (as the main tank). It was a hectic fight, and I had a couple of close calls (the damaging debuff that the main add puts on you is pretty rough), but we emerged victorious! The smaller adds only have 2000 hit points, so it was pretty easy to bring them down with all of us targeting them. With both myself and another warrior using whirlwind, we were able to work over the elite rock elemental at the same time. Then, when Ahune was vulnerable, we were already in the proper stance for damage. Couple fury stance with Blood Fury and Death Wish and you have some serious damage output! Our group makeup was two arms warriors, one elemental shaman, one beastmaster hunter and one holy priest.

Overall a fun fight, though expect to have a few wipes when you're first learning the encounter.

Azh's Quick Tips: Heroic Mechanar: Part II

Made a guild run through Heroic Mechanar last night and defeated all the bosses, including Sepethrea, which is a first for me. And we did it with one healer (restoration shaman) and four melee (protection warrior, arms warrior (me) and two rogues), which is really surprising given how much AoE is in that instance. So I thought I would follow up my initial Quick Tips for Heroic Mechanar with some further thoughts about the three most annoying mobs in the instance; Mechanar Tinkerer, Nethermancer Sepethrea and Pathaleon the Calculator.

Mechanar Tinkerer - Not only is arcane resistance useful when fighting these guys, but it also helps if you can have them going after multiple targets. Having 3 or 4 of them focus fire someone generally just causes trouble, even with lots of resistance. However, we seemed to have more success when we broke them up. Each rogue would stunlock one while beating them down and I would take on the others with my Enchanted Admantine Plate set. They go down pretty quickly. But with all melee, we couldn't take the concentrated AoE damage from standing together.

Nethermancer Sepethrea - The bane of many an adventuring group, especially in heroic mode. The real trick to defeating her is to not panic. She doesn't have a lot of hit points and she also doesn't do a ton of heavy damage like most bosses do. The real thing to worry about are her elementals. Everyone needs to be aware when the elementals are coming for them and get moving. If you let them get too close, they'll daze you, you get caught in the fire and then things go south from there. Draw them away from the main tank as far as you can. Then, when they stop to do their AoE attack, run back and get in as much damage as you can. If you notice one or more coming at you, start moving again. If you cant tell whether they're coming after you or not, move anyway and see if they follow. It's very important to NOT lure the elementals back to where Sepethrea is fighting. Hide your damage meters because that is really unimportant in this fight and will just distract you. Keep yourself alive, don't draw the elementals near other party members and do damage when you can. Also, its a good idea to spread out in a semi-circle in front of her before engaging so you can tell immediately which players the elementals are focusing on.

Pathaleon the Calculator - Similar to Sepethrea in that he doesnt do a lot of damage himself and is relatively fragile. The problems stem from his arcane elementals he summons and from his mind control ability. If he mind-controls a DPS player, you will probably want to try and fear, blind or otherwise temporarily incapacitate them so that they don't kill your tank or healer. It actually seemed to work better for us when he controlled our healer, since the healer wasn't going to kill anyone, and, as long as noone was near death, we could all survive for the 5 or so seconds it takes before the mind control wears off, leaving us free to dish out the damage. By the time we finished tearing up his first wave of elementals he was already at ~30% health and fell not long after.

Azh's Quick Tips: Heroic Slave Pens

As a followup to my post with a few tips on Heroic Mechanar, here are some tips for Heroic Slave Pens.

Coilfang Defenders - These guys are immune to all forms of crowd control. However, they can be snared. They hit extremely hard, so it's best to kite one around (mages and hunters are the best choices) while killing the other.

Mennu - Pretty easy fight. Just make sure to kill all of his totems, except for the Corrupted Nova totem! It explodes when destroyed, so it's best to simply move the whole group away from it.

Rokmar - Very difficult in heroic mode. He's hard enough in regular mode! If you have just one healer, they should be doing nothing besides healing the main tank (unless they have some quick cast area or group heals). Running out of mana during this combat is definitely a possibility. Really just need to unload on him and the tank needs to work hard on maintaining aggro. He will very quickly tear through your party if he gets loose or the tank dies.

Quagmirran - Nature resistance certainly helps. And you want to get the buff from the imprisoned druid if you can, but the real kicker of this encounter is his acid breath attack. This is a frontal area attack, so you need to keep him facing away from the rest of the party. The only problem is that it also causes him to lose aggro on his target, which generally results in him turning around and spraying all the soft targets (or even worse, directly targeting one). So the tank will need to taunt, and the other players will need to use aggro-reducing abilities or just stop attacking for the duration of the breath attack. Improved taunt would probably help here as well.

Azh's Quick Tips: Heroic Mechanar

I've noticed a lot of increased traffic here recently from people doing searches for Heroic Mechanar. I assume they're looking for advice, and while my adventure reports have some useful info, they're not really much of a guide.

So here are a few, quick tips about some of the troublesome mobs:

Netherbinder - I always make these guys the #1 target. Things get ugly if they get a chance to summon their elementals. But with focused fire and a couple of timely stuns, you can easily take them out before they even get a chance to cast.

Tempest-Forge Patroller - They will call for help, so be sure to give yourself some space to fight them in, away from other mobs

Tempest-Forge Destroyer - Interrupt the charged fist! That's by far the most important thing. The cast time on it is extremely quick, so if you have the global cooldown going when they start charging, you will likely miss your chance to interrupt. Generally, I'll open up with a few sunders and debuffs, then I'll just use heroic strike and shield block (since they don't trigger the global cooldown), keeping a close eye out for the charged fist so I can shield bash it. After that, you can throw in a few other attacks before you need to start watching again. Try to keep some sort of snare on him so that if he does get charged, the tank can kite him around until it wears off. It's not really worth the effort to try and heal through his damage while it's charged.

Astromancer - Spell reflection does wonders against these guys. Pretty much all fire damage, so a fire resistance totem would be helpful. Mostly troublesome when they're in the larger groups.

Mechanar Tinkerer - Two general ways to handle these guys. Either have a warlock enslave one and use him to fight the others (very effective) or load up on arcane resistance. With a full suit of Enchanted Adamantine Plate plus a couple of miscellaneous arcane resistance items, I can tank the group of four with little trouble.

Mechanar Crusher - The main thing to worry about with these guys is the disorient effect they will hit your tank with often.

Gatewatcher Gyro-Kill - Keep him turned away from your healers. I *think* his Shadow Power buff can be interrupted. But either way, be prepared to receive some burst damage when he casts it.

Gatewatcher Iron-Hand - Just watch for the 'Raises hammer' message and back off. Any melee shouldn't get hit more than once by the hammer unless they really aren't paying attention. Once he stops, run back in. Pretty easy fight.

Capacitus - Only twist is the polarity effect. Everyone should give the other players in their party some space at the start. After he does the polarity charge, find someone with the same charge as you and stand near them; your damage will be doubled! When he starts to cast it again, move away from everyone else until you can see what type of charge everyone has. Most players seem to like to fight him on the stairs, but I don't see that as a necessary step. His melee radius is huge, so there is plenty of room for everyone.

Sepethrea - Haven't defeated her in heroic mode so I don't have much advice. I would say that fire resistance is required, and if you have equipment that gives you a run speed bonus, this would probably be a good place to put it on! She gets three fire elementals rather than the normal two, and they move at running speed, making it much more difficult to avoid them.

Pre-Pathaleon Event - Very tough. Mainly because you don't have time to designate targets before they're on you. Pulling them back into Sepethrea's room would probably be the best option. That way you have some space, and succeeding waves have to run farther to engage you. Most pickup groups I've been in like to run down the elevator between waves (the mobs wont follow), but that's a pretty cheesy tactic IMO.

Pathaleon - Pretty much the same, though he does seem to be quicker to use his mind control, and the arcane elementals do more damage. Those who are likely targets for mind control should probably use any really nasty abilities they have at the start. This fight is really about dishing out heavy damage as quickly as possible. Once he gets down to ~20% health, his pets vanish and he generally falls soon afterwards. However, unless you have a lot of ways to keep the elementals feared, I recommend killing the first wave of them. It's unlikely you'll get him down fast enough to avoid a second wave, and if you have 8 of them running around spamming arcane bolts at your healer, the fight won't go well.

Basically, aside from a couple of changes to the bosses, everything is pretty much the same as regular Mechanar, only more so. So the tactics aren't that different from a regular run.

For the quickest route, go to the left at the start. You can pull Iron-Hand from Capacitus' area and avoid all the mobs on the right side entirely. Warlocks are not required, but they are helpful. Any Warlock should have little trouble finding a group for Heroic Mechanar. Arcane resistance is useful for the Tinkerers, Capacitus and Pathaleon. Fire resistance is useful for Sepethrea. If you have a single healer, they need to focus their attention on the tank for the boss encounters. Other players should be ready and willing to back off and bandage when needed.

That's about it! This is one of the more popular heroic dungeons and I can understand why. It's compact and fairly straight forward. Pretty easy to acquire four badges (getting the fifth from Sepethrea is tough) and a chance at a Primal Nether, plus whatever other goodies might drop.