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Let's learn about the keepin' of keeps...
Keep Rank - May not be what you think
Did yeh know a rank 4 keep can have only rank 1 doors?
Surprise! You've seen it before, a Rank 3 or 4 keep go down like
the rams were all diamond-tipped.
Y'see rank is decided from a hodgepoge of defense upgrade choices,
not all of which you may think is as important as the keep upgrader
did. Let's get to the nitty-gritty of this.
Entry-Point Keep Costs fer yer Guild
To start, even without an upgrade, yer guild will have 20s removed
from its vault every 5 minutes. That's 2.4g every hour, and that's
for a truly rank 0 keep.
Realistically, however, you need to deadbolt the inner keep's
postern. Not doing so is really an embarassment to the guild.
Before the option to deadbolt was available you couldn't protect
your inner keep from melee dps entering and it was ugly ... you
should always deadlock yer keep. On our server Phoenix Throne
it is almost always done, though we see it missing now and then
with the consequences being little way to get enough forces there
in time to ensure defense.
Adding deadlock costs 10s per 5 minutes so realistically the entry
point for owning a keep is 3.6g per hour (20s+10s per 5 mins).
If yer serious about having enough time to respond to a keep ping
by the enemy, yeh should probably increase the rank of the doors
to at least rank 1. This will add another 20s per hour raising the
cost for owning the keep to 6g per hour (20s + 10s + 20s per 5
minutes). A LOT of damage can be done to a rank 0 door in the
time it takes to get there (even without a ram!).
I would argue that, next to deadbolting the inner keep, the
door hitpoints are the most important to this period of getting
to the keep for defense.
One counterpoint to this is that champion static guards can help
prevent small gank crews from having an easy time of ninjaing
keeps late at night, and for that purpose static champions may
be right up there with door hps.
Some detail:
- The guild upgrade broker on the top of the keep shows you yer
guild funds.
- You'll get a 10min warning or so before yer guild runs out of
funds and the keep drops to rank 0, becomes unclaimed, the
zone loses the domination points, and the keep becomes easy
pickins fer the enemy. If others have been fighting for hours for
the zone and the keep goes unclaimed, that would be suckage
fer everyone.
Keep Upgrade Options!
You can change upgrade options/levels, for example, in response
to actual or anticipated attack, but it takes time to make these
changes, and the changes must be made by a guildie. Given the
high cost of keep maintenance, there is strategy involved in
choosing when to raise and lower keep defenses.
Here are the keep upgrade options including their cost and time
for their addition to the 20silver/5min starting cost:
Why Consider Static Guards for Minimum Keep Upgrade?
Besides generally slowing down the enemy force while your realm
is otw to defend, very specifically it makes it much more difficult for
small enemy dps melee commando force to set up a ram at inner to
get a big head start while the main force of the enemy works on outer.
Semi-Power Keep
Here's a still fairly expensive budget power keep, where the goal is
to slow down the enemy long enough to get there to defend it,
but not break the guild bank. When the enemy arrives you can work
on increasing the upgrade. There are endless variations on this, but
here's my take on it.
Starter Power Keep
Here's a still fairly expensive nice power keep, where the goal is
still to slow down the enemy long enough to get there to defend
it, but not break the guild bank. There are, again, endless variations on
this. Here we assume we won't have 30m to get the rank up from 2 to 4
so we need to make the upgrade in advance.
If you have any ideas for additional info to add
about keeps, let me know! See "Contact Dwooid"
on the sidebar for contact info.
Best Regahds,
Dwooid of Caledor
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