Mercenaries as the new vampire and why they are bad for AvA.

JeffKnight

Until the caltrop exploit is fixed, merc spam is one of the only ways to try and defend a keep, especially for an underpopulated alliance.

Teevesnacks

JosephChip wrote: »

Teevesnacks wrote: »

Yes let's stop small forces from defending a keep so larger groups can take them, we certainly don't want people taking stuff from our alliance dominated campaigns and have to fight for it back

More like the other way around. Let's stop small groups of people from taking keeps. Now you need an entire zerg just to counter the merc spam. And when a small group is everything you have in the server, you are done. Nothing can be conquered.
Your second scenario is impossible. The underdog alliance can't take anything because of mercs now. This situation is just discourging underpoplated alliances and campaigns from fighting. AND IT IS NOT PVP!. Away with this disgraceful ***! PvP is for players, Cyrdoiil for humans!

Hmmm my guild used a small force to take a keep with a emperor spamming merc mages recently and we even took a whole campaign with this group we even managed to take a scroll with 20 merc mages guarding it ontop of the surrounding npcs

Some_Jerk

I would like to see mercs gone altogether. The only fighting NPC's should be guards. There's plenty of NPCs for you merc lovers to battle outiside of cyrodiil; every other zone in the game is dedicated to fighting NPC's. You have enough.

Guards are necessary, Mercenaries are not. No unnessecary NPC's should be getting in the way of players fighting each other.

leewells

Imperator_Clydus wrote: »

Greetings and salutations members of the Elder Scrolls Online community,

For anyone that is an avid AvA player, you should know very well by now the experience that is merc spamming, bombing, or any other synonym you'd like to use to describe this cheap and buggy tactic.

Defenders, whether outnumbered or not, will use these mercs in every scenario at any objective just to farm AP. I have personally experienced this many times already on Bloodthorn, where a full group will constantly spawn mercs leading to an hour and a half of nonstop, buggy, PvE action. Amazing AP gains for the defenders, but poor for those attacking since they aren't killing any players, resulting in very little AP gains.

I didn't come to Cyrodiil to PvE. Certainly, I'm under the impression many of you also didn't come to Cyrodiil to PvE. I enjoy objectives and with the release of patch 1.2, I believe the static guards are more than sufficient to defend against at least unorganized groups.

These mercs are unnecessary, and are really breaking the spirit of AvA. Regardless of how many walls we would break down and breaching both postern walls, the defenders always seemed to be able to spawn mercs, even when we didn't kill mercs. I don't know if this means they can despawn them or move them, as you can tell, I don't use mercs very often.

I truly believe ZOS intended mercs to be a temporary replacement for players if no one was defending a particular objective or they had to move somewhere else. The problem is, people are using these mercs as infinite NPC armies to wall themselves from any competition and to farm a lot of AP in the process.

There are a couple of solutions ZOS could implement to alleviate this issue. They could outright remove mercenaries from AvA. This wouldn't be a bad idea since guards were buffed and more NPCs only detract from the PvP. They could limit how many one individual spawns, preventing one player from just merc bombing anyone.

ZOS could even hard cap the mercenaries at 20, so when they are spawned no more can be spawned throughout the duration of the battle. Even if a few were bugged, the defenders wouldn't have an infinite amount NPCs that they could use to kill PvP.

Update 1.2 made defending keeps a lot easier. Mercenaries only make the experience frustrating as well as killing the PvP experience in Cyrodiil. When I intend to siege an enemy keep that is being defended, I don't expect to sit there for hours killing hundreds of mercs. I expect to actually experience PvP and kill actual players. Lets set things right and put AvA back on the right path.

Regards,

Imperator Clydus

No NPC's while caltrops are still being exploited? Sounds like someone wants a ripe zergfest. I prefer using tactics and organized raiding and using a keep as cover vs mindlessly zerging a keep to take it.

Imperator_Clydus wrote: »

Bitz_Maidenhell wrote: »

hard capping them i think is the best idea, tbh i thought they were already capped, but i have only used a few of them since launch, so i don't really know.

People will always misuse something if it will help them win a battle. I like the idea of the merc's as they can assist people outnumbered by a larger offensive force. I think they have a place in AvA, ESO has really expanded on largescale pvp from games past, and i like that. So i say keep them and and cap them.

There is a limit where only 20 mercs can be used at a time. The problem though is that players will kill the mercs, lowering the limit, and the defenders will spawn more raising it back to the 20 merc limit. This leads to a situation where they have an infinite amount of mercs. Hard capping it would allow them to only spawn 20 and that would be it for the rest of the siege.

You do realize that mercs take up bag space, yes? You keep using that word "infinite". I do not think it means what you think it means.

bruceb14_ESO5

JosephChip wrote: »

...Some times they just lose aggro, instantly regain all their health, become invincible and run back. It is insane. This is not PvP. This is not even PvE. After tonight's session I am confortable I have seen the deepest recesses of hell itself.

Mercs ok at times for hired help strategy. Misuse or exploitation of bugs, NO.

Hit them almost to death and they somehow get pulled back and full again, no need to buy that one again.

Bug where they go after one player and are unhittable.

Have an army of them to ride with your group to a resource, take it over and camp for defending AP.

Changes are needed for the exploits.

Imperator_Clydus

leewells wrote: »

No NPC's while caltrops are still being exploited? Sounds like someone wants a ripe zergfest. I prefer using tactics and organized raiding and using a keep as cover vs mindlessly zerging a keep to take it.

You do realize that mercs take up bag space, yes? You keep using that word "infinite". I do not think it means what you think it means.

It's ironic because I too actually prefer tactics and strategy versus mindless zerging. Feel free to read my other discussions about why AP shouldn't be based around kills, which encourages mindless zergs, and why the game needs to be more objective-oriented. If you actually care about AvA, you'll probably see you agree with most of my points.

Mercenaries are broken and players are abusing what they are intended for. I seriously doubt ZOS wanted an invincible and infinite wall of NPCs to block players from PvP in sieges. Caltrops should be removed until ZOS resolves that as well.

I am quite aware that mercs take up bag space. That being said, I have 30+ slots in my inventory alone that I could hoard with mercenaries. You really believe people are too stupid to clear out their slots and fill them with mercs when they PvP? Come on. Your poor argument and irrational justifications just leads me to believe you are one of the many who is probably exploiting mercs as well as caltrops.

mar1ano1987nrb18_ESO

Make the Merc cost 10k AP instead of 1k ...problem solved.

Imperator_Clydus

mar1ano1987nrb18_ESO wrote: »

Make the Merc cost 10k AP instead of 1k ...problem solved.

That would help. I still believe a hard cap would rectify the problem more directly.

Kevaliji

I have not played PvP since the patch because of the invincible mercs. It ruins the experience. I dont mind the option to buy/place mercs but if they are invincible, now, that is a problem. I decided to try and see if pvp was somewhat better yesterday only to log into wabbajack and get hit with the wall of lag. When you cant swap weapons, cast abilities, mount in your own spawn then you know theres an issue. LAG is that issue.

ishilb14_ESO

The current state of Alliance War:

1. Using caltrops to defend against siege has become common and normal.

2. Multiple players are no longer needed to defend anything, just 1 player with 10 mercs can defend against a group of 25 (since half the mercs go invulnerable)

3. Strength of guards now prevents small groups of doing anything in a reasonable amount of time (relevant to point two where one person can basically defend anything) what's the point of making this a pvp zone if players don't actually need to put much effort in when defending.

4. Foward Camps are still bugged, this has been an issue since BETA and has been mentioned many, many times. Sometimes, they will become unusable and players must wait for them to decay or be destroyed by an enemy player (which can be hard since most people place their forward camps on top of the honor guards in a keep's resource)

So if there are any mods or devs, with balls, that read the forums, when are we gonna see fixes for game-breaking issues, after this game goes free-to-play? There have been many posts about these issues and yet they don't get fixed, leading me to be fairly confident that the devs literally shove their thumbs up their asses and sit on them during the TWICE WEEKLY maintenance that occur.

Worstluck

I agree with everything Imperator has said. It's ridiculous and reduces my drive to even bother with PvP at the moment. They need to introduce a hard cap, and increase the cost of them, along with fixing them so they don't become invincible.

The caltrops issue is supposedly being fixed early next week:

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/105348/patch-v-1-1-3-preview/p1

ishilb14_ESO

Worstluck wrote: »

I agree with everything Imperator has said. It's ridiculous and reduces my drive to even bother with PvP at the moment. They need to introduce a hard cap, and increase the cost of them, along with fixing them so they don't become invincible.

The caltrops issue is supposedly being fixed early next week:

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/105348/patch-v-1-1-3-preview/p1

So it's gonna be even easier to defend keeps now lol, fire ballistas + invulnerable mage mercenaries, it's like they want players to only be able to take keeps with a group of 30+ players against 5 defenders

ishilb14_ESO

The issue with the current state of alliance war is that, even though it benefits low pop servers trying to defend against high pop servers, what about servers with equally low pops? what happens is a 30 man group can guest over, cap everything, and then 5-10 people can defend those objectives almost indefinitely.

Let me repeat myself from several days ago, FIRE whomever had the idea of buffing guards. Hire me, I will do that person's job twice as good for half the cost whilst sitting at home, for that matter, almost anyone with average IQ or higher would do a better job