Breaking the first rule of Fight Club

After the dismal performance by the English football team on Sunday and the crushing defeat by our biggest rival Germany, I was in desperate need of something to lift the spirits. Thankfully we had the perfect tonic already prepared. That evening we had a little guild event scheduled, but not quite to our normal daft standards, this was more serious, well a bit anyway. We had arranged to meet up with the Order guild “Champions of the Gods” in a secret location and have an evening of even numbered fights and amusement away from the zerging that is so rife in WAR’s RvR lakes. It was a brilliant night and both guilds had some tough fights, healthy banter and a great laugh.
 
CotG joined us on our ventrilo in a channel set up for them and our two guilds met up outside the fortress in Butcher’s Pass. This ensured we would have no interruptions from zergs by either faction and gave us plenty of room to fight. Being the first of these events and the evening after big World Cup games, we both had slightly lower attendance than we probably hoped for, but both guilds had enough people for 12 player teams with substitutions available on the bench. At first we planned to fight to try and claim a banner from behind the other team, but we actually both ended up ignoring it and just fighting to the death, or until it was obvious one side had won.
 
It was a fascinating match up tactically, as we both set up and approached it very differently. CotG had a mixture of DPS, which included a melee assist train and 3 Bright Wizards in a bomb set up. Where as we had 2 Sorcerers both more set up for single target and our usual collection of MDPS, so pretty much the usual KF single target heroes bundled together. Due to a healer shortage I used my Zealot for the first few fights and it didn’t go too well at first, with us losing the first 4 fights in a row. Half of the losses were fairly quick, yet the others took quite a long time before we got fully nailed. After each fight we spent a few minutes discussing and preparing different tactics to try and believe me we tried every trick in the book, but no matter what we just couldn’t deal with their combination of excellent melee assist training on our healers and the stacked Bright Wizard PBAoE reaching that infamous critical mass of firey death. At least not while we played as pure single target…
 
So we changed tactics again, respecced our sorcs and two of the Chosen, juggled the groups about, another Zealot logged on and finally I got to change onto using my Chosen. We went with a Sorc/Chosen Bomb mixed with Marauders and others including me on healer shafting duty. Instantly everything changed and we got a surprisingly fast victory. CotG are no mugs though and they adapted to our new play style and the next few fights were much tougher, one of which was an absolute epic. After our big tactical change we had 3 wins for KF and 1 for CotG, giving a final result for the Fortress fight of a 5-3 victory for CotG. I’d like to think had we continued further we might have pulled it closer to a draw, but it’s hard to say, many of the fights could have gone either way at numerous points to be honest. Plus it didn’t matter really, it was just plain fun, I was pleased with how we built on our losses to start winning and when either side lost they had always put up a great fight anyway.
 
After the Fortress fight we decided to do something a little different and took ourselves off to the secret demon prison lair for some 6v6 and good filming opportunity for the KF auteur Durtbocks. Those duelling flagged themselves for RvR, while Durt remained unflagged and resplendent in naked greenness, which allowed him to get some decent footage (more filming required, so this vid is a while away). It had all got a bit silly for the 6v6 with us fielding things like 4 Chosen groups or Marauder groups and I had to AFK quite a bit, so didn’t monitor results at all, but I could hear that everyone was having a good laugh. I have to say it really was a very atmospheric setting for a fight club event, certainly one to use again. As the evening came to a close we all jumped into one vent channel and everyone was saying what a great night it had been as well as a refreshing change from playing dodge the zergs. We’re definitely going to be meeting up again, not too often or it could get stale, but we’re already identified some great locations for our next event.
 
If you’re guild hasn’t done something like this already, I highly recommend you consider organising this kind of event. If you can keep the epeen out of it, focus on just having some good scraps, good humour, be open to try new tactics and learning a few things, then you are assured of a great night’s competitive, fair and thoroughly entertaining RvR.
 
A big /salute to Champion of the Gods for being good sports and all that stuff ;)