The goal of Breakout Events is to allow players a chance to retaliate against being full capped in any borderland. I believe in its current state, the Breakout Event is doing more than just helping teams escape being full capped.
For one, Breakout Events are quite difficult to fight against, especially if you just capped the tower. Let’s say you’re the green team in your home borderlands, and you finally pushed red team off the map by capping Redlake. Oh crap… blue team is attacking the bay keep! 8 players stay to defend Redlake and the rest head to bay keep. Less than 5 minutes later Redlake is under attack from a Breakout Event. Many run back to Redlake to help reinforce the defense. By the time reinforcements arrive, both the wooden gate and wall are already destroyed! There were 8 people defending the tower with 3 arrow carts and a ballista, but never stood a chance…
What happened? Well, the green defenders at Redlake were incapable of inflicting any damage to the attacker’s siege under their protective bubbles. As a result, the Breakout team destroyed the defensive siege essentially for free. An attack on foot was out of the question, because the Champion hits like a truck on top of infantry damage/conditions. This means that the only counter to Breakout Events are LOTS of infantry. Far more infantry than is worth investing, if it means pulling defenses from elsewhere on the map. This introduces a new problem.
Is attacking the Breakout tower actually worth it? The fact that “no” is the answer, when the enemy has enough to activate the Breakout Event, is enough to consider that Breakout Events may be imbalanced. The Breakout Event discourages teams from full capping against invaders, because investing in a successful attack requires far more supplies and infantry than a Breakout Event.
The Breakout team can simply ignore attacks on their home tower knowing that the option to Breakout is available at virtually any time. They can use this knowledge to cap supply camps which will divide the home team forces across the map. It will ensure the Breakout Event has almost no chance of failure. So far it sounds pretty ugly, but this is not the largest issue of all.
Breakout events discourage the two invading teams from attacking each other. This is the most game breaking difference that Breakout Events have introduced. The two southern teams will avoid attacking one another, because either one has to invest far too much in a successful attack which is easily recapped by a Breakout Event.
That about sums up the impact of Breakout Events, and in my opinion they are too strong. If I had the power to influence the design of Breakout Events, I would only change a few things to help bring better balance:
1. Tone down the duration of the protective bubble. It currently discourages making any defensive siege, because the bubble’s duration is enough to destroy any and all defensive siege located inside the tower.
2. Lower the damage output of the Champion commander. He hits for at least 7k every 1 to 2 seconds against max toughness builds. Throw that into the equation against player focus fire / conditions and you got yourself a serious problem on the ground.
3. Increase the time gap between activating Breakout Events. I’m not sure the exact current time gap, but it feels like less than 10 minutes. A more balanced time gap would be 30 minutes.
I’m interested in your thoughts of Breakout Events. Please refrain from ranting or flaming. Thank you for reading.
(edited by Jaha.2840)