Stronghold
Winning games is a balance between protecting your skritt door breaker/champ offenses and killing enemy skritt door breakers/champ offensives. The longer you keep your enemy from breaching all your gates and the more successful you’re at breaking down their gates, the more assured you are of winning. A general run down of priorities when there’s little organization or designated roles are these:
Both teams are still trying to break down eachother’s gates:
1. When the game begins you want to summon and continue to only summon door breakers when you get a chance. That means controlling the middle when not reacting to bigger short term priorities. When the fighting is won (or there is no fighting), channel and run back supply to summon more skritt. Do not summon archers until all the doors are down.
2. Kill all incoming door breakers/champs asap if you’re in a position to respond, are designated to do so or built to do so. You don’t need a whole team for this. Only as many teammates as needed so you don’t die to player defenders before the job is done. Once enemy door breakers are dead try to disengage, or at least move the fight to somewhere more useful (the middle is a good place to keep it contested or champion spawners if they’re about to activate). You don’t want to get held up fighting players after their door breakers are dead because players can’t break down doors without a champion or skritt. There’s always something more you can do like protecting your own door breakers. The only time not to disengage is when you’re fighting and winning against superior numbers and prolonging their down state means their team is handicapped to respond to offensives, champ summon capping etc.
3. When you’re not under threat of gate attack and are close to the middle, this is a good time to wrestle control of the middle again if needed and run more supply to spawn skritt door breakers asap.
4. When you feel safe enough or in a position to go on the offensive, you can help protect your Skritt/Champs as they progress. This is usually a job suited to support players who can dish out enough DPS to clear the way or also pressure enemy players off your NPCs. There should always be one or two people doing this for the most part in order to be successful in the long run.
5. When Champ summon timers pop your team needs to cap these, it saves a lot of time and effort defending your lane and saves a lot of time and effort summoning door breakers to take out the enemy lane.
When enemy gates are all down:
- This is when you switch to summoning archers with supply and most of your team continually assaults NPCs in the main stronghold, sending one person to take out any enemy skritt. The longer your team sustains damage and fights vs. Lord the more panicky the enemy team gets, making their progress vs your gates manageable. By this point you should win through sheer attrition. Ideally, you want to be in a position where 1-2 players can single-handingly take out a Lord quickly while not dieing to NPCs/Players defending it.
When your gates are all down:
- Your in trouble if this occurs if you haven’t made a lot of progress vs. their gates. If your team is good enough and with enough support they may be able to take on superior numbers and keep your friendly Lord alive, so 1-2 allied players can breach their Stronghold and assassinate the enemy Lord.
When both stronghold gates are down:
- A race against time to kill eachothers’ Lords. The most skilled or luckiest team will win out here, because the weaker team will likely not have the numbers to defend their Lord adequately while killing the other Lord. As above, you want to be that team that can easily kill and control the enemy team and if you’re not, somoenes got to play rambo and assassinate their Lord/NPCS before the assured killing of yours. Prologuing enemy down states or finishing them so they only spawn one at a time is sometimes a good thing too. The more they’re attempting to revive eachother or lying there useless, the less time they’re DPSing Lord, or aren’t respawning all at once to ruin your offensive against their Lord.
(edited by Balekai.6083)
All in all you want to build for whatever purpose you feel or find yourself playing role wise in Stronghold no matter what your class is. You should also consider being able to hold your own because you will find yourself outnumbered and chain dieing is bad in Stronghold (well at any time in any mode). For the most part, Necros are good at killing NPCs and groups of enemy players in small/large skirmishes with Condi builds or Well builds.
Necros are also ok at supporting NPCs/players as a support role w/ blood magic. I find Transfusion revive teleportation has turned the tables near the end 2-3 times by reviving a good portion of my team at once (lots of walls to teleport them behind). Life from Death + Transfusion is pretty good at keeping nearby NPCs up too if you got lots of healing power. At least enough time to pressure off a solo enemy player before they kill your skritt(s) or champion(s). Vampiric Presence can add DPS and passive healing to NPC attacks and Lord specials too I think (haven’t checked to see if stronghold NPCs get buffed by it, even though I run it all the time :p ).
(edited by Balekai.6083)