Powah to da greeeeeeen.

After saying in my last post that I would be okay if there was little to no CC in the game I've had a chance to experience something very close to that over the past few days and I've had a total freaking blast.

Choppa and slayer are very low CC classes. They each get a low level snare and a mid-level short duration knockdown. Slayers I think have a moral ability knock down as well. Bored a few nights ago I elected to check out choppa and ended up instead rolling a shaman on the test server as that's what I'll be playing with Calintz's choppa and I wanted to see how shaman works at level 18. It was, as said, a blast. 

I RvRed more in the past two nights on the test server than I have in the past two months on live. It's simple, there's no cheap tricks (Except the few engineers that the slayers seem to bring, hello disable) .  It's just "Heres da boyz, deres da gits. Time ta smash." And I've noticed a hell of a lot more teamwork come out of it than I've ever seen on the live servers. If a shaman is getting hit there are suddenly four or five big choppas or a random black orc physically surrounding him and pushing the dwarves away. Honestly, as if they cordinated it. It's a beautiful thing to find yourself suddenly in the middle of a giant green box, protected not from crowd control abilties but good old fashion collison physics and teamwork. 

There was also a tactic I like to call "the first aid run". When you create a level 18 greenskeen on PTS you're dropped already geared and ready to go into the Marshes of Madness warcamp so naturally the Marshes RvR lakes is hoping, constantly. The keep there has a bridge that links the plateu the keep is on to the main road creating a nice little bottleneck if order chooses to take that route (which... they have almost always done.)

What happens with no other cordination is the members of the giant green wall form up fantastically on the bridge with slayers washing against them. The healy gits (shaman) stand at the end of the bridge. When a choppa finds himself at low health he turns and runs back toward the shaman, his place in the wall instantly filled by another choppa. The hurt orc is spotted, spam healed and usually turns on his heel before he even reaches us and is back in the fray while passing another hurt orc on his way to Mork's First Aid Station.  It made me laugh out loud several times to watch every orc there doing it and how well it worked, like a brilliant moment of unplanned teamwork.

Save a random ironbreaker managing to throw all the orcs off the bridge and rush the healers the only way to break that set up is for a group of slayers to come up the side of the hill, from behind and wipe out the shaman before the orcs can save us. It would be a very simple tactic, and effective, if they'd use it. But for some reason they haven't yet, they just keep bouncing off the green wall. 

Yesterday we also got a chance to take back the keep while it was playing host to a slayer convention. A new feature of 1.2 is that you can not take down a keep door without a ram. If you're ram-less and relying on regular abilities the door stays at 1% and refuses to break. Makes freaking sense to me, who ever heard of knocking down a six inch slab of a wood with a knife? The ram doesn't have to be up at the time the door goes down, but a ram has to have damaged the door at some point for it fall. We had our ram out until the slayers managed to gather enough excess grease from their mohawks to fill the oil cauldron. We took down the rest of the door with shaman spells, choppa axe throwing and random kamakazee choppa bashing. Once we got in it was a gloreous push. There were no bright wizards to single handedly wipe us all out with AoEs, only one or two engineers, a ton of slayers and a few runepriests hiding in the back. We took the keep on pure "throw as much green as it as you can" tactics. Choppas charged, choppas died, choppas rezed and choppa charged again. It was very touch and go, especially when the respawned slayers nearly took us from the floor. But we actually managed to take it and it was fantastic fun. Little Turnip the Shaman even got a gold bag out of it. 

My question is, why doesn't/can't this simple fun exist on the fully classed live servers? Is it as I guess an issue of CC and ranged damage dominating the full game? Is it a question of the prevelant zerg mentalities of WAR that state if you can't win bring twenty more friends? Or is it just because greenskins are that awesome?