Impressions from T3 RvR

Yesterday i had my first taste of some open RVR on a fairly large scale.
It happened in Dark Elf tier 3 RvR lake, with about 60-70 people participating, both sides combined.
Immediately i got bumped to lvl 28 stats upon entering the zone, which was much needed help.

A short run from the warcamp, there is a huge dark elf keep that happened to come under attack yesterday from a couple of order warbands. I joined the defenders to see what the T3 open RvR is like. To begin, the T3 keep has high walls around its perimeter with gates that need to be broken in for the attackers to be able to get into the courtyard. Once they are past the outside walls, they need to take the T2 style inner keep. The outside walls sport various bastions with siege points on them, repeater crossbows, siege oil over the gates, and free points for your favorite flavor of orcapults, spearchukkas and hell canons.
One can stand above the gates and shoot down upon the enemy, but the problem was that bright wizards below did nothing but try and shoot people on the walls while the order melee was busy with breaking down the gates. T3 keep has a lot more defensive siege units like bolt throwers etc. than a tier 2 keep, and every single one was manned by defenders. Order was taking a lot of damage by just hanging around outside waiting for the gates to break open. I am sure their healers were very busy.

As far as defense went, the RP was flowing in at an incredible rate. Every few minutes i would get automatic +100 for being inside the keep under attack, and once in awhile someone outside would bite it and a little bit of rp + exp would trickle in. The actual experience was pretty low, i could have probably gotten more by killing a few mobs over a course of 10 min. or so, unfortunately.

The fun began when the outside gates were finally broken down. Order rushes in while defenders are trying to scramble from the outer wall across the courtyard and into the keep. Lots of skirmishes issue. Defenders usually take heavy losses there, and it feels like order is about to take revenge, but...
They got to break down another door and now the defenders are respawning and running back attacking their rear. More skirmishes issue. The neat thing is, the outer walls have rear entrances that you can use to get inside the courtyard without having to use the front gates. Those entrances are usually unguarded, and its not too difficult to get back on defense.

Once the inner keep gates are broken down, order is in a pinch again- there are defenders on the 2nd floor of the keep blocking the staircase, and loads of defenders in the courtyard trying to pick off the healers that are now inside on the first floor standing back below the stairs. This was my moment to shine as i could happily plink away at the people inside for mucho xp+rp.

Pouring oil on people below is another sweet experience, it crits for around 1700 and you can pour some more every other 6-8 sec. Needless to say loads of people are standing around it clicking madly trying to trigger the oil barrel to tip over. I think it was too much for the order guys, and they broke down after two attempts where they managed to get inside the keep. Every time they failed, defense pushed them all the way out of the keep and back to one of the objective points. I must say that i wished i had more aoe abilities during that siege, as i imagine a magus would have a field day out there. It was kind of neat seeing so many people mounted up, order was rollling in on horses of various colors and it looked pretty cool. It was also remarkable how mobile they were, it was very easy to get caught by a bunch of people who just rode in from out of nowhere.

On another note, our Black Orcs and Chosen looked absolutely awesome, i must say the BO armor designs later on just kick butt.
Wish i took screenshots, sorry! Next time for sure.