A bad timing can ruin everything - Arena of Honor Season 4 Round 8

October is approaching in Westeros, autumn it's fully settling in by now, the trees are starting to lose their leaves, nights are getting colder, you can see smoke rising from chimneys on the cold evenings and for [N0X]Shado it is time to prepare for another Arena of Honor round. In the 2 weeks between round 7 and 8 he unfortunately lost his team so without any team opportunity he'll be forced to go back to the solo que once again. After he found out that he has no team anymore, he started preparing and adapting his strategy for the solo que, specially since he's not doing very well on fame points, barely having 123 after 7 rounds so any loss of fame points in the upcoming round would mean him losing his Lord rank. While being busy with the preparations, time flew by very quickly and it was already Sunday after sunset and time for him to take his commanders, dragons and troops and get back to the mercenary camp. Once he arrived there he signed the registration papers required to participate in the round and then waited patiently for the old gods to finish the matchmaking.

Once the matchmaking was completed, the battlefield doors opened and every warrior stepped in to see which house it's gonna choose them and against whom they will fight. For the first time in a lot of rounds, Shado was chosen by Cersei Lannister to fight for House Lannister and along him, Cersei also choose Kactaheya, [WjB]abvek777, [WjB]Raks, [WjB]jorobadillo, [SsT]PistO, [bOw]A Y D I N, [SdT]OUTsIDER and [WjB]Kneeler.

After he got to know his team, they all headed towards the Lannister's Clan Castle, in the south-east forests of the battlefield, close to the southern scorching dessert. Once they arrived there, everyone started setting their camps around the clan castle and did last minutes preparations for the upcoming fight. Shado used a few of those minutes to quickly scout the other houses and see what they are up to.

Shado wasn't surprised to see a few of the houses managed to somehow sneak in full teams in a solo que map, but they weren't looking that strong compared with his team so he was sure they'd have a chance at winning this round. Time for strategies was cut short quickly by the horn announcing the start of the battle and everyone in the team rushed to occupy and reinforce them as quickly as possible.

The team decided to go with trading posts for this fight, but after taking a quick inspection of the battlefield and noticed nobody else going for military camps Shado remembered of round 3 where him swapping to military camps basically saved the round so he decided to go for it. Unfortunately what he didn't notice is that while changing to military camps, House Targaryen had exactly the same idea so now it was going to be which of the 2 houses has the strongest warriors to occupy more altars. Talking about altars, they started opening as soon as strongholds were completely built so it was time for Shado to start the altar hunt. He started sending scouts all over the battlefield as the pressure to get the NPCs stronger was on him.

While the team was concentrating on taking as many altars as possible, Shado was trying to delay Altar of Maiden from enemies to slow down their points generation and for a while his idea worked. The altar he was trying to keep was under constant pressure, lucky for him his team noticed and send some quick reinforcements that helped him keep the altar and ultimately take'it for House Lannister. There was no time for celebration though as more altars were opening and the pressure on the team was getting very high.

Enemies noticed Shado's relentless attacks and decided to reinforce each other but that didn't stop Shado from attacking everyone on the battlefield on his quest to first place. However, while being so busy with the altars, Shado did a critical mistake, he didn't notice Targaryen's swapping their attack order from Watch Towers to Catapults and that helped them get all the initial points from the buildings and set House Lannister on dead 6th place.

Being his choice to go military camps, Shado felt very guilty and started looking for ways to recover from that one bad decision and hopefully not end on the 6th place. As they were approaching middle of the fight and City of Glory was about to open, that was looking like the best solution, just get the City of Glory but after he did quick math the points, it was looking like that won't be enough, and then he noticed House Targaryen changed to trading posts so he thought he'd keep the military camps just enough to occupy all catapults and watch towers and then swap to trading posts to have a 2 way points generation.

Once the City of Glory dropped the protection bubble he rallies started and they got quickly reinforced by the teams and within a few minutes they started marching towards the city.

Once they arrived there, they noticed that the city was positioned in such a way that only 1 rally could charge towards the city at a time, so they had to fight in sequence. Those were good news for the house holding it as they could maybe reinforce in between the rallies and hold the city. Millions of troops charging at each other made the vale tremble under their marches and the sound of valyrian steel weapons clashing was echoing in all the vale, there were so many troops falling on both sides that the snow-covered vale quickly turned into red and the troops were fighting on top of the bodies of what once were they're allies.

The city was changing hands every minute or so and it was looking like none of the houses are strong enough to keep' it for the 4 minutes required. House Lannister managed to occupy' it a few times too, but despite doing their best to reinforce as quickly as possible, the team couldn't handle the pressure coming from the other 5 houses. Same as House Lannister, the other houses couldn't handle the amount of rallies charging towards them either, so the city just kept changing hands for the whole duration of the battle with no house managing to push ahead.

The battle ended with nobody holding the City of Glory and as expected, going military camps while not being able to hold City of Glory ended up very badly for Shado and the team. Despite him trying to save the round by going back to trading posts mid-fight, it was too little too late and all he could save was ending up on the 6th place. Even worse for him, losing fame points meant losing the Lord rank as well and access to a part of the much needed rewards. He'll have to fight 10 times harder in the next rounds to get his fame points back. Will he be able to find a team again or he'll have to do' it alone? We'll have to wait and see. See you all on the battlefield!