PhoeniX reporting! Arena of honor season 5 round 14

Hello there, everyone!

Found a moment to write you a story about an epic win in round 14 of Arena of Honor

If you caught my last report about that mind-blowing match 13, you know we were doing very good, and you can read about it here.

So our scoreboard looked fantastic.

Because we completely skipped match 12, we were forced to play both match 14 and match 15 back-to-back on the exact same day.

If you’ve ever played at this competitive level, you know just how much pressure that is.

Not bad at all, yeah?!

Let me quickly remind you of the crew we went into battle with today under the banner of the Lannister faction again. Our roster looked like this:

PhoeniX – That’s me, your team coordinator, the guy constantly trying to keep things together.

SAMCRO – Old friend and archer veteran whom I crossed a long path

Rascals – My absolute right hand when it comes to holding the battlefield together and keeping our call-outs synchronized.

Slow Panda – Our main bow rally leader. The man is a literal magnet for enemy troops and usually our ultimate nuke.

Sylvia & Sangrila – Our frontline spear duo. Sangrila is famously wild—we frequently unleash him as a solo hitter or a dedicated cavalry killer.

OSESSA – Another strong spear player. We’ve traveled a long road across the kingdoms and alliances.

TE3AyPuC – A rock-solid infantry player who often deals with enemy clan castles.

Sliktais & Юра 198 – Two incredibly decent bow players. They usually act as crucial fillers like myself, but Юра198 is pretty strong

So, the gang was all logged in and ready. We loaded onto the map, and the very first thing we did was scan the towers and catapults. Boom—infantry defenses everywhere. Infantry is our bread and butter; we know exactly how to crack that shell and perform better then our opponents

The initial plan worked beautifully. We started dropping strongholds and launched a massive, coordinated sand attack right into the Baratheon territory. We managed to take their clan castle, and we even successfully placed Sliktais in there to anchor the position. Immediately after, we pivoted our focus onto the Tyrells.

And we managed to overpower them. Good job so far!

And then, the classic game-breaking thing happened: a catastrophic technical glitch.

Sylvia, who was in charge of marching her lord to protect the newly captured castle, caught game crush. Her screen went completely dead, the game stopped responding, and our voice channel erupted into pure panic. By the time she managed to force-close the client and reboot her PC, the critical defensive window had slammed shut. The Tyrell castle executed a swift counter-rally, and took their clan castle right back. It was an incredibly disappointing blow, especially since the Targaryens weren’t even contesting anything on that side of the map; they were farming resources by building up Trading Camps. We tried to launch a few immediate, desperate rallies to force our way back into the Tyrell castle, but their defensive lines had already been strong snowballed.

Right around this time, we looked over the horizon at our opponents for the day. I remember muttering to the team in voice chat that this might actually be a comfortable ride if we just kept our heads straight and executed our standard plays.

But we should never underestimate a group of highly motivated randoms.

After losing the Tyrell, we made the decision to aggressively contest the middle city when it opened.

But as any veteran player will tell you, if you want to hold the middle with any real degree of comfort, you absolutely need the outer catapults firing in your favor. If those massive guns are turned against your central position, your speed of refresh and refresh expanses will be multiplied, and it will take you much, much more. Catapults are useful for the centre

The middle city finally unlocked, and we jammed absolutely everything we had into it. The coordination initially felt flawless—we managed to slide our reinforcements in at lightning speed to back up Slow Panda. Boom! We successfully captured and held the very first massive enemy rally. We were cheering in Discord, thinking we had just secured our path to victory. 

But then, the official battle report popped up. And the entire voice channel went completely, chillingly silent. When we clicked on the report to analyze the pre-battle preparations, our weapons was somehow put out on Slow Panda.

His lord's weapons looked completely blank. In all the pre-game rush, panic, and stress of managing two competitive matches in a single day, our main rally leader did something wrong, and his weapon left in the armory, but not on the battlefield.

His lord was standing in the middle of the most important city on the map literally butt-naked, with empty gear slots staring back at us. 

The very next enemy rally came flying in from a player named Jaqen. Jaqen brought a relatively modest 2.5 million infantry march—and it wasn't even comprised of full T5 troops. On paper, our massive, reinforced stack of over 6 million defenders should have chewed his march up and spit it out without breaking a sweat. BUT without any weapon multipliers or stat buffs from our rally leader, our 6 million troops were basically made of glass.

Jaqen’s weapons were fully optimized, and his march absolutely obliterated us, wiping us out of the middle city completely. 

At that exact moment, our team morale didn't just drop—it crashed straight through the floor. You can easily imagine the psychological state of the team when you discover that your strongest went to match with no weapons.

Realizing that we could no longer realistically contest the center, we swallowed our pride, gave up the Middle completely to the Targaryens, ordered everyone to destroy our remaining military strongholds, and tried to desperately rebuild them into trading posts to passively crawl for placement points. 

We tried to pivot and adapt. We set up Юра 198 as our main rally leader and launched a couple of heavy counter-attacks, but his raw stats simply weren't high enough to scratch full SS infantry setups. Our other heavy hitter, Sangrila, couldn't help us out either because, as any seasoned player knows, smashing spears into a wall of solid infantry is the road to quick failure. 

And just when you thought the day couldn't possibly get any worse—bam! A Baratheon clone marched right over and snatched their castle back from us. To add absolute insult to injury, they did it using a clone of our own Slow Panda, who was *still* weaponless. We threw the absolute last of our remaining troops at it in a desperate attempt to take it back, but we failed miserably. 

We were completely stuck in third place, buried deep under a solid, point gap. We spent the last few minutes of the round aimlessly dragging resources out of random minor mines, but the writing was on the wall. It was clear to everyone that we weren't going to get anything better than third. To save what was left of our nerves safe, and prevent total team burnout, we collectively decided to just pull the plug and give up. We stopped fighting to save our sanity. As we was obligated to save some to play one more game that day

So, after the match concluded, we sat in Discord for a long, quiet autopsy trying to figure out how on earth the weapons got unequipped from the lord in the first place. It was a tough lesson.

Like I promised at the very beginning of this post, I told you I'd write about an epic win. It truly was an epic win... it just wasn't ours. The randoms and bots declasified us today. 

I’m not even going to bother showing you the elimination rankings this time around because we did a genuinely pathetic job out there. We decided to just take the loss on the chin, walk away, and preserve whatever mental health we had left for the final fight in match 15. Which starts in a few hours from now.

We ended up agreeing to host a mandatory team call an hour before the next match starts to perform some gear manipulations and ensure this absolute nightmare never happens again. I will certainly tell you all about how that final showdown went next week!

See you around on the battlefields, and for the love of god, check your gear before entering battles!