Feedback: Epic Battlegrounds

I’ll try this next time it happens :thinking:

Thanks

AV bosses need to be tuned and made stronger … more and more bosses are being killed with 2 towers standing . What’s the point of defending when the enemy can just by pass the towers you are in and still take the boss down easily .

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WG feedback: The map was designed for more than 40 players which is why number of vehicles is too high in my opinion and without tenacity to help players it feels like players are too weak or not enough players to counter vehicles on the map.

Reducing vehicles is one solution but that doesn’t help the attacking team trying to siege. If a reduction of vehicles happens then what needs to also happen is a buff to towers in the south.

AV feedback: Buff the NPCs some more and also make summoning Ice Lord/Forest Lord more common to end stalemates or long drawn out games. Better than having reinforcements running out IMO.

Long drawn games are fine as long as the bosses are buffed up… make defending the towers matter again !!

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Aloha.

We’re working on some hotfixes to Epic Battlegrounds. These changes are not yet live, but should be ready for the game in the next few days.

Alterac Valley

  • We’re modifying the scaling in the zone to make creatures more difficult for players at high item-levels. Our goal here is to make gameplay feel more similar to the difficulty of Alterac Valley in early Tides of Vengeance.

Isle of Conquest

  • The health of destructible walls will be increased by 30%. This is intended to offset the power that the docks has given players with recent 8.1.5 improvements.

Battle for Wintergrasp

  • The damage done by the Catapult’s Flame Breath ability will be reduced. We still want Flame Breath to feel scary and powerful, especially against other players, but we feel that current values are too high.

We’ve been monitoring Wintergrasp closely, and have been pleased to find that win rates for defense and offense are quite even, with a less-than-5% advantage for defenders. The change above to Catapult could have an impact on that, so we’re holding back on making further changes until we see how this one goes.

We have some other improvements to Epic Battlegrounds, including a new UI to track Lokholar and Ivus turn-in progress, that we’re bringing to the game in the Rise of Azshara content update.

Thank you for your continued feedback on Epic Battlegrounds. We really appreciate it.

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Thank you, these all sound like good changes. Interesting about W/L ratios for Wintergrasp too.

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Love the work that’s been done for Epic Battlegrounds. Hope they keep getting pushed further and further.
(also for AV to be the next for a facelift)

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Wonderful changes, I must add my bit of feedback in that the Summoners (Druids for Ivus for example) really should have a leash attached to them. They can be kited infinitely, and it is incredibly difficult to defend against a single demon hunter kiter pulling the druids way back while you’re dealing with other players whilst trying to reach them. It’s been a few months since i’ve SEEN Ivus/Lokholar attempted to be summoned, so I hope my feedback is still relevant! I beleive the bosses themselves can be kited infinitely aswell?

P.S. I would love to see them get overhauled abilities based off of the World Boss Ivus in Darkshore (and a variation of them for Lokholar) <3

EDIT: Also, the NPC that gives/upgrades the item that teleports you back to the base, i’d love to see that NPC brought into the actual Battleground so that more players get and use it. I personally keep forgetting to fly out there to the middle of nowhere to grab it myself :slight_smile:

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The adjustments seem ok, but I have to say I was expecting some slightly more drastic experimentation in this space by now. This feels like a good opportunity to really differentiate what a normal BG is from an Epic BG in both scale, PvP battle size, strategies, and duration (something feeling more like entering a PvE raid as opposed to a Heroic dungeon).

Any hints that you guys may take some more drastic steps to lengthening the matches, and tweaking things to encourage more active and large PvP battles in AV/IoC? The UI interface for AV objectives is encouraging, but without additional changes it may not come to anything.

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What would you suggest? A lot of work has been done to tweak turn-in requirements, bugs with summoning, making NPCs scale so they aren’t just outgeared and killed when you target them - interested to hear what else you think would help?

This was fixed with the latest patch, and the ultimate units behave much better with regards to kiting now - they lose interest in players trying to kite them and go out of combat (without resetting health).

Agree that the druids/shamans could do with either being beefier or immune to CC - two games in a row where we’ve marched the druids, a single rogue managed to sap the Archdruid for a whole minute, then blind for a further minute, then reapply sap. Even with the potions of heightened senses couldn’t find him at all!

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Repopulating and buffing some of the removed NPCs from ages ago is my general go to for what would tilt the risk/reward of rushing in AV closer to a risk. The increased risk of numerous offensive players dying as they try to run past on mounts is what will deter that meta from being so dominant, even if there arematches where some people can force a turtle. It seems a bit weird to me that the only way to stop people from running straight the end of this battleground is for 1/3 of at least one team to go against the grain of what most players tend to do.

IoC still feels like a BG where all of the PvP is front-loaded into the first few minutes. And they haven’t seemed to the find the right balance between buffing/nerfing the offensive and defensive strategies of IoC as to promote a decent amount of contesting back in each base. Either defense is too strong, not because of the PvP element but because of the strength of cannons, or offense is too strong because cannons are doing nothing.

I feel like the vehicle and bomb positioning of IoC needs to be looked at, as a possible means of encouraging more players to contribute to a real battle, rather than waiting outside of a gate while glaives in the back do the work.

Both of the BGs still feel like they are too often a race to the finish, avoiding the other faction as much as possible in the process for a large percentage of the time. Any mechanic that can curb rushes, and encourage combat would be welcome.

While I’m excited because, I enjoy AV most, are we finally gonna get an AV remaster like Warsong and Arathi got? In all the renovations the horde has I find it hard to believe they wouldn’t upgrade their base there from the old rock and wood set up.

Plus this could finally fix Horde towers from being so easy to cap by skipping all the archers.

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Mr. dev person,

Please add Southshore vs Tarren Mill to the epic battlegrounds list? :upside_down_face:

The only real change needed is to simply give the NPC guards some steroids/buffs… that’s it. Everything else (30 minute time limit, 150 kills requirement, etc) can stay the same :thinking:

From a maintenance perspective the map also needs like no maintenance/dev time at all, it’s a “low maintenance” bg that barely needs any attention due to it’s sheer simplicity (no vehicles to tune, no bosses to tweak, it’s just players vs players). Southshore vs Tarren Mill is like a cheap Honda that never needs any work.

With classic servers coming out soon in the summer, I can see a possible opportunity to “roll it out” during the lead-up to Classic. This bg reminds people of the good ole’ days, so it’s an easy idea for building up Vanilla server “hype”.

Also I think random casuals would respond well to this bg, since they like giant teamfights in the middle of the map. Casuals like “simple” (simple objective, simple map, etc), and SS vs TM is simple and self-explanatory :thinking:

If a random stranger off the street - who doesn’t even play WoW - looked over my shoulder while I was playing a match of Southshore vs Tarren Mill, I bet he would have a general idea of what’s happening on the screen (due to the self-explanatory “deathmatch” format of the bg). On the other hand, if that same stranger off the street looked over my shoulder while I was playing an Alterac Valley match or an Isle of Conquest match it’s very likely he would have no idea what’s going on.

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+1

+1 way it should be.

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Hello. I posted this on another thread, and even the bug thread. It may have to do with scaling, but currently, I’ve encountered this issue two times. The general’s hitpoints would fluctuate between having 1 tower and 0 towers, despite 1 tower being up. Here is the log:

Hello. I was just in a recent AV, and the Alliance had burned 3 of our towers, with one remaining.

Drek’thar’s hitpoints kept fluctuating. Here is some timestamps:

[22:42:20] [I] [Rynegiest-Magtheridon]: Capping: Horde Boss - 63.2%
[22:42:20] [I] [Dogom-EmeraldDream]: all defense focus healer
[22:42:20] Vanndar Stormpike yells: Soldiers of Stormpike, your General is under attack! I require aid! Come! Come! Slay these mangy Frostwolf dogs.
[22:42:24] [I] [Kiekö]: 55
[22:42:27] [I] [Volltarr-Stormreaver]: the defense idi not work s**t strat’
[22:42:29] [I] [Kasnith-Quel’Thalas]: Capping: Horde Boss - 42.0%
[22:42:35] [I] [Kasnith-Quel’Thalas]: Capping: Horde Boss - 28.7%
[22:42:38] [I] [Ernee-Mal’Ganis]: feh
[22:42:42] [I] [Rynegiest-Magtheridon]: Capping: Horde Boss - 14.3%
[22:42:45] [I] [Kasnith-Quel’Thalas]: Capping: Horde Boss - 7.9%
[22:42:47] Drek’Thar yells: Your spirits are weak, and your blows are weaker!
[22:42:47] [I] [Rynegiest-Magtheridon]: gg
[22:42:48] [I] [Kasnith-Quel’Thalas]: Capping: Horde Boss - 1.0%

These numbers make no sense. I had him focused, and no possible way for Drek’thar with one tower up to drop from 63% to 55% in 4 seconds, then 5 seconds to 42%, then to 28% just 6 seconds later.

In total. He dropped from 63% hp with one tower up, down to 1% in just 28 seconds. Impossible. This has to be a bug, because his hitpoints would shift as if he had no towers up.

Please help address this issue. It’s painful as it is. This has happened twice already.

Nah dude

What probably happened is Alliance killed the warmaster add, which has the same effect as burning a tower. This would cause Drek’s health to “suddenly” drop considerably as soon as the warmaster died.

This might be what happened in your match, without more details it’s hard to tell, but that’s my best guess :thinking:

Source: I’ve been in a few Alliance AV wins where we were unable to cap IBT (Horde was turtled up good in there and we just couldn’t clear them out), so we opted to simply kill the “warmaster” add as an alternative strat. Drek went down pretty quick once we killed the warmaster add.

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yesyesyesyesyes

I wanna see more of our tree boi.

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Alterac Valley
I think the problem with AV is the disproportionate value of win conditions. Late in the expansion, you just take down a tower or two and rush the general. This makes towers and most other map objectives meaningless.

In the pre-patch of an expansion, towers are everything, and you have a very real possibility of winning by reinforcements as teams struggle for tower control. NPCs, specifically general and lieutenants, should scale with players to keep map objectives relevant.

There’s also the summonable boss, which I would like to see become a relevant thing again. When summoned, the boss could make its way to the enemy general and solo tank the lieutenants with some splash damage onto the general, giving the summonable boss some useful utility.

The captains, like Bal and Galv, ought to be more desirable as well. Perhaps they could bolster the NPCs on your side, making it even harder to down the general or take graveyards, instead of just affecting reinforcements.

Finally, can we have some turrets mounted to the towers so we can shoot at people in the field of strife or something?

Isle of Conquest
This battleground has always frustrated me. It has never been clear to me exactly how all of it works, and I haven’t seen anything in game that even approaches an explanation.

As with Alterac Valley, I think placing more importance on the map objectives will improve the gameplay.

Additionally, perhaps something like deployable packs of NPC guards could be interesting, but I must admit, I’ve played as little IoC as possible because of how one-dimensional it has always felt to me. Maybe a couple more win conditions would help, I dunno.

Yeah, requires a relog to correct it. Very irksome.

Pls fix blizz peoples, ty…

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