Ashenvale Feedback

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

Hi, I’d like to post my feedback from the ashenvale pvp event.

A small group of friends and I tried out this event last night and while I enjoyed the aesthetic and attempt of the whole thing, I think it has several major flaws.

For one, it is impossible to participate in this event as a solo player, a small group, or a 5-10 man group of players. These groups sizes are the bread and butter of wow classic pvp and yet each base is swarming with elite mobs. Its a bit disappointing that this is the direction that was taken because it feels that unless you are in a large raid, this event is not for you.

I have always felt that raid vs raid pvp is perhaps the weakest and most unfun part about wows pvp scene. The servers lag out, the fights are dictated by ranged and aoe, and in general it is not my cup of tea. I also feel that the meta that will emerge will be the same as AV, with both sides ignoring each other and racing to the bosses. Quite lame.

It is too late to change ashenvale, but going forward in the next brackets, I would much rather have had an expansion on other BG elements that are suited for smaller groups, just on a grand scale. In my opinion, ashenvale would have been much, much better if there were like 30 EOTS style capture points all throughout the zone. Or massive game of capture the flag with 10 flags between astranaar and splintertree. Perhaps the turn in for alliance is east of splintertree and the hordes is west of astranaar.

In any case, I think all of these pvp objectives for world pvp should have the intention of breaking apart large raids of players. That should be a design goal for you guys (if you are reading this that is). This design goal will make for a much more memorable and enjoyable experience.

3 Likes
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I have yet to be in one that is even fair for either side. It’s a stomp in either direction depending on who gets lucky and has more people in the layer. It’s a complete waste of time and takes way to long to start. And its design is obviously trying to work around that there is quests, so I get it, but its still awful

1 Like
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I love getting no rep or honr or ANYTHING for playing def great game

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After the streamer event today, I think my points are even more clear.

This event failed in the design stage. Everyone has known for years that large fights lag out the server and make it unplayable. Any future events need to have the objectives require breaking off into small groups to win.

1 Like
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The map is imbalanced in Horde’s favor.

At this rate all the horde on my server will have the mount and then it will be even more impossible to make it to the boss before them.

Doesn’t help that there is no incentive to defend because defenders get zero rep rewards for winning the game.

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It’s only been a week I really don’t think it’s too late. It’s a horrible designed mess right now but they definitely could fix it pretty easy. As responsive as this dev team is I’m pretty confident that with enough noise this week it will get fix in some fashion

1 Like
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Might be just a week but the first people already have mounts and more are sure to follow.

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Yeah, it’s pretty bad, but I think you’re 100% right, having stuff like capture the flag going on would be a good step in the right direction. I could even see escort quests facilitating that if they increased quest givers spawns.

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100% alot of smaller scale objectives would be better for open world pvp. It would prevent the 1 big deathball (to some extent).

2 Likes
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I dont see how it could be fixed without a massive redesign of the entire battle. It was a poor choice to have the objectives require a raid vs raid fight when the open world just doesnt support it. If lag doesnt kill the enjoyment, then its getting on the right layer or some other thing.

Hopefully they can learn something from ashenvale and the STV event will be something more decentralized.

Ashenvale would be so much better if the battle was simply a massive number of capture points throughout the entire zone. Maybe have them be like AV graveyards, with a few guards at each one.

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This has been the key to literally every successful world PvP/large-scale PvP implementation in any MMO in the past 20 years. It’s mind-boggling how insular the current dev team seems to be with regards to PvP design.

There are so many resources they could learn from and they have rehashed the same old PvE nonsense that gets rolled out expansion after expansion. They honestly don’t seem to fundamentally understand their own game genre.

An example on the basics of a pretty standard PvP zone:

Titan Shard Crater

A huge crystalline meteor smashed into Azeroth and created a crater. On impact it split into 9 pieces, with the largest piece in the centre of the crater and 8 smaller shards dotted around the map.

Taking control of each of the 8 shards provides a temporary buff to that faction:

1 Tower - 5% movement speed
2 Towers - 5% honour gain
3 Towers - 5% rep gain
4 Towers - 5% damage buff
5 Towers - 5% less damage taken
6 Towers - 5% hp5/mp5
7 Towers - 5% honour gain
8 Towers - 5% movement speed

Each shard emanates a radiating power field that also provides a 5% honour gain within 50 yards.

The power that is emanated from each shard is harnessed by each faction and can be captured using a battery provided at camp. When in the vicinity of a shard this ticks full at 1/5 seconds and has a capacity of 60.

Once full the battery can be turned in at camp for rep.

Once enough batteries have been turned in to fuel a special contraption an NPC is spawned that moves to the central shard. Once there they use the contraption to crack the shard and let out a burst of power.

This NPC is elite and attackable, but can be buffed and healed, so needs to be protected.

The crack lets out 7-10 spirits that are only attackable by the faction whose NPC cracked the shard. They spawn in various locations around the map. They are shared tag and when killed everyone receives an orb.

This orb can be used to either:

  1. Hand in for rep
  2. Used as a reagent to craft one of the new recipes for this rep.
  3. Used as a buff on the player (5% change to proc a damage shield)

This ensures that no matter the life of the game and the stage of progress of the player, these orbs remain useful.

The key to all this is that there are no timers. These events roll on forever with no beginning or end.

So much is potentially going on in the zone at once, from small shard control, to handing in batteries, to protecting your NPC, to killing spirits, all the while travelling around the zone and generally PvPing.

You can also make standard gathering nodes continue to spawn so there is another layer to the chaos.

That’s just a rough 10 minute idea. If someone paid me to sit down for a day I could come up with 10 other ideas and actually finesse them. It’s really not that hard.

Oh, and make the zone interesting, with the small shards in cool places: one in a huge cave that is open to the sky (crashed through the earth), one on the side of the crater where there is a platform with a great view of the crater, one in a cleft that has three entrances and can be dropped into, but must be run out of.

Make knowledge of the zone and terrain a key advantage.