Feedback: Epic Battlegrounds

PVP Battlegrounds
41
07/27/2018 06:07 PMPosted by Maxed
You want the matches lasting longer? Ok, that's fine, but you have to significantly increase the honor earned from spending an hour+ of your time inside of them. I won't touch them again until you do. Isn't worth it ATM.


So.. having fun has no value?

I really want to undestand why are you Qing for AV in first place.. If you want fast matches and Honor, go normal.
1 Like
42
I think I'm like 0-15 on Alliance epic BGs since the changes to kill the zerg strats (which Alliance were winning all the time beforehand). Would be cool if the Mercenary NPC was always up. Think the 50% Enlistment Bonus is gone too (should it come back?). Getting into AVs with 20 Alliance at the start, and they just lose the turtle.

Going to be transferring a toon to Horde soon, so its not a big deal since Honor is account wide now, but would be nice to have the option to queue whichever side

One of the IOCs last night was an hour long, and seeing the vehicles just hanging out in the middle was cool (except for the losing part), but I do wish there was more back and forth instead of people trying for 5 minutes and then slowly giving up or trying to feed them kills to end it more quickly. There's not enough back and forth right now, and it'd be cool if there were some sort of item drops and buffs. I'm not sure going full Mario Kart is the right option either (being behind = more buffs/better items). Overall it might just be that there's more serious PVPing horde right now in BGs, but yeah, haven't won yet. Will try it out next week from Horde side. I know you guys have the internal data on this sort of thing already, but I just wanted to a leave a note that they should be closely monitored.

Disclaimer: I'm not the biggest PVPer around. Mostly just grinding from 155 to 175 honor level for the Glorious Pennant, which looks really cool. I also appreciate the added focus on Epic BGs, because the large scale action does appeal to a lot of players, myself included. Less serious, more social. Splitting it off into its own queue was a great idea, as is the opt-in war mode system as a whole.
43
07/27/2018 05:26 PMPosted by Mustard
Bring back mine fields.
bring back the troll elites.
Bring back everything.


I second this.

Also, change the wing commanders' function once rescued to a bombing run flightpath. Those ancient hovering NPCs they summon to the center field are laaaaame in this day.

Additionally, please turn the insignia teleport trinket to an encounter specific power that we can click.
1 Like
44
07/27/2018 06:00 PMPosted by Sammonoske
If you're going to make them take longer to finish, then they should reward more honor. Time spent really hasn't been at the appropriate values when I could do 2 old bgs and get more.


I think if people are overly concerned about honor/hr it gets people in the mindset of "winning fast", zerging etc, defeating the purpose of epic bgs.

Honor should be worth the time for sure. But enjoying longer matches probably should have a cost of a little bit less honor, than smaller more competitive bgs on avg per hr.
45
I wonder if these changes will hurt the alliance zerg strats on these maps.

Ehh, probably not.
46
Bug Alert!!!

Could not release spirit upon dying. Twice insignia was removed but third was out of position for any horde to do that. Couldn't /afk out or leave. Had to exit Wow entirely.
47
Can we get a better way to hand in storm crystals/armor in AV? currently i have to stand there going through the same 'quest/menu' interface 20 times, taking atleasta couple mins to hand in all my items. Also there should be a progress board/or overview of resource progress, similar to how the broken shore works. Gives more incentive for players to hand-in items.
48
Game 2 AV
I have some suggestions.
- 30 minutes we were fighting at Stonehold GY and Bunker. The alliance were trapped in the GY constantly respawning
- They were not able to influence a push out of their own GY
- It took 34 minutes to take their SH GY from them.
- There wasn't much gameplay variance during this time.
- Another reinforcement victory. Unbalanced game in Horde favor.

Suggestion A. there needs to be someway to collect and turn in items from a distance. Automatic resources to your inventory then a turn in at a spawn/bunker. These turn ins need to be able to influence and break defenses or offenses
49
Something I really wish you guys would address:

Reputation Gains in Alterac Valley.

Before Legion, you could grind rep by turning in things like Storm Crystals, Armor Scraps, etc. that you looted from people. However, ever since Legion, these turn-ins only grant 1 Reputation, making them unviable for rep gains, especially since apart from Storm crystals, you can only turn in things 1 at a time.

You also get 1 rep for *almost* every Honorable Kill (It seems to happen every other), which means in a normal game, you'll only get 20-30 rep from the honorable kills in the bg, which really isn't worth farming HK for the rep.

This means the only source of rep gains that actually have meaning are:

12 Rep Per Tower Destruction (And this is stretching "have meaning" as it just means closer to the winning rep, otherwise it would be pointless as well)
125 Rep for Killing Balinda or Galvangar.
~300-600 for Winning.

You get -no- rep for losing ~99% of the time. You will VERY VERY VERY RARELY get 125 rep for a loss, but it is so rare I've only seen it once.

This means in a losing AV where your team doesn't kill Bal/Galv, then you will routinely leave an hour long battleground with less than 100 Reputation.

This is unacceptable. Please buff the rep gained for destroying towers, give a consolation 200-300 rep for losing, or return the rep gains on turning in items and add an option to turn in more than 1 at a time to the others.

Not only would this increase the enjoyability of the game as a whole (since the rep is required for the 100 Exalted Reps achievement), it would help motivate me and others to actually participate in the BG and not just try to sway my group to kill Galv for the 125 rep.
50
YES YES YES YES 100X YES

I played an AV for the first time in years last night, and it was a 300 HK turtle. It was fantastic. I blacklisted 40 mans since blacklisting began because every. other. game. was IOC or AV, and it just got dumb. When I group up with friends, or just want to grind honor, I don't want 30+ minute games.

But when I want epic BGs, I want epic BGs. Anything you can do to make AV bigger and broader, please try it.
1 Like
51
Game 1 Isle of Conquest
- Backfilled into a losing game, wall was already down
- Most of game was spent fighting at the Horde's west wall.
- AoE damage feels very weak and that's why pushes don't really happen.
- A lot of stagnation until the defeated us with reinforcements
- Was pleased to hear siege engines and the turrets were doing a lot of damage

*Vehicle health too low?
52
I still do not, regardless of the location or type of content, like scaling NPC stats with player stats past level or difficulty selection. It defeats the whole idea of an RPG's main gameplay feature: power progression.

However, I strongly welcome longer games (~2 to 4 times the length of a small BG, or maybe a little longer) as long as the reward per time is similar. For significantly longer events, it would be nice to receive something a bit above the normal reward per time, because it can be hard to schedule large blocks of time for a single match. I think an epic PvP brawl with the multi-day form of AV would be very neat! Especially with the old queue system (you could re-queue for the same battle by number label).

Edit: There is a lot of positive feedback in here! I really need to play large BGs to try out the changes! Sadly, the honor frame says you can queue up at level 20, but doesn't allow it for this character since 20, now at 37.
53
Despite people saying otherwise, when BfA gets underway, you WILL have to increase the reward for playing these longer BGs - which can now last over an hour easily - to make them equivalent to playing a few to even several shorter BGs.

No one's saying we aren't playing for the fun of it, but an hour or more is a long time to invest in a single game, especially when many folks may have between an hour or two to play BGs in the evenings before they have to get to bed.

Assuming both factions are getting enough fun from epic BGs, the point is to reward players enough to keep queues as short as possible. Any significant imbalance in reward between epic BGs compared to "spamming" the smaller randoms will affect queue times for epics.
54
Loving it so far, I haven't seen bosses being summoned in AV for almost 14 years <3

How about we remove reinforcements and buff the NPCs a little more.
I love longer games, however more honor gains while we are in the battleground, so if we decide to leave, we will get the right amount of honor depending on the time spent.
1 Like
55
I've stayed up way too late playing AV tonight! Haven't done a 4am marathon in a while...

Phalanx, thanks so much for these changes. These changes bring in line the 'epic experience' so much more than the 'ignore other players, kill the bosses' strategies that have been prevalent for way too long. I've enjoyed seeing people turn in to the various upgrades.

I wasn't sure how much detail you'd want us to go in so apologies if too long!

Rewards

I've had a few 1 hour+ games, even one going to 1 hour 20. It was glorious, a back-and-forth battle. I loved it, even though we lost.

My concern is most players of today won't love it, unless rewards are upped. I mentioned this on beta and I think the quest will go some way to help, but in terms of the honor grind:

Why would I spend 1.5 hours in AV or IoC for winning 450 honor when in that time I could do at least 9 random battlegrounds for 300 honor per win (before multipliers)

NPC health and damage

These could do with a boost still. The non-boss NPCs are still really fragile and don't deal much damage. Druid of the Grove Thorns still hits for 200 damage, their Entangling Roots for 200 damage. They aren't much of a 'meat shield' so even if you do get them to move they get mowed over really quickly. Upgrades don't seem to do much damage. As an example:

Champion Guards who live in the mines, following 1800+ turn ins, hit for 700 melee swings. https://imgur.com/RXCfR9D

Upgrades in general feel pretty underwhelming in terms of the boost they give. In previous expansions you could really notice the damage and health increase, and if you got the shaman or the druids to march during pre-patch, they would wipe entire offensive teams. I'd like that again so even if you don't manage to get the big guns, you have made a noticeable impact on the game.

Turn ins should be a real game changer, like they were originally and how they were in pre-patches of expansions past.

Ivus and Lok should be returned to their boss status, and probably boosted some in terms of damage and health. I think their time spent in the middle should be reduced.

Mines

With reinforcements mattering again, everyone's attention is on the mines. They're too easy to flip. Challenging to capture, but once they are faction controlled, they should be challenging to take. There's a lot of rogue-druid action where they just trade ownership of the mines because the leader is too easy.

I'd suggest Aggi, Umi, Masha and Keetar being upgraded into elites with increased health and damage that are challenging. Every other miner and guardian can stay the same, but the leader should at least be somewhat challenging.

Bunkers

I get why Stormpike Bowmen were moved, and I don't disagree, but their new positions make them poor defenders. I'm not sure if it's because they are too 'in' rather than being on the edge of the bunker, but it's not unusual to see their melee damage higher than their shots, because they seem to get LoS'd by the floor? Some screengrabs of their weird "I can't shoot you" pose... https://imgur.com/a/FPoNuul

Trinket

Please can this be updated to be relevant (it will soon be 60 levels out of date) or can we add http://us.battle.net/wow/en/item/18150 to the vendors for a Mark of Honor or something?

Map

Maybe it will just take time for Alliance players to adapt, but it may be worth looking at the Iceblood choke, given how powerful it is. You just can't breach it without brute force. Dun Baldar has a back door, so I think either that should be fixed or Iceblood should have another way to breach it.

Turn ins

While the quantity required for turns in won't be an issue with longer games, it would be a really nice QoL improvement to, similar to Ashran, 'take all my stuff!' rather than the 1/5/20 turn-ins we have currently.

That's it for now, will do a post for IoC tomorrow after playing some. Thanks again!
56
Siege Engines are dying way too fast to Keep Cannon damage. At 75k+ dmg per direct hit they die to 3 Cannon shots currently, so they feel pretty underwhelming for such a long wait.

Also, considering vehicles in general are too frail, wall HP seems a bit high, and Keep Cannons deal a high amount of damage to both vehicles and players (and can be repaired fairly quickly) a turtle-ish meta where vehicles and offense in general are neglected seems very likely to happen, which doesnt deliver the most engaging kind of gameplay.
57
Did some AV's tonight with the gang. The new changes are awesome! 100 kills really makes a big difference in how long the games can last! Gonna have to try out some IoC sometime too! So pumped for this new expansion right now and what seems like a renewed emphasis on pvp the likes of which I don't think I've ever seen in this game before. Thanks Kry! ;)
58
- Side-note: I do like the changes, and the fact that the Blizz. devs. are looking to improve the BG content. Keep up the good work Blizzard.

* Alterac Valley:
To sum up what could be a long rant from me (I played AV back in vanilla); AV used to be the first 3D moba style content. There were A LOT more NPCs / bosses mid field, and in bases. Plus the summoning mechanics for the ram riders, bat riders, summoning Ivus (Alliance) / Ice Lord (Horde), etc..., etc... was waaaayyyy better than what we have now. Players did not have to summon them, though players would stand a MUCH better chance of winning the long AV BG due to having those summoned NPCs push the front line back.

The current AV feels, and plays out more like a "race to the finish line" (aka who can cap the opposing faction's back two towers, and graveyard before the other faction), vs what it used to be when the AV BG first came out which was "an all out war front", with keeps, bosses, NPCs, air support, ground support, buffs, etc..., etc....

* Isle of Conquest:
One of my favorite BG maps. My issue is small compared to the love of this BG. The map has "white-space" (design term), otherwise known as dead zones where players might spawn from, but usually do not. There are places / real estate on the map that players never use. They are the Horde's spawn point if their base is taken in the north east corner, and the Alliance's spawn point in the south west corner if their main bases graveyard is taken. These two areas make sense when written down on paper. They provide a place for players to res. if they do not have another option, however over the 10+ years of playing Isle of Conquest I've maybe only used those spawn points 3 time? Maybe 4 time?
59
I'll be quite honest: The Epic BG queues has been the most fun I've had in PvP in years. I am very happy with all the tweaking that's been done in the past two weeks to ensure the optimal unrated PvP experience.

For Alterac Valley, I think there should be fewer turn-ins required to summon the various NPCs and buffs the BG has to offer. I also feel the graveyard NPCs that guard the flag are a bit too strong at the moment. Towers (unless sniped by rogues/druids) should require dedicated teams to take over, but I feel graveyards should be more susceptible to solo grabs. With all 4 NPCs up, I find that to be more than a challenge to do without dying. As it stands, the only thing a solo player can really accomplish is take the mines, and even that takes some work. Lessening the turn-ins and making GYs a little more solo-friendly would help those players that don't want to just run around with the pack of 30 or 40 to be able to still contribute.

I haven't played IoC as much so I don't have feedback. I guess I just miss the first month or two the BG came out in Wrath, when there were no defined stats yet. The games were more exciting back then. Nowadays it's just Horde hangar, Alliance docks, and both workshop. Then one side absolutely collapses and the other coasts to victory (this is usually dependent on whether Horde kills glaives).

As long as I have you here, the Honor levels are just too much. I ranked all the way to Prestige 25 (on 1 toon only) before the change, and that came out to about Honor Level 130. I've been doing nearly every PvP WQ, in war mode, and doing epic BGs with all my free time, and I'm only at Honor level 140. Let's say I'm getting 5 Honor levels a week, roughly. That means it's going to take another year and a half to reach Honor level 500, and I guarantee when BFA hits I will have more to do than just spamming BGs. And I already started with the advantage of being Prestige 25! The amount of honor required to hit 500 I feel is too much, even with the idea that it should be "epic" and "a feat" to reach. I like PvP but even I'm burned out on grinding honor. I did it for the better part of Legion. At least the epic BGs make it fun again. My idea is to give us "rested" honor like we have "rested" XP. If we take a break from PvP, let that bar go double for a time period. That will also entice people to get back into PvP! Why this hasn't been implemented yet is beyond me, it seems such a simple solution.

The last thing I'll say is I will give you every dollar I have in the bank if you figure out how to add Wintergrasp to the epic BG mix. Wintergrasp was WoW's high water mark for PvP. It will never be matched again, in my humble opinion. Please, I beseech thee, find a way to make it an epic battleground. I will never cancel my subscription if you do. (I also know if you add WG you'll find a way to add Tol Barad and Ashran. I am willing to accept the sacrifice of having to play TB and Ashran if you add WG).
60
I would like to see a return to more of the old school AV's. At least in the sense of putting more of an emphasis on the objectives, gathering resources to summon Ivus/Lok'tholar, Ram/Wolf riders, wing commanders etc. It'd be interesting to see how strong some of those NPC's are now with the scaling changes. A lot of players nowadays just simply don't even know how/that you can can do these things in AV though.