1-2 hour games "normal" and 3 hour games not abnormal
If you don't want this, don't queue for Epic Battlegrounds?
To be fair, games should probably end around a certain time.
1 hour vs. 2 hours (or 3 hours) is a big difference. Players are probably ok if an epic bg lasts for 1 hour. However, if it randomly lasts for 2 or 3 hours, that's a bit much.
IoC is absolutely terrible currently. 1-2 hour games "normal" and 3 hour games not abnormal
cannons in base do too much damage and you can constantly repair them with no downside
siege engine worthless
glaive throwers easily killed by 1 person
gates have too much hp still
if one side fully defends the base it is almost impossible to take.
healer balance really skews the game. ex one side has 12 the other has 0-2. might as well /afk
DRASTIC changes are needed to make the game go quicker latest hotfixes are a change in the wrong direction
I agree with everything except whats in bold.
Siege Engine is great, but suffers as all vehicles do because cannons do so much damage. As a melee it's so hard to actually hit the Siege Engine which is probably why I find it stronger. Maybe it needs a health buff, but its damage is fine.
Gates only seems like they have too much hp because vehicles can't actually get to them because cannons kill them on the approach too easily.
The changes don't need to be drastic, they just need to fix cannons, either lower their damage(no), make them harder to repair(maybe), or give them a stacking reduced damage dealt every repair so they eventually become useless(makes hangar and docks stronger at the start of the game). Also increase vehicle health or give them resistance to player damage.
Hey you never know, I was in a game last night I thought for sure we were going to lose, lost tons of people who thought the same, but we pulled a win.
You may have noticed we've been doing some updates to Alterac Valley and Isle of Conquest recently. Our goals with these changes are to both improve the gameplay experience in these battlegrounds and to also design them around a longer duration format. We feel that with the longer match length, players have more room to switch strategies in a match, change from offense to defense a few times, etc. to provide a, well, more epic experience.
With that, we're looking to you to give us feedback on these changes.
Here are some of the changes recently (through hotfixes, so they are very recent):
Alterac Valley
Increased the number of Reinforcements by 100.
The NPCs health and damage will match the players level and gear, which will result in a more consistent difficulty.
The increase to the length of the battle is small but welcome. In my opinion the average Alterac Valley battle should be between 2 and 4 hours, and range up to 48 hours, so another thousand reinforcements or ten might be appreciated, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.
The race strategy could still work to shorten the game and trade honor. If you guys ever make battlegrounds a worthwhile source of gear, you should expect that to reemerge. You guys need to bring back the NPC forces in the Field of Strife to prevent that strategy.
The Horde "turtle at Galv" strategy has become perhaps excessively effective - there are other threads about this, some started by Horde - and I wonder if it might have been due to the bosses scaling with the opposing team's average gear. If, for example, Horde spend more of their time in PVP, and Alliance spend more of their time in PVE raids, one would expect the Horde to have more expertise, while the Alliance raiders have great gear from PVE to balance their PVP cluelessness. It might be better to scale the bosses with the 80 person average gear over both factions.
Incidentally, I hope your scaling is not just to the people fighting the bosses, as that would eliminate sensible strategies like sending fewer but better geared people to fight them. Best would probably be to average over all 80 combatants, but if you want to adjust just to the opposing faction, it should be the average over their 40 combatants.
Isle of Conquest
Increased the number of Reinforcements by 100.
Increased the health of the walls significantly.
Increased the damage the Siege Engine, Demolishers, Glaive Throwers and Keep Cannons deal against players. (The Seige Engine in particular will now be pretty scary!)
Increased the siege damage dealt by the Siege Engine and Demolisher. (The Ram ability will deal a lot of damage in particular)
The Refinery and the Quarry now generate Reinforcements more frequently.
Increased the health of the "bosses".
We welcome your feedback! Please focus your feedback on the gameplay in the map, in particular the pacing, balance of different mechanics etc.
Thank you!
I'm not very famliar with Isle of Conquest, but I have to say it seems to make more sense than it used to. I don't know whether that's because I've been forced into it more as the only way of getting marks of honor that I suddenly want, or whether your changes cause it to make more sense, but I'd guess the changes get at least part of the credit if not all of it.
I just wasted an hour in an AV and lost for 900 honor, you need to quintuple honor earned or just delete these BGs because as it stands I will never queue for these again.
I'm going to throw it out there that the #1 think that sucks in BGs is how badly the rewards are skewed for losing. These ARE supposed to be fun, the rewards should be primarily from participating and trying to win... but not just immediately folding at the first inconvenience because the reward for your likely loss is so pitiful that you RIGHTLY don't want to waste your time.
- Make rewards come from PARTICIPATION and objectives - And minimal/removed difference for Winning vs Losing
As it stands, there's essentially no incentive to do anything but run to the meat grinder and hope you win. Because even if you win by doing objectives, your honor reward will suck... you'd get more losing in a meat grinder than defending a tower to try to win.
And extend this to all BGs. Nothing's worse in this game than playing something like Warsong Gulch and losing, you get no reward and no rep. It doesn't even matter if the match was short because you get so little. Encourage players to participate and to do objectives and reward for TIME and EFFORT not winning vs losing.
This hits the nail on the head for how I personally feel regarding BGs. Nothing makes me want to log off more than feeling like I just had my play time wasted because of a loss. If I still feel like I got my daily objective completed I wouldn't feel as incentivized to leave a losing BG.
Some nit picking: AV towers go a wee bit too fast, between figuring out what they are doing and respawns, doesn't leave us much time to mount a defence.
Any longer and they'd be a guaranteed recap. Maybe that's what you want since the Horde always tries to recap and the Alliance often don't, but the Alliance ought to have a chance to burn towers too.
In IoC base turtling shouldn't be a thing? Or maybe you all like that strat, but when the horde have all 3 objective points and both the refinery and the quarry and we still can't make it into their base (with the gate blown down) It raises some red flags.
Alliance do seem to fight into the Horde base better than the Horde fight into the Alliance base. Maybe this is a case where the Alliance PVE gear beats Horde PVP strategic skill. That said, perhaps we should give it a few days to let additional strategies be developed; for example, if you use the vehicles to bombard the courtyard, that might help compensate for any gear differences.
Good job on both, I had a chance to play both maps for several hours today and had a great time wins and losses. One issue I encountered in AV was when I tried to loot a corpse it made me have to loot a 2nd time to get scraps. Plus less than half the corpses had scraps for me to turn in. In the past most corpses had at least something, even if change. This isn't the case now.
Games [can] last too long and give less reward than winning normal battlegrounds.
If the epic battlegrounds last longer, yes, they should give better rewards. I'm currently getting 2 marks of honor for each epic battleground, but I have no clue what people in the 10v10 playgrounds are getting.
Honestly regardless of how much you fix up the maps the sheer time sink they need to win means we won't have enough players to play with unless rewards are proportionate.
I can Zerg around with a raid in wpvp and get 30+ honor a kill very fast as long as there are enemies around I can run a random battleground and get 300honor+ kills in like 10-20 minutes I can run an epic take 1-3 hours and get 450honor+ kills
I mean there needs to be a perk to get ppl drawn in atm its vastly inefficient compared to the others so I'm stuck in long q waiting cause I actually enjoy them and want to play. Sure you don't want it too good so ppl afk but maybe increase honor per kill or something and harshen up that afk kick with some more penalty
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 normal BGs in the same amount of time or even less and get more honor than a single epic BG.
Honor in battlegrounds come from two sources: kill honor and objective honor. The kill honor is higher in Alterac Valley because the battle lasts longer. Usually the top honor earners in AV get over 1000 honor, which is in my experience substantially higher than the quicker battlegrounds.
I think Alterac Valley awards honor for time in play, which helps make up for the fact that the duration of the battle is variable while the number of objectives is not. That leaves the honor for objectives, which perhaps should be boosted if the bosses have been buffed. The towers haven't been buffed, but they are harder to burn due to other changes.
There are a few things that are broken with respect to honor gains, specifically the Arathi basin 5 cap acceleration and the fact that you can win Warsong Gulch in the time it takes to traverse the field four times. The 5 cap acceleration could probably be removed now since being camped by raid geared folks for 15 minutes doesn't seem to be a thing for solo queuers any more.
Awesome changes to the Epic Battlegrounds! I've played a few rounds of AV, haven't gotten into IoC yet but my feed back mirrors that of many of the people in the thread.
I think the added resources are a great change but adding an additional 100 or so would allow all towers to go down and give time for a Drek/Van kill or just epic battles to the end.
I think the NPCs that can be summoned in AV also need to have their power amped up. I've seen them summoned and their damage/health wasn't as imposing as I think it should be, so maybe a buff to that would help.
And finally I think the honor rewards should also be increased. And not just for the winners but losers as well. Maybe much greater honor for taking a tower, a graveyard, or killing Gal/Balinda, or even summoning the NPCs. Maybe even honor reward quests inside the BG to turn in resources that give substantial honor to encourage people to use that mechanic.
All in all, the changes you guys implemented are AWESOME and I haven't had this much fun in a battleground in years. These AV matches are as fun as the ones I had way back in the day when I finally dinged 51 and could queue up for it. Great changes, keep 'em coming!
You may have noticed we've been doing some updates to Alterac Valley and Isle of Conquest recently. Our goals with these changes are to both improve the gameplay experience in these battlegrounds and to also design them around a longer duration format. We feel that with the longer match length, players have more room to switch strategies in a match, change from offense to defense a few times, etc. to provide a, well, more epic experience.
With that, we're looking to you to give us feedback on these changes.
Here are some of the changes recently (through hotfixes, so they are very recent):
Alterac Valley
Increased the number of Reinforcements by 100.
The NPCs health and damage will match the players level and gear, which will result in a more consistent difficulty.
Isle of Conquest
Increased the number of Reinforcements by 100.
Increased the health of the walls significantly.
Increased the damage the Siege Engine, Demolishers, Glaive Throwers and Keep Cannons deal against players. (The Seige Engine in particular will now be pretty scary!)
Increased the siege damage dealt by the Siege Engine and Demolisher. (The Ram ability will deal a lot of damage in particular)
The Refinery and the Quarry now generate Reinforcements more frequently.
Increased the health of the "bosses".
We welcome your feedback! Please focus your feedback on the gameplay in the map, in particular the pacing, balance of different mechanics etc.
Thank you!
Thanks for trying to make AV a better place. Iâve played it since vanilla and always loved it. I guess my question is why reinforcements. Make it a true battle. Perhaps after being in it for 20-30 minutes you can leave without a penalty and keep the honor you earned so as to not have anyone feel they have wasted their time
Longer battles are fine by me, but the part that blows is that they are because of turtling. The rewards just arenât there for the amount of time. An hour and a half spent in an IoC loss with top kbs for everyone to leave with around 1k honor for example.
1-2 hour games "normal" and 3 hour games not abnormal
If you don't want this, don't queue for Epic Battlegrounds?
Then they need to retire the Alterac Valley reputation or MASSIVELY buff rep gains.
It's currently required for 100 Reps achievement.
However, the only real way to get rep is to win Alterac Valley, which grants 300-600. (Losing *VERY VERY VERY* rarely grants 125 rep, but it's only happened once for me in all my losses.
Which means you need to WIN 70-140 games to reach Exalted. At 2 hours a game, that's a minimum of 5.8 days /played if you won *EVERY SINGLE* AV you entered and got full rep for each one.
Turn-In quests only grant one rep each, destroying a tower only grants 12 rep, etc. They USED to grant more. (Like 5-15 rep per turn), but Legion nerfed them, most likely unintentionally.
If they insist on making Alterac Valley even longer, they NEED to increase the reputation gains. No ifs, ands, or buts.
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.
They're an improvement, but I have to say that the current world PVP raiding is even more fun at the moment. In the past week, I've done half a dozen city raids, got all three bosses needed for my black warbear, defended Tyrande and Stormwind, and had lots of fun wiping and being wiped in Darkshore. To be honest the only reason I even queued for even the improved epic battlegrounds was to save for certain items useful in world PVP. To compete with that, Blizzard would have to go completely back to Vanilla Alterac Valley, scaled to the current character levels, of course.
Granted the world PVP raiding scene will quiet down once the expansion comes, so I am happy for any improvements that can be made to epic battlegrounds. Alterac Valley is back to being good enough to be even with Arathi Basin for me, and not just a backup, though it could be much better.
Regarding the flag guards, making graveyard capping difficult is important to prevent races. I think it's fine for solo capping not to be possible, though I think it might currently be possible. There used to be all sorts of specialized strategies to solo cap an AV graveyard, back when actually fighting the guards toe to toe required 4 or 5 people.