IOC needs to have a significant update to be a viable Epic Battleground going forward. Currently the strategy is for both teams to zerg Hangar. The team that loses Hangar has a constant stream of people leaving the battleground for the rest of the game because holding Hangar and killing vehicles has a 90+% Win rate; meaning the outcome of the game is often decided in the first 2 minutes.
Suggested changes to IOC are as follows:
Add a timer that will create a resource based win. This will also help prevent griefing which is prevalent in IOC.
Buff vehicles every season to reflect increased DPS created by gear upgrades.
Add an Immunity Bubble around Faction Graveyards to prevent graveyard farming.
Allow all heal spells to be used on Glaives and Demos. This will require fixing the Overflowing Mists exploit as vehicles would be impossible to kill otherwise.
Increase the damage caused by bombs, making all bases viable, and making pvp more necessary.
Other unusual approaches like allowing engineers to repair vehciles could be used to improve the game play. The issue of the Alliance team being allowed to bomb the Hangar flag, especially long after they have lost possession of Hangar needs to be addressed as well as it creates a faction imbalance.
It’s not that big a deal with vehicles, overflowing mists is only exceptionally strong against like a boss-level NPC with a lot of health.
An excellent idea! Very smart! That will even make it so blizz doesn’t “need” to tune them as much, since damage AND healing will both scale upwards as players gear up.
Horde team can reach alliance gunship easy though so I think that kind of cancels it out a bit. Idk, I’m prob just biased lol
They should do what AV does. After X amount of time, the resources start both depleting automatically.
I would argue that both the Hangar flag bombing and climbing onto Alliance ship should be fixed. Neither reflect the BG working as intended.
With respect to Overflowing Mists, becuase the Glaives do so much damage exponentially faster than Hangar does an unkillable Glaive would be a game ender. But in general Overflowing mists needs to be fixed.
It’s only 20k healing per million health. Hardly gamebreaking, especially when most people are able to do over 100k DPS.
Honestly, if blizz wanted to have more balance, they should make Huge Seaforium bombs do more damage. Make them do a LOT more damage.
Basically, you can get into the courtyard from Hangar gunship OR from docks catapults. And workshop has its own (smaller) bombs. Making bomb running the “meta” would mean that ANY base is viable, since it’s only a means to an end. And to counter it? Just kill players in the courtyard. Good ol’ PVP!
I think Hangar is honestly fine as-is, it’s other modes of winning the game that need to be viable in response.
Hangar is approximately 13% per pass with all guns full which means that it would take 8 passes to down the gate.
If people at Hangar need to respond to bomb runners, or choose to take advantage of bombs themselves, then they would not be able to leave as many people at Hangar and would be more likely to lose the node.
But think of all the mittens we get to knit while sitting hangar & spinning the flag to keep off that brave solo rogue who thinks today is his day to steal the flag!
There is an immunity bubble in the keeps GY until the keep is taken by the opposite faction. Once it’s taken, it disappears.
Glaives need to be buffed somehow to allow the other team a chance.
For some odd reason, they nerfed running bombs in the opposing keeps, maybe they were too strong.
Every season we have these problems, which Blizz is aware of. NPC’s in AV and Ashran weak etc. There is a whole load of things like this that are needing attention. With no dedicated PVP team in retail and all the layoffs, good luck with anything changing.
As an engineer, my vote is to return options for engineers to be able to repair the siege engine, the demos, the catas, anything that blows things up. Allowing us to augment the machine in some way (increase it’s defense? make it hit harder?) could also be fun.
I was referring to the faction-only graveyards that you default to when you have no nodes. Some groups will farm those graveyards instead of killing the boss when they can easily finish the game.
Id also like to see the epics be reduced from 40 v 40 down to 30 v 30. I think it would be more optimised due to some of the lag we get in the big fights, such as Hangar or SR. I think it also gives more opportunity for some cool pvp situations.