Wintergrasp is, by far, the worst epic BG we have in the roster. You can hear the collective sigh of every player when they zone in. No one is really sure why it was brought back, but in Shadlowlands it needs to go away, permanently.
The imbalance of vehicle momentum combined with very little to no mitigating factors to counter zerg or camped up defense make for a very unenjoyable experience.
Further, players in late game expansion (now especially) have so much corruption, gear inflation etc, it makes for an even more drawn out and punishing game. It is also, as many will agree, ENTIRELY TOO LONG, with the clock ticking for sometimes 45mins fully, with no way to down towers to lower the clock due to zerged or posted defense.
Please review and consider removing Wintergrasp, permanently.
I have a love/hate relationship with WG, but I think it should stay. I get in some really bad games and I get into some really good ones on come back offense and nail biting defense.
Not saying the BG as perfect as is, but itâs probably my favorite epic BG, and definitely wouldnât want it removed. I love mortaring people in a demolisher, and the dynamics that arise with players defending vehicles, staggering vehicle positions to defend other vehicles, etc.
Eh, I donât know about âremove itâ altogether, but I definitely agree 110% with the sentiment. There is a small minority of players that actually enjoy this bg (as strange as that sounds), so it is somewhat unfair to remove the choice from them.
The bg is poorly designed/balanced, and most importantly itâs just NOT FUN.
This part is particularly relevant:
I see ^ this aaaaaaallll the time lol
The moaning and groaning in the bg chat is almost constant, everything from â40 minute loss? im outâ to âwtf why did they add thisâ to âomg not this againâ. Pugs obviously have a negative reaction to zoning into this bg, and I can totally understand why.
The only other bg where I regularly see lots of moaning/groaning in the chat is Ashran on Alliance-side (specifically). But WG seems to be unpopular with both factions.
And of course, whenever you get an in-progress match while queuing epic bgs itâs a losing/in-progress Wintergrasp like 90% of the time. Most of the other epics start off as âfreshâ games, that should tell you something.
I donât think they need to remove the battleground, but it does need some balancing changes. If the defending team wanted to wait 40 minutes for their win, they could literally just all sit in their base for the entire game, and the other team would not be able to get enough kills for vehicles. I hope nobody would ever actually do this, but the very fact that it is possible exposes the flaws in the BG design. The defending team need only turtle in the keep to win, while offense only wins if the defense repeatedly makes huge mistakes.
Even outside of the balancing issues, like you said, the game is too long and vehicle combat is not interesting enough to do for 20+ minutes. The map is also very large, and, unlike in Wrath, you cannot fly inside the zone even if your faction controls the area you are mounting in.
Here are the changes I would make to the battleground:
Make it an equal 50/50 chance for either faction to be put on either side. Currently itâs like 90% offense for Alliance. And no, Iâm not just remembering the ones I lose. Everyone who plays on Alliance reports the same thing and has a year of data to back it up at this point.
Reduce the # of vehicles significantly, but make the remaining ones more powerful and beefy while requiring no kills to use. Each workshop outside the keep will have 3 vehicles that can be used by capturing it. No more build mechanics or farming kills.
Make vehicles do a lot of damage to other vehicles and very little to players., rather than the other way around. At the same time, make vehicles resistant to player attacks. The keep guns should be the only exception since they are stationary and can be destroyed by ranged players.
Add raid powerups (similar to the Ashran solar sphere) to the corners of the map, such as the Forest of Shadows and Cauldron of Flames. These will serve the purpose of making a comeback possible for the losing team.
Make the game a maximum of 20 minutes. Make the towers instead each give a buff to Offenseâs vehicles until they are destroyed. Once they are all destroyed by the team on Defense, a boss will spawn that will immediately end the game when it is defeated. (The lack of a win condition for defense other than running out the clock is a main contributor to games where everyone on the losing team just leaves or goes AFK to wait out the clock.)
Whatâs funny is that Wintergrasp can be âfixedâ pretty much overnight, here are the stepsâŚ
scrap the ârankâ mechanic altogether
make all workshops start off as âneutralâ (neither faction controls them), and make them function the same way as the Isle of Conquest workshop
destroying a tower now takes 10 minutes off the timer (up from 5 minutes)
There, done
If I was on the PvP dev team, I bet most of these bgs would be balanced/fixed in like a month at the most.
These current devs probably donât even actually play any of these bg maps, they donât have the same âboots on the groundâ experience as us players that actually see these map imbalances/map issues on an almost daily basis.
ion doesnât even PvP, as evidenced by his armory page (âŚa certain Resto Shaman on the Malâganis server), wouldnât surprise me if itâs the same story with the other underling devs.
And sometimes you have an amazing game âŚ
Just lost a WG attacking to alliance . They won with 1.1 percent of the inner wall remaining. We had 30 sec on the clock remaining but they managed to get the last of the southern towers down and won the game .
Iâve seen this, and won as attackers when the defenders tried to stay inside and turtle. I wonât go into specifics but yeah no itâs not a thing.
When wg was on the PTR (unfortunately i donât have proof of this right now) during the âplay with the devsâ thing they always do, they said which side gets attacking and which gets defending is completely random.
The bg is 45 minutes to start with to give the attackers a decent chance of winning. Making it 20 minutes would make it impossible, and the south towers would be pointless. Even the original version 10 years ago was 30 minutes, so I disagree completely with this part.
Queueing as a group lowers the chance of getting backfilled, with the unfortunate side effect of making your queue times 30+ minutes per epic bg.
I kindasorta disagree with this. Vehicles how they are now are a genuine threat that canât be ignored and must be avoided. Seeing a full zerg of 10+ demos coming at you has a⌠âmorale penaltyâ to most players. i canât think of any other way to describe it.
This would destroy the nostalgia feeling of wg for those who remember it 10 years ago. It would be the same thing as, say, removing drek and van from AV entirely. Getting kills â rank â vehicles is how itâs always been, and how it should be, at the very least to avoid massive backlash.
The biggest issue with the map design is that the defenders can spawn vehicles inside their base over-and-over. You literally canât get through a wall breach that has 8 catapults sitting behind it lobbing away at the entrance. The defenders need way less vehicles, cooldowns between making new ones while defending, and/or canât bring vehicles inside the base.
Generally I think that Wintergrasp and SOTA could be fixed in part by mirroring it so that each faction gets a defense and offense team. The timer has such a strange effect on morale, which is weird because it has the opposite effect in WSG/TP.
I was so excited for WG and Ashran to come back, but now that theyâre here all I want is a good AV or even an IOC when I do epics.
It has the easiest 150 conquest quest for Alli, so itâs good for something at least! At least we have a chance at winning it, unlike Ashran, which is immediate /afk material.
