Posts with tag alterac-valley

New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. For links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's, visit WoW.com's WoW Rookie Guide.

Now that you can spice up your leveling experience by adding a little PvP to the mix, you owe it to yourself to do it up right. Battlegrounds can be bufuddling for new players, and WoW Rookie would be sad to hear you'd given up on them based on a couple of false starts. Head straight over to Zach Yonzon's A-to-Z coverage of Battleground basics in The Art of War(craft)'s Absolute beginner's guide to the Battlegrounds. Join us after the break for a complete list of the Battlegrounds you can enjoy, starting at level 10.

I make liberal use of the "Report player AFK" feature when I'm in Battlegrounds, particularly Alterac Valley. I can't stand AFKers who leech XP and honor off of the rest of us actually trying to win a game. But while I also abhor when one of my fellow Hordies caps Snowfall Graveyard (don't get me started on that), I would never consider reporting him AFK in retaliation. Sure, I don't want to play with him anymore, but I wouldn't abuse the report AFK feature to try to force the issue either. Others, it seems, are not above AFK reporting abuse.

There have been a couple of times that I've died and run off for a biobreak only to come back to being in town and a deserter debuff. That's kinda understandable: I was actually AFK. But just how quick are people reporting? It's like being at a stoplight in New York City, where people start beeping their horns to hurry you up before the light even turns green. And then the other night, I was trying to get through a bottleneck near Stormpike Graveyard -- which admittedly wasn't the smart way to get around -- and next thing I know I'm at a loading screen. Obviously, I got reported for being in the group of people fighting on the road; but since I was just trying to get through, I didn't get rid of the debuff.

Here's how reporting people AFK works:

Zach is a huge fan of the Battlegrounds. He loves those instanced mini-games where you bash other players' faces in almost as much as he loves Pringles Screamin' Dill Pickle. That's a lot of love right there. So much love, in fact, that he writes these weekly Battleground and world PvP columns just for you (and also because he greatly fears the lolcat hell controlled by his bosses).

Alright, newbies, it's time for today's Battlegrounds primer -- Alterac Valley. This huge, 40-player-per-side Battleground was an ambitious project by Blizzard intended to give players a sense of epic battles. In it's original iteration, Alterac Valley had more NPCs roaming the battlefield, including a massive troll in the Field of Strife who has since packed his bags "for greener pastures". Those greener pastures turned out to be Zul'drak in Northrend, as Korrak the Bloodrager shows up in the Ampitheater of Anguish as the penultimate boss. It's a sweet nod to old school players, and his yells never fail to tickle my old, nostalgic bones.

The old Alterac Valley didn't have the resource mechanic, which I'll explain shortly. Instead, the only way to end it was to kill the enemy General, which sometimes took quite a while. Back in the day, it wasn't uncommon to have Alterac Valley, or AV, games that lasted for hours and hours or even more than a day. There were numerous quests which included turning in race-specific enemy player drops which could be turned in for reputation with a particular Horde or Alliance faction.

It was also one of the game's highlights to summon elemental lords into the battle -- an Ice Elemental named Rokholar for the Horde and a Forest Elemental named Ivus for the Alliance. Those elementals can still be summoned in the current version of Alterac Valley, but rarely make an appearance in today's fast and furious environment. The game has changed quite a lot since its inception, so we'll go through the AV basics right after the jump but make sure to read the Battlegrounds primer along with beginners' looks at Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin.

So, death knight. You're through with Outland. You just dinged 68 in Nagrand and want to move on to whiter, snow covered pastures. Maybe those pastures are in Northrend. Maybe those pastures are in Alterac Valley. Either way, let's discuss getting through those final levels and pushing you through to the end game.

Robin Torres writes WoW, Casually for the player with limited playtime. Of course, you people with lots of playtime can read this too, but you may get annoyed by the fact that we are unashamed, even proud, of the fact that beating WoW isn't our highest priority. Take solace in the fact that your gear is better than ours, but if that doesn't work, remember that we outnumber you. Not that that's a threat, after all, we don't have time to do anything about it. But if WoW were a democracy, we'd win.

Patch 3.2 introduced PvP leveling and even though Patch 3.2.2 made Alterac Valley a bit less lucrative experience-wise, the Battlegrounds are still a really great way for those of us with limited playtime to squeeze some leveling time in. Before we go any farther, however, let me just say that PvP leveling is only for those who actually enjoy Battlegrounds. If you think BGs are a chore, then leveling in them will be a chore. Really, you should only be playing WoW if it's fun, so just skip this column if Battlegrounds aren't for you and we'll see you next time.

Ok, so if you are still reading, you enjoy BGs. On the flip side of the coin, if this is your main character on this realm, then I can't recommend PvP-only leveling unless you only want to PvP on this character. You will miss out on a lot of cash and gear if you skip questing entirely. Of course, if you have a sugar daddy main to feed you gold and heirlooms and are done questing before Cataclysm, you are already hanging out in BGs all day. Or you are playing Aion or Champions Online.

I'm still running AV.

Before you alert my local mental health professional (I saw him this weekend, actually, he was pretty jazzed about a Wintergrasp string of wins he'd pulled off this week) let me explain: I like AV because I like the total mass chaos potential. Sure, a lot of times we end up with both Horde and Alliance zerging to their objectives and very little PvP, but that's not what I enjoy. What I enjoy is sitting in a tower with a buddy and waiting for the enemy and then seeing them come running in the door, six against two, and doing my level best to Bladestorm their faces off before they manage to cap the bloody thing back. Or going prot and becoming the most annoying man alive, zipping around with Warbringer and popping Shockwave in the middle of a pack before throwing every defensive cooldown I have up to annoy them even more.

I enjoy Flame Shocking a DK from behind just as he's about to take Dun Baldar North back from us. Orcs just look cool shocking people.

Patch 3.2.2 has gone live and it has made a significant impact on World of Warcraft PvP. Most of the changes affect class balance, which greatly affect PvP, but there are some important changes to Battlegrounds, as well. One Battlegrounds-specific item in the patch notes is the way lower level characters can see daily Battlegrounds quests independent of quests for characters in different brackets. This means that players will always have a daily Battleground quest available, only that they will range from whatever Battlegrounds they are eligible to enter.

This is great news for leveling players or even twinks who can gain Honor and a bit of gold. The change also moderately offsets the undocumented change to Alterac Valley Battleground experience gain. Zarhym explains it with a little more detail, saying that the bracket changes were responsible for the unexpected shift in experience gain. He also adds that overall, Battlegrounds experience gain should be improved across the board so playing, say, Warsong Gulch will be as rewarding as playing Alterac Valley.

Earlier this evening we posted a list of in-game fixes, and we included in that list a bit about then-unannounced changes AV; namely that the brackets were moved around and the amount of XP gained by completing objectives was changed.

Bornakk has since came out and clarified the changes a bit, and provided a bit more detail. Most interestingly is that this change was intended for Patch 3.3, and was accidently applied to Patch 3.2.2. I'm not really sure how such a significant change could accidently make it in, but there we have it. From Blizzard's mouth to your ears.

It would make sense that the change be applied in Patch 3.3. Cross-server instances are coming in Patch 3.3, and that's going to help leveling a ton. Think of how easy things will be if you just want to chain run dungeons at 1 a.m. for a few hours. That speed and leveling agility would help offset the XP nerf contained in this sudden AV change. But as it stands, we'll have to wait a few months to allow for another quick level mechanism to be put in place.

The other part of the change that was clarified is exactly what happened with the brackets.

This week, Totem Talk talks about leveling a shaman through PvP. That's right, I said leveling a shaman through PvP. Matthew Rossi has discovered the joys of returning to the Horde this weekend with a level grinding AV blitz that even he doesn't really understand.

Before we even get started: I'm working on a post about the change to Glyph of Flame Shock and the Earthen Power changes. It will be its own post, it probably won't be a Totem Talk all by itself. It's one of those "Enough to give it some focus, not enough for a full column" changes. For now, here's a relevant forum thread with blue feedback on the issue.

Alterac Valley's transformation into The Great Level Grinding Gulch (apologies to Warsong Gulch) has had one significant benefit to my Horde shaman: it's gotten me to dust him off and start playing. What's even more amazing is, it's been fun to play an enhancement shaman in PvP again! I think I may have suffered some subtle form of head injury, but there it is. This experiment was initially inspired by my desire to get back to my Horde roots without repeating all the content in Northrend for a sixth time. You know, it's well designed, and I do expect I'll go run Zul'Drak again for the Ampitheatre quests, but I wanted a shortcut and Alterac Valley has provided one. At present I honestly think any leveling guide should recommend a daily dose of AV to help speed the process up.

Oh, I die a lot. Pretty much any time I don't have Feral Spirit up, I die. I die if the Alliance Rogues sneeze on me, which they do often, and with great relish, often snickering at my Zul'Aman enhancement gear and my poor green offhand. It does its best! But even with all the dying (to the point where the Orc death animation is sort of soothing to me now and if I go too long without having two rogues making me the meat in a stabbing sandwich I sort of miss it) I'm sort of impressed with how much I can actually do as an underlevel, completely undergeared Shaman leveling up purely through AV.

Since we didn't have a WRUP this weekend, I'll go ahead and tell you what I did: leveled alts using Alterac Valley. Just a few hours of play, and the levels were flying past without a care, even with only about a 50% win rate. And those times we won fast? Hoo Boy. 100-150k experience for about 10 minutes of work is nothing to sneeze at.

It might be possible that I could have leveled up quicker by loading up a few questing addons and buckling down, but I found PvPing a lot more fun and relaxing for some reason, and I don't think questing would have been all that much quicker.

Ghostcrawler has posted a little paragraph on the forums, reaffirming something we've already heard from Blizzard: that in the past, they've spent more time on Arenas to the detriment of battlegrounds, and that battlegrounds are going to be gaining a little more focus in the future. They've already started, actually, with the Isle of Conquest in 3.2, but GC says there's even more on the table, and that future plans will be revealed at BlizzCon.

He also brings up another good point, however: in terms of class balance, Arenas are a much more striking example of imbalances than battlegrounds are. Battlegrounds have all sorts of things going on, and so you don't get as good a picture of just how the different classes work with and against each other as you do in Arenas. And so, if you're a dev trying to figure out class balances, of course you'll spend more time looking at the Arena gameplay than the BGs. GC also says that the majority of issues in BGs tend to be map-based rather than class imbalances, which is really a whole other science. Not that BGs aren't relevant to how the classes work, just that there are many more variables in there than the relative vacuum chamber of Arenas.

All good points. I'm a fan of battlegrounds much more than Arenas, but I don't particularly feel that Blizzard has ignored them necessarily. The real problem, to my mind, with BGs is simply how faction imbalanced they are: it seems like on every realm in every given BG, one side always seems to have the upper hand, for whatever reason. Sometimes it's a population problem, sometimes it's a map issue. But GC is right: those problems are more pressing than class balance in the BGs.

Videogamer.com has a nice long interview with World of Warcraft Producer Tom Chilton about everything from patch 3.2 and the Argent Tournament to the future of the game at large. They caught up with him at the Warcraft Regional Finals 2009 tournament in Germany this past week, and in part one, he talks about the upcoming patch and what Blizzard is expecting to get out of it. He says the Isle of Conquest battleground is their most "epic-feeling" instanced PvP setting since Alterac Valley, and that they want it to feel nuts, with players fighting each other via air and land. He also mentions Arena, and says that it was originally designed to be "a fun side PvP activity" that they went a little overboard with during Burning Crusade. Finally, he talks about twinks, and says that neither Blizzard nor twinks, apparently, want to see other players crushed by those who have the time or money to max out their low level characters. Even twinks, says Chilton, want to see competition against each other, and the option to turn XP off will let them do that. I'm not sure I agree with that last one -- many twinks seem to beef their characters up just for the chance to lay waste to "normal" players, but Chilton says Blizzard believes otherwise.

The second part of the interview is more general -- he talks a little bit about the next expansion (with the same speculation we've already heard: Gilneas, the Maelstrom, the Emerald Dream), and says that designing a race is tougher on artists, but designing a class is tougher on designers. He admits that because we had a new class in Wrath, it's unlikely we'll see another class so soon in the next expansion, but "not impossible" of course. And he does note that Blizzard tries to "pre-seed" the races before they use them as playable races, so if they are adding in races, chances are we've already seen them (which, you may note, wasn't strictly true with the Draenei in BC). Finally, he talks about the future of Blizzard's MMO in general, and says it's still wide open to them: they plan for the game to last for years, and what they do between now and then, whether that be more expansions, microtransactions, or even a free-to-play model, will have to depend on what they want to do at the time.

Very interesting interview. Chilton doesn't really reveal anything, but you do get the sense that save for a very skeleton plan of one or two years in the future, Blizzard is really playing it fast and loose with World of Warcraft. Even he admits that the game may look very different, depending on how things go, in another four years from now.

We mentioned this issue a while back -- since it was introduced to the game, Strand of the Ancients has started Alliance on attack first, and that's caused problems. Due to the way the map is set up (a back-and-forth attack and defend map), the team that starts attacking has an advantage in terms of farming honor -- they only have to play until the other team loses rather than having to keep up a defense the whole time. That means shorter battlegrounds for the Alliance, which means more honor overall for them.

The problem was that Blizzard couldn't just flip a switch to randomize the battleground's spawn points: they were hard-coded into the moving ships that players appear on, so it took much more coding to use a coin-flip start. However Zarhym now confirms that the coin flip is coming to SotA. And though he didn't say when in the original post, the Patch 3.2 notes tell us that it's coming in that patch.

Hopefully Blizzard will have learned their lesson for the Isle of Conquest -- although since it's closer to Alterac Valley from what we've heard, we probably won't have that asymmetrical issue, and both sides will be able to start with just as many advantages and disadvantages as the other.

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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So one of the things we have coming our way in patch 3.2 will be the new Isle of Conquest battleground. Unfortunately, we don't know much more about it than the name, but that has not stopped everyone from speculating on what it could bring, whether it be a combination of some of the old mechanics from previous battlegrounds (Much like Eye of the Storm was a combination of Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch) or completely new ideas. There's been hints it's more like Alterac Valley than other old battlegrounds, but for now, we're waiting impatiently for the PTR in the hopes of getting a real look.

Zarhym chimed in on one of these threads a couple days ago, and while he mostly told people they'd have to wait and see, one reply he did give suggests a sneak peek into what the battleground could be: "If "conquest" means the ability to catapult or parachute players behind enemy lines, then yes."

Ok, so it's not much, but it's there. There will be Catapults, and we will be flinging players in them! I know one of my favorite things to do in Alterac Valley back when it lasted hours was to sneak behind enemy lines to capture objectives or gather Frostwolf Hides and the like. Of course, I could do this because I played a stealthing Druid. Non-stealthers generally did not have the ability to sneak past all the PCs and NPCs blocking their way. But the idea of sending paratrooping special forces in to complete small objectives or even just flank the enemy is just plain sort of cool, if it ends up working out like that.

Beyond that, Zarhym also hinted that the Battleground revamp is coming along, but of course, once again, he had no information to offer. Will we see it in Patch 3.2? Hopefully, the PTR will come up soon and we'll know more for sure.