Posts with tag battleground

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If you're interested in PvP battlegrounds, you're probably aware that patch 3.3.3 is turning the system on its head -- completely removing Marks of Honor as well as increasing honor gains across the board. Have a bank full of the things? Well, we've got good news for you -- at present on the PTR you can convert them to honor at the rate of 2000 honor per mark. Combine that with the recent explanation of Wintergrasp mechanics and what have you got? A lot of excitement about PvP battlegrounds. Here's what's making the rounds of the blogosphere.

• Cynwise thinks now's the time to be running battlegrounds and collecting Marks of Honor.
• Holypaladin.net talks about Wintergrasp imbalance.
• Birdfall discusses seeing the opposite faction as people.
• Getting back to the basics, Spiceytuna explains resilience and gives talks frost mage PvP 101.
• Already a PvP expert? Over on the official forums Nethaera is looking for Warsong Gulch advice to be included in the next World of Warcraft magazine.

So just when it looked like things might be getting quiet in the wake of Patch 3.3, Blizzard stirred things up again last night with a release of PTR Patch 3.3.3. There's some pretty big changes coming our way. In addition to various class changes, we've got some other cool stuff too, including an abolishment of battleground marks, a way to get rid of all those annoying Frozen Orbs clogging our banks, new auction house functionality, and a lot more.

Zarhym has announced today major upcoming battleground and honor changes. These changes will be present in the next minor content patch, which will be on the PTR soon. Some of the key points:

• Marks of Honor are going away.
• Holiday weekends will now be denoted as "Call to Arms" and award tiered system of honor for participation. The tier is based on you winning or losing the battleground, and if you've won or lost before.
• Honor kills reward 100% more honor, Wintergrasp weekly quests give 50% less honor, and XP rewarded from honor kills are reduced by 50%.
• Implementation of the Random Battleground Finder -- much like the current Random Dungeon Finder. There are further honor rewards, which are similar to the ones provided by the Call to Arms.

Obviously, there are a ton of implications in these changes to the basic way people participate in PvP. These changes also represent a good start to the massive overhaul we'll see in Cataclysm when rated battlegrounds are introduced.

The full statement after the break.

Every week, Shifting Perspectives examines issues affecting druids and those who group with them. Today we gingerly step back into battlegrounds and discover that the world can be a very unfriendly place.

I love writing this column, but there's one thing that bugs me about it -- the druid class is tailor-made to defeat a sole writer's efforts to cover everything she can. No matter how hard I try, I'm never going to cover each spec and playstyle with up-to-the-minute and in-depth experience, because it would require the simultaneous mastery of ranged DPS PvE, ranged DPS PvP, tanking, off-tanking, melee DPS PvE, melee DPS PvP, healing PvE, and healing PvP. Even with all that, I'd be leaving out all the hybrid and kooky specs people dream up. This has been getting to me lately.

Consequently I thought that, before we get to some end-of-year and patch 3.3 business, it might be a good idea to spend some time on topics that -- to be frank -- I haven't been that great about covering. Balance as a whole needs some love and so do our kitties, but before I do that, I'd like to address a topic that, in contrast to Balance and Cat, I've been willfully ignoring -- PvP. It occurred to me that roughly a year after Wrath's launch, it might be a good idea to pop back into battlegrounds and see how the class' most common PvP spec (Restoration) is faring in combat these days, so I dumped badges and gold into a PvP set and went for broke.

And, well...a lot's changed.

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky be your host today.

Patrick Stewart doesn't look good in glasses.

Many of you asked...

"How am I going to do the Kalu'ak Fishing Derby when I raid at 8pm on Wednesday night?"

We've gotten a bunch of tips recently that claim some very e-famous PvPers are botting in BGs. If you aren't familiar with the term "botting," Dictionary.com provides us with the following definitions of bot:

1. Bot:
   –noun
   the larva of a botfly.
2. Bot:
   –noun (Australian Slang)
   a person who cadges; scrounger.
3. Bot:
   –noun
   a device or piece of software that can execute commands, reply to messages, or perform routine tasks, as online searches, either automatically or with minimal human intervention (often used in combination): intelligent infobots; shopping bots that help consumers find the best prices.

One of the most widely-cheered announcements during the Game Systems panel was the introduction of rated battlegrounds and the reappearance of old PvP titles from the now-defunct ranking system. It's a question we've seen asked a lot -- plenty of people out there aren't fond of arena but love battlegrounds, and many of them chafed under the inability to get up-to-date PvP gear. It looks like Blizzard will be trying to reward better battleground play without punishing people who have the bad luck to land on an indifferent PuG. Here's what we know so far:

• Whichever battleground is currently on its holiday weekend will also be a rated battleground for that week.
• Battleground wins will award both rating and arena points. Battleground losses won't punish you with a ratings loss, but also won't award any points. I would assume that you can continue to accrue honor and a single BG token per loss. Points earned will be capped at a certain number (not yet known) per week to keep rated battlegrounds from feeling too "grindy."
  
• Your battleground ratings will, like the current arena system, encompass two ratings: a personal and a match-making rating.
• Old PvP rankings will make their reappearance as end-of-season titles (e.g., "Scout," "Commander," "Centurion"). No word yet on whether these are permanent or if, like the non-Gladiator arena titles, you have to earn them each season to continue displaying them.
• "Special epic ground mounts" will be made available to people playing the rated battlegrounds.
• Rated battleground wins will also contribute to the new guild talent system.

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BlizzCon 2009 is here! WoW.com has continuing coverage, bringing you the latest in Cataclysm news, live blogs, galleries, and reports right from the convention floor. Check out WoW.com's Guide to BlizzCon for the latest!

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Good evening fine ladies and good gentlemen, I want to invite you to head over to your liquor cabinet, grab some of that fine gin and do with it what you will. I like mine without anything added, right at room temperature. Ghostcrawler prefers his with coffee. Once you're settled, come back to your computer and read up on the best of the blues and the ghostly-crab-crawler.

Welcome to a new weekly column here at WoW.com. Each week we'll take a look at what Ghostcrawler and his cohorts at Blizzard have said about the game, highlighting all the important announcements and discussions.

What Ghostcrawler says in particular is of great importance these days to WoW. A lot of the stuff he's talking about is reflective of the direction of the entire design team at WoW, and if you follow what he's saying you'll have a better understanding of where the game is headed.

So after the break we'll wrap up what Ghostcrawler and the other blues had to say this week. This week's topic include: Battleground Focus, 5 Second Rule, On Class Representation Versus Actual Power, Going to heckle at BlizzCon?, Water Dungeon, Affliction Changes, Console WoW, Truth In Developer "Promises" About Change & An Angry Community, Amount Of Leveling, Phasing Technology, and Flying In Old Azeroth.

The new Battleground coming with Patch 3.2, the Isle of Conquest, is live on the 3.2 PTR as we speak, and we've been running some games on said Isle to see how it measures up to the current BGs. We're pretty happy with it so far -- it certainly looks great, as you'll be able to tell by checking out the screenshot gallery we've compiled for you. It shows the BG and all its sundry parts in action.

We'll keep you up to date with new Isle info as we get it. If you're on the PTR too, then be sure to queue up -- who knows, it might just be one of us you're ganking!

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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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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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Blizzard just released some screenshots from Patch 3.2's brand new super massive Battleground, the Isle of Conquest. For those unfamiliar with the Isle, it's a large-scale 40v40 Battleground that features siege combat, good old-fashioned melee, capturable resource points, NPC bosses like Alterac Valley, steady Honor ticks from capping certain areas, and more. It's essentially the Battleground with something for everyone. We just recently posted a Q&A with World Designer Cory Stockton, with a lot of questions about the Isle answered.

And now we've got screenshots to give us a feel for the place. They show bits and pieces of the Isle, including the Alliance Keep, part of the Refinery, what appears to be the Airship Hangar, and the Lighthouse. It's all very Northrend and very exciting. After all, in the grim, dark future past World of Warcraft, there is only war. As long as you're in a Battleground, anyway. But only if you're fighting instead of fishing or killing harpies. Regardless, there's definitely war going on somewhere.

Check out the shots in the gallery below. We'll keep you posted with all the new info we get!

Zarhym has got some answers to the widespread problem of lag in Wintergrasp after patch 3.1 the other week. He says Blizzard figures the problem is simply population based -- there are many more people playing in the battleground than there were before the patch. For that reason, they're having trouble coming up with good solutions: the battleground is designed to be non-instanced, and that's why a lot of people like it, so putting a limit on the amount of people in there is not the way to go. Hardware isn't a solution either -- Blizzard's hardware is already top-of-the-line, and not only would upgrading it take a while anyway, but my guess is that most of the lag issues come not from Blizzard's side, but from the connections between players and them, which they may not have any control over anyway.

So yes, we're more or less out of luck -- as long as Wintergrasp is extremely popular (and even Zarhym remembers the naysayers before the release with a smirk), there will always be a certain amount of lag in there. There are a few good suggestions floating around the comments thread -- one is that Wintergrasp should always be conquerable, which seems like it would keep down on the flood of people, though of course there'd be other issues if that were implemented.

At this point, Wintergrasp lag may just be something we have to live with. Eventually, you have to think the population will drop back down, and then those of us still in there will enjoy lag-free battles again. But Blizzard has taken on quite a goal trying to do non-instanced PvP full of vehicles and towers without any lag at all.

The new Wintergrasp, I am here to tell you, is a lot like the old Wintergrasp. Which isn't a bad thing -- though Blizzard has made a few significant tweaks to the game's big non-instanced battleground, it's still the same match it's been (and a good match it is, if you ask me). The main difference is that all of the workshops outside the keep are now up for grabs, so the defending team can now not only take out the southern towers to knock some time off the clock, but also lock down the workshops to create a vehicle shutout. That's tough to do, in my experience, though -- even if you grab the two lower workshops, it leaves the top two open for attack, and odds are that the lower two workshops will really only be taken if all of the towers are down and the vehicle drives down south need something to do.

So the gameplay hasn't been changed that much, but it is nice that the requirements for the daily quest have been lowered -- we now only need 10 kills of the other side, and there are more NPCs around to count for those kills, so I actually finished both the kill and vehicle quests without even trying. It would be nice for Blizzard to somehow streamline the raid invite/share quests process that happens everytime WG begins, but they're leery of that, given how honor farming was such a problem in the auto-invite AV. And I have one personal request: Blizzard, can you please have me auto-dismount when I try to pick up an RP-GG? I'm fine with not mounting while I have one, but every single time I try to pick one up I get that error message, when all you need to do is auto-dismount me like any other object I use while mounted.

The biggest WG change isn't even in the battleground, it turns out -- most of the players I've talked to are just thrilled that you can now fly over Wintergrasp on the way from Dalaran to Sholazar Basin (and it figured 3.1 would drop a week after I finished the Oracle rep grind). I've even heard you can get credit for winning the BG if you're in the air when your side wins. Though a fix for that will probably have to come during the next round of WG improvements, whenever that will be.

Lots of the new stuff in today's patch 3.1 update will be in your face -- the class changes won't be missable, and the LFG channel will be full of people trying to head into Ulduar (though who knows how far they'll get). But some of the changes, especially to the user interface, will be a little more hidden -- you'll have to dive into the options to go and find them. Here's a few things we've reported on that you might want to make a note of, if you're interested.

• Arenas now have an option to show Enemy Unit Frames. These will only appear in the Arenas, but you can enable them in the Interface options.
• You will now be able to see when the next Wintergrasp battle is from anywhere in the world -- but only by going out to the world map and then zooming back in to the Wintergrasp map.
• Make sure you hit the map button (usually "M") next time you go into an instance. There are maps in there now.
• There are new "advanced features" for quest tracking now -- but you've got to go into the Interface Options to enable them. If you're already using Questhelper or a similar addon, these will be familiar to you.
• The Equipment Manager isn't in the game yet, but the Color Blind mode and new Battleground and LFG options can all be accessed now.
• Finally, there are a number of new video options available in the Video Options panel, including better shadow and texture details, and even a "Video Mode Ultra" setting. Even Blizzard recommends you run things on the highest setting at your own peril -- lower end computers will have major issues trying to run graphics at the highest setting.

It's definitely worth putting "take a tour around the options screens again" on your to-do list for when the patch arrives on the live realms. There are lots of little changes and updates hiding in there that you'll never know about unless you go look for them.

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Patch 3.1 is live and it takes us into Ulduar, delivers us dual specs, and brings significant changes to all the classes! We've got you covered from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1 and the official patch notes!