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So, after rezzing up, I took a quick look at my UI, and noticed a couple of changes for this battleground — icons for Alliance and Horde at the top of my screen showing how many flags had been captured (I’ll get to that in a moment), and the PvP icon on my mini-map. The mini-map icon now showed all the stats pertaining to your current battleground instance when you clicked it.

Flag, you say? Yes, flags. As in, Capture the Flag (CTF), which many of you may be familiar with from various other games (Unreal Tournament, Quake, etc.) Basically, the Warsong Gulch battleground is a small CTF arena. Each side starts in their own base, and has to defend their flag from the opposing side, all the while trying take the opposing flag and run it back to their base. Each side is allowed a maximum of 10 people, and the map is quite small, much smaller than a regular WoW zone. It’s split in half, the northern half being Alliance territory, the southern half Horde. Each base is pretty well situated behind some structural/environmental barriers, funneling the action through a couple of choke points. The first side to capture the opponent’s flag 3 times and return it to their base “wins” the instance, which then boots you out and resets.

After spending about 45 minutes in this battleground (that’s how long it took for the match to end), I can say that I really enjoyed it. It’s a good twitch experience but some strategy is also involved. My Horde team lost 3-2, but the end was very close and the match didn’t feel lopsided at all (I’ve found that many PvP games tend to degenerate into very one-sided fights.) The map was nicely designed with lots of physical barriers and some well-situated open areas, and the action was pretty much non-stop.

Wanting to check out the other battleground before heading off to bed, I hearthstoned my way back to Orgrimmar and grabbed the zeppelin out to Undercity, then flew to Tarren Mill in Hillsbrad. Running north (I remembered the entrance to this raid instance from previous time spent in Alterac), I headed to the Sofera’s Naze sub-region and headed towards the Alterac Valley instance entrance. Again, I was offered more PvP quests from the NPCs outside and inside the instance, some for various items that drop off opposing NPCs, some for remains of actual player characters (i.e. Night Elf skins, appetizing!), and some for quest mobs inside the instance. I grabbed whatever quests I saw available, but I haven’t had the time to read through them all yet.

After zoning into the Alterac Valley battleground, which is a 40 vs. 40 player instance (I picked the first instance, assuming it would probably have the most people playing), the first thing that hit me was the size of the battleground — it must be easily 5-10x the size (or more) of the Warsong Gulch map. Definitely geared towards larger fights, more people, and much easier to solo in, if that’s more your style. You zone in through a tunnel that exits at the border of your side’s base/keep. The terrain in this battleground is great — lots of hills, cliffs, trees and other objects for cover, and blockages to allow for ambushes and good ranged attacks. I followed the road out of the entrance, noticing the fortifications and town-like structures nearby. After checking out the Horde base and grabbing more kill-task oriented quests, I asked in chat if there was a raid group (and was prompty invited to a group within it.) The sides looked quite even, maybe 35 people per side. A mounted warlock galloped past me, and yelled for me to follow, so I mounted up and headed north behind him. He in turn dragged me right into the middle of a huge firefight at the Alliance mine — one of the quest objectives, though I’m not sure what all is involved in these strategic location quests yet. Not having paid attention to where I was going, I was summarily knocked off my mount and killed. I ended up back at a graveyard much closer to the center of the map, but still in Horde territory — again, another strategic capture point. I noticed later on that after the Alliance had captured our graveyard, we rezzed in the tunnels right at the instance entrance instead. This definitely changes the gameplay experience since it makes getting back into the fight a lot harder for you, and easier for the opposition.

I spent a good hour and a half in the Alterac Valley battleground, either in a small group raiding environment, or in a large zerg of 20+ people fighting off the Alliance who were raiding our end of the map. The strategic capture points and terrain had some major effects on gameplay; hitting a large force with one much smaller, but from a higher position, had the effect of evening the odds. I’ll need to give it some more time before I can give a better evaluation of this map, but I enjoyed it and it seemed nicely designed, again with several choke points reminiscent of milegates in DAOC (but without the physical obstacle blocking passage, just a narrowing of the terrain forcing people through a certain path.)

On to the PvP itself: keep in mind that I am coming at this from the perspective of someone who played 3 years of Dark Age of Camelot (DAOC) as (primarily) a solo/small group oriented stealther (rogue.) Playing my 60 Orc Hunter, I found that (a) Hunters are much more viable in large group PvP than they are in group PvE; (b) I had a large amount of kills in a small amount of time, stemming primarily from my AE and instant shots (Multi-shot, Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Serpent Sting), and not so much due to my regular or debuff shots; (c) Hunter tracking is godly in small-map CTF-based PvP, as is Aspect of the Beast when you’re holding the opposition’s flag; and (d) I need to get a better, slower ranged weapon for frontloading damage on my instant shots. :)

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Posted in Game Theory |