This is Wintergrasp. Not a Battleground, but I wanted a semi-relevant picture.
In thinking of themes for this blog, one of the ideas that came up was a feature on my favourite battleground. As lame as the idea may sound, it is not without motive.
I think it's easy for PVPers to get jaded about battlegrounds. Depending on your faction, battlegroup, and alliance to horde ratio, sometimes battlegrounds can be the most excruciatingly painful PVP experience ever. Depending on your tolerance threshold for bullshit, you might feel the urge to bust in some of the skulls on your team. People go afk, people enter BGs for achievements then immediately depart...
...anyway, my point is that it is very easy to find reasons not to like certain battlegrounds. I think it's harder, but more satisfying to find reasons why you DO like a certain battleground above the rest.
In forcing myself to think about it, my favourite BG is Arathi Basin.
There's a lot to hate about Arathi Basin. I think that aside from WSG, AB contains the least amount of teamwork-oriented PVPers, unless you go in with some friends. But I think I love it the most simply because to me, it's easy, it's quick, you get a lot of HKs (even guarding flags - which is an important aspect of AB), and nothing quite beats the feeling when you assault a flag and that flag is captured in the name of your faction.
Also, if you pair up with a nice mage or priest, you can find yourself floating off of the lumber mill with your pewpew lasers set to full and nuke the hell out of people from above at the blacksmith. I like the rush out of the gate, especially when DKs leave up their path of frost and your forces go barreling across the water directly to blacksmith, sometimes leaving stables entirely in the hands of fate.
I like that it's so easy to get - capture flags, hold flags, receive bacon - and yet it poses a rudimentary challenge in teamwork. Perhaps this will serve as fuel for a later post about learning teamwork in battlegrounds.
Anyway. I just wanted to put some positivity down on paper related to a battleground, since it's really easy to get frustrated with running endless battlegrounds, especially when they're unsuccessful. Maybe your favourite BG is different, but I encourage you, people who are reading these words, to think about what battleground you enjoy the most and WHY. You'll find it's a harder task than you thought, and maybe it will refresh your enjoyment of PVP as a whole.
There are aspects of all the BGs I really like. My least favourite is AV. Normal execution is boring as all hell, where you can win/lose without ever seeing, let alone fighting someone of the other faction. And it has all those mini-objectives and quests that are obsolete... I'd LOVE to be in an AV where they turned all the quests in and summoned Ivus... but good luck getting that to happen with everyone rushing to do a fail-blitz...
ReplyDeleteStealth typhooning Horde off the AB Lumber Mill cliff is the reason I went back to moonkin (and spec'ed my shaman to elemental for a while).
As far as tactics go, SotA is by far my favourite BG. It's guaranteed to be short. It's simple to understand but has a surprising depth of strategy that makes it really easy to pick out the noobs. It can be really frustrating though, because I'd say it's the only BG where you can actively stymie your own team (people who get on demos and tool around shooting players and not gates).
OK, I guess that happens in IoC too. Speaking of which... I still don't really get that one.
It took me a long time to get Isle of Conquest. In fact, every time I get queued into one, there's usually one or two people in bgchat going "uhm, what do we do here?".
ReplyDeleteFrom what I have learned (I *guess*), it's a resource-gathering, node-catching assault on the opposite faction. We tend to capture the hangar first, so we can mount the airship and fall into the Horde base (since you get a parachute when you jump from the ship). Once inside, you grab bombs and bomb either the front or side gate. Simultaneously, you can only hope that there are forces TRYING to get the workshop away from the horde, or that there is a significant number of people guarding our base against attacks from the docks, all while capturing the refinery and the quarry to make sure our resources don't diminish.
*pant*
Yeah, it's a touch complicated.