Denogran

Ok, since you're the third person to respond in this matter, I guess I wasn't clear enough in my initial post. My apologies.

I know some people thought the original AV was the shit, and really enjoyed being mired down in an unwinnable game for days. I get it, you don't have to tell me how much you liked it. All I was looking to do was to point out that there were a number of people, myself included, that thought the original AV sucked ass. Please, don't bother explaining how you loved AV - it will not change how I feel, and it's not necessary. Just realize that your viewpoints aren't shared by everyone, and that the same reasons you loved it might be the reasons why another hated it. I was just trying to provide one easy counter-argument without starting a whole list of people saying "I loved it! I hated it!" My mistake for not doing that clearly enough.

Additionally, I might actually be bold enough to say that the developers shared my viewpoints. All of the revisions of AV have turned it away from the long slugfest that it used to be. If there's a specific aspect of AV that wasn't just the fact that they were epically long (cause it looks like you're just going to be SOL there, given the way wintergrasp looks, and every revision of the battlegrounds that's happened), then that'd be awesome to hear. If it's just going to be complaining that the good ol' days were the leetsauce and should come back, then that's entirely less interesting to read.

 

Seratha

This keeps getting brought up about Auchindoun, but the quests that explain what's happening in Shadow Labyrinth aren't read by most people. The very quest that tells you to go to Auchindoun is given by an NPC right next to A'dal. The follow up quest leads to the Codex of Blood which explains that the Shadow Council was summoning Murmur to Auchindoun and that's what caused it to blow up. When it comes to Sethekk Halls, it's explained that Ikiss believed he was Terokk reincarnated and that he lead the Arakkoa to Auchindoun.

The other two instances are a bit light on lore. Mana-Tombs is simply the bad Ethereals plundering things because they're greedy space mummies and the good Ethereals want you to kill them. And Auchenai Crypts, which had some build up from Nagrand quests, is terrible in that you're just told that Exarch Maladaar is evil and a necromancer and you must kill him. If you're a Horde character, you get a bit of extra lore in that it's also the resting place of a Naaru.

I think the problem is not that there's no quests for Auchindoun, it's that most of them are simply grabbed in a "kill end boss, get blues" haste and the content of the quest text is ignored.

 

Enova

That's not what I meant. Sure, you're given one quest for each boss and you're told why you're supposed to kill them. But what I gathered from Auchindoun is it's supposed to be an old Draenei fortress used in the wars with the orcs. Now, the fortress was probably taken (since a quest tells us Shatt is the only remaining bastion that survived the whole Horde). But every NPC says only recently Auchindoun became that big flat piece of wasteland with a hole in the middle, due to Murmur induced explosions . What happened in between is a big blank.

Compare it to the quests leading to Onyxia; to Hakkar; hell, even to Kel'Thuzad. You had nice bits of insight into Troll lore in what... five zones, if I'm right? (Tanaris, STV, Hinterlands, EPL and Sunken Temple, to be sure); the Black dragonflight chain spans across Dustwallow, Lakeshire and Burning Steppes. The Emerald Dream and Qiraji lore spread across the whole world, and kalimdor respectively. The Fel Orcs, the Etherals, they all have rather decent explanations for being in Outland. Heck, even the Mag'har have a story that makes sense.

Auch, and as a side note, the Gronn story while we're at it, seem by contrast rather unfinished. Which is a damned shame, since both of these could be a lot better exploited.

Guilty as charged ^

 

Seratha

You're right. It's implied that the explosion that was the result of summoning Murmur happened years before you arrive to investigate Auchindoun, yet the Shadow Council has been and is still fighting him. You do bring up another point of interest.

The biggest failure when it comes to the lore in TBC is that most of the storylines are far too concentrated in their own respective zones. In Hellfire you're primarily focused on the Fel Orcs and Hellfire Citadel while the Burning Legion's presence is more of an afterthought. In Zangarmarsh, everything you've been doing in Hellfire is put on hold while you deal with the Naga. By the time you reach Terokkar, the Naga and the Fel Orcs aren't on the radar since you're now dealing with the Shadow Council and the Firewing blood elves. There's very little connection between the zones in terms of story. It's particularly bad for Blood Elves who go from thinking they've reached the promised land in Hellfire Peninsula quests to finding out Kael is leading them to certain destruction in the Shattrath tour

 

Duilliath

Enova; other than the bits you mentioned, the Sha'tar camp gives some information as well. Crypts was actually reasonably well developed if people paid attention (which they didn't), but included an elite quest in Nagrand which half the world would skip. Simply because by the time you get there and get it done you're not going to bother with Crypts anymore. Bit of the old problem Alliance had in regards to Stockades (where you had to kill a bunch of elite Dark Iron Dwarves, finishing with a level 32 one in the middle of a camp only to be sent back to Stockades to kill a level 27 Dwarf...)

Denogran; wasn't the problem simply not getting marks? Not getting to the finish line?
What says that a BG *has* to end for it to be enjoyable? The problem there lies in the fact that marks were used to get rewards, which of course was the main reason people do AVs. I can't even remember queues as my Realm always had one or two AVs running you'd land in within minutes. What we're arguing for (me, at any rate) is that we would appreciate one battleground that isn't a 15 minute zerg fest. From a PvP slugfest it was turned into a PvE-zerg into what it is now.
There is nothing inherently wrong with joining a war to partake in a skirmish. Heck, it's (part of) what WoW is based on throughout its gametime so far. We're all partaking in a war against the Evil Alliance/Horde, killing bosses for greater glory of the fabulous Horde/Alliance. That doesn't seem to end anytime soon nor does it seem to bother people that they're not "winning".
One single Battleground to reflect this and really feel like an epic battle where one can step in, hit a skirmish and get out without having to be lured in with the promise of Cheap Epix and Ez Honour + Marks wouldn't be out of place.

An thenn tehy wuz al ded. Srsly. (Exodus 1)

 

Enova

I guess the problem with this is not that people don't pay attention. It's just that 'reasonably well developed' is a lot less than we expected. After all, this is Draenor, and the place has a very long, very interesting history. But safe from a quest for the Horde in Nagrand and a few scattered quests in Shadowmoon, nothing seems to cover the 'pre Warcraft 2 period'. Instead, we're given a lot of information about what happens now. Fair enough; long dead enemies cause no trouble. But this place isn't just Outland. Again, this is Draenor, and old Warcraft players probably wanted more refferences, because I know I did.

I'm a great fan of old school AV, because it had that epic war feeling. The problem of not getting marks for it was easy to overlook, because... well, the only thing you needed marks for back in the day was reputation. And AV rep was easy to raise up to exalted in a single long AV. In a way, the old system, of rewards via reputation rather than marks + honor was a lot more competitive, because it encouraged you to win rather than 'get 1 mark fast and queue again'. Now the question is... If AV marks were suddenly removed from gear requirements and you would no longer be flagged a deserter for leaving it... would the week long AVs be popular again? Coming and going as you please, like Wintergrasp, but with the teams permanently balanced by the cross realm queuing pool?

Guilty as charged ^

 

DeusEx

One iconic element of TBC that hasn't got enough praise on this board is Karazhan. Though technically a raid and suffering from over tuning and inferior itemization at its release it turned out to be "the dungeon" of TBC. It was all what the 5man dungeons weren't. Epic, non linear and worth more than one visit. Really the Karazhan design stands out as one of the most atmospheric and beautiful in the whole game, and the only gripe is the raid lockout. They should have got rid of it down the line, as the loot from Karazhan lost it's usefulness anyway and farming it around the clock wouldn't have done any harm anymore. But really the architecture, the way mob groups seems to belong there, and unforgettable encounters, like the opera event, make this dungeon really a true gem of the TBC content.

I'm not an addict ... maybe that's a lie.

 

Enova

Karazhan was indeed quite a jewel. That's part of its popularity, but let's not fool ourselves; it was only popular because it became the 25 badge farm and because you could easily get 10 people for it after a raid, either mains or alts. It has its flaws, like all of BC. It was overtuned; it was poorly itemized; it could have done with a bit more of Medivh's presence. But cedit where credit's due, it has something most content in BC lacks. It has character. It has style. I doubt that, come Wrath, people will remember a lot of BC with nostalgia. But Karazhan will be one of the exceptions to this, much like we're talking about BRD right now. In retrospect, we're saying BRD was too crowded, too long, too difficult, but it had character. Now, your idea about removing the weekly lockout would actually allow for some quite grand instance content for the future.

Guilty as charged ^

 

alhill

I'll add my thought on some bosses, which were well designed and which were not. I'm not talking about tuning, whether the fight was too easy or hard, merely about which mechanics worked and which didn't. in my opinion.


Good (in no particular order of preference):

1. Gruul. Not the best fight overall, but the best mechanic for a gear check fight. The grows allowed for a gear check fight for the whole raid in a way that felt fair and flexible. If you healers or tanks were good, your dps didn't have to be as good. I think this is a much more enjoyable gear check mechanic than the patchwerk/brutallus type fights.

2. Vashj. A beautiful, elegant fight. The way everyone had multiple discrete roles that interconnected and how tactics could be carefully tailored for each raid.

3. Hydross. It got boring after a while, but I thought the nature/frost switch was a cool mechanic, and also a better way to do a resist check than something like Sharaz or Saph, which required 25 set of resist gear.

4. Archimonde. Just a fun mobile fight. Generally fights that required mobility were good. For the record, I don't consider "move out of the fire" fights to be mobility fights.

5. Bloodboil. I thought this was a well designed fight that integrated a lot of elements elegantly. You had different types of execution checks for every role in the raid.

6. Reliquary. Was cool for how technical it was. I wouldn't want every fight to be like that, but I appreciated the creativity.


Fights with a good mechanic that were overall flawed:

1. Mag: Had some nice elements, but there something wrong with the summoners being harder than the gigantic boss.

2. Leo. Very cool mechanics, but was flawed by the fact that the last 30 seconds of the fight trivialized the first 5 minutes.

3. Alar. I loved phase 2, as it had a nice mobile openness to it. Phase 1 was OK, but was too long.

4. Void Reaver. The Arcane ball mechanic had potential, but the fact that you couldn't actually see the balls without a camera hack was idiotic design. This forced folks to use mods on the fight. I shouldn't have to use a camera hack or adjust my camera at some cranked angle to see the boss' core ability.

5. Kael/Illidan: Some cool ideas, but the fights felt like pu pu platters, just a pile of elements that didn't fit together. Kael was better than Illidan, which didn't feel epic enough. The epic weapon element of Kael was a neat idea, but I don't think that a player's ability to navigate their UI to pick of and equip a wep should be combined with a timer.
P.S. Please make future bosses with long speeches only give the speech on the first try.

6. Gorefiend. Nice gimmick, but Blizzard seemed so proud of it that the rest of the fight was lazily designed.

7. Kalecgos. Great ideas, but I found the portal clicking a tad clunky. Would have been better for the portal to remain open until x people went through, instead of on a timer. Once again, don't combine UI navigation with a timer.

8. Felmyst. A little derivative of Nightbane, but generally a fun fight. However, mind control gas dodging was poorly implemented. Why make it hard to see? A potentially fun element became "stand in a clump and hope your RL calls it in time", which is poor design. Compare with the well-designed Heigan, which gave each player a chance to individually succeed or fail.

Bad fights:

1. Karathess. Absolutely nothing interesting about this fight. Of all the group boss fights, this is the most boring.

2. Morogrim. I don't like the mechanic of exploiting heal aggro to deal with adds. Just felt too gamey too me. And the main mechanic of the final phase could be completely avoided by a simple repositioning. I understand this fight was intially different than how it ended up, but it ultimately fell flat.

3. Sharaz. Hopefully the last pure resist gear fight.

4. Prince. After all the great Kara fights, the ultimate boss fight was crap. At best a tank and spank and at worst a really capricious fight. Once again, PLEASE DONtT MAKE A DIFFICULT ABILITY HARD FOR THE RAID TO SEE. Any fight where you have to designate a specific player as a "spotter" is bad design.

Great ten man fights: Aran, Netherspite, Dragonhawk (doesn't get the credit it deserves), Opera (not mechanically, but great atmosphere), Chess (not challenging, but a neat idea.)

 

Darian_TruBlade

I agree heartily that Karazhan had character. There was really a sense of exploration and discovery there that eclipsed almost all the other content I've experienced. That said, I don't find BRD comparable. It took a handful of BRD runs for me to tire of the atmosphere, the fights and the challenges of BRD. Karazhan had a much greater lasting power.

"A man's IQ, yearly income, sexual prowess, ingenuity, physical appearance and generally every other aspect of his character can be condensed down to four digits: his Arena rating." - Zechsy [70 Rogue - Skullcrusher (EU) - 10/23/2007]

 

Douglas

Yah, but as you point out with the elemental plateau, on PvP servers, world PvP already happens in places like that. The PvP servers are already handled. And turning PvE servers effectively into PvP servers would make lots of people upset. So the question isn't "how do they introduce world PvP?", in my mind. It's "how do they introduce world PvP on a PvE server without destroying the reason it's a PvE server?".

I used to think the Terrokar spirit towers were the best answer to that question. On my server, I can't remember a time when the towers came up for grabs and there wasn't at least a little competition over them. Now, I think Lake Wintergrasp is the best answer.

But in terms of TBC scorecard (the point of this thread), in my mind there's no question that the Terrokar spirit towers are significantly better at meeting this goal than sandlol was.

 

Putts

Kara, in my opinion, was a success for 3 reasons:

1. It had character. Kara is the only raid I've experienced to date where I felt like the environment was even more interesting than the inhabitants. It's one place that I love to continually go back and explore after the instance has been cleared. There's a large amount of lore behind Kara, the ongoing quest chain that continued long after you completed the attunement, and little details that Blizzard didn't have to put in, but did. Things like the Organ NPC at the theater, the Romeo and Juliet reference tucked away in the Guest Chambers, the Skeletal Gryphon and sleeping Nightbane in Netherspace, Medivh's Chambers, even the teleport functionality added to Ateish. All of those contributed to the idea that this is a place that Blizzard deeply cares about, and they wanted to make a fantastic entry-level raid experience. Plus the mysteries behind that (until a few weeks ago) locked door, and the crypts always kept me intrigued.

2. Flexibility in the layout. One great thing about the dungeon is that nearly every single boss was optional. With the exceptions of Moroes, the Opera Event, and Curator, a guild could just power straight through the instance until they arrived at Chess/Prince. If your guild was constantly having problems on one boss, there was usually another boss you could move on to so you could come back later. Also, there were multiple paths that you could take early on in the instance. Obviously one path turned out to be the most efficient, but simply having the option was cool.

3. Tuning. The instance is extremely well-tuned, in my opinion. Maybe Moroes was a bit too tough for new guilds, but other than that, I thought that the difficulty ramped up beautifully. Plus, the addition of Nightbane was fantastic. Imagine going into Kara with no prior knowledge of it, fighting your way through every nook and cranny until you finally defeat Prince, and then discover that there's a whole new boss that you can go back and fight that's the toughest one yet. Also, Chess was a unique, fun, and easy reprieve before you faced off against Prince. And I know Kara eventually devolved into a place to farm badges, but I also think that this was a good thing. A group of experienced, yet undergeared alts could power through the place and get a ton of great gear in 2-3 hours.

I would absolutely love to see another place like this in the future, Kara was by far my favorite instance. The inclusion of the rumored Karazhan basement would make my day.

 

Volrath50

I agree with all the praise being heaped upon Karazahan, and would like to add something else that hasn't really been mentioned: the music.

Most other places have music that's rather forgettable, unless you hear it hundreds of times like the Orgrimmar music or whatever. Karazhan has amazing music, that fits with the different locations of the place amazingly. One of the places I certainly like to keep the music pretty high.

My only complaint about Karazhan, other than itemisation (which appears to be more of a problem with Kara being itemised early, presumably before it was decided to support "off-specs") is that Prince and other bosses appear to have little to no story. If they'd managed to build up to prince like VanCleef or some other well built up to boss, it would have been perfect.

"As surely as I live forever, when I sharpen my flashing sword and my hand grasps it in judgement, I will take vengeance on my adversaries and repay those who hate me."

 

• Disquette

For lower level characters once every few hours, i do agree. For the rest of us, I would have preferred an expanded elemental plateau.

 

Enova

So far, WOW's attempts at organized world PVP sucked hard. Each and every one of them. Why? Because the best PVP was spontaneous, not forced. After all, why bother going to Halaa, and experience one of the most horrible corpse runs ever, just for a few HKs when you could go to a battleground or just wait near an enemy town for victims? That's why Halaa is deemed a failure, while the Tarren Mill vs Southshore conflict was a booming success (well, aside from the fact that for a while, those were the only enterances to AV :P). And why the hell would you bother carrying a piece of Silithist all across Silithus when you could just duke it out close to a graveyard or at the AQ gates, raid vs raid style?

The problem with encouraging world PVP by rewarding participation is that you really need a clear target audience for the reward. If the rewards consist of token leveling items, like Halaa or the spirit shard rewards from Terokkar, then you're only going to attract the lowbies, who happen to be leveling in the area. If the reward is faction based, like the Hellfire towers, then once people are done with that reputation, you're going to experience a sharp decrease in interest.

On the opposite side, if the rewards were to appeal to the very hardcore PVP crowd (fictional examples: resilience gems/enchants, a Stormherald upgrade pattern, better arena consumables, whatever), then everyone else would lose interest real fast. Basically, we'd have the arena system all over again. You need gear to get points, and you need points to get the gear. And, equally, as we found out with the release of Naxx 1.0, a PVE world buff is NOT a good idea either. Nobody really needs it for a 5 man instance, and tuning a raid boss around it can fuck up things for a lot of people.

Quite frankly, I'm not even sure how much attention Wintergrasp will draw, and how long before a large mass of people complete the respective achievements and lose their interest. Disquette is right here. If you really want to encourage world PVP, the rewards have to appeal to everyone.

Let's step into the realm of hypothesis for a bit. Think about how the motes and primals were the lifeblood of TBC economy, because every profession needed them, and in the freak case you didn't really need them, someone at an auction house certainly did. Halaa was fun for a good few weeks, but imagine what would have happened if all of Nagrand was a free PVP zone, and the faction controlling Halaa would increase their players' efficiency (i.e more damage to elementals, double the amount of motes from drops/professions, better results on gathering professions, whatever else you can think of). Because, unlike the current [Halaani Claymore] kind of rewards, which gets replaced by the first blue drop, you were always going to need an extra few primals for an enchant or two, up until Kil'Jaden's loot. And let's face it; who wouldn't be tempted to cull down the competition on his mobs or resource nodes?

Guilty as charged ^

 

Uglesh

I too am in Diskette's camp on this one. AV has become a largely irrelevant BG that people mindless grind simply to get gear in the fastest fashion.

More concerning with PvP (and I believe was already mentioned) is the fact that the current system FORCES people who want to compete to spend dozens of mindless hours just to get enough gear to become remotely competitive. Resilence and burst damage have gotten so out of hand that even in T5 PvE epics it's still very likely that a clothie can be 2 shot or locked up long enough that they are virtually helpless. The answer from Blizz has largely been "get more resilence".... which is really just compounding the problem. At the end of the day all they have done is erect a GIANT barrier for players (even ones who have played for years) from even trying to enter PvP. It's contradictory that they have pushed so hard to make PvE accessible to everyone and yet PvP, and moreso arena's, have become the realm of the hardcore.

Badges and gear overall need to better reflect the relative difficulty of getting it. Epic's shouldn't be the "norm" and one shouldn't have access to gear above their progression level by simply doing lower content or simple rep grinds. The idea of "upgradable" items would have been a nice touch (like the Kara ring), but more should be done with Uncommon quality gear to make it something people would be happy to progress through. Hand in hand with this would be the need for much larger variety of gear of all types. Too much focus was put on epics when they could have easily had a better progression of blue dungeon quality gear.

As for instance progression..... I think TBC made a big mistake in moving to a 10 & 25 system. The reason is simply due to numbers. If fielding 40 people was too onerus, then why make any middle of the road guild try to field three 10 man groups just to gear up for eventually having to cut out 5 people?? As someone who has played in largely friend-based casual guilds, I can say that this hurt a lot more guilds then people think. I forsee this being a larger problem in WoTLK as guilds will fracture once again and it will prove ever more difficult to find 25 willing raiders.

Lastly, moving to smaller group instances while good for short term, will just speed up the exhaustion of content. I think it goes without saying that group dynamics is often what determines victory or failure. As groups become smaller, the number of pass/fail challenges faced by the raid most likely decreases. Overall the effect of 1 good player vs 1 bad player become even more crucial to sucess. Content will either have to be tuned so tight that many will be overwhelmed, or it will be trivial for anyone with even moderate skill/knowledge.

 

Beliandra

Blizzard are probably hoping that the "bind on account" heirloom items which can be earned in Wintergrasp will (a) be appealing to everyone and (b) not cause any "need gear to compete, need to compete to get gear" problems, since they won't be particularly powerful for level 80 characters.

 

RobertM

Agreed, with the caveat that this could be applied to many other bosses as well. VC is one of the best boss build-ups in the game, IMO, and it's rather sad that it also happens to be one of the first instances you ever do. Most of the content in WoW feels like you do it just because you want the loot that you know the instances will drop. But with VC, there was a story behind it that was developed over quite a span of played time (two zones!).

Prince could have been something like this. Instead, "some presence" is mentioned in the main quest line in Kara, but that's it—his story begins and ends in and around the instance itself. And even in that quest line, there's not an overly large amount of focus on Prince himself.

Fortunately for the raids, all the end-bosses were all established in WC3... except Gruul, of course. I never found a story-driven reason to kill him, other than that he's a big, bad Gronn. (Is there one?)

The 5-man bosses, OTOH, were almost all pointless, story-wise. And it's sad, because there could have been more of a story to the instances. Especially the Tempest Keep instances, which had minimal quest lines (IMO). Combined with the hyper-linear structure of most of the instances, it made the experience more... hollow, IMO.

 

Dehn

They were not merely summoners, but the guys holding him prison at Illidan's command. To be able to do that, they had to be more powerful together than he is in some aspects.

 

footloop

I believe the Gronn were explained in the Ogri'la opening quest chain. Essentially they're enslaving the ogres and lording over BEM, or something similar. I actually kind of like Gruul as a lore figure for that reason, if you've done the ogre quest chains then going to kill Gruul is the culmination of your quest to free the ogres (that and he drops epix). It's kind of nice to have a boss who you go to kill solely because he's a menace and you've grown kind of attached to the people (or ogres, whatever) that he's been enslaving. I think having a "Go kill Gruul he's bad" quest would detract from this; sometimes it's cool to come up with your own explanations for things.

As an aside, I really liked that entire questline. Having all of the BEM ogres turn neutral to you was an excellent touch.

I didn't pay too much attention to this while playing beta, but there are a lot of elementals wandering around Wintergrasp. I also remember seeing a blue post on the beta forums fairly early on about it being intended to be the prime place to farm elementals (as in, they realised that the elemental plateau was a really good spot for world PvP). I don't know how this panned out, or if they added some other place that is a better farming spot.

 

Prinsesa

While I agree that the neutral change was pretty mind-blowing given WoW's relatively static world, it's worth nothing that Ogri'la wasn't patched in until much later, which left Gruul without an overarching storyline for quite some time.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

RobertM

That is true that the associated Gruul with Ogri'la, but this felt somewhat cheap to me, coming in Patch 2.1 on May 22, 2007, a little more than four months after BC came out. For four months, Gruul's Lair had no implemented explanation.

This also reminds me of all the quests that link together seemingly unrelated areas. Quests like the "Champion of the Naaru"/SSC/TK attunement questline that tells you to kill Mag, Nightbane, and Gruul. Makes sense from a game-perspective (they're all T4 bosses), but from a story perspective... it's weak. Understandable, but weak.

I would also point out that you can achieve that without killing Gruul himself. While I thought the questline was creative and enjoyed the results (as well as messing with people who don't know about it by dancing with seemingly hostile Ogres or not having them attack you ), it is, again, not well-linked to Gruul's Lair. IMO, of course.

 

alhill

I agree that there was a viable lore-based reason for the strength of the summoners, but it made for a lop-side fight. I would mention however that, generally, summoners are much weaker than the actual bosses (Razorgore, Leotheras, for example).

 

Enova

Well, as long as we're here we could find all manner of excuses for this. But the Leotheras point you bring up is quite interesting. I always saw Leo as trying to hold the inner demon within him as much as the channelers. But I have no way to prove or disprove this without just so much as a mention of him before we stumble across him in his room. Again, we're being confronted with the general problem that BC seems to suffer from. Lack of common sense. Who the fuck is Leotheras, and why is a blood elf demon hunter being subdued in the middle of a water pumping facility? Is he trying to hold back his inner demon with the help of the channelers, or are they imprisoning him because he's their enemy? To create a real word parallel, would you say the best place to restrain a madman is in the middle of a functional oil platform?

Guilty as charged ^

 

Niton

The biggest reward from controlling Lake Wintergrasp that I noticed was an abundance of "Elemental Templars" or similarly-named mobs. They're only visible when your faction has actual control of Wintergrasp (through a special buff), have about 25,000 health, and have a 100% drop-rate on Crystallized <Element>. Aside from that, there's a large amount of Rich Saronite and Titanium spawns there, as well as some herbs, though i'm not sure if they require the Wintergrasp buff. What you went on to describe is more or less accurate as far as Wintergrasp's rewards.