Calixtus

I don't think you're identifying the cause correctly. It could just be my battlegroup, but most AVs in my experience are not won with a tower still standing and an add being off-tanked. Most AVs are won because one side managed to delay and/or recap one of the towers, leaving an add still standing, and leaving the group of campers outside the general's fortress stumped. The towers - the defense or taking thereof - are important to securing victory, barring the presence of a few dedicated healers and tanks with real tanking gear.

The reason the towers are ignored isn't so much that you don't need them to win, as much as it is that you don't need to win period. Winning at any cost in an AV is not rewarding when compared to a "fast loss". Winning while trying your personal absolute best to win by paying attention to the strategic objectives, is not rewarding when compared to a fast loss where you've engaged in the HK farm. With the current honor system, it applies to all battlegrounds; Ultimately, winning - by paying attention to the strategic objectives - is not neccesarily the most personally beneficial option in terms of reward gained. There's also a massive element of tragedy of the commons that I'd argue ties in with the above, as well as being a separate issue.


I think that (almost!) regardless of how they design IoC, the same issues that plague it's predecessors will quickly make their way over, because their respective root causes are almost exclusively related to the design of the honour system rather than the design of the individual maps. Being a defender will not be beneficial to you as an individual compared to charging forward with complete disregard for the best way to win - like AV or AB. You have little to no reason to take advantage of all the tools available to you, and even if you decide to, you have no realistic hope of convincing your team to do the same, so the gain is negligble - like SotA.


Lastly, Crygil made a somewhat enlightning post about IoC;

 

Nemantopia

Your point about reward/time is well taken, and I'm hoping that the Oil Derrick and Cobalt Mine will address this. My hope is that if honor farming becomes the point, honor farmers will heavily contest these two locations for:
1) more reinforcements to attrition
2) more honor gain
as opposed to fast-loss thinking. If that's the case, the actual strategic objectives will become important for dynamic games and strategies. Of course, the flip side of this is they may make the honor gain to be too strong. In this case, the reward/time becomes favorable for ONLY fighting at the resource locations to extend the attrition war. If that happens, they'll end up nerfing the honor gain too much and we'll end up right back at square zero...potentially fun battlegrounds turned into fast-loss farms. Here's to hoping that even if the honor gain starts too low or too high, it finds the right level.

This is not the signature you're looking for. You are free to move along.

-Curse you, Raglu!
Generation 28:
The first time you see this, copy it into your signature on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social experiment.

 

Calixtus

Actually, as long as the honour from those two platforms are zone-wide we'll see the road-fighting of AB regardless of how much honour you gain from the derrick/mine. To paraphrase the IoC preview, win or lose, the more resources you have accumulated in an AB the more honour you have gained from holding the bases. Does this mean that being the stalwart stables defender gives more honour than randomly zerging? No.

As long as random HK farming gives strategic objective honour plus HK honour, there will always be a "sweet spot", a percentage of the battleground participants who gets more honour from doing, well, nothing truly useful, without impairing the completion of strategic objectives too much. While this kind of calculating selfishness is fairly rare in the average battleground (mostly because you need to be able to mentally switch between zerg and strategy), the underlying principle that being selfish in a BG is more rewarding than working towards the common goal is very, very evident in most BGs (at least the ones I'm running), assuming you're "going to lose anyway".


Zarhym clarified the mount changes;

So no effect on Northrend/Outlands farming, 77+ dailies or 60-68 leveling.

 

Heenk

Blizzard just released a new blurb about the Argent Tournament in 3.2

Still nothing about the new 5, 10 and 25-mans, sadly.
Also, I always thought 'quest hub' meant 'a place where you pick up quests', but it seems to mean 'a place where you go to complete a number of quests at once'.

 

Marieth

That is an amazing upgrade, very neat idea. Time to save some marks then I guess.
I really like the idea of the whole tournament scene expanding, building up some sidestory leading to icecrown.

"...gone missing."

 

Krag

Also, for people leveling twinks:

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> 3.2 new heirlooms

 

• adamb10

Here come some profession buffs:

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Upcoming Epic Gems and Profession Changes

 

Krixooks

As soon as I read this I thought 'Isle of Quel'Danas!'. It describes the areas as 'quest hubs' which is a little vague; yellow quests for experience and Sunreaver/Silver Covenant Rep? Dailys? Or a combination of both.

I sincerely hope that these two new areas do not contain any traces whatsoever of: Armistice and/or Mounted combat.

 

Vaccine

I'm not so sure about that, it kind of reads that you need to be exalted Sunreaver to even access these new quests (see quote) which would be nice and a good way to make sure everyone has mounted combat experience. I guess there will be one or two story chains regarding the new locations that lead into opening up the dailys once completed. Given you're going to need a combined total of about 1250 marks to get everything (less if you buy pets off ah/alts) I'm hoping they reward 2-3 each and the 5 man drops some.

As for Armistice, I agree it was pretty fun getting continously ganked whilst trying to accept quests or buy jewels from the vendor at IQD. Also the gank squads blocking off half the island were also fun.



(that was sarcasm)

 

aegir123

The implementation of epic gems strikes me as a bit odd. Considering the availability of both patterns and raw gems the question is why add another tier of gems that are acquired as easily as the current one?

My guess would be added interest in honor, emblem of heroisms, titanium ore and an added perk to alchemy. They may want to boost the benefits from mining and alchemy and make heroics and honor grinding more attractiv but overall adding another tier of gems doesnt really change anything at all which is quite different from TBC where the gems, at least untill you could buy them with badges, were a benefit to high end raiders only.

 

Unity

If they're limited availability and the other professions keep up with epic gem blacksmithing then no-one without access stays a blacksmith; if they're limited and the other professions don't keep up than everyone with access rerolls to blacksmithing. That's true whatever the barrier to access is and neither is desirable unless you're trying to make gold by speculating on levelling materiels. So Bliz's real choice was between making epic gems widely available and keeping them out of the game.

 

Douglas

I think as part of the time-based nerfing of content that we've all grown used to, no? This is going to make it easier for guilds that don't have Naxx on farm yet to get there. This is going to reduce the amount of time it takes to bootstrap up to Ulduar levels. This is going to reduce the amount of fale on Emalon. But it's kinda sneaky in a way -- players who can't put 2 and 2 together are going to feel like they beat the content without that content being nerfed, and that's going to make them happy.

 

Cranberry

Implementation of epic gems will also make blue-quality gems even cheaper than they already are, which is a substantial levelling nerf - 3-socketed Outland gear will last you a while into NR at this rate.

 

Proudmoore

I think you're overrating just how much of a bonus the epic gems are, Douglas. If we assume they will have 20 rating/30 sta, upgrading all my gems (9 sockets), I'd gain 54 sta (if I used all Solids), or 36 rating (just shy of 1% dodge if I used dodge rating).

Even if a full raid upgraded 8-10 sockets from rares to epics each, I just cannot see how that will make the difference between defeating Naxx/Emalon/watever and not doing so. Or rather, if it's that close, pure luck with crits/avoidance is likely to be the difference between defeat and victory as often as not. This is probably going to sound rather offensively elitist (not that that'll be remarkably unusual around here), but those same people who cannot defeat Naxx are unlikely to be those who pay through the nose to immediately have epic gems.

 

Granger

That might be at least partially true Proudmoore, but it's definitely a nerf to several achievements, especially the timed kill achievements.

 

Mr. Crow

There's a cumulative effect to this, though. Tanks get bonus stamina and defense, which increases their survivability marginally. Healers get bonus spellpower, or crit, or haste, or intellect, which increases their throughput and longevity via Replenishment returns. DPS get bonus AP, crit, or haste, or ArPen, and considering you've got more DPS in the raid than anything else, their likelihood to bring the boss down faster is increased. Marginal increases on one character aren't substantial, but marginal increases on all of those fronts (especially DPS, which has the highest representation in raids) is going to be a not-insignificant increase in raid effectiveness.

And I'm not sure that the argument of "people who can't get through Naxx aren't going to be the ones to buy epic gems" doesn't hold water with how much gold people are getting through dailies and other non-raiding incomes.

Bad players are bad players are bad players, and I would say it takes about 30% fail ratio in any group to turn Naxx into a nightmare, and so yes, there's going to be groups that don't benefit from this. But I could see these changes causing at least some turnaround for guilds that are struggling with that content if this is the only change that affects them.

 

Urgok

Has any more specific information about the availability of epic gems come out? I assume that titanium ore will prospect into it at roughly the same rate that saronite turns into rare gems. But what about the alchemy patterns?

I have spent a good 30 minutes searching various threads and forums and don't have any more specific information. If there is here I'll edit later with anything I find.

 

Leviathon

You will be able to buy them with Emblems of Heroism and honor also.

 

Darian_TruBlade

Their availability via Emblems of Heroism should encourage Heroics and Naxx PuGs, and keep new/more casual players from being locked out of progressing upwards. The honor versions are probably meant to have a similar effect on BGs.

"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]

 

Varuk

Fresh off the WoW Forums:

So, in short, instead of running the instance twice a week we get to run it four times a week. Woot?

 

KamPa

Entire raid instance is getting the Algalon treatment in the "heroic mode". Is this really their way of making the content "difficult"? Well, it kinda makes sense with there only being 5 encounter with Sunwell gates system, but it seems very unimpressive.

 

KrinKer

Am I the only one concerned by a tier of raiding with only 5 bosses ?? Granted there is regular and heroic and tribute, but 5 bosses seems really low for a tier of raiding. Is it possible Blizzard will introduce another "raid" in the mix ?

 

Ptoleman

The Algalon treatment is questionable for an entire instance, but it's subject to change and player feedback. It's possible they won't go through with it as they iterate on the PTR.

What I'm more interested in is the new hierarchy of raids. By separating the normal mode and the hard mode it frees Blizzard from having to "weave" increased levels of difficulty into a single encounter. Now they can just tune and add elements for each level of difficulty as needed without having to worry about any of the others. So "just" 5 bosses could easily turn out to be misleading, as each level of difficulty could vary wildly.

The only downside I see to this is having 4 lockouts, which could get pretty tedious after a while, but the many benefits of this separation outweigh that disadvantage in my opinion. For example, a guild that wants to start working on the hard difficulty won't have to waste their attempts on bosses they already have on farm.

 

Prinsesa

Perhaps its a Violet Hold-type deal where you fight 5 random bosses out of a potential ... 10 or 15? In the vein of Algalon's limited attempt timer to artificially lengthen the content learning phase, randomizing the bosses would also prevent players from continuously practicing on specific bosses.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Ptoleman

It's basically 10-man hard mode, I'm guessing. So the hierarchy goes like this:

1. 10-Man Regular
2. 10-Man Hard ("Heroic")
3. 25-Man Regular
4. 25-Man Hard ("Heroic")

Obviously no one can say for sure unless a Blue confirms it, but that seems the most logical interpretation of the new hierarchy from where I'm sitting.