I've been a big fan of the battlegrounds produced thus far, even AV in it's infancy. They were a change of pace, a new way to pass the time in game without spending hours farming mobs endlessly burning away the 1 through 3 keys. But the latest conception has been nothing but one large disappointment after another. It probably started sometime in the first 30 seconds of my very first match when a mage blinked through the 'wall' and ran off to cap a tower unopposed. Perhaps I thought Blizzard had learned their lesson with shaman in AB, indeed I was mistaken.

My joy quickly diminished when I realized that the new method of capping world towers was mimic'ed within EOTS. I was a fan of the flag system, fighting down a group of freshly spawned players so that an undead priest hidden under a kodo would ninja out the flag before respawns. This new deviation on that system greatly forces and promotes the zerg mentality. 5 people trying to take a tower from 3 defenders can be held what seems an indefinite amount of time. Either the graveyards are too close to the 'main contest area', or the spawn rate is too fast for a system whereby numbers, not a single objective is needed.

It only got worse tonight when I zoned in with some shifty eyed Mal'Ganis mages. Not only were two mages blinking through the shield, but by the time we were out and across the map the mage had capped the flag more than 5 times. I thought at first all the sirens (whatever that noise is when the flag gets dropped) was just them taunting us, till I realized the score was already to 500 to 0, 3 minutes (including the prep time) in. Exploits ho:

http://chuckg.org/dump/2007/eotsexploit.jpg

Icing on the cake. For those interested, I've made a thread on the official WoW forums in hopes something can be hotfixed in. I'm not sure I'll queue up for EOTS again after I get the 30 marks for some armour I'd like, it's a frustrating dump of time (unlike WoW, WoW is the best use of time ever). Is there anyone out there that does like it?

It's fairly good fun, when played in the proper spirit, but I won't be queuing until the mage problem has been fixed.

Mages? :D

I daresay that using this exploit is a good way to get your account suspended. I play a mage myself and used said exploit once, after which I reported it.

Anyway - I think that Eye of the Storm brings some different tactical aspects to the game. You still have to manage your numbers the same as in AB, but it's not possible for single people to ninja flags anymore - or at least not in the drastic way that was possible in AB. I also always found it very frustrating to have a single player defend a flag against an overwhelming force for much longer than he should be able to, just by interrupting the flag capturing, and doing nothing else but that. Of course, it's fun for that player, but it also makes defending much more powerful than offense. I think this is somewhat remedied in EotS, since the difference of players of each faction in capturing distance of the tower actually determines which way the tower is going, and not some mage or paladin jumping around popping various AoE spells to delay the capturing. It also shifts the focus of the battle away from crowd control somewhat, and more towards the actual fighting (one of my major griefs with Warsong Gulch - CC is king).

I think Eye of the Storm is different from AB, and I like it that way. I can't wait to have some premades battles in EotS and employ some tactics, such as keeping the flag from the enemy but not capturing it until enough towers are owned, and the flag spawn has been secured. For now, I have 100 Eye of the Storm Marks of Honor saved up - the difficult part is getting enough honor to actually buy something useful.

It's a very fun battleground, other than the way every opposing group in my battlegroup seems to contain a minimum of 6 warlocks and the aforementioned blink-through-shield issue. I think everyone who does it gets reported, though, so it's a good way to get rid of silly exploiters if Blizzard break out the ban stick.

Mostly because it actually promotes fighting (zerg or not).

AV has long since been tuned to the point where many people will actively avoid fighting the other side, and it is indeed best that the majority of your side goes on offence vs NPCs and does not face too many human opponents.

WSG is completely not about killing other people and is completely about incapacitating people and moving on as fast as possible. Midfield fighting in WSG = lose, as we all know.

AB is the closest to EotS in style, and naturally enough also the only other battleground in which there is a decent amount of fighting, but again, the emphasis on clicking nodes shifts the emphasis from "fight" to "incapacitate" a lot of the time.

Maybe they need to tune respawn time or GY placement, but overall I am solidly behind a BG which you win via your guys beating their guys (whether at towers or for control of the flag spawn). Looking forward to playing more once the blink bug is fixed.

The blink issue aside, the only other real problem I have with this BG is that the range to cap the towers is way too big. Most of them allow you to be way down a hill and out of sight of the real battle and just kind of AFK there and still help cap. Mage tower has this hill in the back that you can ride up when you come from Fel Reaver, and we were laughing because we turned the tower and the alliance were all out front and had no clue where we were. I guess these secret spots will become common knowledge and people will defend the back of towers eventually, but it's still a lot of area to actively defend.

This battleground seems to have been designed with the sole purpose of preventing one team from dominating another.

You can take the worst mismatched teams, games that would never last more than 4 minutes on AB/WSG and they will still last around 15 minutes in this battleground.

This battleground is designed as the source of honor/marks for pugs. For what its worth they seem to have suceeded but I am not sure how much people will want to play this BG 2-3 months from now.

My real only gripe is the fact that at least at the Fel Reaver Ruins, you can defend the node while sitting in the graveyard. There's no tactical reason to not just stand in it. There's also nodes that are significantly shorter to cap the flag at - the mage tower stands out in this regard.

I have noticed a meat grinder type phenomenon in pugs - namely that its two 13-15 man zergs that just run a circle from node to node, crushing the people in front of them and abandoning the nodes behind them.

I think it's too early to tell which way this place will go.

Despite anything else, its really nice to have a new environment to fight in. A face-lift to the other bgs would be really nice.

Reposting something I wrote on another board:

At first it was a refreshing break from the long tours of duty in WSG and AB, but after playing enough EotS to be overflowing with marks again I can't say I really like it. It's way too zerg friendly. Unlike in AB, you're not going to have two skilled defenders keeping 5 noobs off a flag; you're not going to have two skilled attackers take a flag away from 5 defenders. As soon as the attackers ride up, you're already losing the tower. The end result is that both teams just zerg around the map, trading towers, and everywhere you go it's just more of the Stormpike slaughterfest rendered in purple. No ninjaing flags, no clever attacks and misdirection. It feels more like Unreal Tournament than Warcraft.

That really sums it up pretty well.

I was extremely disappointed to see that they used Blizzard's new proximity location capturing system. While this system makes sense in world PvP to prevent players from riding up to a tower unflagged, then just pulling the flag, it doesn't make any sense in BG PvP. The AB/AV capturing mechanism was much better because it allowed both ninja capturing by small, skilled groups and flag defense by small, skilled groups against uncoordinated zergs. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to stealth up to an EotS tower, gank some AFK defender, then have to sit around for 2 minutes, unstealthed, while the tower slowly transitions. Once the opposing team realizes this, its a joke to retake it. Either I stealth when I see them coming, and stop making capture progress, or I stay unstealthed while they ride up and DOT/nuke me from afar.

The idea of merging CTF with King of the Hills seemed cool, until they put the flag on a narrow bridge. It is far to easy for ranged classes to AOE massacre any melee dumb enough to approach proximity of that flag. The only way to reach them, is move through that choke point, or spend a minute riding around through another bridge. Haven't they learned anything from the Alliance base in AV about how ridiculously easy it is for ranged classes to hold a bridge?

Finally, it is really frustrating having to deal with so many unclimbable slopes with relatively few LOS blocking objects. It is really easy for ranged classes to abuse the hills that the towers sit on. They can sit at the bottom picking people off. If you drop down to attack them, its an unreasonably long run around to get back up onto the hill.

How to make EotS actually fun:
1) Fix the Blink through the bubble bug
2) Fix the spam multi-cap bug
3) Change the tower capture mechanism to AB/AV style
4) Make the center bridge about 5 times as wide
5) Add more terrain/features that are usable to LOS, or make all sides of the tower hills scalable

That pretty much sums up my grievances with EotS. Its very tough to hold more than 2 towers simply because of the numbers aspect, which makes for games which are much longer than they need to be. I actually am enjoying the mage exploit atm since it shortens games considerably.

It's not that, flying mounts would obliterate what few bottlenecks exist on the map.

I haven't seen any exploits, but it seems like a very good source of honor points at least in PUGs. The map feels very small. The short distance between towers and flag spawn make running to the fighting and healing very easy.
Honestly, I also like the new setting... even if they had only added "WSG in space," I think I'd be happy. It's fun to see something new.

Things I dislike:
Flags are too easy to cap, the bases aren't far enough from the middle(even when people follow the road instead of going directly for the bases)
You lose durability from falling, and sometimes fears will bring you on the slopes you can't get up from.
The starting jump is annoying as hell
The bubble at the start is pretty small, making my camera zoom closer and hurting my eyes because it's the same bright purple they used in the eco domes in nterhstorm(god I hated questing in there)

Things I like:
It's decent honor from what I can tell
Some of the land setups lead to interesting strategies(running inside the blood elf or mage tower with 2-3mages to pull the defenders inside, then AE them all down ^^)

Overall, it's a decent bg if you play as a pickup, but I found it boring/annoying as a team because it's mainly slow wins, even against pugs, you don't always 4cap if the pugs aren't total idiots. Even in a 4caps, it takes like 8-10mins to win I believe(not sure what our best time was). This is with heavy rushing and the alliance scoring 0point. Flags are too annoying to intercept against a team that has healers, the distance to run with it is like half of WSG, probably even 1/3 of it. A druid or a hunter getting the flag is pretty much an 100% cap.

I hope they make a bg where you can use flying mounts tho, but they'd need ways to dismount people. I'd play a bg where you can man a ballista or something like this, and shoot down people on their flying mounts, just to see people crash down and die in a big splat. I believe they could have made some gravity gameplay changes to EoTS too, maybe a bonus that reduce gravity so you can jump above the pits and stuff.

The two exploits are that a mage can blink through starting pen (and therefore get flag when it spawns and cap), and that if you jump right as you are capping flag at a base and drop the flag, it'll still cap but be available for pickup/recap.

Not sure if both are bannable offenses, since you are using in game mechanics. I'm fairly suprised blizzard didn't fix this in the 2.0.7 patch, wonder how long it'll take and whether it will need client patch or not.

(delete this post if you feel exploit talk is against rules, but its pretty common knowledge at this point)

Epic ground mounts are 25% faster, relatively speaking. Epic flying mounts are over twice as fast...

This, 10 times over. It's already bad enough trying to pvp as a warrior right now, on top of that I get to have fun getting blasted through the floor wherever I go. At least I can charge/intercept up the hills which is useful sometimes. Overall I'm extremely dissapointed with EOTS. The initial drop off from the start point is horribly designed, it seems like they designed it with unmounted(!) people, or people on non-epic mounts in mind. It's really easy to overshoot the platforms on an epic mount, and if you have a paladin in the group with crusader aura, it's that much worse. I was turning on walk to stop myself from eating 4 or 5k fall damage right off the bat each game from crusader aura.

Also, the large cap radius even though it has already been mentioned, is another big gripe. You've got people just sitting in the graveyard, or in the ditches behind hills everywhere while helping cap the flag. The only reason to really be on the top the hill is to grab the powerup, that's about it. The capture system works great in world pvp but I'm not really a fan of it in a battleground. Perhaps they should retain the AB cap system, but instead of a flag cap being fully interrupted on any damage, make it a relatively small pushback instead?

EOTS would probably suck big time with flying mounts. Still, I would very much like to see a flying mounts BG sometime. There are all sorts of amazing possiblities, ranging from floating platforms to flying mount combat. Blizzard could be creative.

As for EOTS itself, it's an OK battleground, nothing special (though the art is nice). It's also very lame that there's no actual world entrance. Would it be that hard to add one in Netherstorm?

World PVP is already annoying enough when people can see you coming a mile away and just float up in the air being completely untouched. Not to mention it would be hell of earth for those of us that REFUSE to spend so much money on a flying epic. I mean, what do you REALLY gain from getting one at the moment? If you're like me and done every available quest and spend all your time grinding certain spots, instancing or doing BGs then you don't really need one. Of course, if they did make them usable in EOTS then there would be a lot more incentive to get one...

But at any rate, its hard enough keeping an eye on attackers from two axes, let alone three.

And I don't know what in the hell they were thinking when they made that ledge at the start. I guess its supposed to be a way to prevent guild groups spawn camping the PUGs like what happens in AB a lot. But couldn't they have just made a short, steep hill to prevent that instead of a 40 foot plummet?

But, despite the issues its a great battleground. Its not the best for honour farming against PUGs (5 capping AB will always win) but the constant combat is tremendous fun.

The faster you get one, the closer you are to the 14 years of cost recovery in never having to take flight points in Outlands again.

I'm prob gonna embarrass myself here but here goes, is there anyway to get down from the rock you start on WITHOUT fall damage? =o

And the first one to say "Roll a Rogue" gets smacked!

Well, what's the point in getting a mount then anyway (besides that some instances need a flying mount to access them)?
Faster is faster, it's just the same with the old epic mounts. 800 gold? Wow, how should I ever get *that* much money...


Even rogues take fall damage if they don't jump down carefully. Not as much though.

As for other classes, you have to take the floating rocks to get down. At least on alliance, don't know how it's designed for horde.