Feedback: Epic Battlegrounds

Greetings,

You may have noticed we've been doing some updates to Alterac Valley and Isle of Conquest recently. Our goals with these changes are to both improve the gameplay experience in these battlegrounds and to also design them around a longer duration format. We feel that with the longer match length, players have more room to switch strategies in a match, change from offense to defense a few times, etc. to provide a, well, more epic experience.

With that, we're looking to you to give us feedback on these changes.

Here are some of the changes recently (through hotfixes, so they are very recent):

Alterac Valley

• Increased the number of Reinforcements by 100.
• The NPCs health and damage will match the players level and gear, which will result in a more consistent difficulty.

Isle of Conquest

• Increased the number of Reinforcements by 100.
• Increased the health of the walls significantly.
• Increased the damage the Siege Engine, Demolishers, Glaive Throwers and Keep Cannons deal against players. (The Seige Engine in particular will now be pretty scary!)
• Increased the siege damage dealt by the Siege Engine and Demolisher. (The Ram ability will deal a lot of damage in particular)
• The Refinery and the Quarry now generate Reinforcements more frequently.
• Increased the health of the "bosses".

We welcome your feedback! Please focus your feedback on the gameplay in the map, in particular the pacing, balance of different mechanics etc.

Thank you!

Aloha.

We’re working on some hotfixes to Epic Battlegrounds. These changes are not yet live, but should be ready for the game in the next few days.

Alterac Valley

• We’re modifying the scaling in the zone to make creatures more difficult for players at high item-levels. Our goal here is to make gameplay feel more similar to the difficulty of Alterac Valley in early Tides of Vengeance.

Isle of Conquest

• The health of destructible walls will be increased by 30%. This is intended to offset the power that the docks has given players with recent 8.1.5 improvements.

Battle for Wintergrasp

• The damage done by the Catapult’s Flame Breath ability will be reduced. We still want Flame Breath to feel scary and powerful, especially against other players, but we feel that current values are too high.

We’ve been monitoring Wintergrasp closely, and have been pleased to find that win rates for defense and offense are quite even, with a less-than-5% advantage for defenders. The change above to Catapult could have an impact on that, so we’re holding back on making further changes until we see how this one goes.

We have some other improvements to Epic Battlegrounds, including a new UI to track Lokholar and Ivus turn-in progress, that we’re bringing to the game in the Rize of Azshara content update.

Thank you for your continued feedback on Epic Battlegrounds. We really appreciate it.