App-turnin tiem is done! Thanks for all the people who care. Will be deciding / interviewing soon.
An island somewhere off the shores of Northrend. A rock, hardly worth a second look. But as insignificant as it may seem, this is no ordinary place. A sound of thunder as waves crash endlessly against rocky cliffs; a sound of fury as swords clash on the blood-stained fields of this island on the edge of forever.Welcome to the Isle of Conquest.
The ongoing struggle between Horde and Alliance has turned many once peaceful (and some not-so peaceful) places into theaters of constant war. The Isle of Conquest is the latest such place, set to be the location of a battle of epic proportions over the island’s precious resources.
An Alliance and a Horde general are fighting for dominance, overseeing the action from the safety of their keeps. Whichever side manages to eliminate the enemy general first will triumph on the island; failure to protect your leader will bring shame, dishonor, and defeat. There is no peace accord here, and it’s an all-out war between the factions.
Once More into the breach…
Isle of Conquest, a new battleground scheduled to make its debut in the upcoming content patch, Call of the Crusade, will pitch teams of up to 40 players against each other in a massive battle over this small island off Northrend’s northern coast. To win, your team will need to make use of the island’s unique strategic locations including an oil derrick, a siege workshop, and a fully equipped airship hangar. You will deploy devastating siege weaponry on the field; Light have mercy on anyone caught between you and your ultimate target, the general holed up in the enemy keep.
There are five points of interest on the Isle of Conquest for the factions to battle over. Each one offers its own benefits and strategic value. Which one will you claim for your side, and will it be enough to ensure victory?
Capture Locations
Consider your options before storming out of your keep to confront the enemy head-on. Spread throughout the Isle of Conquest are several capturable locations (as seen on the map), each granting a unique strategic advantage to your team.
The Oil Derrick: Located on the northwestern end of the island, this smudge in the Frozen Sea produces enough black gold to run a thousand siege engines. Taking this resource garners precious reinforcements and a continuous flow of honor to the side that controls it.
The Cobalt Mine: This snow-covered assembly, located on the southeastern end of the island, hides untapped supplies that must be harvested. Taking this resource grants reinforcements and a continuous flow of honor to the side that controls it.
The Docks: The western shore’s docks will further expand your selection of siege weapons with the devastating new Glaive Thrower and the Catapult. Unleash the destruction of the Glaive Thrower upon the walls of the keep, or launch your invading party over the walls to assault the keep from within.
The Airship Hangar: This sturdy steel structure stands on the peak of Mt. Conquest overlooking the eastern side of the island, allowing players to board the airship docked there. This devastating weapon of war is capable of raining death upon the heads of your enemies and destroying enemy defenses. Once onboard the airship, players will find it comes equipped with parachutes enabling a strike team to drop into the enemy keep from above.
The Siege Workshop: Situated right between the Alliance base and the Horde base, this siege workshop occupies a strategic hot spot. Seizing it grants the controlling party the ability to utilize an arsenal of siege vehicles perfectly suited to reducing the enemy keep’s walls to dust and ashes.
Graveyards: There are five graveyards in the Isle of Conquest that are attached to different points of interest on the map: the Horde base, the Alliance base, an oil spill island in the center of the map (attached to the siege workshop), the northeast corner (attached to the airship hangar), and the southwest corner (attached to the docks).
Main Objectives
The Keeps: The Horde and Alliance keeps sit at opposite ends of the island. These citadels host four easily accessible defensive cannons set on the ramparts, capable of unleashing hot fury onto oncoming attackers. Additional explosives sit safely stowed in the base of the keep along the back wall. At least, they’re safe as long as they don’t fall into enemy hands. If they do, though, they can be employed to bring the stone walls down from within.
The General: Holed up behind the keeps’ massive walls, the generals command their forces from a position of relative safety. Should the keep fall and the general be slain, the Isle of Conquest will fall to the victor.
Reinforcements: Isle of Conquest uses a reinforcements system similar to that of Alterac Valley. The clock is ticking and every individual counts. If too many of your comrades fall to the enemy the battle will end in defeat. Killing enemy players will reduce their reinforcements by one for each kill, Once your faction’s reinforcements reach their limit, so too does your bid for control of the island and the wealth of resources you’ve fought so hard over.
An island somewhere off the shores of Northrend. A rock, hardly worth a second look. A test of strength. A chance to prove your might, to crush your enemies, to make a difference, a chance for endless glory and conquest.
Will you seize it?
Seems to be Blizzard’s idea of AV 2.0. I’m not too big on big battlegrounds, as they are much more team orriented and that you individually can’t make as much of a difference as you would in a smaller BG. I’ll remain optimistic, because it seems like this will also be a good source of honor from the bonuses mentioned above. I just hope we end up with something for everyone in the end. AV seems to be a very love/hate kind of BG because of the style, in my opinion.
-Slayton
June 12th, 2009 - 4:12 pm
Sucks.
Any large-scale battleground Blizzard creates fails hard unless they make the reward disproportionate. Just look at AV (any version of it) and Wintergrasp. When AV tokens weren’t on concerted efforts, hardly anyone played it.
June 12th, 2009 - 6:37 pm
AV was sorta fun like when you had your first ever match. And people played.
There needs to be some serious rewards tho, which will make people QQ about that tho.
Wintergrasp IS horrible, the concept was nice, but they scrapped the planes, and it still turned out shitty, because of how laggy it was and always uneven teams.
On my server it is absolutely impossible to get the tenacity buff. Other side always has it.
Fighting people with 100k hp who hit for 20k is no fun. Unless you can do the same.
June 12th, 2009 - 9:59 pm
Rewards don’t work. People play long enough to get the rewards and then stop. Like I said before, when AV wasn’t worth the honor, few people played it.
The approach here seems to be a re-make of the older AVs that stalemated, but with the addition of non-linear maps - it seems like it will be like the Arathi Basin map or Eye of the Storm map - and a mechanic to continue to give honor so there’s incentive to stalemate rather than give up and win or lose and start over.
June 13th, 2009 - 12:02 am
What good is honor? People dont need that either.
June 13th, 2009 - 12:54 pm
My deathknight has already replaced my paladin for pvp.
I hope at least this bg they do not have the terrain advantages for one side…lolav still not fixed. I have a feeling that the near unkillable healers will ruin this battleground too somehow. F arena, worst thing to happen to the game, worse than deathknights
June 13th, 2009 - 7:46 pm
I think this’ll be fun. I would have liked a new bg style, but an AV2.0 sounds pretty sweet too.
June 15th, 2009 - 6:27 am
AV was fun until they changed the honor system back before TBC. Fun…it depends on why you are playing. The honor grind is what it is. For me, nothing will be as good as grinding out my Strompike rep to get my The Unstoppable Force. Did I stop playing AV after I earned that? Hell no, I wanted to run mad and smash pplz face off with it. That was fun and there were other faction rewards that were great to [u]earn[/u]. Remember the plate leggings from Siverwing?
Now it’s become more and more carbon copy. Everyone is grinding the same amount of rep for the same sets of gear, which are either last seasons Arena set, or something completely boring that you feel you need because of resilience. Maybe it was just my perception of it all at the time, but at 60 I felt like I had options. IDK.
In all of this, what I am really trying to say is that if you are only playing to grind the next piece of gear, it’s not going to be fun. Remember when they moved the S1 set to the regular honor system? That was when this whole non-arena pvp system went bad. They need to stop handing out the arena set from 2 seasons ago as the bg rewards. Blizzard has to find a way to separate the arena from everything else in this game.
June 15th, 2009 - 1:03 pm
All blizzard needs to do is add new rep rewards for AV, AB and WSG for lvls 70 and 80. Also they need to find a better system to remove honor leeches that just stay in one spot to gain honor, the whole inactive debuff is not cutting it. All a person needs to do is just run into combat and get killed and the debuff is gone, what they should do is once you get the inactive debuff you automatically get kicked from the BG and gain the deserter debuff, if it they get booted from a BG again they gain a debuff for argument sake lets call it Coward and that lasts for lets say 1hr. If they get booted over and over again the Coward debuff stacks till the point that they cannot enter a bg or arena for months, hopefully this will get people to actually play and not just stand around leeching honour from those that want to play
June 15th, 2009 - 2:21 pm
All that would do is make old chars get free gear and new chars forced to grind a long time before they can get it. I agree with you about booting players who have the inactive debuff. I think they should restructure the way honor is awarded. Instead of being near combat honor would be awarded for being in the flag area for capping or defending a flag. Things to encourage players to try and win.
June 16th, 2009 - 7:11 am
im sure this will take forever to work the bugs out and it will be just one more excuse to nerf ret pallys.. lol
aside that, i feel if every one wants to get rid of the afk’er who just go to grind honor for last years arena suit like most of us are doing.. well i am that for sure. get rid of resilience… then get new honor items for higher lvls for each of the bg’s we have. bring back honorable kills and killing blows as 2 different categories and dish out better gear for amounts.
again with the new BG, hopefully its part of the battle group and not server only. if it is server only then blizz need to work more deals for different factions to xfer because there are some realms grossly uneven.
June 16th, 2009 - 3:39 pm
They need a revamp of the BG system again soon. Old content needs to be tweaked or deprecated like all the PvE content. The mini-game BGs always seemed oddly placed in the context of the game, while AV never really worked well for grand battles, nor casual fun.
I think it would be interesting if the BGs had an AI commander that gave orders what to do, while sending NPC forces out to certain objectives, telling what was exposed (based on the sight of players and NPCs), and what was under attack. You would get additional rewards for following orders–kind of like on the fly quests. It would take some serious programing effort though.
June 18th, 2009 - 3:16 pm
I had no idea this was going on. Thanks for letting us know.