Patch 5.4 patch notes
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The latest patch 5.4 newsBreakfast Topic: What do you think of the Wintergrasp changes?
by Lesley Smith 
May 21st 2009 at 8:00AM
But, of course, there were problems. The Horde seem to out number us Alliance on my server and they're also a hell of a lot more organised. For them, Wintergrasp isn't just a sport, it's a carefully planned massacre. but, despite the instability, the DCs, the insufferable lag, it was fun. But I was keen to find out if Blizzard had plans to fix the problems so I asked Tom Chilton. He he specifically mentioned the issues of Wintergrasp and that they didn't think that the lag and other issues "was an acceptable play environment situation". So Blizzard did the 'smart' thing -- they nerfed it. Boo.
So readers? What do you think of the weekly quests? Do you think nerfing Wintergrasp was the way to go? Now you only have to do them once every seven days, do you think you will do the battles less? Are you pleased you now get more Shards for the quests? Can't care less? Tell us!
Filed under: PvP, Breakfast Topics
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 6)
Merus May 21st 2009 9:37AM
I think that poison idea is workable - I had an idea that uses the stackable debuffs we're seeing in Wrath ala Sanity.
You get a debuff, let's call it Warsong Fatigue, every ten seconds while carrying the flag. It reduces your total health by 1% per stack and prevents you from picking up/returning a loose flag. (So if you get 100, you die.) The flag itself gives you a 50% damage increase.
The thing is that the amount of debuffs you get per ten seconds varies depending on where you are. If you're in the enemy base, you get 1. If you're in the field, you get 2. If you're in your base, you get 5. And if both flags have been held for 5 minutes, another 5 on top.
There's three ways to stave off death: personally capping the flag or dying, both of which wipe your stack, or getting an honorable kill, which takes off one debuff. If you drop the flag, you can't pick it up again until you wipe your stack.
The implication's clear. If you turtle, eventually you'll be fodder. If you head out into the field, you have a massive advantage and with some help can stave off death long enough for the other flag carrier to pop their gasket. If the opponents turtle, eventually they'll have to hand off the flag and they'll be weak as kittens.
Maybe make things even more painful: every HK the flag carrier gets gives her a buff, let's call it Silverwing Vengeance, which increases the damage done by everyone within ten yards of the flag (other than the flag carrier) by 1%. Stacks to 100 too. Essentially, it's a turtle buster.
QQInsider May 21st 2009 11:25AM
Players can CHOOSE to do lots of stupid things if they're allowed to, and who designed it such that it allows turtling? It wouldn't be hard to tweak the design to fix that problem, as demonstrated above.
Ofc, nerfing WG is less work.
Eisengel May 21st 2009 4:04PM
@merus
While I like your suggestion, I think unfortunately, the opposite will happen, you'll get HK turtles in the middle of the field. Someone will grab the flag and basically sit in the graveyard pwning face, popping off their debuff stacks and piling up their buffs. Getting the flag shouldn't be so good that you want to keep it even if you could capture it.
kashidog May 21st 2009 8:16AM
I'm only level 77 and I love to man the cannons! I can do that well and it's fun. And the Hordies want to take me out so I know I'm doing ok LOL I might try to hack away at a level 80 at the end, but really I'm only in mostly greens so I die. But I'm having fun!
zenotds May 21st 2009 8:24AM
it sucks.
stupidest change ever.
give back dailies
venomslife May 21st 2009 8:21AM
i've done wintergrasp once this week in 3 days. i still dont really understand this solution.
on my server alliance greatly outnumbers horde, and if any kind of forum drama happens between horde and alliance over wintergrasp, the alliance simply pile 500 people in the zone. pretty epic..but still they could handle this differently.
i think the big problem is allowing people to fly over the zone and participate. and joining the zone 15 minutes into the battle.
i just dont understand why they didn't instance the zone.
Drahliana May 21st 2009 11:16AM
I understand completely why. Wintergrasp was intended as world PVP, not some closeted instance like Alterac Valley. On Earthen Ring wintergrasp seesaws fairly often, even though Alliance outnumbers Horde here, the Horde are organised enough to more than make up for it.
Give the changes a chance if it drives down the popuation of those who are only there to pick up shards and coin, then sure Tuesdays may continue to be the lag fest but it just might give us 6 usable days of the week.
Dan May 21st 2009 8:20AM
Well it got me back into PvP - I hadn't done much in TBC after being an avid PvPer in vanilla... At least in WotLK I've done some PvP, some Arena, had a bit of fun.
WG was the best though, and the rewards and honor were part of what made it so much fun, compensation for the lag...
These changes have not fixed the lag, the same faces are still there everyday, but now they're doing it for less reward.
Not being able to fix the technical issues seems like a terrible reason for nerfing it.
Markainion May 21st 2009 8:21AM
It makes alts more valuable, glad I already got two 80 and two mid seventies characters. But I don’t really think that a 5-minute battle once a week makes much sense regardless. If they really want to keep WG relevant, they need to make it last longer, by making it harder to complete than a quick offensive victory
Rylka May 21st 2009 8:21AM
I don't mind the weeklies, though the steep reduction in Stone Keeper Shards really hurts us altoholics trying to get ALL the leveling shoulders. Used to be each quest could earn you 21 shards per week (3 per turn-in times 7 days = 21 shards), but now you get only 10/week. It's going to take me more than twice as long now.
They may have nerfed WG a little too hard though. Now there is little reason to battle in WG once you have gotten your weekly "dailies" done.
I'm Alliance and I just got out of a morning battle a few minutes ago where there were exactly THREE horde players. I wasn't even able to get the tower quest done because we rolled over them so fast that I couldn't get down to the towers before they were all destroyed. The horde never made any vehicles so I couldn't do that quest either.
The WG participation has dropped so low that it looks like it may only be viable nights and weekends for some quests.
At least we get a week of tries to get it done. :)
xX FearHAVOK Xx May 21st 2009 5:52PM
alliance outnumber horde? i didnt think anyone played alliance because on Hakkar, horde outnumbers alliance by like 10:1... might be a bit of an exaggeration but its a lot.
Rylka May 21st 2009 8:06PM
Yeah, surprising as it may be, Alliance outnumber horde on Uldaman-US about 2-1 or 3-1.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Server:Uldaman_US
Normally that just means the WG horde players are tighter knit and work better as an underdog team, usually with tenacity. But at off-peak times recently, they haven't shown up much.
They did kick our asses later this afternoon though :)
warhacker07 May 26th 2009 8:18AM
I agree, the other battlegrounds need to get buffed back up.
Wouldn't it be awesome if we could go back to the old days of Alterac Valley?
Where you would battle for an hour or so, the battle actually felt epic, and people would use the NPC options back at base (*gasp*).
Wulfkin May 21st 2009 8:21AM
Doesn't make a difference to me, im still going to be playing a lot of WG: for honor, for fun!
Lfd May 21st 2009 8:23AM
ok so here is my issue with this. First of all I for one will still do WG whenever I love doing it and it is sometimes the only thing to do at 80 when you are bored.
Second, well blizzard screwed us on the stones things. Before if you wanted to actually get shards if you just did one daily every day you would get 21 shards so how does that help us that the weekly's are only 10? Yet again blizz and screwed us.
Third, well WG was a Honor farm and now there is no point to farm it there either they totally nerfed the Honor you got from quests.
On my server, Nazgrel, it has done nothing to change the lag either. It is still extremely laggy and I think forever as dalaran is it will always lag.
Thanks again blizz for screwing us! FOR THE HORDE!
LFD
Ian Oh May 21st 2009 8:29AM
weekly quests are ok. but the rewards dont stack up. 10 shards and 3k honor only means 3 dailies. so we lose out if we do the old dailies everyday. even the cash reward is stuck at 13g so its a huge loss.
bring back to old dailies or up the rewards.
Zim May 21st 2009 8:32AM
WG is a great ideia, but poorly implemented.
Blizzard seems not having enough testers to help figure out how something will work in a huge mass of players together. WG ins´t the first time we see this, instances and world events suffered as well.
If you test your code against a database and fetches few data correctly is something ok, don´t assume its a perfect code and will be able to fetch billion times that with good performance.
I don´t know what they are suppose to do, but they must figure out a way to test they product against one server full of people. A vanity pet for ptr users achievement? I don´t know...
What they are doing with this nerf is correct something 'on the fly'. Its just 'ok', but not 'good'.
My 2 cents
Zim
Jinx May 21st 2009 8:30AM
I'm pretty indifferent to the change; I used to casually do WG for the marks whenever I happened to be in Dalaran, so with or without quests I'll still hop in.
Horde on my realm also vastly outnumber us, about 70% (or was it 75%?) of the player base is theirs - we almost always have tenacity stacked in WG battles. imo, most people that do go horde probably do it because they want to have a "badass" killing machine when they PvP, which explains their dominance in that field. I know very well that they also have pretty incredible PvE guilds that are awesome at burning through progression content.
Ironically, when you hear a member of the Horde complain, s/he'll claim that the Alliance owns everything, from PvP to PvE, while on the other hand, we're on this side and complaining about the Horde owning everything. I think I read a webcomic that's narrates things from Horde POV and has the characters complain about them always failing in Arathi Basin while I myself out of ~30 matches for the marks only won enough times I could count on one hand . :P
Coincidentally, I was looking into Archavon's record book just yesterday to find that the Horde have successfully defended the keep about ~350 times (give or take 25) while the Alliance has only successfully defended the keep 26 times :S. Ouch! >_<
Horde basically win at PvP, from my experince, with the only exception being AV - we do win it often surprisingly enough! ^_^
Aeoey May 21st 2009 2:27PM
I feel you. On Bronzebeard (US) the Alliance out number those of us in the Horde by 70/30. We've defended the keep a total of 25 times since it started While the Alliance is well above 300.
Alucardtes May 21st 2009 11:41AM
PvP = useless in the PvE world.