Altitis

Well, Matt, I’m not suffering from writer’s block, but I take your challenge nonetheless.

Here are 16 Patch 2.4 changes and additions worth mentioning:

Shorter 2v2 Arena queues

2v2 has, admittedly, several balance and synergy issues, but one which is more irksome is the queue time on heavily-populated Battlegroups. Due to the sheer number of people wanting to play 2v2, which, let’s face it, is the easiest to set up a team for and requires least coordination, queue times can exceed 15 minutes at peak time. Due to the low organizational requirements, 2v2 will always remain the bracket with the lowest barrier to entry for the most casual player, even if entering it as a brand new green level 70 player is going to be quite an experience.

Well, fortunately, Blue has recently posted that this will change for the better:

There is a change in 2.4.0 that will allow the servers to kick up more arena instances in a shorter amount of time, generally lowering the amount of time it will take to get into a game with an equal amount of people queuing. We want to avoid calling this a one time “queue cure” as we’re still not entirely certain how the changes will affect queue times under full load. Especially considering the increase in activity we see with any major patch release.

I think they’re guaranteed to have some effect, but if it isn’t an adequate impact we’ll need to make further adjustments.

Although I don’t have an arena partner or arena spec at the moment, shorter queue times = win.

The Sunwell Plateau

Part of the current higher-than-average tension between “hardcore” and “casuals” (also in its side incarnation PvE vs PvP) is most definitely due to the fact that the top raiders have run out of content, some of them several months ago. While I definitely don’t like AQ-Style server-wide unlocking events, this one looks to be less mindless grind-focussed than its infamous predecessor. The Isle of Quel’Danas is probably going to be as packed as Hellfire Peninsula was during the first days of TBC’s release, and since I currently don’t play my horde pallie, I’ll give the whole offensive a miss.

Still, the whole Shattered Sun Offensive comes along with a huge amount of new content from solo to five-men to full raids, so people who more or less ran out of things to do will have plenty new stuff to keep themselves occupied for the coming few months.

Of course, the top catassing guilds may very well burn through the new content in two weeks like what happened with MH and BT, but designing content with these people in mind is, fortunately, no longer on Blizzard’s agenda. Either Tigole and his crew grew softer on the catassing part or the rest of the design team has been overshouting them for a couple of months now (in fact, Tigole has been very subdued since his ill-advised Welfare Epics remark). Whatever the reasons, this is full of win for the large majority of the playerbase, hardcore and casual alike, and the couple of sour apples who don’t find the game challenging or fun enough for their taste anymore will move on. Less lag for me, and probably 0.1% less QQ on the o-boards. Not that you’d notice any difference of course.

The New Combat Log

The new combat log is going to increase data collection accuracy for damage meters and for WWS alike. While the change will require all addons working with the log to change, the net result is more precise information from all relevant tools. For any player, hardcore or casual, striving to improve their playing skills, accurate measurement of their performance is a good thing. Always remember, though, that in a group or a raid, you are actually playing an instance, not “top-the-meters”.

Teleport to CoT

Due to the travel time involved, getting to Caverns of Time is almost as much as a pain than going to Kara. Adding a means to teleport from Shattrath straight to the summoning stone is removes a lot of the wait, leaving more time for actually playing the instances.

Intellect Boosting Mana Regen from Spirit

While I don’t play any classes which rely on spirit and the 5-seconds rule as part of their normal routine, this will be huge for priests, druids but also mages. Other classes will spend less time drinking, which equates to less downtime. Now if it would only affect MP5 while casting too…

Faster Weapon Skillups from 1 to 295

Anyone who ever had to skill up a neglected weapon by even a mere 100 skill points will immediately remember what a pain in the nether regions this is. Less mindless killing for skillups? Yes please. The only thing unclear to me is whether it actually applies to weapon skill below 295 or players below level 60. If it’s the latter, the change will be, unfortunately, not noticed by level 70 toons, which would immediately remove this paragraph from the sexy additions to the “badly thought out” list.

Daily Quest Amount Raised to 25

Not that I’d care too much since I rarely do more than 3 dailies (never managed to unlock Ogri’La on the paladin). Still, more choice is always a good thing in my book.

Multi-Target Abilities no longer hit CCed NPCs

I have a bit mixed feelings about this one, actually. It certainly lowers the skill requirements in instances and participates in the dumbing down of the playerbase. On the other hand, it also means less wipes when running with people who lack the most basic CC management skills. An interesting side-effect, though: people who no longer care how they position CC relative to tanks will actually find running with a tankadin more difficult than before if their CC ends up in the Constant Consecration area. Since the Flavour of the Month in terms of 5-men tanks remains firmly in tankadin hands, the dumbing down may result in a couple of unexpected and hilarious wipes. Then again, good tankadins don’t really need CC in the first place.

Mana Cost Reduction on Regrowth

I don’t play a drood but from what they tell us, this is a very nice change, which actually gives them more variety in their spell casting rotations. As a recovering healadin, having just one single heal which makes up most of your casting routine (at least there’s cleansing and protecting to break the monotony) is something which gets pretty dull. More tools to keep your party or raid group alive, more varied gameplay? Yes please.

Avenger’s Shield Won’t Hit Critters Anymore

I love this one. Imagine the following pull: 3-mob group to the left, another group farther back on the right. The closest mob of the left-hand group stands at the right side of that group. Your tankadin positions himself and pulls with Avenger’s Shield on the closest mob of the left group, expecting all three mobs to have a good does of front-loaded threat on them.

Unfortunately, there’s a pesky critter sitting, unnoticed, between the left and right group, and Avenger’s shield actually bounces over it to hit the closest mob of the right-hand group. Your group now has to deal with 6 mobs instead of 3, 4 of them without any frontloaded threat.

Sounds familiar? Won’t happen again. Win.

Turn Undead Rank 3+ working on demons

Makes sense. Though why not Rank 1 and 2 escapes me. Then again, I think the last time I’ve ever used Turn Undead was on my level 26 alliance paladin desperately trying to survive an unexpected meeting with Morladin in Duskwood while bubble was on cooldown. And that was before TBC got released. So it’s a sexy but pointless change for the sake of consistency.

Partial Vanish Debugging

There’s been various abilities which would leave a rogue stealthed when using plain normal stealth but break vanish. Bug fixing is always nice in my book, and vanish has been plagued by bugs for a long time now.

New Stormstrike Icon

I’m kidding. Shamans get little love in this patch, and one of the more jaded shammies out there once commented on a message board “it will be changed to a middle finger Blizzard is pointing at shamans”. ‘Nuff said.

BG Honour calculation changes

There’s no more diminishing returns per kill until an opponent dies 51 times, and honour gets awarded on the spot. If it helps diminish the AFKing in the peace cave, I’m all for it.

Horde AV starting point moved back

This is a change for the better, and will help balance the map. In the same spirit, actually mirroring the whole map perfectly would definitely remove any claims of map imbalance and make it all about teamwork and tactical skill. This has been suggested for much longer than I’ve been playing AV and should come back.

In the same vein, joining AV as a group is something I have very mixed feelings about. If the group is 5 or 10 friends joining together, I rather like it. But with the extremely soft matchmaking happening, getting steamrolled by a 40-men preform AV for 0 honour (which you probably never will be allowed to join if you don’t have 350+ resilience, which you won’t be able to get in a hurry because the bloody AV premades kill you over and over for 0 honour) is going to be utterly detestable.

Warsong Gulch changes to Flag Carriers

In a valiant effort to shorten the pat situations where both sides could have been hiding with the opposing flags for ages, Flag Carriers will now appear on the map within 45 seconds and will get a 50%/100% damage increase debuff after 10/15 minutes. I like it but I still don’t think it goes far enough. Add reinforcements like in AV, each cap and kill taking off from the enemy reinforcements, and you could pretty much guarantee much more action-packed games lasting 15-20 minutes tops, and perhaps even kill the mindless HK farming which happens way too often. One can always hope…

And that takes up to 16 changes. There’s actually more to be highlighted, but Cosmo said 16, so 16 it is.

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Euripides over at Critical QQ relates his past 7 months of disastrous experiences in the level 70 BGs as horde. Although by all accounts how each faction fares depending on the battlegroup you are playing in, I have definitely noticed a difference (read “a slump” to put it politely) between the level 70 bracket and all other ones as well, regardless of the BG.

I do believe that an important part of that is due to the level 10-19 and 20-29 bracket which are heavy with twinking since fall 2005. Many players try out their newest toon in these brackets, get crushed, and no longer worry about BGs at all until 70, where they grind honour at all cost for their S1 kit. Which is all fine and dandy, but a combination of the inexperience, the usually wrong specs, daily PvP quests and an overall pessimistic outlook (“It’s a PUG, we’re gonna lose anyway, just hand me my mark and let’s get this done”) give the more dedicated PvPer a miserable team to work with.

Add the general Internet Anonymity factor which tends to turn your averagely educated person into a jerk when faced with adversity (like losing BGs over and over), the matchmaker which still pits organized preforms (premades for us EU players) against ragtag PUGs, and the potential for weeks of horrible BGs gets realized.

There’s one method which works pretty well in AB (a bit less in EOtS and WSG for some reason, go figure). People react to leadership. When you enter a match to grind your marks and your motivation is low because you are already sure the other 14 people with you are scrubs, setting simple instructions can change things entirely. Back in the day before TBC, I could experience this on my level 60 alliance lock: AB was pretty much horde-dominated and alliance did the headless chicken run every single time. And one day, I wrote a simple macro which I would use 15 seconds before the game start unless someone else was taking charge.
The instructions? Simple.

Group 1: Mine. Group 2: Stables. Group 3: Mill.
Announce incoming in chat, and remember, 3 bases wins the game.

That’s all it took to go from a 1-9 win ratio to 4-6 with that toon. Something I verified over several dozen games.

Nowadays on horde, it works the same way, except the dispatches are sent to LM, farm and BS. I usually add a “stables last only after the other 4 are secured” after the first nodes cap for us. And you know what? It works. A ragtag PUG will tend to follow whatever commands are given in a firm and clear manner, simply because everyone craves organization.

Of course it won’t be a 100% win ratio, among others because you can get matched against a preform, or an alliance group which organizes in the same fashion. Still, 18 marks in 10 games is a lot better than 12 in my book.

Organization beats chaos every single time. Rome built an empire which lasted close to a millennium on that principle. And the only thing it needs is a bit of communication. Your BGs suck? Don’t sit on your hands cursing the other 14 people. Take charge. At least if you fail you will have put up a decent fight. That’s always better than getting mad.

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Every other month or so, there’s another common QQ theme, and the current one is about AV post 2.3 -  the complaint that losing nets you next to no honour, making queuing up pointless.

Now I’m holding the opinion that AV needs fixes, both in its design and more generally through improvements with the AFK mechanism, but what strikes me with this current wave of forum angst is that the current belief prevails so much people don’t even put a honest effort into the game anymore.

Undeniably, the heavy strategic weight the captain has in current AV is what usually decides the battle, and horde do have an unfair advantage on their side, as much as alliance has one with the positioning of Dun Baldar’s NPC and the bridge. Nonetheless, in the first weeks after 2.3, especially at the later hours (past 1am) when you’d find a bit more of the dedicated PvPers in any given game, it wasn’t unusual to have the losing side actually get more bonus honour than the winners.

The key being, of course, to play the new AV instead of the old one.

It has been said by many people in the blogosphere but bears repeating again. Today’s AV requires a combination of offense and defense to score honour. Rushing the enemy general (made harder with patch 2.3.2) actually nets little points, whereas downing the general, capping towers and defending yours is where the money lies.

“But Gwaendar, it’s easy for you to say, you’re horde and you have Galv!”, some will object. And there’s some truth to that.

But let’s think in broader pictures. For horde, defending Galv during the first 10-15 minutes is one of the most important keys to victory, for two reasons. First, it breaks the alliance assault and scatters their forces along a fragmented GY line, making a Drek + 2 marshalls rush more difficult to pull off. Second, it creates traction – Balinda usually goes down within the first 5 minutes, and the difference in reinforcements puts alliance under pressure. Add Stonehearth Tower which caps within roughly the same timeframe, and at that point, the score is usually around 400-580 in favour of horde.

That’s not entirely trivial to turn around, and at that point, often alliance just plain gives up and leave the game in the hands of horde.

But let’s look at the scoring system in a little bit more detail:

• Capping an enemy tower or killing a general nets you 62.7 bonus honour when it happens
• Killing the general earns 83.6 bonus honour
• A wing commander reaching his base nets 20.9 honour

Here’s the other important part, though, what happens when the victory screen goes up:

• A surviving Captain is worth 41.8 honour
• Each tower you defended is woth 41.8 honour as well

So how do you capitalize on that?

1. First, write Balinda off. She’s literally undefensible, that’s just a fact of the game.
2. Unless there happens to be a well-geared PvE tank available, killing the general with more than one marshalls is now quite challenging. Capitalize on that from the start. The horde offensive will rush Balinda and then move on to SH GY and towards Dun Baldar. The SH Bunker cap, however, rarely gets defended by more than 3-4 horde. Make sure SH doesn’t fall
3. Don’t charge Galvanger when the game starts, you can’t mirror what horde does. Instead, the objectives during the first 10-12 minutes should include defending SH Bunker, capping SF and IB GY, and burning Tower Point. Mount a defense of the Dun Baldar Bunkers, and if you get a chance to defend IW, do it. Frostwolf GY and putting pressure on FW towers will help
4. When the game clocks above 10-12 minutes, the Galvanger defense tends to get bored and leave. Half of them will move to offense, the rest will go to FW keep and try to defend the towers. Now is the time to go kill Galvanger, and burning IB tower at the same time. If you have IB GY, FW GY and SF is either yours or disputed, horde will rez either at the Relief Hut (and will stick to FW towers and the GY), or at SH / SP and tend to join the offense.
5. From there, react to the situation. Your objective should be that when one side runs out of reinforcements, you have burned 3 towers and defended at least 2 bunkers.

Obviously, once AV can be joined as a group again, coordinating all this becomes much easier. Still, taking the lead and announcing a short battle plan before the game starts, then driving one objective after the other will get 10-15 people to follow, because most people are just content to follow directions from anyone pretending to know what he’s doing. If at the end of the game you scroll back to /bg chat and the majority of the communication is insults, you know why you lost. If it’s timers, objectives and situation reports, congratulations, you were in a good AV PUG and you will have gotten substantial bonus honour even in defeat.

And another thing. I don’t know how this plays out on other Battlegroups than EU-Blackout on horde, but if this one is any indication…  Remember that WoW has integrated voice chat nowadays? Yes, nobody uses it, and in any given PUG, 75% won’t even hear it. Still, try out just giving calm commands and objectives to the 10 other people who will listen, and add the other 10 who will read what you type. Horde has 10-15 afkers per game these days, so you suddenly lead a coordinated group of 20 against 25 people split in two barely coordinated groups.

Theorycraft, since I’m horde? Sure. But give it a shot. If you pull it all off, you will get 334 bonus honour from the game. Horde would get 314 provided they killed Vann. In about 20 minutes. That’s hardly “zero honour” in my book…

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