Me and my Tiny Spore Bat - Articles

Revisiting Halaa

Altherac — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 10:31:00 +0100

Halaa is a neutral city in Nagrand that was designed by Blizzard to be an outdoor PvP hotspot. Fighting here grants you tokens you can use to buy PvP stuff (read: with resilience) and controling the city grants a faction a zone-wide damage buff. While Halaa may have been successful some time ago, when dozens of levelling players where swarming Nagrand, it is very hard today to have a fight there involving more than 5 to 10 players.

Halaa is actually fun to play, but most players have no interest in coming here and this ruins the concept. While you would expect fights in Halaa several times a day, it hardly happens one time a week on a very well populated server. Is Halaa definitely broken ? Can Blizzard do something ? Hell yes, and you'll find out how in the rest of this article.

Halaa's flaws

I don't want to go there

Fighting in Halaa requires you to be in Nagrand first. This happens when :

You're questing here : either you are levelling, or you are grinding a reputation (Mag'har, Consortium...)
You're farming : motes of air, primal water, mines, plants...

Since there is only one daily quest in that zone (Soup for the Soul, cooking daily), it's no surprise that you don't find a lot of people in Nagrand. Blizzard suggests that players making Arena games could use the Arena Battlemaster in Nagrand, but only a few people do that : it's way easier to be in Shattrah to do so. People questing in the area are often concentrating on their quests, and don't want to spend time in Halaa, unless it's already under their own faction's control.

Rewards suck

Most Halaa's rewards are PvP oriented. You can find blue stuff with resilience, and an epic yellow gem with +10 resilience. The blue items require between 20 and 40 battle tokens (you get one for each honorable kill you achieve in Halaa) and gem requires 100 battle tokens. Here lies the problem : considering fighting in Halaa is rare, it takes tremendous time to get the tokens you need. And if you spend that time in battlegrounds, you can get gear that's way better, plus you benefit from the 30 seconds respawn timer instead of running to your corpse (since Halaa is outdoor).

The most interesting items in Halaa are thus those you can get for gold, and since Halaa changes hands several times in a month, you just have to fly by sometimes to get them (the green lvl 66 two-handed sword is a must for an arms warrior, for instance). So well, that's not enough. When you're 70 and full of mighteh purplze, you don't give a damn about Halaa. The only item that could be of interest to hardcore PvP player, the +10 resilience gem, has a crafted equivalent wealthy players can get to the auction house without the hassle of collecting a hundred battle token.

Controlling Halaa also grants your faction a +5% damage buff in the whole Nagrand area, but it is not worth taking the necessary time to take over the town.

Solutions

Bringing people to Nagrand

More people in Nagrand and Halaa means more potential people fighting for Halaa. Thus the first thing Blizzard could do to improve the situation is to bring more people in Nagrand. How ? Nagrand is already and attractive area for 65-69 players, so there's not much things to add for them but you could drop a few more quests. So the obvious answer seems to be : ok, let's add a few level 70 quests, add an easy outdoor boss, and it's done.

Not so fast. You can't bring more and more level 70 players without potentially ruining the experience for lower characters. In fact, it turns out that bringing a lot of level 70 in Nagrand for anything else than Halaa is not really a good idea. The answer comes with Halaa itself, not the whole Nagrand zone. You want to make people come to Halaa, not doing a quest there that will take them 10 minutes and then they go away.

So let's see what could make Halaa worth the trip from Shattrah, for instance.

Making owning Halaa worth the fight

First, pump up Halaa rewards by adding more rewards, especially for level 70 players.

Offer good level 70 PvP items that can compete with some S1 slots (and adjust the cost accordingly) : this will allow people fed up with countless Alterac battlegrounds to have an alternative at least for some slots of their PvP gear. It's basically the same thing as the old T0 set : you get the head in Scholomance, the torso in UBRS, etc. Why should all good PvP sets be necessarily tied to battlegrounds ? It ended up with people going into battlegrounds rather than outdoor objectives.

You can add honor incentives : provide good items for honor points plus battle tokens. Offer honor bonuses for taking Halaa or killing guards (this bonus on guards would have to be moderate in order to avoid trivial farming with wyverns and boting, but it's still a plus when you battle there and you take the wyvern).

Add more gems. Add consumables sought by raiders. Add enchants available against tokens. Gems, consumables and such enchants are perishable goods. Gems go away when you change your stuff, and so do enchants. Consumables vanish in raiding sessions. They must be constantly replaced, and this creates the need for people to come back.

Change the buff, and make it more efficient for players, and not only pre-70 players (+% exp bonus, bye bye). Reputation gain bonuses, mounted speed bonuses, special drops on mobs you can turn-in for goodies. There are many possibilities. But +5% damage is just not enough.

Add quests! Currently, the only thing you get as a quest for controlling Halaa is the turn-in of Oshu'Gun powder samples. That's not enough. Add a money making daily quest you can only take and end in Halaa while controlling it. This will be a bonus for people taking Halaa, but since it will benefit to people coming here later, this solution could fail. A quest which objective is to take Halaa would be fine, given at Alliance and Horde respective towns in Nagrand. Or a quest involving neutral Goblins, or Gnomes, or the Consortium, or whatever you want.

Now do it!

Blizzard promised great outdoor PvP for Wrath of the Lich King. But there is room for good outdoor content right now. But I'm no fool. With the patch 2.4 already on the way, and the extension coming next, I doubt there is much room in Blizzard's roadmap for enhancing a tiny bit of zone in a continent nobody's going to play in in 12 months. But I think this article stresses Halaa's flaws well enough, and it's a hint about what players expect from an outdoor PvP objective, and what could sink a poor outdoor PvP implementation.

Comments welcome.

En Français ou en Anglais. In English or in French.

Altherac — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 13:09:00 +0000

J'ai décidé, pour pouvoir répondre facilement dans des articles provenant de blogs anglophones, de publier indistinctement en Français ou en Anglais selon le cas. Les 0,013 lecteurs hebdomadaires de mon blog devront faire avec :D

In order to answer to English-speaking blogs more easily in long articles, I decided to publish not only in French but in English too. My average 0.013 weekly readers will have to deal with it :D

How to win in Arathi Basin

Altherac — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 12:53:00 +0000

Euripedes has published an article today on CriticalQQ on how much Horde sucks today in Arathi Basin. With Horde getting paladins and Alliance getting Shamans, I expected to find some good balance between the two factions in battleground PvP (Alterac excepted, since this map is not symmetric). And I found out it was not, for no particular reason.

While this would be worth a long post, I won't go into explaining why Horde sucks in the 70 bracket and why Alliance sucks even more in the 69 bracket. I'll just take the opportunity to talk about strategy in Arathi Basin, since the most obvious reason beyond gear and class mastery for repeated losses in battlegrounds is lack of knowledge.

The article from WoWWiki is more than a decent start, but it may be a bit confusing with a lot of different strategies and tips. Remember, they key here is to deliver basic information and strategies, to avoid the biggest mistakes that make you lose.

Default Horde strategy

Having the Farm and the Forge may be obvious to everyone playing on the Horde side. If it is not, you are either playing in a team with alternative strategies or being dumb. This leaves you with one choice : Lumber Mill or Mine ? Apart from the fact that LM is on the left and Mine on the right, what's the difference ?

Mine : located below ground surface, closest to the Stables.
Lumber Mill : located upper the ground surface, closest to the Farm.

Now if you are still wondering which point fits best, please quit playing World of Warcraft and play Sudoku. Or play Alliance. Whatever.

Starting from Farm and Forge, Lumber Mill is the closest point. This means faster backups, and an slight advantage for the first capture. Faster backup is something that's often overlooked by players. But it's basically the same as reducing your respawn timer. If you respawn in 30 seconds and get to the flag in 15 seconds instead of 20 seconds, it's like you respawned in 25 seconds. Moreover, LM is the highest spot in the battelground, allowing a single player there to see every single move from the opposing team.

The strategy is thus very very simple : take that damn Lumber Mill. I repeat, take that damn Lumber mill, please. Never, ever go to Mine at startup, for this is a loss of precious time and energy, and could cost you the victory. Don't hesitate to tell other people in the battleground at the beginning. Have a macro that says "Farm/Forge/Lumber Mill first". Tell the word. Lead people to the left when portal opens. Click the minimap. If your team fails to understand the easiest way of winning Arathi Basin on the Horde side is to take the Lumber Mill, I'm afraid winning will be extremly hard, if possible.

Golden Rules

Now that you have a strategy to start with, let's get some tips and rules you can't live without in Arathi Basin.

Look at the map, dammit! : Shift+M. Enough said.
Communicate : tell the others when the Alliance is attacking one of your points
Communicate early : tell your mates when the Alliance is en route, not when they have wiped the defenses away and are capturing the flag.
Defend : never, ever leave a point defenseless.
Stay on the flag : when fighting for a flag defense, stay near the flag to prevent capture. Do not let the attackers drag you away.
Keep an eye on the flag : try to interrupt any opponent that tries to capture the flag.
Be ready : nothing to do ? Stay at the backup point (white X on the map), and answer to calls for help.

Sta-bi-li-ty

If you don't own the 3 base points yet, your one and only goal is to get them. Refer to the WoWWiki article if you want to know more about successful capture methods. Once you have the base points, you are in a stable winning situation. You get more resources than the Alliance, thus time is on your side. There is no need to rush anywhere, no need to hurry. Let the Alliance make the first move, let them make the first mistake.

You should never, ever rush for the Stables without the 3 base points, except for a potential ninja. This is even more critical if you don't own the Forge, since players dying at the Stables will respawn very far and lose precious time running around. Rushing the Mine is out of the question too.

Once you have established a stable situation, with 1-2 people defending on each point and someone that announces incoming ennemies, this leaves you with around 8 people to wreak havoc on the Alliance defenses. Those people should stay aware of alerts and be ready to backup as soon as possible. Remember keeping the 3 base points is your most important objective.

If you can successfully manage to make it happen, it's a win. A nice win with Honor Points, Marks and maybe Champagne. And now you've read this article, you can't say you didn't know.