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.