by Hotstreak - 10 years ago     show comments

Ashran, the big PvP zone that’s getting added into Warlords of Draenor was just recently made available for testing on the beta servers. While it has potential, I feel like Blizzard has missed the mark a little bit with Ashran. Ashran is meant to be a PvP zone where there is always something happening. Whether it be a big battle between the two factions or a smaller band of players that are going for the PvE side objectives to try and strengthen their faction’s push to the enemies base.

While that all sounds great on paper, none of the side objectives or side bosses help at all with Ashran’s main underlying problem.

Ashran’s Main Problem

Currently, Ashran is a giant two-way zerg, in one lane, until one faction’s reinforcements are depleted. Once one faction’s reinforcements are depleted, a thirty second timer appears which counts down until the next battle and that’s it. As it stands, there isn’t any sort of goal in Ashran other than beating the other faction’s face in until they run out of resources and that is a problem. There isn’t really much going on in the middle of a battle other than a one lane tug of war.

The side objectives don’t really impact the battle at all really. One objective in particular is the Ogre King, if your faction defeats him he will fight for your faction and help push the lane until he’s defeated. Which again sounds good on paper but the Ogre King just simply isn’t a powerful enough NPC to really have any sort of impact on the battlefield. There isn’t really any point to do the side objectives other than to farm them for Artifact Fragments.

Artifact Fragments are looted from the various creatures at each objective. You collect them to use as currency in order to summon more powerful NPC’s for your faction to help with the war effort. But these NPCs suffer from the same problem that the Ogre King does, they are simply not strong enough to impact the battle. They are immediately focused by the other faction and brought down with little to no effort. Resulting in a battle that consists of nothing but a big zerg fest.

How Can Ashran Be Improved?

There absolutely needs to be some sort of objective or goal to the whole Ashran battle. There needs to be a reason to win and it needs to hurt to lose. Take Wintergrasp or Tol Barad for example, they weren’t perfect by any means (in fact Tol Barad was pretty lame} but at least you were fighting for something. If your faction lost a battle in Wintergrasp or Tol Barad, then you didn’t get to do the raid that was inside of them or you didn’t get access to the zone exclusive vendors that gave rewards. You simply just got kicked out of the zone until the next battle. There needs to be a reward for winning and a penalty for losing.

Currently, the only actual “goal” that seems to be present is to get into your enemies base and take down their general. These generals act as a Conquest PvP gear vendor(I’m not sure if these will be the only Conquest Gear vendors in WoD or not). But the issue with this is I haven’t even seen this get anywhere close to happening. Mostly because there are narrow bridges connecting the faction bases to the battlefield, so what ends up happening is you have over a hundred people clashing on these bridges resulting in a reinforcement drain or a stalemate.

It’s near impossible to get into the other factions base but if your faction does, then player kills no longer drain reinforcements if they happen inside the base. The NPCs inside of the bases are also too much of a hassle to take out a long with the one hundred other players attacking your team. Now if this is the goal of the battle on Ashran, that’s fine. But there needs to be more incentive to achieving it other than faction wide bragging rights. Make those faction generals stay dead for a good while and reward the other team for taking them out with Gear, Conquest, or Honor. Design it so each faction really doesn’t want their general dead but really want the rewards from taking out the other factions general.

The side objectives need to be more impactful and worth fighting over. Like I said above, these objectives aren’t worth doing because they have little to no impact on the outcome of the battle. Ogre King needs to be harder to defeat and in return, much more threatening to the opposing faction. Maybe they can change how Ogre King works by only making him available to fight if you control certain objectives. For example, whoever controls the points and defeats him gets rewarded by having a very threatening and powerful Ogre King fight by their side.

The only somewhat useful objectives right now are the graveyards that spawn you closer to the enemy base. Ashran’s side objectives need to be more engaging and more meaningful than they currently are. Take towers for example, each faction has a tower near the end of their lane but from what I can see it doesn’t really do anything. So where’s the gameplay in that? Make those towers a threat and make players want to destroy them. Another suggestion that I have seen is to put some tower objectives around the map to be captured or destroyed and to make those towers vital to the other team. If there is meaningful and impactful gameplay to the side objectives, it will get more players out of the middle lane and more spread throughout the continent.

Something will need to be done to take the focus off of zerging the middle lane every single battle only to end in a stalemate, or players will get very bored with it very quickly.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

With the issues that Ashran has, keep in mind that it was just released and there is still plenty of time to improve it and to potentially make it the best world PvP experience in a long while. I really like the Ashran continent, it’s art, and the atmosphere of the zone. I also think it has a lot of potential to be a really fun PvP experience. But it has some issues, and I don’t think the issues are anything that can’t be fixed with the proper amount of feedback.

Just remember to keep giving Blizzard feedback about the implementation of features so that they can make WoD the best possible experience for everyone when the Dark Portal is open for adventuring.