Doing all the Tanaan Jungle dailies and raiding Hellfire Citadel are pretty fun in Warlords of Draenor, but even after patch 6.2, there’s one thing that’s just not shaping up as intended: the large PvP island Ashran. In an upcoming patch, a new feature called “Mercenary Mode” that allows players to join the battle for the opposite faction. It might shake things up a bit.
This is actually really good news. PvP is still fun in World of Warcraft, but some maps feel a bit broken, abandoned or unbalanced. There are more than a dozen PvP battlegrounds in the game, so it’s not that surprising. However, Ashran, the big new max level zone with really cool level 100 rewards, is one of them. People usually have to wait an hour or so to get in, and when they’re finally there, the battle is so unbalanced that it just doesn’t worth the wait. Ashran got a few tweaks in patch 6.2, but the queue is still huge. So a change like this might be pretty cool.
Here’s what Blizzard shared about this new feature and how it will work:
In an upcoming patch, we’ll be adding a feature that allows you to act as a mercenary for the opposite faction in PvP. Whenever your faction is experiencing a long wait time to get into Ashran or unrated Battlegrounds, agents of the enemy faction will appear in your base in Ashran (Stormshield for the Alliance, Warspear for the Horde). These agents will allow you to enter Ashran or Battlegrounds disguised as an enemy player, and actually fight as the opposite faction.
When you compete as a mercenary, you’ll still earn all the same rewards you would have by winning or losing as your own faction (with the exception of faction-specific achievements). You’ll also have your race automatically changed into one appropriate for the opposite faction while you’re still inside the Battleground or Ashran. Perhaps most importantly, however, you’ll experience much shorter queue times, as our matchmaking system will be able to fill up groups much quicker!
Comments
16 responses to “World Of Warcraft’s PvP Is Getting A Big Change”
PvP stopping being interesting when it was no longer just your own server.
I understand why they did it… it works for instance queues, but it ruined the feel of group PvP. Open world, or even instance games, had a certain epicness when you knew the strengths of your team, and who the most dangerous players on the other side were. The second I stopped recognising the names of my team mates / enemies, I stopped having much fun.
That and heirlooms.
Exactly. Cross realm and LFG tool both helped ruin this once amazing game. There’s nothing social about WoW anymore. Log in, press button, get epics then wait for the reset to do it again, all without communicating with anyone.
“But I pay my $15 a month and I don’t want to deal with other players! I demand to see ALL the content and get ALL the stuff!”
Why not just play a single player RPG?
i agree it ruined it but blizzard more than any other company knows when the community needs something it may not like. the player base is too casual and too fragmented across other MMOs now that it’s the only way to keep people interested. it’s why wildstar failed. we wanted the hardcore raiding experience but when it comes down to it nobody has time to organise 40 man groups and wipe continuously for minor amounts of progress. they let us have what we wanted and it didn’t work, at all.
Wildstar was 4-5 years too late IMO and an optimized mess.
As someone who only played during the pre-expansion era, that is sad to hear. It was a real hoot sometimes to encounter other people on your server in-game and in the forums who had distinct personalities and playing styles and also to see rivalries develop. I can definitely see why cross-server PvP killed the enjoyment for you.
I just joined a private vanilla server called Nostalrius Begins. So much more people grouping and actually talking, questing and leveling can actually kill you and takes concentration. I played through vanilla myself and really missed it. This new feature sounds silly, the reason pvp sucks at the moment is more to do with lack of actual interesting pvp itself and the way pvp itemization works now. PVP should have stayed as a skill based thing not a gear based thing. Blizzard have taken people complaining about things being hard as a sign they need to nerf it but now there’s no sense of accomplishment in anything. Playing vanilla again really reinforces how the game was still fun even when under level 60, you still had challenging content for your level designed to engage you rather than just to level you. Now I go from 90-100 without anyone talking to me and with every quest soloable and every dungeon just nuke everything.
so much more lag, bugs and limited content. Not to mention the trolls, gold spam and pay to win shenanigans.
There’s an aussie hosted server Called Vanilla243 you should check out.
No pay to win, every raid up to Naxx implemented and working, runs on patch 2.4.3 but is entrely vanilla.
Bring your friends and help it grow!!
Oh I remember those days. Lvl 40 Freaking mounts that you couldnt afford unless you had a lvl 60 toon, or you were leveling a pally.
Level 40 mounts weren’t too bad if you had someone tell you to save your money while levelling. Level 60 ones were hard.
Yeah I think everything was hard back in those days :P. I do remember locks having a cry about their class mounts because if you didnt do herb gathering you were stuck with buying those expensive as hell mushys off the AH. Man those were the days.
I liked the class quests, Warrior ones were fun getting stances. I remember the rogue one petered out with no resolution though, at one point you went to the rogue manor but it was just unfinished content.
Yeah so it wasnt just me but the Ravenholdt questline did just finish, I thought I might have missed something. I agree with you the warrior questline was cool, My particular favorite was getting beserker stance on that island of pit fighters.
Yeah that content is all removed now. They introduced a lot of good new features but the focus is far too slanted on leveling content just being there to get you to 100 instead of being fun game play while leveling.
Could you imagine if blizzard actually decided they were going to run dedicated servers for Vanilla wow or BC Expac. I think that would be awesome and players could still just jump on the recent server lists and when they feel bored or whatever they could then jump on one of the older servers. Seems legit to me anyway.
Id love it but they claim they don’t have any of the original code they need left to support it