Thursday, August 6, 2009

Isle of Conquest

One of the first things that I did after my realms was finally up was to head to the new battleground, Isle of Conquest. There certainly seemed to be a lot of qq'ing in battleground chat, but I for one thoroughly enjoy it. I worked to get the victory achievement on both of my level 80's the first night. I like the multiple resource and attack strategy element. It seems to combine a lot of the things that I really like about Alterac Valley and Arathi Basin with some aspects of Wintegrasp even. The hangars and the flying attack vehicles are definitely one of my favorites, although I'm never sure exactly how much damage I'm doing when shooting from those.

There seem to be a lot of disagreements over strategy on this one at the moment. The zerg the middle and capture the workshop, then pound away at the gates strategy seems to work pretty well some of the time. Others swear that capturing the hangar and then parachuting folks into the keep and taking down the gates from the inside with Seaforium bombs is the best way to go.

I haven't heard anyone yet argue that capturing the docks is especially crucial, but could definitely see the catapults being used in combination with the parachute from the airship strategy being particularly effective. Also, the glaive throwers are a ton of fun. I haven't figured out their value strategically yet, but holy crow are they a blast. Let's throw giant spinning knives as people that do personnel and siege damage! Sign me up!

The one main thing at the moment is there seems to be some confusion about what it takes to actually win this one, and on that point, this one is exactly like AV - you kill the other team's general, you win. So you don't have to get down the main gate to the enemy keep, just the interior gate, and there are seaforium bombs inside their keep that can be used for that purpose. Then, inside the interior and up the stairs and it becomes a typical tank and spank, just like AV. So a combination airship / parachute / catapult strategy could definitely work without ever capturing the workshop.

I could also see this battleground becoming a great one for farming honorable kills as folks tend to clump in the middle. Finally, if you're one of those squishy types (like my warlock) that feel like you never get to capture anything, the quarry and the oil refinery on this one are isolated enough that it's not unusual at all for those to be completely unguarded so can quite often be an easy cap - even for a squishy!

After hearing some of Ghostcrawler's recent comments about focusing more on battlegrounds and trying to produce more new battlegrounds, if Isle of Conquest is what we have to look forward to - I'll be looking forward to the next installments.

One thing on this one though is that it doesn't seem to generate quite as much honor as a good Alterac Valley or Strand of the Ancients can generate. I'm not sure if Blizzard isn't giving as much credit for various objectives or for final victories, but most of my battles, even victories, have finished with under 1,000 honor. I've heard others claim as much as 2-3,000 honor from a single Isle of Conquest battle, but I haven't seen anything close to that yet.

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