Project Lore

Blizzard released some more information on the new battleground that will be coming out in the 3.2. The first thing to really notice is that it is a return to form, of sorts, to the 'bigger' battles. With the release of WotLK we saw the release of Wintergrasp which is only held back by how many players the server can handle (which had a recent change to hopefully alleviate that), alongside the new battleground Strand of the Ancients which was a departure from the typical BG with the inclusion of vehicles. With Isle of Conquest Blizzard is opening a battleground that will support 40 on 40 player battles (the same as Alterac Valley holds). Siege weapons will make an appearance of course (SotA, Wintergrasp), alongside capturable locations (AB, EotS, SotA) which will open access to bigger and better siege weapons. One of the more interesting new vehicles is the Glaive Thrower which sounds as if you can assault the keep walls with it, or load up some friends and shoot them over the walls to engage the enemy directly! The system overall for this battleground seems to be very similar to the new design of AV in that the reinforcements are tied to how many people have died on your side in the battleground. I'm sure this is to prevent those epic seven hour AV sessions that were had before many of the initial changes (oh the good old days). But enough of me talking about the new battleground, why not check out the details Vaneras over at the WoW Europe Forums posted:

An island somewhere off the shores of Northrend. A rock, hardly worth a second look. But as insignificant as it may seem, this is no ordinary place. A sound of thunder as waves crash endlessly against rocky cliffs; a sound of fury as swords clash on the blood-stained fields of this island on the edge of forever. Welcome to the Isle of Conquest. The ongoing struggle between Horde and Alliance has turned many once peaceful (and some not-so peaceful) places into theaters of constant war. The Isle of Conquest is the latest such place, set to be the location of a battle of epic proportions over the island's precious resources. An Alliance and a Horde general are fighting for dominance, overseeing the action from the safety of their keeps. Whichever side manages to eliminate the enemy general first will triumph on the island; failure to protect your leader will bring shame, dishonor, and defeat. There is no peace accord here, and it’s an all-out war between the factions. Once More into the breach... Isle of Conquest, a new battleground scheduled to make its debut in the upcoming content patch, Call of the Crusade, will pitch teams of up to 40 players against each other in a massive battle over this small island off Northrend's northern coast. To win, your team will need to make use of the island's unique strategic locations including an oil derrick, a siege workshop, and a fully equipped airship hangar. You will deploy devastating siege weaponry on the field; Light have mercy on anyone caught between you and your ultimate target, the general holed up in the enemy keep. There are five points of interest on the Isle of Conquest for the factions to battle over. Each one offers its own benefits and strategic value. Which one will you claim for your side, and will it be enough to ensure victory? Capture Locations Consider your options before storming out of your keep to confront the enemy head-on. Spread throughout the Isle of Conquest are several capturable locations (as seen on the map), each granting a unique strategic advantage to your team. The Oil Derrick: Located on the northwestern end of the island, this smudge in the Frozen Sea produces enough black gold to run a thousand siege engines. Taking this resource garners precious reinforcements and a continuous flow of honor to the side that controls it. The Cobalt Mine: This snow-covered assembly, located on the southeastern end of the island, hides untapped supplies that must be harvested. Taking this resource grants reinforcements and a continuous flow of honor to the side that controls it. The Docks: The western shore's docks will further expand your selection of siege weapons with the devastating new Glaive Thrower and the Catapult. Unleash the destruction of the Glaive Thrower upon the walls of the keep, or launch your invading party over the walls to assault the keep from within. The Airship Hangar: This sturdy steel structure stands on the peak of Mt. Conquest overlooking the eastern side of the island, allowing players to board the airship docked there. This devastating weapon of war is capable of raining death upon the heads of your enemies and destroying enemy defenses. Once onboard the airship, players will find it comes equipped with parachutes enabling a strike team to drop into the enemy keep from above. The Siege Workshop: Situated right between the Alliance base and the Horde base, this siege workshop occupies a strategic hot spot. Seizing it grants the controlling party the ability to utilize an arsenal of siege vehicles perfectly suited to reducing the enemy keep’s walls to dust and ashes. Graveyards: There are five graveyards in the Isle of Conquest that are attached to different points of interest on the map: the Horde base, the Alliance base, an oil spill island in the center of the map (attached to the siege workshop), the northeast corner (attached to the airship hangar), and the southwest corner (attached to the docks). Main Objectives The Keeps: The Horde and Alliance keeps sit at opposite ends of the island. These citadels host four easily accessible defensive cannons set on the ramparts, capable of unleashing hot fury onto oncoming attackers. Additional explosives sit safely stowed in the base of the keep along the back wall. At least, they’re safe as long as they don’t fall into enemy hands. If they do, though, they can be employed to bring the stone walls down from within. The General: Holed up behind the keeps' massive walls, the generals command their forces from a position of relative safety. Should the keep fall and the general be slain, the Isle of Conquest will fall to the victor. Reinforcements: Isle of Conquest uses a reinforcements system similar to that of Alterac Valley. The clock is ticking and every individual counts. If too many of your comrades fall to the enemy the battle will end in defeat. Killing enemy players will reduce their reinforcements by one for each kill, Once your faction’s reinforcements reach their limit, so too does your bid for control of the island and the wealth of resources you’ve fought so hard over. An island somewhere off the shores of Northrend. A rock, hardly worth a second look. A test of strength. A chance to prove your might, to crush your enemies, to make a difference, a chance for endless glory and conquest. Will you seize it?

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Patch 3.1 introduced arena season 6. While PvP will likely get a large makeover in 3.2 and the number of arena players is at an all-time low, it isn't difficult to get some good PvP gear to jump into the fray if you are so inclined. The most successful PvP outlets are Lake Wintergrasp and the five battlegrounds, which award large amounts of honor. Players can also now convert arena points to honor by purchasing Commendation of Bravery for 100 (arena points, or AP), awarding 2,000 honor (and allowing you to get a head start in honor between seasons). Any team that plays 10 games a week gets arena points regardless of their rating. For teams below 1500, a 2v2 team will get 261 AP, a 3v3 will get 303 AP, and a 5v5 will get 344 AP. If you are just going for honor rewards, that is the equivalent of 5220, 6060, or 6880 honor respectively. That's a lot of honor for just playing 10 games! Below is the complete list of rewards from honor and arena and their cost. We earlier speculated about this list; this one is the correct and complete one for 3.0.8 and presumably the rest of season 6 and 3.1. Arena required denotes Arena Points, Honor designates Honor Points, Archavon/Emalon designates that those pieces drop from them, and Option Two lists a second exchange rate for some items. Rating is required only if bought with arena/honor/badges. This list does not include gear bought with badges. Later, we will look at the PvP gear available from Wintergrasp.

Item	Honor Required	Rating Required	Arena Required	Archavon Normal	Archavon Heroic	Emalon Normal	Emalon Heroic	Option Two: Honor	Option Two: Arena
Deadly Gladiator’s Wrists	31600	0	0			Yes
Hateful Gladiator’s Gloves	31600	0	0	Yes				7200	200
Hateful Gladiator’s Shoulders	31600	0	0					9600	275
Deadly Gladiator’s Necklace	38000	0	0			Yes
Deadly Gladiator’s Cloak	38000	0	0			Yes
Deadly Gladiator’s Ring	38000	0	0			Yes
Deadly Gladiator’s Belt	49600	0	0			Yes
Deadly Gladiator’s Boots	49600	0	0			Yes
Deadly Gladiator’s Battlemaster Trinket*	49600	0	0
Hateful Gladiator’s Legs	49600	0	0	Yes				12000	350
Hateful Gladiator’s Tunic	49600	0	0	Yes				12000	350
Hateful Gladiator’s Helm	49600	0	0					12000	350
Deadly Gladiator’s Idol/Libram/etc**	6400	1250	350
Deadly Gladiator’s Gloves	7200	1300	400		Yes
Deadly Gladiator’s Legs	12000	1350	700		Yes
Deadly Gladiator’s Tunic	12000	1400	700		Yes
Furious Gladiator’s Wrists	39400	1400	0				Yes
Deadly Gladiator’s Helm	12000	1450	700
Furious Gladiator’s Belt	62000	1450	0				Yes
Deadly Gladiator’s Shoulders	9600	1500	550
Furious Gladiator’s Boots	62000	1500	0				Yes
Furious Gladiator’s Necklace	47400	1550	0				Yes
Furious Gladiator’s Gloves	0	1600	1300				Yes
Furious Gladiator’s Rings	47400	1650	0				Yes
Furious Gladiator’s Legs	0	1700	2150				Yes
Furious Gladiator’s Tunic	0	1750	2150
Furious Gladiator’s Trinket	62000	1800	0
Furious Gladiator’s Offhand	0	1850	1100
Furious Gladiator’s One-hand Weapons (tier 1)**	35000	1850	1200
Furious Gladiator’s Two-hand/Range Weapons (tier 1)**	50000	1850	1400
Furious Gladiator’s Helm	0	1900	2150
Furious Gladiator’s Thrown/Wand/Idol/etc	0	1950	1150
Furious Gladiator’s Shield	0	1950	1950
Furious Gladiator’s Cloak	47400	2000	0				Yes
Furious Gladiator’s Shoulders	0	2050	1750
Furious Gladiator’s Tabard	0	2300	500
Furious Gladiator’s One-hand Weapons (tier 2)***	35000	2350	3000
Furious Gladiator’s Two-hand/Range Weapons (tier 2)***	50000	2350	4250

*designates iLevel 213 items from this list **designates iLevel 232 weapons from this list ***designates iLevel 239 weapons from this list What PvP rewards are you picking up these season? What image should I use for PvP articles; I'm as tired of Murkimus as you are. Make or link one in the comments and maybe you'll see it on the next post!

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To celebrate the 2008 Olympic Games, Blizzard has implemented a couple of fun new rewards for competition in battlegrounds. There is a new tabard that is pretty much a participation ribbon, it is a white tabard with four colored rings on it. In order to get it, all you need to do is run any battleground once and stay until the marks are awarded. You don't have to win, but you need to stay till the bitter end. Afterwards, you'll get the tabard in the mail. Easy, right? In a year, it might be a rare item that you can show off to all of those people who got recruited by their friends who just wanted an exclusive mount. Something that may end up being a little rarer than the tabard is the vanity pet. It is a very cool looking chinese type dragon, and you can summon it using the Gold Medal that you have a chance to receive when you win any battleground. Check your mail after each win if you're one of the many pet collectors. Now you've got even more incentive to keep running those BGs. Don't forget to read up on the basic strategies for each battleground that SaintGermain posted a while back, if you really want a chance at winning that gold medal.

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This is the first of many features about addons I use in order to make Juggy the best shaman ever and Xenophontos a halfway decent warlock. Grid is an addon I used much more while I was resto and main healing, but it is still pretty useful even while I'm enhancement. An Ace addon, grid displays party and raid health bars in a compact form, and it gives loads of information using very little screen real estate. This means that at a glance, you can see how your raid is doing. By default, it displays each party member as a small square within a grid. I think that is where the name came from, but can we ever be sure? One of the great included features of grid are the inverted health bars, meaning it fills up a dim box with color as the player loses health, making it easier to spot who needs healing in a large raid. There is also a built in range check that can automatically dim all player's boxes who are out of range. This feature is invaluable, since trying to heal players who are out of range can waste a lot of time. It's also a great feature for battlegrounds, allowing you to become top healer and help your side win. Lastly, my favorite feature of Grid is its use of the incoming heal module, which shows a visual estimate of any incoming heals on any target in the raid from anyone using Grid (or any other ace addon that has the incoming heal feature). If all of the healers use this addon, you can avoid a lot of overhealing. There are also border colors, center icon, and other corner icons that are configurable to show tons of different statuses of each player in the raid. I do like to make a couple of tweaks to the defaults, though. I play on a relatively high resolution, and I find the default size of the squares too small. So, I scale it up in the options. As a shaman, I have two dispel options, poison and disease. The standard set up has all types of debuffs appear as a single mark in one corner of the player's box. I go in and change it so that magic debuffs and curses don't show up and poisons are in one corner while diseases are in another. That way I know which button to press or totem to drop in order to cure all of my party members. I also like to be able to see when Dorkins is going to run out of mana, so I've picked up GridManaBars. This takes a slice of the square and turns it into a mana bar. Imagine that! Most of the other options are fine for me on their default settings, but Grid is highly flexible, so play around and look at the documentation to find the settings that work best for you.

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I wish to gawd that people would learn how to play battlegrounds. It's hard enough to spend a weekend getting 12K honor points to get a nice new belt or something but to have freakin' morons f'kup AV by not know what the hell to do or what the real objective is really, really pisses me off! The game on a PvP server is frustrating enough so I don't have time for people who continually fail. So listen up all you people who don't know what the hell you're doing in AV and, for those that do, point your lame NooB friends and guildies to this post so we can clear this BS up once and for all. First let's focus on the goal of Alterac Valley. The goal is simple: to reduce the opposing team's resources to zero. Period. If you kill the enemy general, that team's resources go to zero instantly and you win. Got it? Enemy captains can be killed reducing resources by 100. Capturing a tower reduces their resources by 75. Capturing a mine gives your team 1 resource per 45 sec. Turning in various supplies quests increase you teams resources. Killing an enemy player reduces their resources by 1. Wait. What was that? Killing an enemy player reduces that teams resources by 1? Only 1? YES! Only freakin' 1 damn point. Damn it people listen up here. Caping a tower gets you 75 point reduction in their resources AND more honor points while wasting time ganking people or chasing after runners to try and kill them only, ONLY gets you 1 point reduction in their resources!! Sure you get 1 point reduction in the other team's resources and slight satisfaction for pwnin some Noob tart with the skills of a baby Murlock but that is a far weaker return for effort than say... KILLING THE ENEMY GENERAL! DO YOU FREAKIN GET IT YET?!?! So listen up all you noobs: here's how to win AV for the last freakin time. 1. Cap the towers. 2. Keep three people at each til they cap. 3. Take every graveyard you can all the way to to the opposing side's base. 4. Wait til all towers cap. 5. Kill the general. NOW stop pissing me off NooBs and go and freakin' win AV!

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Great... Season 4 is here, along with a new patch which I am sure to rant about tomorrow, but for now let's all remain focused: Season 4 gear. There has always been two basic games in WoW: kill monsters or kill players, more commonly known as PvE or PvP. And Blizzard has done their best to keep the gear rewards for both sides of this dynamic as balanced as possible... mostly. With Season 4 gear PvP seems to have stepped up a little bit, namely you have to do arena to get the best PvP gear. Period. Usually you could do AV until your eye's bleed or until your voice shriveled into oblivion from screaming at the screen 'cuz most people have no freakin' idea what to do in battlegrounds. But still, with the right combination of battleground weekends, and if you were lucky, a few premades along the way, within a few months ( yes, MONTHS ) you could have a decent set of PvP gear suitable to get your ass kicked just a little less in all those battlegrounds you just spent your life doing. ( Anyone else see the futility of this? ) But now, not only do you have to do all of that all over again to get honor points and marks and new Season 4 gear, you have to have a personal arena rating to get certain items. Holy crap! Okay, yes, I have four of five vengeful pieces. I also have some other fun PvP gear, but those damn shoulders keep alluding me. That personal rating was just to much of a personal time commitment to get - all freakin' weekend trying to wack people, figure out their possible tactics against me and hoping to get a lucky crit off now and again to fry someone just to move my personal rating up 17 points. Damn it sucked. And I guess it will again. Oh well... I'm off to arena...

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Okay... maybe not you... but there a re a huge number of people who have no freakin' idea how to play Eye of the Storm battleground. And why is this important? Because if you want to get your classes PvP boots, neck or weapon, you'll have to get a lot of these Marks. And with season 4 upon us, you'll also have to do arena, but that's a different blog. Here's the two strats that I have seen work best in EotS:

1. Hold two towers and control the middle. Period. Don't go for other towers or get pulled away by enticing PvP kills. Just defend the towers and keep taking the flag.
2. Hold three towers and defend. Period. Don't go for other towers or get pulled away by enticing PvP kills. Just defend the three towers.

That's it. Do one of those - NOT BOTH - and you'll get your marks. EotS is not a gankfest like AV or Warsong can deteriorate into from time to time. You must defend your position and hold it to secure a win. And EotS IS NOT capture the flag. That is a silly diversion to keep you away from your real objective of taking and defending the towers. Now go do suggestion 1 or 2 - NOT BOTH - and go get yourself some pretty little PvP boots.

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