Cataclysm BG Imbalances

Farewell WOTLK, may you rest in piece with some of the features you brought with you. You brought us Death Knights and times of cleave, cleave that involved several animals and a bunch of totems. Armour, jk arp arp arp, the stat that brought warriors out of the slums of fury spec and into the spotlight as arp heroes. Times of wizardry where only the people living in the biggest of tunnels were able to show themselves as the true victors of this expansion. Indeed WOTLK brought us many features that we will hopefully never have to experience again. The future? It looks bright, many of these issues being fixed or just being plain unviable to play in the same style with the state of Cataclysm. Welcome to a new era friends.

So I'm sure many people are now suffering from the fatigue and tiredness of leveling like myself and are now beginning to prepare for the next season of arena ahead of us and the rated bgs that people have been clamouring for since vanilla. Now with rated bgs on the way and some things still not having been done I have a few concerns about them which in my opinion will prove to be rather large issues in the first season.

One of them is the constant bracket size changing, shifting teams between 10 and 15 players when most realms barely have 15 people capable of performing at a high enough level to compete with the top teams is going to cause a number of things. Drama, hard feelings and some rather irritated left out people who are now forced to pug the rest. I don't see why this approach was taken with the constant rotation rather than rebalancing every BG for a 10v10 or 15v15 experience, or even just allowing players to choose what BG they want to play each week.

Now my main concern with rated BGs in their current state is map imbalance, while they've removed AV from the map pool as 25v25 was going to be rather ridiculous to try organise and the map was incredibly imbalanced. But in spite of the removal of AV there's several other maps which are going to suffer from large imbalances based on start points.

Twin Peaks

To start with I'll take a look at the Cataclysm BG Twin Peaks, a 10v10 CTF map. While both bases have 3 entrances, the south base is accessible by water, what this creates is an easy escape route for any druids/rogues who want to grab the flag and sprint away with their superior swim speed/water walking with sprint glyph. Not only this but the frontal assaults are completely different for both bases. The south base has a narrow choke which will lead to people being knocked into the water if they attempt to push up it. The north base however has a wide ramp to access it directly. Having an easily attackable front or an easily ninjable flag will provide different playstyles depending on which spawn a team gets but most likely in favour of one team, the base that will be favourable though will only be seen with some proper matches being played.

Arathi Basin

AB reminds me a lot of the HON/DotA map, ever lost a rune that spawned at bottom because the Legion ramp gives them a far shorter travel time? Welcome to the issue for people spawning north wanting to easily defend the LM/BS/ST combo that will be the prime 3 nodes that you want to hold. Having a ramp that is on the GM side is a large problem as I very much doubt there will always be a DK to hand to path of frost people across the water (yes you can jump on boxes but it's undeniably slower than running across a ramp). This doesn't even take into account the fact that LM being a high ground node is infinitely superior from a defensive perspective for any teams wanting to hold BS, as while you can reinforce BS to GM easily, it's far more likely that BS is the node you want to keep. What needs to be done is not only should the map be mirrored with both the GM and LM being high ground, the bridges should also be shifted to a central posistion with the bridge at the farm that leads to GM also being removed so that there is only a moat around the BS that contains water. I would also remove the back entrance to the BS, my own version of AB would look something like this -

Strand of the Ancients

This BG quite simply, should not even be in the map pool. This http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/859358779 thread outlines most of the reasons but for those who don't want to read through 27 pages of players against SotA I'll give you a brief overview. I don't have much faith in it being removed, just that it'll become the ROV of rated BGs that gets fix after fix after fix rather than someone admitting that it's not well designed and should not be in the game.

Vehicles don't belong in PVP

Making vehicles move at stupid speeds but be snarable and rootable is not the solution (this is what they did in response to peoples concerns about SotA)

Every match between competitive teams will either end in a draw, or end in 2 minutes. This is because achieving that magic balance of HP where the demos are able to survive will result in the latter, whereas any other situation will result in the former as every demo dies before it gets through the yellow gate resulting in a draw.

It's completely ranged biased, not only is their damage bugged when they're a passenger (possibly ignoring resilience), but melee cannot get close to a demo when it has a ranged dps class of which the player still has working fingers

Please voice your concerns in the above thread and support the fact that this BG should not be in the map pool, hey if we're lucky ROV might go with it.

The other BGs that we're presented with, those being WSG and EOTS are fairly balanced simply due to the fact that they follow the simple formula of mirroring the map for both sides (I didn't forget "Battle for Gilneas", I just don't know enough about the BG to see if it's imbalanced). Considering this is a practice adopted in every competitive RTS would it of been so hard to fix the few imbalanced maps for the start of the next season? Releasing a new bg with glaring imbalances is also not really something that looks too great for the overall balancing of maps in the future. Despite all of this blizzard have said they will fix it, just not when.

I don't think that the imbalances on the maps will be quite so glaring at the start while teams are still developing solid tactics. However, when the metagame develops and the level of play increases these small things will begin to make a difference and we may even see situations such as certain SC2 matchups that change the win % of a map completely based on the spawn location (TVZ close vs far posistions on Meta for example). Oh well even if the bases are a little imbalanced it should at least be a lot of fun and is definately something to look forward to next week, if anyone is struggling with the last boss of Vortex Pinnacle the video below has the tactics for him, I advise skipping through the first 90 seconds to get to them though. Karuki out.