World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor seems like it will be a good expansion for PvP. Blizzard is trying to bring back to the old school by making a world PvP zone that is similar to the old Alterac Valley, redesigning the UI, and adding in a new feature called the Trial of the Gladiator. They are also giving new players more incentive to wet their feet in the river of PvP blood.
Keeping Score and User Interface Changes
Anyone who has played a significant amount of PvP knows that the current scoreboard system in World of Warcraft is kind of bogus. You can see how much damage you’ve done, how much healing you’ve done, how many killing blows you’ve landed, etc. but you can’t combine all that into a meaningful number. With the release of Warlords of Draenor, however, you can do just that.
Players will have a Battleground Score that gives them a concrete assessment of just how well they did by combining everything they have done to contribute to the match into one easy-to-find number.
Not only is the score tracking being improved upon, but so is objective tracking: there will be objective timers viewable when you open the battleground map and you can keep track of objective captures by viewing the flag fill up over time as seen in the picture above. This will give players more ways to keep track of their objectives without them needing to use add-ons.
More Rewards
Over the course of the game’s history, the developers have seem to adapt to a player’s need to receive rewards for what they do. Even if it’s something small, frequent rewards motivate many players to keep playing a mode type. PvP is one area of the game that has lacked in rewards for players that aren’t very good at battlegrounds or arenas.
In order to give these players a bit of encouragement and to give even good players a nice little treat, getting a victory in a battleground will sometimes lead to a random reward. These rewards run the range of anything from a bind-on-equip item that can be sold at the AH to a PvP set piece, or even a PvP consumable.
Trial of the Gladiator
The first of the two big additions to PvP in the new Draenor expansion is the Trial of the Gladiator. Players that are looking to get serious about honing their arena skills are going to benefit heavily from this: players can purchase all the gear, gems, and enchants they need for PvP from a vendor and duke it out with their opponents in tournament rule arena matches. All the gear of equivalent quality so that players can compete with skill and not item level.
This new Warlords of Draenor system takes after the Arena Tournament realms. If you play in aforementioned realm type, you know that many players exploit the rating system and fix matches with their friends to climb the ladder.
Blizzard is addressing the issue by making matches to earn rating available only during specific times. This will make it easier to check for rating exploitation in Warlords of Draenor than it was in previous expansions.
Players will still be able to play in the Trial of the Gladiator outside of these times, it just affect rating.
Ashran, the World PvP Zone
Take some of the old school Alterac Valley battleground and Southshore world PvP, mix it with Wintergrasp and Tol Barad and you will get the second biggest addition to PvP in Warlords of Draenor: Ashran.
Ashran is an island on Draenor, off the coast of the Tanaan Jungle where players can take part in non-stop world PvP action. In an effort to build upon the non-stop action of old school PvP like 24 hour Alterac Valley matches, Ashran will be a zone with never-ending PvP. You can drop in at any time and even before level 100, although you will probably be killed mercilessly.
There will be objectives that players can fulfill and these can change at a moment’s notice. You could be on your way in one of the new faction-based or Iron Horde siege weapons, ready to take out the enemy’s base when all of a sudden your faction needs you back at yours to build up fortifications.
There is no player cap in this new Warlords of Draenor PvP zone. This means that you could have as many bodies littering the battlefield as the server itself will allow. In order to make sure that the fight remains balanced, Ashran employs cross-realm technology.
