Battlemaster : Conquering the Isle of Conquest

10:51AM on 09 Mar 2010 by shieldbreakr
2 Comments

My quest for Battlemaster has begun again. Unfortunately, I have not restarted it on my death knight**. I have worked these last two weeks getting a mage (my TBC raiding character) from 70 to 80 and ready to hit the (battle)ground running. While not on the Battlemaster pre-requisites list, I have spent a great deal of the past four days in the Isle of Conquest farming honor off the poor alliance and just having a great time with my wife and her warlock. However, like all events Warcraft, a few things stand out to me concerning strategy in the Isle of Conquest. The most concerning point is the disparity of victory between the Horde and Alliance in this particular map.

Over the past weekend, I have enjoyed about fifty games of IoC (29-21). About half of those were played with my wife's warlock and so perhaps the constant presence of my arena partner has skewed my views on this particular battleground, but I think these observations have more to do with overarching strategy than two casters burning down every poor wardering solo that we come across. The first idea is pretty much the simplest: unless you are specifically defending a strategic point (that needs defending), you should always be moving towards the enemy's keep with something to kill a wall. Fundamentally, IoC is about destroying a gate. Ihrayeep has speculated that the map is Horde bias and while I would normally defer to his experience, I must comment that all the gates have the same hitpoints (600,000) and there is a good sniping spot for both the horde and the alliance on the west side and the hanger is gate neutral as you're dropping into the courtyard and have equal access to all three gates. Killing the enemy general is a reward for destroying the gate. Once the gate is down, unless your team is full of addle brained night elves, you will win the game in about a minute. Have no doubt my friends, the team that destroys the first gate wins the game ~95% of the time. Fortunately, there is an arsenal of gate destroying weapons spread out over the Isle that have varying levels of gate destroying potential if used correctly.

First, we have the docks. I mention the docks first because they are pretty much the best node on the map if you intend to finish the game in about eight minutes and leave the opposing team wondering how the hell you did it. Properly used, the glaives put out around 1700 siege DPS (3400 with x2 glaives firing) and have the longest range of anything on the Isle. Their range is so long that when properly positioned, they are immune to the defenders rocket towers. However, like all things with great power, they are incredibly delicate with only 30kHP. This means retadins dropping a golden retriever on the keyboard can kill one before the bubble wears off if the team is not actively working to keep them safe. What this really means is that you need five to eight defenders for each glaive. While 18 units dedicated to firing and defending glaives may seem like a lot, be assured that once both glaives are firing the gates will fall in about 5:48 minutes and this does not scale with gear level, so putting your weakest into the glaives is advisable. Defeating an opponent using the docks as their main avenue towards your base exposes their single point of failure: kill the glaives or lose the game. While generally capped by the Horde in the Nightfall BG, unlike every other node on the map, single handedly holding the Docks and defending the glaives will win you the game in the fastest possible way.



Symmetrically opposing the docks is the hanger. The problem with the hanger which makes it less valuable than the docks is subtle, but manifold. First, you have to defend the hanger flag or the airship returns to base and leaves your paratroopers stranded inside the enemy base. Second, any enemies you kill in the first two minutes of the match will be re-spawning inside your LZ. Third, it requires a great deal of strategy and teamwork to properly coordinate a hanger victory with many moving parts and many single points of failure. Unlike the docks, if your defenders fail to hold the flag, you will lose. If the rest of the team does not concentrate on killing glaives, you will lose. If your paratroopers aren't up to snuff, they will get cut down before they can get to the bombs (and you will lose). If your team is anything like my teams, getting the prerequisite number of people (15) to hit the hanger simultaneously and properly defend/jump/bombard has about the same odds as winning the Pik-an-flik from Barkeep Morag's nose in Orgrimmar. For a proper Orcwaffe* conquering of the Isle, you need 15 people to jump into the airship and four to five left to defend the flag. Only ten need to make the actual jump, as the others should stay in the guns and bombard the little ants in the courtyard. You never know when a falling ball of pure liquid fire will do the 3500 damage needed to finish off a pesky healer (otherwise, they should be shooting the graveyard whenever it is in range). The reason you only need ten to jump is the rate in which huge seaforium bombs spawn: four per twenty seconds. This means you only need four dedicated bomb carriers and a group of six killing the alliance trying to defend. As stated previously, the rest of the group needs to realize you are using a hanger strategy and cap *both* refinery and quarry after killing those glaives. Capping both siege damage bonus nodes will take huge seaforium bomb DPS up to 1700 from 1300, matching the glaive dps. If you do not kill the glaives, you cannot win with just the hanger. It really is that simple.

Lastly, there is the the workshop. If your battlegroup is anything like mine, the workshop is the site of the best grand melee battles available in Warcraft. No other place in the game so greatly encourages the 40 v 40 tactless zerg like a lone flag in the middle of a flood plain. Sure, AV has some good battles for the bridge or at the IBT chokepoint, but nothing compares to the huge field sitting around the workshop flag when both teams are filled with crazed berserkers who think strategy is targeting the red names and dropping a golden retriever on the keyboard. If I am not specifically farming an achievement, I will generally head straight at the workshop in the beginning of the game just to take part in the awesome battle that nets 25-30 HK's for my honor wallet. During the grand melee, a few things seem to always push the battle our way. First, I politely ask for Bloodlust about five seconds after the lines have crossed if it has not been used already since so rarely will the full power of this skill be brought to bear on the enemy outside of a raid. Second, while the alliance seem to still possess way, way more paladins than the horde, their paladins are all retardins who run directly into our lines, start hacking away, and bubble run back when their lifebar gets chopped up. Our shaman, conversely, seem to stand in the back and heal the hell out of our frontline warriors. As a mage, I pay special attention to helping our healers get out of rogue/warrior issues and everything seems to go just peachy. Once we have the flag, leveraging the demolishers is pretty cut and dry: charge the west gate of the alliance keep. I would call the workshop weaponry the potatoes side dish of the IoC dinner plate. It's nice to have, but will rarely win any games alone. Workshop's deficit comes from the fact that the siege engine does the same damage as a single glaive, has no range, and spawns two minutes after the workshop battle has been decided. The real advantage to owning the workshop is controlling the shortest path to the enemy stronghold across the field. Once secure, you can get your re-spawns back into the fight much faster via the graveyard in the middle of the map than the poor alliance spawning at the hanger.

Once you have successfully leveraged the glaives or huge seaforium bombs to knock down a gate in about seven minutes, all of the defenders can conveniently pour right into the courtyard. You did have about fifteen people hanging around the glaives or deployed to the airship, right? Well that is more than enough to go stomp a mud hole in the spot where High Commander Halford Wyrmbane's testicles used to be and to do it quite fast. So, even if you are cursed with five afk'ers and another ten completely useless players in mixed quest rewards, you can still easily win IoC with 15 people working a concerted strategy to take down one target: a gate.

Good luck and good hunting




* "Orcwaffe" is a term coined by Ratshag, author of Need More Rage, for the Horde airborne. It is pretty much the best Orc blog ever written and should already be in your bookmarks.
** I have a confession to make: I have abandoned PvP on my DK. After many months of struggling to make him work, I have pretty much given up. As Euripedes has opined at great length, the fundamental problem is damage. I feel like my job as a DK is to keep everyone snared and attempt to put diseases up. However, ultimately it is just too easy to shrug off diseases in this game, and thus the damage throughput of an Unholy DK is terribly neutered. It is hard enough to fight the crazy healing going on in this game with 8-10k dmg arcane blasts, but with even full powered scourge strikes doing only about half that much damage (when diseases are up), it is getting untenable to continue. Call me a social or a casual, but I feel that pvp is much more enjoyable as just about any other class.

Tags: PvP Battlemaster IsleofConquest

Naeva

11:24AM on 09 Mar 2010

The biggest issue I have with IOC is the bombing. I like pretending I'm Jack Bauer as much as anyone else, but when the alliance is pouring down on me, planting bombs, exactly how am I supposed to walk in there, diffuse a bomb, not get killed by the allies or the bomb itself, which is going to go off, in, say, five seconds. I've never even been able to deactivate one bomb. Not to mention, unless you're going for the achievement, why bother messing with the bombs anyway?

Granted, I'm still a noob to IOC, mainly I just jump in the side car and head wherever the husband decides to drive, jump out, howl of terror, whatever, and dot some people up. It isn't always clear what you should hit and why it's useful.

Add to that there seems to be way more nose picking in this bg than any other, (Well, save AV.. )but when I get in to IOC, it seems like running towards the mass of people is the most fun thing to do. But then what? The BG doesn't really live up after that initial charge, imho.

Anyways, just my thoughts on the BG.

shieldbreakr

11:33AM on 12 Mar 2010

Trying to get "the red wire .. no the blue one" is just about impossible, I agree. Either the enemy owns the courtyard and they are bombing or they don't and no one is even using the bombs. The rare event where alliance owns the workshop (which never seems to happen lately), they are almost always using demolishers and not seaforium. I put it right up there with the steady hands SotA achievement (5 bomb disarms in one game).