One problem remains, though: the rewards do not provide anything even near commensurate to the effort of winning the actual conflict. It looks like a war, and feels like one, and in the World of WarCraft we can consider this an important addition to the PvP environment. Ashran, to me, does not represent much in the way of “skill” it’s more like the ability to have fun all day just trying to kill some people on the other side. Things tend to go back and forth when it gets good, and just about anyone can have fun. The battle progresses in stages, as each faction needs to kill a specific amount of people to progress to the next stage. People keep dying, respawning, and trying to push the other faction back to their base through spawns, camping, special NPC spawns, new item books (which enhance your default abilities just in Ashran), items that summon huge beasts to turn the tide of battle, and just about everything else you could imagine. All fighting takes place on a central Road to Glory, and the level terrain gives no strategic advantages to either faction (each base even has a narrow bridge and several chokepoints! Yay!).įrankly, every single Ashran battle descends into total chaos almost immediately. The further into enemy territory you go, the more people of the other faction you need to kill. The asymmetry really does not matter, as there’s no capping of points – just kill totals.

Pump the numbers up to 100 versus 100, while also throwing new character abilities and random events in the mix, and Blizzard crafted a recipe for success. Ashran, for all intents and purposes, replaces the nostalgia of the original Alterac Valley with yet another endless battlefield where weird stuff happens, people can do quests outside of the battle to tip the scales, and everyone fights on the road.

Before we go onto fixing any of this, though, I just want to note the weird outlier in World of WarCraft and Warlords of Draenor’s PvP rebalancing: Ashran.

Ashmaul strongbox