1.6 Leaked Patch Notes

[nobbie]

And here is the official info from Blizzard's "Under Development" page:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/

[Quark]

Well, one idea here is that I did many Baron runs, but not many with a group where I knew all the players and they were experienced there. In the case of gargoyle Fear then, all the "should happens" fall out the window with pickups, because trust me, it's only a matter of time before you see them screw up. In that case, at least, WotF wins out - you're not depending upon someone else at all.

But yes, certainly, if people are playing well, the Fear from those gargoyles should never be an issue.

[vor_lord]

Pretty much all priests in hard-core guilds should be asked to reroll dwarf priests.  Dwarf priests are so overpowered now relatively speaking.  I hope that Fear Ward gets reduced to a 30 second duration or something, because now that WOTF has been nerfed, Fear Ward is just over the top.
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Isn't fear ward dispellable?

[Thawwing Light]

Well from the alliance perspective on Bronzebeard i'd give the horde the bonus of an improved WotF if i didnt have to wait 3+ hours just to get into a Warsong Gulch match.&nbsp; As it is the horde side has < 5 minute waits at almost all times while the alliance has 2+ hour waits almost all the time.&nbsp; I have yet to get into a BG match for only this reason.&nbsp; I sat in the waiting line for 3 hours last night before i gave up and went to bed.&nbsp; (and this is on a monday night after midnight.)&nbsp; This is an issue that Blizzard is going to have to resolve at some point.&nbsp; I'm not sure if they have the ability to merge Battlegrounds for multiple servers IE DAoC, but something will need to be done.
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It's not pure peaches and roses for the horde - we still get queues. 40 minutes tops, generally, but my average wait isn't <5min, it's more like 15 min. You may call it horrifically annoying. I agree it is. It's as annoying as having to deal with overwhelming odds for the longest time where the average fight with the Alliance meant 2 of them for every 1 of you. Fair? It's not fair either.

They need to find a way to give the players a compelling reason to pick the undermanned side. If that ever becomes Alliance, they should make it so that population balances back.

[Chesspiece_face]

It's not pure peaches and roses for the horde - we still get queues. 40 minutes tops, generally, but my average wait isn't <5min, it's more like 15 min. You may call it horrifically annoying. I agree it is. It's as annoying as having to deal with overwhelming odds for the longest time where the average fight with the Alliance meant 2 of them for every 1 of you. Fair? It's not fair either.

They need to find a way to give the players a compelling reason to pick the undermanned side. If that ever becomes Alliance, they should make it so that population balances back.
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that was my whole point to begin with. If giving WotF would instigate more people to play as undead, or just horde in general, i would be fine with it since i wouldn't have to wait for 4 hours just to get into a CTF match that closes down after 5 minutes cause there is only 2 horde players there. Speaking of which, I Finally got into a match today. Entered the queue around 4:30/5 and didn't get to play the match untill after 9. The match was a blowout cause there was only 5 horde versus our 10. Then after waiting another 3+ hours I bounced into the above mentioned oh-so-happy 2v10 that closed out after the 5 minutes.

[Skandranon]

On Tichondrius, at least, it's rare to find an undead Warrior, since the Tauren and Orc racial abilities are generally considered superior.&nbsp; Undead warriors are rare enough that I've heard people describe someone as, "Mick, you know, that undead warrior...".
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On Stormrage, undead everything is the norm, with a couple tauren shaman and warriors thrown in for good measure. A typical Warsong Gulch match will pair you against six undead, three tauren and one troll or orc. Priests are almost 100% undead, rogues well over 80% undead, and warriors at least 40%.

[Raelynn]

Blizzard also said they weren't going to give wands autoshoot, they weren't going to wait until content patches to fix bugs, and that there were to be no new ruleset servers implemented.
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Point taken :D

[MongoJerry]

And here is the official info from Blizzard's "Under Development" page:

Got a bit of a scoop from a GM friend: The Blizzard developers are actively working on linking the battlegrounds from different realms to one another. That way, there will be a much larger pool of players playing in the BG's. So, players on low-population servers will no longer be punished for playing on low population servers. Also, even those players who are on high population servers will have many more BG instances to choose from. Heck, maybe guilds will be able to make large raids and enter the BG's as a group? One can hope. Anyway, this is something that they're almost done with. They're just working on how to deal with naming conflicts and other such issues.

Hmmm... just thinking out loud here, but I wonder if that means there will be a cross-realm economy developing soon.

By the way, the GM friend didn't say, but I would guess that one would only play against other realms of the same type. That is, if one played on a PvP server, then one would only fight against players on other PvP servers, and so on.

[Quark]

The Blizzard developers are actively working on linking the battlegrounds from different realms to one another.
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Let me just say:

WOOHOO!

This was my pipe dream when I first saw the queues in Battlegrounds. I thought Blizzard wouldn't do it for various reasons. Thankfully I was wrong.

[lemekim]

Got a bit of a scoop from a GM friend:  The Blizzard developers are actively working on linking the battlegrounds from different realms to one another.  That way, there will be a much larger pool of players playing in the BG's.  So, players on low-population servers will no longer be punished for playing on low population servers.  Also, even those players who are on high population servers will have many more BG instances to choose from.  Heck, maybe guilds will be able to make large raids and enter the BG's as a group?  One can hope.  Anyway, this is something that they're almost done with.  They're just working on how to deal with naming conflicts and other such issues.

Hmmm... just thinking out loud here, but I wonder if that means there will be a cross-realm economy developing soon.

By the way, the GM friend didn't say, but I would guess that one would only play against other realms of the same type.  That is, if one played on a PvP server, then one would only fight against players on other PvP servers, and so on.
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When there is a will, there is a way.

Now, if only they made added some ranking system to the interrealm Battlegrounds, and it would really make it great. =)

And maybe you know, name the new interrealm guild battle system something... Maybe "Guild Wars"! (just kidding on this one).

[Thawwing Light]

Let me just say:

WOOHOO!

This was my pipe dream when I first saw the queues in Battlegrounds.&nbsp; I thought Blizzard wouldn't do it for various reasons.&nbsp; Thankfully I was wrong.
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Awesome! This means my warrior may, by pure chance, fight alongside some people from Tichondrius some day... He's horde and on a PvP server.

The scary thought is I may pull my friend's guild, where he plays a NElf druid. He's a master strategist, and thoroughly thrashes me in this sort of thing.

...

That said... I don't think this is going to fix ANYTHING for the Alliance.

That's right. I just said that. I'm sorry, but if they populations are universally skewed in favor of the alliance, then this isn't going to fix the problem. The only boost will be thefact all servers will be equally screwed by the unbalanced populations, and the high-pop servers will help balance out the low pop servers' lack of players period.

If I could see something mathematical that would prove this is going to improve the wait times for the alliance, I'd like to see it. Until then, I think this will just make things equally bad across the board.

[oldmandennis]

Got a bit of a scoop from a GM friend:&nbsp; The Blizzard developers are actively working on linking the battlegrounds from different realms to one another.&nbsp;

Heck, maybe guilds will be able to make large raids and enter the BG's as a group?&nbsp; One can hope.

Hmmm... just thinking out loud here, but I wonder if that means there will be a cross-realm economy developing soon.

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Interesting.... In my opinion, each team should come from only one server, that way you aren't playing with COMPLETE strangers.

Also, that way you don't open up back chanels for covert trading, which would be a bad idea I think. The economy here seems much more stable, and I don't know what would happen if inter-server trading was allowed... the first thing I could think of is chinese farmers over running the low pop servers for crystals, etc. for sale on bigger servers.

This would help the problem of lines a LITTLE, because there are actually servers that have more horde then alliance.

On my, medium pop server, our guild was able to enter AV as a nearly 40 man group, it only took about 10 min.

[Taakal]

Isn't fear ward dispellable?
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So it would appear.

[MongoJerry]

So it would appear.

But not on a practical level. I always cast dispell magic on opposing priests a couple of times to get rid of buffs, but if a rogue unstealths and backstabs you, etc., there isn't time to target the rogue, dispell magic, and then hope to get a psychic scream off. You'd be long dead and/or restunned long before that happened.

If Blizzard made it a 30 second buff, though, I think that would balance. That way a dwarf priest could still keep tanks fear-free. Plus, if a dwarf priest managed to time it so that they got a Fear Ward cast on a rogue during battle, I don't have a problem with that -- teamwork that requires some skill is good. What I don't like the idea of is a dwarf priest being able to anti-fear buff multiple members of his or her party prior to an engagement.

[Quark]

That said... I don't think this is going to fix ANYTHING for the Alliance.
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Oh, it might not be great, but it'll fix something. On Stormrage, we haven't had an Alterac Valley instance in over a week. We used to be the highest population PvE server, though I don't know if that's true anymore.

[kandrathe]

Edit: Grrr. Wrong place. This was in reply to Mongo Jerry's GM friend's info.

Hmmm... just thinking out loud here, but I wonder if that means there will be a cross-realm economy developing soon.

They couldn't disable trading... er, I guess they could, forcing toons to get thier water, soul stones, health stones, etc before entering.

I would hate to see trade spamming and people preoccupied with deals in BG, when they should be kicking some tail.

[Roane]

Edit:&nbsp; Grrr.&nbsp; Wrong place.&nbsp; This was in reply to Mongo Jerry's GM friend's info.
They couldn't disable trading... er, I guess they could, forcing toons to get thier water, soul stones, health stones, etc before entering.

I would hate to see trade spamming and people preoccupied with deals in BG, when they should be kicking some tail.
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Perhaps if they just disabled coin trade, and disabled item linking in chat channels? It's discourage cross server trading, though not prevent it.

[Thawwing Light]

Oh, it might not be great, but it'll fix something.&nbsp; On Stormrage, we haven't had an Alterac Valley instance in over a week.&nbsp; We used to be the highest population PvE server, though I don't know if that's true anymore.
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Wait - not one?! Not just no free spaces, but no instance period? Wow, that's harsh.

I retract my statement about not fixing anything I might fix something.

Warsong is one of the most populous PvP servers, and we generally have about 1 41-50 Warsong Gulch going... so I can certainly agree there's an issue with the number of instances available period.

[MongoJerry]

If I could see something mathematical that would prove this is going to improve the wait times for the alliance, I'd like to see it. Until then, I think this will just make things equally bad across the board.

While wait times will not be eliminated, this change will help the wait times in several ways:

1. First, there will be more open BG instances. Assume that there are always people waiting in all the realms to get in an instance now, in an inter-realm system, the server can take a lot of those waiting people and make several new battlegrounds from the waiting player pool.

2. Along the same lines, there are lots of low population servers that probably don't have any battlegrounds running on them. If players on those servers can suddenly play in the battlegrounds, that'll be more people to add to the general population of people playing battlegrounds and therefore there will be more BG's to choose from and be involved in.

3. The biggest factor, though, is that the inter-realm system will smooth out many bottlenecks. I've had situations (and I'm Horde no less) where I've had to wait an hour to get in a battleground instance, because there are so few BG's running and the Alliance just decided not to show up (I think most of the major alliance guilds were running Molten Core at the time). While an inter-realm system won't cure all wait times, I think it will cure the massive wait times. That is, it might not cure, say, 15 minute wait times, but I think it will cure the spikey hour or longer wait times.

Perhaps an example would suffice: Let's say that there are only enough players on a realm on opposing sides for two active Warsong Gulch instances. The players who managed to get into the instances turn out to be fairly evenly matched and the matches last for an hour and a half to two hours. Meanwhile, other players show up to join but they can't get in, because there aren't enough players of the opposing faction waiting to make a new instance and because the players of the opposing faction who do want to play in Warsong Gulch are already in long duration matches. The result is a spikey hour or more wait time. However, if there are many battleground instances available, then there will always be a mix of short 15ish minute matches and long duration matches. Even if there were twice as many Alliance trying to get into matches as Horde, that would be OK, because some of the Horde will be involved in short matches and Alliance players who are waiting can then play against them. There would be a constant flow of CTF matches that are starting and completing, so the queue would be constantly moving. Without an inter-realm queue, though, it's easy for bottlenecks to form.

4. If people can get into battlegrounds easier, more people will play in the battlegrounds.

5. Horde-alliance populations on servers aren't balanced, but it isn't always in favor of the Alliance. Again, this should smooth out problems due to particularly harsh player population imbalances on individual realms. Actually, on Tichondrius, I think Horde players are more interested in PvP, so even though Alliance slightly outnumbers Horde (It's about a 1.2:1 Alliance:Horde ratio). It appears that it's the Horde who has to wait more than the Alliance on Tichondrius.

6. I think this system would be particularly helpful for lower level battlegrounds, where it's rare to get into a CTF match if you're under level 50.

[fractaled]

Got a bit of a scoop from a GM friend:&nbsp; The Blizzard developers are actively working on linking the battlegrounds from different realms to one another.&nbsp;
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assuming your source is correct, i'm impressed that they can tackle this, but can't tackle inter-city auction houses...

--fractaled