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General

• The point is to keep arenas simple, while leaving room to innovate.
• Stream lost at this point, will update later.
• The battleground reporting system is being tuned to let player police themselves easier.
• A spectator mode is planned.
• There are no new racial abilities to to be added.
• PvP rewards won’t be changed.

Arenas

There’s 2 new arenas, Dalaran and Orgrimmar.

• Keep the new ones simple but still innovate
• Moving objects in the arena - dynamic LOS. Can be timed, can be set random. Helps focusing on player skill.
• Unique starting areas, that might be very close to each other

Dalaran Arena

• Based on the new lore of the city
• Arena map is located in the sewers of the flying capital city of Northrend
• No mounts allowed
• Similarly sized as the Blade’s Edge arena
• The dynamic element is a pipe, a wall of water flows out of it sometimes, that is a complete LOS block
• Only a few ramps to the center area, player-height ledge on the sides
• Water shoots players out of the starting area, players can’t stay or return there

Orgrimmar Arena

• New area in the old world
• Dynamic objects that do damage to players (spikes)
• Moving pillars on timers, players will see a wheel spin up before that happens
• Extremely close starting areas - elevators bring players up to the center of the arena, only 10 yards away from each others, the spikes drop and the fight begins
  Mounts are allowed
• Bigger than Dalaran Arena
• Orcs like watching fights, so there are NPCs on the edges who make noise too!
• Players can stand on the pillars that sometimes move up. Still vulnerable to ranged damage there
• When the pillars go up, the spikes come out of the ground so the player has to decide what to do.
• Take the damage when moving across the area? Stay separated from the group?
• No other LOS objects
• Players have a couple of seconds to check out the opponents before the spikes go down and the fight starts

Lake Wintergrasp

• PvE elements are being added to this PvP Zone, for example the equivalent of Elemental Plateau in Outland is in Lake Wintergrasp.
• Siege Combat will be in both Lake Wintergrasp and the new Battleground (see below)
• Siege vehicles incude air combat with flying vehicles.
• You can destroy the buildings within Lake Wintergrasp and in the Battleground.
• Lake Wintergrasp will feature an attack/defend game type. Just like the Auchindoun Spirit Towers, when your faction holds a tower it will keep it for a certain amount of time and retain all the advantage for a few hours.
• Northrend “Spirit Shards” will be used to reward players. When your faction controls Lake Wintergrasp all the bosses in Northrend will start dropping them. You can then use these shards to buy rewards from a merchant, they won’t be more powerful any other reward but just an alternative to other sources of equipement (like gearing up for PvP very quickly).
• “Wintergrasp Marks of Honor” will drop as well and will be redeemable for items through the honor system and other NPCs.
• Bridges will be used as “choke point” in the map, siege vehicles can’t travel through water.
• The goal of Lake Wintergrasp is to capture the “Wintergrasp Keep”, everything in that keep is destructable and you will have to break into the keep to capture the point.
• Players will be able to control stationnary cannons on each tower to defend the keep.
• Bridges are very large and very tall, players should be able to see them from anywhere in the map. They’re also totally destructable as well.

Siege Vehicles

• The Demolisher
• The Demolisher has both short and long range attacks
• It is meant to bombard players and buildings from a long distance, it’s also equipped with a ram to siege buildings.
• It can hold up to 3 passengers, passengers are exposed and can be targeted individually. However, players can cast while the vehicle is moving if they’re in it.
• Forsaken Catapult
• The catapult is faster than the demolisher but its range is slightly lower.
• It does slightly less damage.
• It cannot hold any pessenger.
• The Siege Engine
• This is the siege weapon with the longest range.
• The gunner is sitting in the turrent and has full control of the turret.
• The driver is only moving the vehicle.
• The passengers in this vehicle are fully protected but can’t shoot other enemies.
• It’s also got a very powerful ramming attack
• Flying machine
• Can bomb enemies, they’re swift but very vulnerable to anti-air attacks.

• Goblin Shredder
• The shredder is an anti-air vehicle.
• It will use anti-air rockets, they’re long range homing missiles.
• This is a personal armor suit, if the vehicle is destroyed the player just jumps out and keep fighting on his own.
• You can use your sawblade as close range melee attacks.
• The shredder can jump into the air just like rocket boots for players. This can also be used to jump over walls.
• The shredder is very vulnerable to siege damage.

New Northrend Battleground

• This battleground is located on an island south of Dragonblight
• This is also an attack/defend game type battleground.
• One team will attack and the other one defend, you will have a specific amount of time to succeed. After the end of the round teams will switch sides.
• Attackers will come from boats and defenders will start in the middle of the beach.
• There are 3 sections of walls in the Area, after each wall there are capture points and graveyards to make the attack on the next points faster.
• Attackers will get more siege vehicles depending on their progression throughout the siege.
• The battleground will be either 10vs10 or 15vs15, this isn’t decided yet.

Here’s some interesting Q&A, most importantly changes (or lack of them) to pet scaling:

Q: Now we have one source of honor, Alterac Valley, and everything else is a source of marks. Some people lose on purpose to get marks quicker. Is there anything being done to solve this problem?
Chilton: It’s a very very difficult problem to solve. We find that if we give no rewards for losing a battleground, it’s very punishing. That’s why we have systems to report players for not participating and we’ve lowered the number of players who need to report someone. (There is a certain point where the system can’t determine how hard you’re trying.

Q: Do you have plans to implement a spectator mode?
Chilton: Definitely on our list of things we want to do. To add to that, we also have the idea of using that spectator mode to extend to other things, in raids for example

Q: Unique (racial) combat moves?
Chilton: We don’t plan to add any more racials.

Q: My girlfriend and I love PvP, but since the Burning Crusade, we feel like we’re forced into arenas
Chilton: We do plan to keep a pretty similar sort of reward items.

Q: For the frost mage, some crowd control talents seem to be PvP-oriented, don’t you think this could cause unbalance?
Chilton: It’s always going to feel that way because bosses tend to be immune to crowd control, but we’re trying to open it up.

Q: What do you plan to fix Warlock pet scaling?
A: Right now we’re pretty happy with pet scaling. It should be a viable tactic to spend some time attacking the pets. A player has to make a choice. We feel like if that scales very well, it’s going to be a viable tactic to just focus on one.

Sources: Game-say.com, Wowjuju.com, Wowinsider, Mmo-champion