Eye of the Storm Battleground Report

[Muridin]

Hey all,

Ive tried out the new Battleground, and ive written the following report summarising it from my point of view.

Its a cross of WSG and AB. With a Flag in the Centre of the map, and four towers with a 15 man cap for both sides.



The loading screen itself invites a player to openly welcome a whole new experience just from the look of teh screen.



upon entering the BG, yuo will start normaly on seperate sides of the map for the alliance and the Horde.
( From what i gathered, Aliiance was at the north side, teh Horde at the South Side )
You spawn on a huge pile of rocks



When in proximity of a tower ( located symatricly around four corners of the map, see above map ) a capturing bar will appear, much like the ones for World PvP Objectives.



The flag is located in the centre of the map, and it looks like this,




Its tough to co-ordinate between two battle plans, for the flag or towers, and as always, the Horde mustve figured out a way, here are the scores for my first match in Eye of the Storm.







All in all, i reckon it is fun, challenging and most definatly worth a try.
And as it is 15 per team, i would presume you can pre-make it.

[Muridin]

/bump

just so ppl will notice it =)

[un4]

Ooh, good summary.  Thanks! 

[Kaethdorala]

I really enjoy this Bg. Its very fun and tactical you cant just run and gun and win this one. Ppl always try to say the key to winning is the flag or towers but its really a good mix of both. You can get a great advantage at start if you send guys straight to other side's towers and just have 1 or 2 of your team go to cap your towers. then they scramble to recap there towers meanwhile you get a couple of flag caps in while there busy. Most times though it ends up being both side holding there towers, and then the middle of the feild and the flag becomes very important in those cases whoever caps the flag the most will win.

[Tolwen]

TY Mur now i know what to expect when I join the Q for it

[Luise]

thanks Muri...when I get back into pvp mode I'll check it out

[un4]

It's a good way to earn honor.  I made about 250 in five minutes of playing.

[capnpop]

From the WoW forums (our battlegroup actually)...

How to play Eye of the Storm:

Eye of the Storm is a mix between WSG and AB. It could have been a train wreck, but it was done very well. Here's how it breaks down:

15 players a side
Both teams start on opposite ends of the field
There are four towers and one flag, which must be delivered to a tower that team owns to score.

Points are scored as follows:

For every two seconds, your team will score

1 point for 1 tower
2 points for 2 towers
5 points for 3 towers
10 points for 4 towers (very rare)

For flag returns, you will score 25 points per tower your team controls. Scoring while you have three towers would be worth 75 points, for example.

First team to 2000 points wins.

Here's the first thing I noticed: You simply cannot win without at least two towers. Going down 1-3 will cost you 4 points every 2 seconds, or 120 points a minute. You simply cannot make it happen if you only have one tower. Do not let your team fall behind.

Something else to note: Towers are captured like the PvP towers in the contested zones: simply standing in the area will send the tower closer to your team's control.

From what I've seen, the towers are much, much more important than the flag. The name of the game here is to take at least three. You can actually completely ignore the flag if you hold three towers for a long time. The way the game is scored, the flag is simply not that important. The strategy for this game is much like AB, and less like WSG.

As always, you may PuG at your own risk, but I'd obviously bring a team. When assembling 15 guys, I'm just looking for balance. I'll need at least two players whose sole purpose is to defend a tower, (hunters work well for this), but the real point is to have a functioning fighting unit.

Arathi Basin games usually are won or lost in the opening minute as the bases fall where they fall...the rest of the game comes down to who makes less mistakes because it is so much easier to defend a base than to take it. In Eye of the Storm, defending is not as easy. While you do have a graveyard nearby, your opponents do not need 10 seconds of uninterrupted channeling to take a tower, they just need to be there. The AB tactic of simply moving from base to base taking and taking is the way to go. Your team should be looking to swarm a tower, take it, and begin to swarm the next almost immediately. This will make your opponents react to you, and simply try to not lose as you run them over.

One of my favorite openers in AB was to overload the farm (overload the stables if I was Horde), this is usually unexpected and will usually result in a base for my team. For now: I'd set up my EotS team the same way: of my 15 guys, I'd send 1 to one near base, 2 to the other, and send 6 men each to the far towers. I'd ignore the flag completely, because that's where most of my opponents will go. And as we know from above, the flag isn't that important anyway. If all goes well, my team will win all four towers in a clean sweep, and my opponents will have the flag with nowhere to go with it.

Now as for individual tactics: it's much like AB. Make macros to call for and send help. Keep your minimap up and know where everyone is. If you've got a lot of teammates at one base, it's safe. If you've got none at all, that place is probably the place to attack: Everyone ends up going towards their opponents in this game, and it's easy to catch a tower undefended or with only one man. Simply having two players on a team come up with the idea of going over there is enough to win a tower.

As a defender, you'll need to be more alert, and you simply cannot be late with your calls for help. If this leads to a few instances of "crying wolf" (calling for help when you really didn't need it), that's ok. The towers are what this game is about, and you need to be careful with them.

In my experience, pretty much correct.  I've seen horde teams completely ignore the flag for 2-3 caps in a row, it was usually used to secure their two towers (or perhaps a third) before the middle zerg begins.  Some of the more effective (and annoying) horde teams I've seen simply zerg tower after tower, riding up into it and fighting there (up to 10 attackers).  They would take it and mount up to the next tower.  It successfully left us spawning in akward places with no place to cap the flag (they only maintained 2 towers).  The result was alliance recovering (WTF?) and eventually pulling out a 31 point win (WIN??!?!).  Had the horde use the bad spawns for us to cap flags, we would've lost...

This entire battleground is a fight, rogues have it tough if they are defending the flag in the middle, it becomes a target for AoE at random times.  Oddly, it's quite fun (and with an Allie shammy dropping grounding totems, it's nice) and balanced (imo). Some say that it's slanted toward the horde, but alliance has always said that about everything...

Oh well, it's a good time..