World of Warcraft PvP Panel

The latest word from WoW devs on player v player mayhem.

11.00am: World of Warcraft Lead Level Designer Cory Stockton outlined some of the new PvP elements being introduced in the expansion in today's PvP Panel: new arenas and new the new world PvP zone Lake Wintergrasp.

Arenas
The Ring of Valor and the Dalaran sewers are two new arenas being implemented in the game, both using new mechanics to give a different feel to PvP play. The Arena of Valor is a gladiator-style arena which places opposing teams extremely close to each other at the start of the match and uses rising and falling platforms, and fire, to force players to choose damage over movement and create rotating Line of Sight issues.

Dalaran Sewers is a Fight Club-style underground arena in Dalaran city. It's a small enclosed arena that sees teams entering from sewerage pipes at either end and dropping down into the arena at start. Players who stay too long in the pipe will experience a knock-back style effect including rushing water that throws them into the arena. Dalaran Sewers will also feature a central water feature as a Line of Sight block, with a knock-back as an 'area denial' mechanic to stop players from attempting to live inside the the water feature.

World PvP
World PvP zone Wintergrasp has been implemented in the beta and will have extra features added to it before the expansion. Stockton announced one of the major additions to the PvP non-instanced zone will be players being able to PvP for both PvP and PvE rewards. Wintergrasp is a fortress that can be captured by either faction on an Attack then Defense basis. Once a faction has won control of the fortress itself they can gain the benefits of controlling the area, including vendors and the opening of an instance to all members of that faction. Tokens will also drop from non-PvP world bosses while that faction is in control of the base, similar to the spirit shards in Auchindoun, which can then be exchanged for vendor goods.

In order to obtain control players can use siege vehicles to attack destructible buildings and other players, while defenders will have access to 'emplaced cannon' weapons to pick off attackers in the field below. "We've worked really hard to maintain the balance between the players and the vehicles. If you have enough players on the ground you can definitely take out a vehicle." Stockton seems pretty sure that having this many players in the one area won't see a return to early Warcraft server crashes. "We've spent the majority of our time making sure that our servers can support the number of players in the game."

The faction in control of the area will also have access to workshops and be able to create siege engines for the next part of the battle, with different ranks of vehicles available to different players. "Someone who's contributed to the fight, is gonna be the one in the siege vehicles".

Tom Chilton announced some other elements that should be implemented in a future patch, specifically for players who feel like they spend all their time queuing in cities for battlegrounds - the option to queue from anywhere in the world, including the ability to queue while participating in world PvP.