The “no changes” school of WoW Classic players are surely upset as Blizzard announces significant changes to Alterac Valley. This battleground has undergone many alterations through the years - especially during vanilla WoW. Though the game preserves many of the original World of Warcraft’s bugs and flaws, Blizzard has chosen to make some alterations to Alterac Valley.
World of Warcraft Classic uses the framework of Alterac Valley in patch 1.12. At this point in vanilla, games had shortened from taking up the better part of a day to less than a half-hour. Side quests within the instance were gone. Parts of the map had collapsed, making it much smaller. The mighty Korrak the Bloodrager and his troll companions no longer camped Snowfall Graveyard. Alliance summon Ivus and Horde summon Lokholar were still possible, but not the problem they had been in past iterations of the battleground. Most of the NPCs that, like the side quests and other features that caused the games to last longer, added tons of flavor, were gone. But in terms of balance, Alterac Valley had never been stronger.
Blizzard announced that it will be implementing some major changes to Alterac Valley, Massively OP reports. These changes, the company says, “address some of the more prominent pain points and unfortunate behaviors” without “cracking open the substance of the battleground.” With the scheduled weekly maintenance, Blizzard will allow a group of 5 to queue together. The patch will also remove the number in the name of the battleground on the “Join Battleground” screen. This makes it harder for players to organize illicit 40-man premade teams. The patch also fixes an error that allows an Alterac Valley instance to start up when a team has as few as 20 players. Blizzard plans to introduce a fix to WoW Classic “as soon as possible” that will make honorless targets unlootable “to further discourage camping the starting caves as an efficient activity.”
The most significant change coming will happen after the weekly honor reset. Currently, honor is reduced by 25% for each repeated kill. Blizzard says this made sense when world PVP was the only option, but that the additions of Warsong Gulch and Alterac Valley “where repetitious engagements can happen with much greater frequency.” After next week’s reset, honor will only drop by 10% per kill. This takes effect both in and out of WoW’s battlegrounds.
While these changes will significantly improve the quality of life in Alterac Valley, many players feel that WoW Classic shouldn’t use the patch 1.12 version at all. Many argue that the game should use patch 1.5 - also known as the original Alterac Valley that represented at times a full work day-length battle. For many, this was the best version of the game as they feel it perfectly encompassed the flavor of vanilla WoW. As it is, these changes are a positive quality-of-life adjustment all around.
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World of Warcraft is available on PC and Mac.
Source: Massively OP
