Is Ashran Blizzard's biggest design disaster?

[Daymanmb]

The voice chat patch

/shudders wow voice is gold /end sarcasm

[Annesh]

Wait, why do people think Dragon Soul was bad? I enjoyed it, but that might have been because my guild was great and it was the Shadowpriest golden age.

[Deleted]

Still a 4hr+ que on peak times on both servers I play on

[Jessicka]

Not been in there since Beta, didn't appeal to me then; the subsequent changes to account for the persistent negative feedback it have only served to make it appeal less. Why do I want to queue for something no one seems to be enjoying, and have evidently legitimate, thanks to these constant changes, complaints about?

Switching it to be a regular battleground just makes even more of a mockery of the decision to put Stormshield there too. Absolute calamity from every angle imho.

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Wait, why do people think Dragon Soul was bad? I enjoyed it, but that might have been because my guild was great and it was the Shadowpriest golden age.

It was a tiny raid that lasted way too long, and Deathwing was a massively underwhelming fight that basically amounted to two consecutive encounters of killing tentacles, before NPCs took over and won.

[Anium]

Maybe if I wasn't melee i would enjoy it slightly more.

[tankbug]

Flops? The features you mentioned are popular improvements. I have never been in Ashran, so I can't comment on that, but if it's as good as the other things you mentioned, I guess I'll give it a go soon

[Itisamuh]

I can think of nothing worse off the top of my head. Of course most of the other things you listed as candidates are not even bad in my eyes.

[Graeham]

The base idea isn't bad, it's the implementation that causes it to fail. Maybe I'm spoiled by the likes of FFXIV but it really does seem like Blizzard are struggling to keep up with the development pace of other major MMO's. That might explain why a lot of features are implemented poorly these days.

[eillas]

It's tied with Tol barad.

[Gungtah]

Are we talking about in-game or scrapped.

I remember seeing "Flying Combat" alongside Wintergrasp.

I actually prefer Ashran to Tol Barad and Wintergrasp, but maybe I just hate vehicles and ring-a-ring-a-rosie.

[Sezuka]

It's fairly annoying that their hotfixes to 'fix' the zone are only going to make things worse for unbalanced servers. As horde on my server the only way to get the conquest from Ashran every week is doing events, so thank you Blizzard for giving ally the incentive to dominate those too.

[Toppy]

I'm of the opinion they are purposely making it fail so in the future they can point at it and go "Look, look how bad that was. Do you really want us making more pvp features?"

I mean, the changes they make are just so obviously bad. They have loads of people giving ways to fix it. The biggest example being "Make events actually help mid", which is a good idea. That would encourage actual PvPing everywhere.

[Deleted]

For me it is without a doubt the worst thing I've seen in the game.. and I've been around a long time. PvP, up until this expansion was the main draw for me (Vanilla titles, Glad ranks, 250-300k kills). That's a alot of time spent PvPing. Ashran has made me do a complete u-turn and I now only raid.. It has literally taken away all of my motivation to do any PvP.

Granted, there are probably more reasons than Ashran as to why this happened but It's a pretty big part of it I'm sure..

[Straamibuu]

I love it, beats playing random bgs with bots that just zerg around the map. My server seems pretty balanced which is a plus.

[Daymanmb]

Maybe if I wasn't melee i would enjoy it slightly more.

I crush it as melee! Stop trying to be a hero, or try once you have better gear!

[Annesh]

It was a tiny raid that lasted way too long, and Deathwing was a massively underwhelming fight that basically amounted to two consecutive encounters of killing tentacles, before NPCs took over and won.

See, I interpret the same data differently. There weren't many bosses sure but they were all interestingly designed. And Deathwing felt epic just because of the way you have to fight him across two different boss fights. Lorewise, Spine was an entire boss fight just to struggle to make the boss killable, and in the last one the combat area is HUGE and it's counting down to literally the end of the world.

Tentacles? So what, we've been fighting tentacles for years. C'thun, Yogg, etc etc. Tentacles are just as likely of a mook/sub-enemy as like, little whelps or cultists or orc grunts or whatever.

NPCs take over? Not before we actually kill the boss. It's like that in any fantasy story - the protagonists do the fighting and then the NPCs come in and do the aftermath/denouement story shit. Like remember Silence of the Lambs? Starling fights Buffalo Bill but it's the FBI and hospital personnel who does the clean up and takes care of the senator's daughter.

I think it just comes down to how long it was current content, which again I didn't mind because my guild was fun to hang out with regardless of what we were doing.

[Daymanmb]

For me it is without a doubt the worst thing I've seen in the game.. and I've been around a long time. PvP, up until this expansion was the main draw for me (Vanilla titles, Glad ranks, 250-300k kills). That's a alot of time spent PvPing. Ashran has made me do a complete u-turn and I now only raid.. It has literally taken away all of my motivation to do any PvP.

Granted, there are probably more reasons than Ashran as to why this happened but It's a pretty big part of it I'm sure..

Lol Ashran is the reason a vet pvp'er, pve's now... Lol come on..

[Deleted]

I've said it before and I'll say it again:
Reintroduce old AV the way it was in vanilla before all the changes, reintroduce the guards, the elite guards, the patrols, make them stronger, give elite guards a fairly short respawn time, disallow assaulting a base for as long as the elite guard is alive, rebuild the Horde towers to be more fairly balanced compared to the Alliance bunkers, remove the reinforcements system, let capturing towers/bunkers spawn another warmaster by your general like it used to, add this version of AV as a "Classic AV" with its own signup outside of random battleground so only those who want to play it, play it.

It would be impossible to zerg the opposing base, too many guards that will thin out your forces and kill them, making it even easier to defend it, the general will be too difficult to kill with the warmasters, and we would hopefully, once again, have our precious 10+ hour AV's that are all about chaotic maham and endless fighting.

Bring in the frostwolf riders, bring in Lokholar the Ice Lord, bring in the buffs from the general and captain, bring in the wyvern riders that can kill players from several hundred yards...

[Pua]

I can think of nothing worse off the top of my head. Of course most of the other things you listed as candidates are not even bad in my eyes.

That's important, I think those other features could easily be considered positive. I just hear complaints about them a lot.

Ashran, on the other hand, seems to be universally reviled with changes that only serve to make the experience worse. If this thread goes on, and more and more people comment similarly, I'm going to link it to Holinka in order to point out how bad a job he's done with it. Next to nobody seems able to cogently defend Ashran, and most people have simply given up on it.

[Jessicka]

See, I interpret the same data differently. There weren't many bosses sure but they were all interestingly designed. And Deathwing felt epic just because of the way you have to fight him across two different boss fights. Lorewise, Spine was an entire boss fight just to struggle to make the boss killable, and in the last one the combat area is HUGE and it's counting down to literally the end of the world.

Tentacles? So what, we've been fighting tentacles for years. C'thun, Yogg, etc etc. Tentacles are just as likely of a mook/sub-enemy as like, little whelps or cultists or orc grunts or whatever.

NPCs take over? Not before we actually kill the boss. It's like that in any fantasy story - the protagonists do the fighting and then the NPCs come in and do the aftermath/denouement story shit. Like remember Silence of the Lambs? Starling fights Buffalo Bill but it's the FBI and hospital personnel who does the clean up and takes care of the senator's daughter.

I think it just comes down to how long it was current content, which again I didn't mind because my guild was fun to hang out with regardless of what we were doing.

There were some good fights with some interesting mechanics, but the issue was more broadly my first point that it overstayed its welcome; 8 bosses wasn't enough to tide people over for as long as it lasted; at that point the over-exposure leads to bordom and when you're bored and fed up something you do start to look through it, and stop seeing whatever may have been epic about it in the first month or two - and all you see it nuking tentacles.