Upgrading the existing warfronts with more features

[TheVaryag]

Given we arent getting new warfronts, I'll be frank, adding heroic or challenging warfront gameplay is not enough. They need to be upgraded with more features

We've already played the current sequence to death, new patches should add new things to them. New challenges, new troops that do some different and interesting things so it feels different.



Dark shore Warftont Upgrades Example
Like forsaken bringing in vampyrs, Ziggaruts, death knights, Kvaldir and the power of Helyas realm. Night elves bringing in Illidari, Highborne like Farondis, power of the well of eternity and emerald dream, maybe nelf worgen and void elves join up.

Epic Quests to Upgrade
Make it interesting too, like you have to go to northrend to get Ziggaruts, and scourge troops, go to Stormheim for power of Helyas realm and Kvaldir, getting the zvampyr and San'layn etc upgrading your troops. Night elves gather thehighborne, which you need to free zfarondis from an item you get from Azshara, thenunlocj the Well of Eternity so you can power those troops with arcane, then complete the healing of shaladrassil, collect the night elf worgen and empower with nature. Finally get the Illidari on board too.

New Features
Once you do these quests and unlock, your warfront will have additional challenges, new features like:
Ziggarut ships vs Illidari legion ship,
Empowered by blood Vampyrs vs Arcane empowered highborne.
Death empowered Kvaldir vs Life emerald dream empowered nelf worgen..,
Allied Goblins, Orc, Shatrerspear Trolls met by Gileans, Void elves and Draenei who joining the night elven to combat the orc, goblin and trolls assisting the forsaken.

Example of Arathi Warfront Upgrades
For this warfront, the alliance upgrades Humans, Lightforged Draenei , Wildhammer dwarves and high elves.
The horde utilises Orcs, Forsaken, Blood elves and Raventusk trolls to the battle.

Zandalari meet Raventusks, Kul'tirans meet Arathors.
Lightforge Vindicaar plays a role.
Nightborne meet the high elves.
The Dragonmaw return to the war

More coming I'm watching Shazam with the boyfriend and his looking daggers at me posting during a movie

At this point they won't do major changes to Warfronts I don't think, they've failed In their implementation miserably and I hope If they do make such things again In the next expansions they will consider a few things:

- Alliance/Horde ships don't have warp capabilities (Look at the Alliance/Horde ship after you cap the flag at your base, It's hilarious)
- We should be able to train the troops ourselves, that was the Intention from the beginning or so I thought, let us send 10 footmen, 5 riflemen, 3 priests down the left lane to counter their 15 grunts and 2 healers and 1 demolisher and so on. And this could be done by ONE player, who Is either randomly or voted Into being the Commander (Ala Battlefield 2142/That one Alien game I don't remember) and just staying In the base, managing buildings, units and resources, peasents that go gather Wood or Iron depending on what we need.
- Reduce the player amount to 5-10 so each player feels more Important to the battle, with 1 being a commander, 4 helping with resources and 5 pushing the lanes and countering assault waves alongside the units that the commander sends In that lane
- NOT have thousands of units just run up each lane uselessly fighting eachother, only to then vanish at the enemy gates like useless tits, why did we have them In the first place?
- Have special events (Not just random rare bosses that come into the Warfront from the outdoor area) like: An airship has arrived to reinforce the Horde, put resources into It to have a flyby of the enemy base and do some extra damage.

And so on.. and that's just off the top of my head, I agree things need to change but adding things like you suggested wouldn't fix the core Issue with the Warfronts, that they're boring, grindy with minimal player Input, LFR-level if difficulty (Confirmed by the devs) and give you loot too good, which goes along another and another and another problem that the game has, one of those being how often you get loot everywhere, so much so that It's become pointless, replaced by Artifact Progression which is also useless, not fun and unending.

[Firedemon]

Existing Warfronts are a lost cause. Gotta love how they acknowledged that it was dumb to have the players just sit there while the wall was getting destroyed and then did the exact same thing in Darkshore.

The problem with the warfronts is that they're just boring. Especially the resource gathering part. Should just make several sites like 6 mines, 6 mini-forests and whoever controls them has a resource income.

Make them PVP. And probably more like mobas.

Current versions are just dull as fuck.

[Aeula]

Adding more fluff while leaving them a boring grind? What’s the point? Just let the feature die.

[ravenmoon]

They said there weren't new warfronts planned for 8.2.

8.2.

Nothing about the remaining of the expansion after 8.2.

They did say in earlier interviews there weren't anymore planned for the foreseeable future when it was asked if more were coming down the line.

[Piesor]

To improve warfonts I would provide more statistics in the first place to motivate the players to play more efficiently instead of afk'ing in the base.
E.g. Damage done, Healing done, wood harvested, iron harvested, ressource turn-in ratio, flags tapped etc.

Given we arent getting new warfronts, I'll be frank, adding heroic or challenging warfront gameplay is not enough. They need to be upgraded with more features
[...]

Unfortunately I don't feel the same kind of immersion in Warfronts like you do. I don't even realize the NPCs, how they look, behave or what they do. I just know that they are designed in a way to figth against each other without any progress if the player does not intervene, similar to LoL creep. Imo the only thing that counts is the player harvesting, creating the neccessary buildings for the bombardement of the enemy base and just zerg his way to the enemy leader. That's the sensible spot where improvements should be implemeted.

[kamuimac]

I'd be happy if there was a more efficient way of collecting lumber and iron in Darkshore.

ye this is annoying like hell.

i prefer Arathi warfront so much because of this factor.

[rda]

To improve warfonts I would provide more statistics in the first place to motivate the players to play more efficiently instead of afk'ing in the base.
E.g. Damage done, Healing done, wood harvested, iron harvested, ressource turn-in ratio, flags tapped etc.

That's a little dangerous - who knows what weird incentives this is going to create, maybe people will let the AI recapture flags in order to cap them back or something similarly bad - but perhaps worth trying in a limited way. Eg, resources harvested is probably safe to reward for. The main thing that they should do is to stop soft-timegating warfront via huge health pools / number of glaives, etc, and let warfront finish times vary from 15 min to 45 min instead of from 27 min to 33 min or whatever it is now.

[kamuimac]

I want to see warfronts as an alternative to raiding and also PvP version. The idea behind warfronts is pretty epic - outdoor content, you can build your army, make upgrades, conquest but it's too easy. Now it's on the LFR level which is okay but boring. The problem is not rewards but the difficulty, it's not challenging.

What I would like to see, for example, some people (who enjoy collecting and building) should stay on resources and at base to build it. Players should mind what troops and upgrades they spend their resources on etc.

the problem is how difficult they would have to be.

and im not trying to be a dick

but with upgraded troops and shrine buff geared toon does ridiculous amount of dmg.

problem with WF is most of people have no clue about it and they dont take buff and dont recruit troops .

[Low Hanging Fruit]

If they had a feature that turned on my coffee maker, dropped a sugar and a creamer in there for me, and then brought it over to my desk to keep me awake it would be a huge step in the right direction.

[Toppy]

where does it say this ??? i 've been searching after reading this and can 't find anything

They confirmed that there's none planned for the coming major raid patch (I dont mean the two boss raid but the Mechagon patch) and if I remember right they even confirmed that they had none in development.

So at most we have one more coming, in at the least half a year.

[Gaidax]

They just need to intro higher difficulties Warfronts on lockout with appropriate reward in same cycles as new raids.

This won't happen in 8.2, but I think it would be cool - it could be a genuine raid-like activity on 3 week lockout which could break the monotony of doing same thing week after week for raiding guilds.

Like Mythic Warfront where you need to fight tooth and nail as a guild to get it done with reward being a guaranteed mythic item for all would be great.

[ravenmoon]

At this point they won't do major changes to Warfronts I don't think, they've failed In their implementation miserably and I hope If they do make such things again In the next expansions they will consider a few things:

- Alliance/Horde ships don't have warp capabilities (Look at the Alliance/Horde ship after you cap the flag at your base, It's hilarious)
- We should be able to train the troops ourselves, that was the Intention from the beginning or so I thought, let us send 10 footmen, 5 riflemen, 3 priests down the left lane to counter their 15 grunts and 2 healers and 1 demolisher and so on. And this could be done by ONE player, who Is either randomly or voted Into being the Commander (Ala Battlefield 2142/That one Alien game I don't remember) and just staying In the base, managing buildings, units and resources, peasents that go gather Wood or Iron depending on what we need.
- Reduce the player amount to 5-10 so each player feels more Important to the battle, with 1 being a commander, 4 helping with resources and 5 pushing the lanes and countering assault waves alongside the units that the commander sends In that lane
- NOT have thousands of units just run up each lane uselessly fighting eachother, only to then vanish at the enemy gates like useless tits, why did we have them In the first place?
- Have special events (Not just random rare bosses that come into the Warfront from the outdoor area) like: An airship has arrived to reinforce the Horde, put resources into It to have a flyby of the enemy base and do some extra damage.

And so on.. and that's just off the top of my head, I agree things need to change but adding things like you suggested wouldn't fix the core Issue with the Warfronts, that they're boring, grindy with minimal player Input, LFR-level if difficulty (Confirmed by the devs) and give you loot too good, which goes along another and another and another problem that the game has, one of those being how often you get loot everywhere, so much so that It's become pointless, replaced by Artifact Progression which is also useless, not fun and unending.

No you are right, what I said wont fix the core gameplay issues of the warfront, it wasn't really intended to, I had done a much larger post with gameplay ideas and suggestions as well as this and others.

This one was more about making the actual feature more interesting as well more lore involved and progressing.

Warfronts as a feature, like the story, the quests, should advance with patches, adding more things to do. Like the horde airship you mentioned attacking in darkshore, well, that's the Zigaruts I mentioned the forsaken gain from Northrend, the night elf equivalent was be the demon hunter legion ship, making gameplay additions enhance and develop lore. The two don't have to be mutually exclusive, in fact the opposite. Far more interesting than human-washing the night elves with an alliance ship or the forsaken with horde ship. When there are assets that belong to those races racial theme available. Just a matter of using them. Especially if this is it for warfronts, it can be used as a lore means to improve both night elves and forsaken(for the darkshore one) and humans and orcs and their regional allies(for the Arathi). I mean we've never really had an in game feature like this that can not only explain why a race gets more powerful or build up (and use those build ups for epic fights) but shows it and utilises it in a way players can participate.

If night elves were ever to start finally recovering from their long lists of nerfs from the end of Wc3 RoC, this is one of the better ways to do it, as players can both enjoy and experience this actively rather than just read about it, or have it stated and they appear all buffed next time we see them. Same with forsaken. Gives you an excuse to journey in game on quests that show you how they powered up, how they got more allies joining their cause, restored powers of death/necromancy or arcane, / nature

And don't stop there, we have a year to go, provided they are fixing the core gameplay issues, playing the same features over and over again for the same map over two years, when they could add things as the fighting between the factions grows in intensity, adding to the vibe and making new things and additions quite interesting as you go along.

However, it would not mean much if the core issues arent addressed to make the playstyle more fun. So that absolutely needs addressing

- - - Updated - - -

Adding more fluff while leaving them a boring grind? What’s the point? Just let the feature die.

Well I'm hoping theyd fix the boring grind feel too, I just didnt want to address that part in this post, I have done though in others I've made

[Kromus!]

Simply being able to lose would be a good feature for me. Way too easy. Way too linear. Illusion of difficulty is shattered after facerolling first couple. Maybe as mentioned above the NPCs doing different strategy or more unpredictable stuff would help, or punish the players for running around like solo headless chickens with certain mechanics.

[ravenmoon]

the problem is how difficult they would have to be.

and im not trying to be a dick

but with upgraded troops and shrine buff geared toon does ridiculous amount of dmg.

problem with WF is most of people have no clue about it and they dont take buff and dont recruit troops .

Spot on, the difficulty level has been at the heart o f the gameplay issues, while some have suggested more interesting ways you could play and commandeer a warfront, though I focus on the meaning and immersion in the story that can provide more fun things to do...

[A Chozo]

They did say in earlier interviews there weren't anymore planned for the foreseeable future when it was asked if more were coming down the line.

Negative. What they said is that there was no new warfront for 8.2 - they are delivering Heroic Warfronts instead.

They also denied the existence of a Barrens Warfront - it was just Alpha stuff.