The Lake Beckons You

Lake Wintergrasp is the newest "Outdoor PvP" addition to World of Warcraft's continued attempts to bring interest back in the World PvP setting. Many argued in the past that the only way anyone would get any PvP done was through Battlegrounds, even in PvP servers. With the advent of Wrath of the Lich King, this will change, atleast in Northrend.

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Lake Wintergrasp's Map

For the first time ever, we are given a true PvP-only zone in Northrend. Named Lake Wintergrasp, this zone is in the middle of Northrend, just one zone west of the Dalaran town, or one south of the infamous Icecrown, where Arthas resides!

First Impressions

Arriving on my Death Knight was as easy as flying over from Dalaran, and there were lots of people already fighting each other and testing out their new skills on one another. Pretty much anyone can get here from either side and aid their faction in their task at hand - as Blizzard has stated before, this task will rotate - sometimes, your faction will be charged with attacking the fortress, and sometimes you will be charged with defending the fortress within a timeframe.

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Attacking Wintergrasp Fortress from the side, Siege Weapon infront!

The main attraction this zone has is that it has destructible buildings. To accomplish this, you must board either Catapults or Siege Tanks in order to start attacking enemy fortifications and make way into the enemy's stronghold, or to fight off enemies using these vehicles against you.

By holding off in your fight and waiting until you have some more kills and help under your belt, you're able to board more powerful siege weaponry that will undoubtedly be better at destroying the buildings encountered in the area. One thing has to be made clear, too, even if you're in a PvE server, this zone will be a PvP environment and will most likely flag you.

There's a few quests you are able to complete here, as should be expected, and some of them even become dailies if you succeed often. As usual with exerting domination on a zone, it is planned to have some benefit to keeping the Wintergrasp Hold for a long period of time as opposed to losing it to the other faction.

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Obtained Rank 1 by killing an enemy player

 

Rank System

The rank system will allow for people to use more and more complex vehicles as they battle on for more time in one sitting. Upon killing the first enemy, you will be Rank 1 and able to use Catapults. These are a 1-man vehicle and do moderate damage to the enemy's building.

Participating further into the battle unlocks more vehicles for you to use (you may obtain them at set spots in the map), also, your Rank will be displayed in the form of a Buff, so you must reobtain it each time you come back to fight in Lake Wintergrasp.

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Horde Wins!

I participated in this battle initially as a Death Knight, and currently they have no textures for their armor, so it was notoriously easy to get confused with others, still, we led the assault into the Wintergrasp Fortress, destroying one of the side areas and pouring through to destroy the objective in the center and finally take hold of it.

Worth noting is the fact that NPCs do fire and help you out, if you're attacking or especially defending. In the combat logs, you may see I took quite a bit of damage from cannons around the Fortress's sides.

Currently, the PvP server is under a lot of strain from many people getting new Beta invites and creating new templates, so a clear preview of the mechanics of everything wasn't possible as the latency was a bit too high, however, from the initial look of it this looks like it will be a very fun place to do Honor and Marks for your PvP gear.

 

 


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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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