Blizzard continues opening up on details for its upcoming World of Warcraft releases. There’s another new blog on Wrath of the Lich King Classic, this time addressing plans (and the adjustments) to the Battle for Wintergrasp.
The Battle for Wintergrasp will be coming to Wrath Classic as an instanced battleground due to some structural requirements with how WoW Classic servers work. They explain that since Classic was always intended to feel like 2004 all over again, with a contiguous world that loads in without breaking the immersion.
Since modern live servers are sharded for capacity reasons, they balance for demand. Classic was created with what they're calling a layered system that creates copies of the whole game world instead of zone-specific shards. These systems don't even work as well as they did when Classic launched, as it has grown. This affects the Battle for Wintergrasp and how it will work in 2022, as an instanced battleground to allow the most access without sacrificing capacity.
The battle will be available every three hours, and if you’re in outdoor Wintergrasp (which will remain an outdoor PvP zone), you'll get a notification that it will begin soon, and a queue prompt. The number of players either faction needs to be present will be low and it can even be greatly unbalanced (the example given is 40 Horde/5 Alliance) because of the special mechanic: Tenacity.
The Tenacity buff will stack and it will greatly increase power level of players on the underrepresented side. This mechanic means that even if you bring in only a handful of players, you still have a chance of winning. This matters since the buff for victory, Essence of Wintergrasp, gets you access to special additional content including Stone Keeper Shards for rewards, and even just being able to fight the Elementals in the zone. Applying these mechanic to a battleground version is intended to allow more players to participate and for things to get started faster.
Read more over at World of Warcraft.
