Wintergrasp Keep

Despite it’s problems, I’ve come to like Wintergrasp Keep.

The keep is divided into 4 zones, of which attackers must pass through 2 to get to the goal. That’s a minimum of 3 walls that must be destroyed by siege to come down, including the wall protecting the relic. By isolating it into 3 outer zones (east, south, west) and an inner keep, the designers have made it more difficult to defend than a ring keep would be — the sight lines are all blocked, and you can not tell at a glance where the enemy are located.

In and of itself, the layout of the keep lends itself to focused fighting in each specific area. This is good for the side which doesn’t have Tenacity, which is almost always Alliance on Durotan. But it’s not really good, because as soon as you cluster people together, the real enemy of Wintergrasp appears: lag. Lag takes the game out of your control — you get killed and don’t find out until 10 seconds later, you lose the game before you even see the engines storm the keep. (Sadly, Patch 3.1.2 didn’t do much to fix this. No surprise there.)

Since you can’t do much about the lag, you can at least do something about focusing your strength where the enemy is weak. The picture above shows how not to do this — by breaching the walls on either side of the south zone, the Horde allowed the Alliance defenders to switch back and forth between the two fronts without yielding the inner keep. The keep can, and should, be used against the defenders to split them apart and divide their forces.

I’ve noticed that the best, quickest attacks don’t divide their forces. There is a buildup of good vehicles (Demolishers, not Catapults) that attack en masse from the northern workshops, either as a single wave or two waves that meet at the middle wall and punch through. The defenders are caught without engines of their own, the southern towers are safe, and you can focus all your fire on knocking down those three walls.

I’m still gearing up, and the PvP rewards out of Wintergrasp are too good to pass up. But I find the battle for the Keep itself to be fascinating, and I’d play it even if I were maxed out. I wonder what the next one will bring?