So, this week I’m going to talk about ‘domination-style’ game modes. In these, you capture and hold points on a map to accrue points. The winner is the first team to obtain a certain number of points.
To start this off, let us talk about Arathi Basin. A 5-point map, this gamemode has been frustrating people since 1.7
This BG is the yardstick to which I measure all other Domination style battlegrounds. A fairly simple map, a good number of flags relative to the number of players, and generous flag-turning mechanics, lead to this BG being one where a good offense almost always pays off.
While I have (jokingly) refereed to Arathi as “the worst BG of all time” there’s a reason it’s so popular, and that is that you always feel in the race. The scaling of resources gained to bases owned means that a lucky 5-cap can turn the game around (although these are incredibly fragile, which is probably a good thing).
Battle for Gilneas on the other hand, feels somewhat less… I’m not quite sure what it is. The most obvious changes are the number of Flags (3 opposed to 5) and Players (10 opposed to 15), and the map does a better job of restricting infomation about incoming players with lots of line of sight blocking doodas and terrain (which you can’t really see from the map here), opposed to the relatively wide open terrain of Arathi.
My personal problem with 3 point domination is as follows. Once you hold 2 points, you can usually turtle your way to a win fairly easily. If the other team pushes very hard, you send players from your other flag to smash their flag. Generally speaking the tide of battle is much harder to turn in a 3 flag scenario.
This is also my main problem with Civil War in SWTOR. The other thing that is the case in TOR is that flag turnaround is very short once taken, and the damage dealt to the enemy ship appears to scale linearly. This means once you get 100 points behind, you’ve probably lost the match with 10-20 minutes to go.
In addition to my general distaste for TOR’s PvP mechanics (I’m not sure, it never feels ‘fun’ to attack in TOR, it’s hard to say), this makes for a painful experience. Generally speaking, Civil War games are the ones that make me want to Queue dodge the most, as they’re long (at least they feel long) and always painful.
Before we finish up fully, I’ll also make a brief word on Rift’s domination Warfront, The Codex. I don’t play it very often, so I don’t have that much to say on it, but it feels a bit better than either of the 3 point offerings (I believe it has 4), in addition to Rift having some nice PvP in general (unfortunately the best WFs don’t have equivalents in other games, but I might do a post on just them at some stage soon)
