Review of
WoW: The Battleground +AI [1.0.a]
Played one time with three players.
I played the Orc Shaman on the Alliance side.
First of all, I have to admit that we might played with not enough players.
So, the experience we had might be very different in a full house game.
The first thing one can see while playing this map is that you have a
talent for converting all these materials so that they look good but
still have a low file size.
At this point I also have to state my first critique point.
If you have so much file size left, why do you have to add such an ear
raping cripple music file? But that's a minor problem. Starting with the
real points.
1.) Weird Gamestart
Why don't heroes start at their bases, which is marked on the minimap.
The first spawn of heroes at the same point is just confusing.
And I think it is not good because players who are new to the game or
players who pick a low health hero can be killed easily and this could
may be abused by players who know the game already.
2.) My Hero
As I said above, I played an Orc Shaman on the Alliance side. I don't know
if that was intended. I must say. It is one of the most boring skill set
I have ever seen in an arena map. Standard casting spells which are well
triggered, which scale with attributes and are spiced with a channel system
but also are nothing more then simple damage or heal on target effects.
This is just boring. Where are the fun World of Warcraft abilities?
For shamans, you could have used this:
http://www.wowhead.com/spell=51490/thunderstorm
In general you should add movement spells as jumps/shifts/charges/teleports.
Also some of the existing skillshots could be transformed into skillshots,
which are much more rewarding if hit correctly. I know you want to transform
the WoW battleground style into Warcraft 3 and you are quite successful with that
but I wish you put a little bit more diversity into it.
3.) Texttag Apocalypse
I see you are really a master of texttag abuse. Do you know they are limited to
100 Textags shown at the same time?
You should focus on showing textags only if they are needed and necessary for the player.
The descriptions for shops should pop up if a shop is selected.
The damage and abilities should only be shown for the local player and by that I mean
only the damage made by your hero and the damage taken by your hero.
Anything else makes the fights just messy and we played with only half of the players
possible.
Also one can see the texttags from enemy units in fog of war.
4.) Item/Shopping/Upgrading System
This is something I really like about your map. It is easy to understand. Not too
complicated with recipe system which many map makers still like to implement.
And the shops which are spread over the whole battleground are POIs which force players to
collide with the enemy.
5.) Finding the enemy
This is the main problem of your map. After the clash at the beginning of the game, there
wasn't any big fight for us. You really have to implement some kind of enemy detection.
Maybe you could ping the position of all players periodically or what I would like to see
are captur able control points which are increasing the field of view drastically.
You could also add rune spots with movement speed bonuses. The game would benefit from it
a lot. For example having another POI and improving the slow motion movement speed
which heroes have in your map.
And WoW also have battlegrounds with movement speed bonus runes.
6.) Multiboard
The multiboard contains good information but it is just unreadable wit so many colors.
It would be good to have at least one paragraph between horde and alliance side.
As funny as it is, the bot names are distracting. You can leave them as they are which is
not a big deal, but something like "Bot 1" would not hurt either.
7.) Miscellaneous Stuff
The selection circle is not converted properly, one can not see it clearly but the border of
the texture is not fully transparent which creates ugly lines around the units.
The home healing fountains should not heal enemy units, that makes the whole home base thing
weird.
All in all you have much of wasted potential and the gameplay is in its current state boring.
You have a perfect base andrea. You only have to make a fun gameplay now!
I would like to see a 12vs12 mode, where one can play against 12 AI players.
Rock on!