OutDPS!

Hey everyone, hope you’ve all reconfigured your addons and scrounged up enough epic gems to fill out your gear! Today we’re going to talk about Isle of Conquest. Disclaimer: for the purposes of this article I’m going to assume you’ve either read the WoWWiki page, stepped into the BG at least once, or both.

Isle of Conquest combines elements from all BGs and world PvP. It also will drain your computer’s resources badly if your comp is 4+ years old like mine, so be ready to turn off iTunes after you zone in.

What you need to know is that there are 5 nodes that can all be captured by the time-honored Arathi Basin tradition: interacting with a flag graphic for 8 seconds (in AB it used to be 10 secs, but flag captures in all BGs that aren’t instant are now 8 seconds). Two of them contribute to your honor gain (something that should be irrelevant to you, since you’re pugging this BG) and can be safely ignored reinforcements: The Quarry and the Refinery. The other three, the Workshop, the Docks, and the Hangar are more useful for accomplishing more goals, and are way more fun.

The workshop provides you with demolishers and one siege engine every few minutes, which, when destroyed, has to be repaired by NPC engineers before it’s usable again. The Docks provides your team with different, much more interesting vehicles which I’ll address shortly. The Hangar, probably the coolest thing in the whole BG, is a node that grants you access to your faction’s airship that does laps around the map. If you time it right, you can infiltrate the enemy keep by leaping from the airship as it makes its rounds. The airship also has gun turrets that you can operate in order to fire on the hapless players below, although you’ll have to turn up your video effects to be able to see all the way to the ground. Yes, you really are that high up.

Your keep also has a flag which can be captured, but it is not assailable until at least one of the keep walls have been broken down (correct me if I’m wrong on this). Once your keep is captured, your team will no longer spawn there and your general is vulnerable, so don’t let the other side control it for too long.

Capturing the Docks grants you access to two vehicles whose like you have not seen outside of this BG. The glaive thrower does decent siege damage and can spray glaives at short range to fend off foes, but its biggest asset is its range. It can hit your enemy’s wall from out of range of the turrets that line the ramparts, so take advantage of this next time you’re riding in one. Don’t be afraid to jump out of the vehicle to defend it from enemies, however, as it doesn’t have a lot of health. The other vehicle, the catapult, should be familiar to anyone who’s ridden shotgun in a demolisher in Ulduar, because you can use it to catapult yourself a great distance, even over the enemy’s walls. It also has a sweet little ability that puts the whole vehicle into stealth mode and makes you move very quickly (like a blademaster in Warcraft 3). It’s utility is questionable, but it’s fun factor is undeniable. It has no true offensive abilities though, so be warned.

The most important nodes by far are the Workshop, the Docks and the Hangar. Anyone who has seen a map of the BG knows that these nodes are spread out evenly across the center of the map, so trying to hold all 3 is probably futile. You want to focus on the workshop and 1 of the other nodes, because this will leave you the freedom to head back to the keep to defend it from attackers when necessary. And remember, the airships themselves aren’t that useful, at least in my experience. Being able to deny the enemy access to it is good in theory, but because Isle is exclusively a PUG BG (what BG isn’t these days?) you don’t exactly have to worry about coordinated land and air assaults on your keep. If people are trickling into your base from the air, it shouldn’t be hard to pick them off from the safety of your courtyard, where they can’t be reinforced from their allies outside the walls. The danger is that your enemies use the bombs conveniently stacked inside the courtyard to sabotage the walls from within. Pro tip: a lot of people try to blow up the gate that blocks access to the building in each keep where the general is housed, but this is in fact futile as it does not take damage of any kind and opens on its own.

The key to winning this BG is to avoid getting distracted by all the fun stuff you can do, like riding the airship around, and to focus on what’s important, which is draining the other team of its resources. You do this by killing enemy players. Try to make sure you always take out at least two opponents before you die, as that’s the number one way to do your part in such a huge (40 on 40) battleground.

If you drop into your enemy keep from the air, grab some bombs and set them off near the walls. If you’re attacking from the outside, try and defend your side’s siege vehicles, and if the other team captures the Docks and/or Workshop, try to get them back ASAP, because there’s no more effective way to break down the walls than siege tanks and glaive throwers.

As always, let me know of any necessary corrections or useful additions in the comments!

-Jurgwena