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WoW 8.1: Battle for Darkshore Warfront (Horde)

by - 6 years ago

Today we’re taking a quick look at the recently released Darkshore Warfront. There have been some improvements and streamlining since Stromgarde went live with 8.0, but overall the experience is very similar. In this post, we experience the Warfront from the Horde perspective.

Storming the Shore

You’ll start off aboard the flashy new Forsaken warship as it heads for the Darkshore…shore. On our first playthrough, we saw a lot of dialogue between Sira Moonwarden and Maiev Shadowsong. Sira Moonwarden was previously slain by Horde forces as risen by Val’kyr as the first Dark Warden.

As you land, you’ll fight uphill against Night Elf forces as you push to establish your base in Bashal’Aran, including a boss that you don’t have to pay much attention to since you’re just zerging the place (looking forward to Heroic Warfronts, though). Alliance players will remember Bashal’Aran as the location that Tyrande ascended as Night Warrior.

On your way up to the base location, you’ll fight a lot of Treants and similar creatures, which let you get ahead on your Wood collection. You’ll also get to see many of the new or reused Legion art assets for Night Elves and Forsaken, including structures, trees, textures, and effects.

Locations

  • Ruins of Auberdine: Horde lands here, pushing through Alliance forces to fill a progress meter and kill an elite boss before moving into the main part of the Warfront.
  • Withering Thicket: A small area to the south of Bashal’Aran, Alliance players will remember helping Maiev investigate Tyrande’s disappearance here during their Darkshore quest line. Horde pass through here without any real use for the space.
  • Bashal’Aran: Horde base of operations in the Darkshore Warfront. You’ll have to clear out legions of Druids, Treants, and Night Elves before you can claim it and build your structures.
    • War Chest: Pick up Iron auto-mined. Once you claim Lornesta Mine, it offers a quicker rate.
    • Barracks: Recruit units to take the field. There’s Deathguards (mdps), Deadshots (rdps), Alchemists (healers), and Lancers (tanks).
    • Armory: Spend resources to increase defense and power of your troops, including those recruited at the Barracks.
    • Altar of Storms: Empower yourself or transform into . It’s pretty cool to see this magical structure built by Goblins to look more like a factory.
      • Augment your strength with Bristling Power.
      • Transform into a meaty, self-healing tank (Abomination), a curse-dealing healer (Banshee), or a ranged DPS robot with a rocketpack (AzerMEK Prototype).
    • Great Hall/Stronghold/Fortress: This is your main structure in your base. Increasing its level allows you to passively collect more resources in the War Chest and gives you access to new structures, such as the Workshop. It doesn’t otherwise produce units or grant buffs.
    • Workshop: Let’s you construct powerful Catapults to take down enemy forces, including the towering Guardians that block you from the Alliance base.
  • Cinderfall Grove: To the northeast of Bashal’Aran, the area is rich in Wood production.
  • Gloomtide Strand: Capturing this allows you to recruit powerful Abomination units. These are great for pushing the roads.
  • Cliffspring River: Nothing really of note here.
  • Lornesta Mine: A shallow cave held by Naga and their enslaved Darkscale Dig-Slaves. There aren’t any nodes like in Battle for Stromgarde You can kill some Dig-Slaves and loot some slow-spawning chests outside for Iron, but it looks like Blizzard wants players to just rely on gathering Iron from rarespawns and the War Chest.
  • Forlorn Crossing: This bottleneck just north of Bashal’Aran basically bars your recruited units from taking the rest of the roads for Darkshore.
  • Ashwood Depot: Here you can complete a quest to learn Echolocation, allowing you to use your Flight Whistle from the open world to return to Bashal’Aran while in the Warfront. As the halfway point between Horde and Alliance forces, it also offers a Flight Master to quickly fly to many other conquered locations.
  • Mist’s Edge: An alliance defensive chokepoint protected by two Ancient Protectors. You won’t be able to take them out quickly or easily, and they’re part of one of the final phases of the attack.
  • Lor’danel Landing: You’ll depart from here on Bats to defeat Maiev, but first you have to take down Alliance glaive-throwers so your bats can fly through safely.

The Final Push

At the far northern edge of Darkshore, Horde players mount the final attack on Night Elf resistance in Mist’s Edge. In addition to general military units, two massive Ancient Protectors bar passage to confront Maiev and end the Warfront. These meaty tree guardians will burn like Teldrassil, but you need to keep at it. Recruiting Catapults helps significantly, but otherwise you’ll just have to zerg them with your team.

Past Mist’s Edge at Lor’danel Landing, you’ll have to clear out Kaldorei forces and take down anti-air artillery on their ships to clear the way. The ship glaive throwers can only be hit by the two Dread Ballistae on either side of the beach. When the Ballistae break down, you can use the barrel of tools just behind them to repair them.

Overall, this phase was a little dissatisfying, as only two players could really do anything out of your team of 20, and the 4 glaive throwers took a long time to take out.

After you take out the glaive-throwers, you’ll mount Forsaken Bats to fly to the overgrown platform off the coast where Maiev is holed up. She doesn’t seem to have any particularly interesting moves herself besides tank and spank, but she will summon waves of burning Kaldorei spirits of vengeance throughout the encounter–and more as she hits lower health states. These spirits will stay up for the rest of the fight and move in progressively more complex patterns, burning anyone in their path. While they don’t do a fatal amount of damage, it’s probably more than you’d expect from a Warfront.

And that’s it. Kill and collect your loot!

Notes

  • Mining: Blizzard seems to have gotten away from mining with this Warfront. The Lornesta mine doesn’t offer mining nodes and is rather small. You can either kill Murlocs in the mining cave, loot a couple slow-spawning chests outside the cave, kill rarespawns throughout the map, or just pick up Iron from the War Chest in Bashal’Aran.
  • Layout: The Darkshore design lends itself to a more straightforward/linear approach toward the enemy faction. There’s still an east and west road, but the zone is more narrow than Arathi Highlands.
  • Echolocation: You can complete the quest to learn this in Ashwood Depot. It allows you to use your Flight Whistle earned in open world content (Legion, BFA) to quickly return to Bashal’Aran while in the Darkshore Warfront. (You only have to do this once.)
  • The phase in Lor’danel Landing is pretty boring if you’re not one of the two players on the Horde ballistae taking down the Alliance glaive-throwers.

Gameplay Footage

Don’t miss the rest of our patch 8.1: Tides of Vengeance coverage! Questions, comments, or corrections? Feel free to drop them below or @BlizzPro!


Seth Harkins

PC gamer and lover of (most) things Blizzard. In his off time, he writes bad fan fiction, tends to his growing number of house plants, and enjoys a love-hate relationship with two cats.


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