The new community site blog appears to be the way we'll hear from the World of Warcraft development team moving forward. Ghostcrawler hasn't posted on the official forums since the new site went live, making the daily blue post tracking a bit less than interesting. Cory Stockton also jumped on the blog bandwagon today by providing an update on Tol Barad balance. A surprise from the post is that Blizzard is actually happy with the difficulty of attackers winning Tol Barad. Another surprise is, well... it's a giant post without actually addressing many balance issues.
"When we set out to create Wintergrasp, one of the issues we dealt with was that we were never able to ensure the sides were even -- in fact, they rarely were. Because the smaller team would almost always be assured defeat, we attempted to address team-size imbalance by favoring the attacker," Stockton said. This is not the case, however, with Tol Barad. "Tol Barad is intentionally balanced so that it’s a challenge for the attackers, because we want to make sure that control of Tol Barad matters," he said.
It's designed this way primarily due to the mechanics in place that always ensure there's a balanced matchup -- at least in terms of raid sizes for each faction -- which in Stockton's mind makes for a more "fair" match. That said, Stockton does go on to say that Blizzard feels it's currently a bit too hard to win as an attacker. They're working on ways to make it a bit easier, though they still want it to be difficult.
One change coming in patch 4.0.6 is to make it easier for attackers to capture that third base, assuming they already have two under control. This means that you'll capture the final base faster -- allowing you to quickly grab it from the defenders if they've decided to turtle on defense, before they can snag a base back from you.
Unfortunately that's the only real change he goes into, though he does say they plan to make multiple changes in 4.0.6 to address attacker difficulty. I guess we'll have to wait and see what they are in the PTR patch notes.
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