Nemesis Groups - the other half of Ashran

Ashran was the new PvP "battleground" this expansion. It tried to tie in PvE objectives and mass PvP like some old PvP maps - old Alterac Valley, Wintergrasp. Their success with Ashran might be called murky at best. They've made multiple changes to Ashran along the way in an effort to fix the problems it has. At first the queues were just unbearable. They fixed that, kind of, but there are still plenty of "does this make sense?" issues.

Basically, most of the rewards (honor and conquest) are gotten from doing the PvE Objectives, meaning that most people aren't interested in fighting in the middle of the map. This lends itself to feeling very anti-PvP, which is rather a shame given the fact that this was the only new PvP map introduced in WoD. Open the LFG tool and look under Ashran, and you'll see plenty of "Events group!" and "Winning events!" groups. These groups first and foremost try to win the events. The events pop up randomly and have a fixed cooldown in between them, and in between events, groups will try to meet in the middle of the map and "push the road" ... which is basically just a way to kill time until the next event pops up. Of course, there is also a second type of group you'll find in the LFG tool: Nemesis groups.

The PvP building in your garrison, the Gladiator's Sanctum, offers a number of quests that revolve around killing the opposite faction in open world PvP. Battlegrounds (whether rated or not) do not count toward these quests, but Ashran does. Basically there is one quest for each race, requires you to kill 500 of them, and once completed you get a cool title. You can accept one quest at a time and, in an odd quirk, while in an actual group (not just overall raid, you have to be in that person's group in that raid) anyone who also has that quest will earn you credit every time they kill someone. So, as an example, the first quest I selected was for Gnomes. If someone else in my group was also on that quest, then every time we killed a single Gnome, we would both get credit for 2 kills toward our quest. This is the basis for Nemesis groups - every group in a raid has a specified race, hoping to get credit for 5 kills each time you kill a single player.

Some races are easier to kill than others - the vast majority of Alliance are Human or Night Elf, and so those are quite easy. There are very few Pandaren overall, and they are split between Horde and Alliance, so that is the toughest one.

Nemesis groups are focused on one thing - killing the opposing faction. They sometimes even hop from server to server trying to find an Ashran that has a large amount of alliance/horde. Once they've found a group, they try to control the road, but let the opposite faction win all the events and then slaughter them afterward. This way the other players don't just leave; call it a perverse win-win. Here you can see my group waiting for the alliance to complete the racing event:

Waiting ...

If you look closely at the map, you can tell our raid is trying to block the two entrances to this event, and once the alliance gets 90% of the way to victory, we'd charge in and try to kill everyone. My goal on Friday night was to quickly knock out the rest of my Gnome quest ... and I was successful!

I am now known as Gnomebane Laktose. The titles are shared across all characters on your account, which is nice. Since humans would be pretty quick, I knocked that one out of the way this weekend, too:

I believe that title is Laktose the Manslayer. Completing all the Nemesis quests gives you the title of "Warlord of Draenor" which is pretty awesome.

Of course, Blizzard is changing Ashran again in the next patch. Some of the side objectives will no longer reward conquest, which doesn't seem like a huge deal ... but what will have a large impact is that they are no longer allowing raids to queue for Ashran. Event groups and Nemesis groups will cease to exist, you'll just be thrown into Ashran with a bunch of random people with different goals. To make things a little better though, they are dropping the amount of kills required from 500 to 100. This actually makes it easier, number-wise, to finish each quest, of course. In 6.1, in an ideal scenario (full group on the same quest), you'd need to kill 100 members of that race. In 6.2, worst case scenario you need to kill 100 ... but if you happen to find anyone else in your raid group on that quest, the number will go down. Of course, it might not be as easy to find a group willing to kill the opposing faction as opposed to just trying to win rewards, but we'll see.