Goodbye Xel'Naga Caverns, hello Cloud Kingdom

Blizzard have posted a Battle.net blog regarding the changes to the map pool in season six, including the departure of the 2-player old-timer.

The fresh blood in the map pool will be represented by two extremely popular battlefields that were born from the TL.net map contest. The first is SUPEROUMAN's Cloud Kingdom, which is already being used on a tournament level, namely the Season 1 of GSL 2012.



Cloud Kingdom is a 2-player map, whose center is striped by a couple of high-ground areas, each having a watch tower that monitors the middle low-ground lane. There is a nicely tucked natural and the third is just around the corner down/up the main "road". Although giving an initial impression of a map filled with narrow corridors, Cloud Kingdom actually allows more maneuverability than it seems. Each highground has five ramps that can lead you to virtually any position on the map - to expansions, watch towers or directly into the enemy natural.



monitor's and ESV's Korhal Compound is the second new addition to the ladder map pool and is another 2-player map. The way Korhal Compound is built allows the players to split the map in half and taking four bases easily. The two watch towers present on the map give vision over the center low-ground as well as the bottle necks on both their sides. Several pillars of terrain are placed on various locations to create even more choke points.

In order to make room for the newcomers, Blizzard are retiring two of the older maps in the pool: Xel'Naga Caverns (the 2-player map that has been around since beta but eventually falling out of tournaments' pools) and Arid Plateau - another 2-player map which never became a tournament map, in part due to having uncomfortably to defend natural expansions.

Ladder players will get the chance to play on the new maps come next week when Season 6 is scheduled to begin.