Slayer's Rise Guide: Midnight's 40v40 Epic Battleground

What Slayer's Rise is

Slayer's Rise is the epic battleground Midnight added: a 40 vs 40 fight set in the Voidstorm, built in the tradition of Alterac Valley and Isle of Conquest. Two domanaar warlords are fighting for control of the region, and the Alliance and the Horde each end up aligned with one of them. You do not choose a side: your faction decides it.

It sits in the random Epic Battleground queue alongside the older epic maps, and a March 2026 hotfix raised the chance of Slayer's Rise being picked from that queue.

How a match plays out

Blizzard describes the match in three stages, and they are a useful way to think about where your 40 players should be:

1. The opening brawl. Both teams meet at an initial control point in the middle and fight over it before the match opens up.
2. The lane push. Each side then pushes down a lane toward the enemy base, destroying defenses and killing key NPCs along the way.
3. Recruiting and the kill. Players can break off from the lane to recruit neutral NPC forces to fight for their side, and the match ends when one team defeats the opposing domanaar.

Behind that, both teams have a reinforcements pool, and the side objectives feed into it: capturing the Sparring Grounds, for example, costs the other team reinforcements. So the lane is not the only way to put pressure on the enemy, and a match can swing on objectives nobody was watching.

The named objectives and the ultradon

Five holdable positions carry names you will see on the map: the Shenzar Refinery, the Bastion of Might and Gates of Might, and the Bastion of Valor and Gates of Valor. The Refinery has its own graveyard, so holding it gives your team another place to respawn.

The best-known neutral recruit is the ultradon, which each faction can summon at The Husk or the Sparring Grounds. Getting one on your side is a real swing in a close lane, and killing the other faction's ultradon is an achievement in its own right. Watch too for the Path of Predation: catching an enemy there before they dismount is another of the map's achievements.

Achievements and the weekly quest

Slayer's Rise has five achievements of its own:

There is a practical reason to queue epic battlegrounds every week too. The weekly quest Enshrouded in War asks you to earn Honor in Epic Battlegrounds, and it pays Honor and 175 Conquest, Conquest you can earn without playing a rated match. Honor earned in Slayer's Rise counts toward it; an early bug that stopped it counting was fixed in March 2026. Our Conquest cap guide covers how that Conquest fits into your weekly total.

Where to go from here

Epic battlegrounds are unrated, so Slayer's Rise is about Honor, Conquest from the weekly and achievements rather than rating. If a 40-player objective fight is what you enjoy and you want it to count on a ladder, Battleground Blitz is the rated 8v8 version of battleground play, and its live activity shows how often games are firing in your region:

The rules and maps of that bracket are in our Battleground Blitz guide, and the Honor you collect in Slayer's Rise is best spent as our PvP gearing guide describes.