◊ Praetorian

I didn't say to also defend the bunkers. That's unrealistic and spreads you too thin. Defend things that will permanently change the flow of the game if tagged. If you defend SH GY, Horde respawns at Frostwolf and you can easily reclaim SH bunker. When I call for Horde to defend IB GY, we don't worry about IB tower initially. We hold the GY and wipe them at Galv, then ten people can rush up IB Tower to recap it easily once everything else is secure. If you defend the SH GY/ramp area, Horde will never get to Balinda so that won't be a concern. Stop them in their tracks there, recap SH bunker, and then get ready for a hard fight at IB GY. But shockingly now you're fighting on the Horde side of the map instead of giving up your own territory.

 

Sando

The problem for alliance is that they have to react to what horde do. If the Horde rush hard - no PUG defence of SH will hold, so alliance need to turn it into a race, which they should win. If Horde play a 1/2 defence 1/2 offence that is often the one beating alliance so convincingly, Alliance need to take their time and consolidate their games. However Alliance cannot rely on using a set tactic at the start of the battle. If they decide to go with the consolidate strat, they'll lose to the horde before taking FW/RH if horde decide to rush. If they decide to rush through, a defensive Horde team will chew them up and retake IB/Towers.

Horde are the ones that set the pace of the game, alliance need to react to it, if they do so (and do it reasonably well) then they should win, but if they don't react they'll be lucky to get a win. This is probably always going to be the case, 1 team will always be the initiator, but in a PUG, where the extent of tactics is sitting in the cave giving a basic opening gambit, the non-initiator is in a serious disadvantage due to needing a much greater level of communication, which isn't going to work with the general wow population.

Allowing Queue'ing as group would bring in some much needed communication, where even if you can only bring in 5 players, at least you can react with 5 people rather than 1 and actually make a difference. Effective communication is what alliance really need to bring their win percentage up to 50% in my opinion, and this isn't really going to happen with just randoms. This is why i think so many alliance believe it's just bad alliance costing them games, because when alliance play properly and listen to instructions then the game is often a win for alliance. However it's very frustrating when people refuse to listen, and alliance are very lucky to win when that happens.

And by the way, no, that strat is not reversable, SH is nowhere near as defensable as IB, horde will take SH bunker, and Balinda is not defendable to anywhere near the extend that Galv is. I was in a game where 8-10 of us tried to defend Balinda, just as something to try, and by maybe 15 horde, we got absolutely destroyed. However i've seen the same number and more alliance get destroyed by the same number of horde or less on Galv, on many occasions. Recapping SH is a very dicey option, if you're too early, the horde O is in an even or better fight, if you're too late, the horde have a chokepoint next to IW bunker shooting down the hill at horde coming from SP.

 

◊ Praetorian

Defending graveyards is easy. You just keep them off the flag and sort of kill them and eventually enough are dead that you can mop up the rest. I held IB GY with a group of like 5 people (complete pugs by the way, not a coordinated group) vs. 20 alliance yesterday, until more help arrived, just by dropping magma totems on the flag and running away, eventually dying on the flag, waiting 5sec and ankhing to drop a magma, etc., until people could rez at the GY to reinforce it. Defense inherently favors the defender because of the capping mechanics. If there is a single person alive, including paladins who can bubble to buy time, mages who can iceblock and then pop out to AoE the flag, etc., you should be able to wear down a more numerous stream of attackers just by rezzing there repeatedly. And if everyone you kill is respawning at Frostwolf, you'll quickly have the area secure.

I really don't buy the "Horde dictate the course of the game" reasoning -- I think it's self-fulfilling to an extent. If you are giving up Stonehearth without a fight, then yes, they do dictate it. Either they go all O and it's a race like pre-2.3, or they defend and force you to respawn at Stormpike and it's a "turtle" that Horde dominates. But that is shaped solely by the complete failure to defend SH GY.

 

Cromfel

But dont you see what happens when you defend SHGY? You will loose SH tower, because IBGY respawn flows the horde trough it. And this leads to situation where you are always 1 tower worth of points ahead of your enemy. What happens when you defend SH tower? You will loose Balinda and most likely SHGY in conjuction. Where something like this will never happen on the defensive line from IBGY to Galvanger trough IB tower.

We all know how to play time, but that is not reasoning to the raid wide play if you personally know how to play time at GY. If you had also similiar player at offensive end, frostnova/iceblock and pet frost nova people at SHGY respawn, people could easily cap the flag under pressure. I find it a bit silly to go into 1 player role details into this evaluation.

How will crowd react on horde attacking balinda, and pushing there if they were defensive? It would likely need a lot of players due Balinda being easily controllable compared to Galvanger, what pretty much solo attacking group when healers are interupted. And when this defense is put up, SH bunker will be wide open, giving you the point edge that can give you option to focus 100% on defence and always win, because you took the point lead with that 1 tower. Something like this can never be duplicated by Alliance. They can not dominate IB tower when they push to Galvanger. The defence will always run trough IB tower on their respawn to zerg Galvanger. Your defence will wear out Alliance without giving up any part of the map that is important.



There you see the IBGY route for horde defence, but alliance SH/balinda defence needs to split up. They dont naturally defend SH by defending Balinda. They dont defend bunker nor the GY from the route from going to Balinda, if they go for SH bunker, they leave 2 doors open for balinda and SHGY. Where horde will block IBGY and IB tower simply by killing the alliance offense. Even if alliance pushed you to 100% defence, horde IBGY respawn is "behind the lines" for alliance offense at certain point, so its extremely easy for small amount of players to go harash tower or even GY, while rest blocks galvanger. Something that isnt possible to do in horde offensive attacks where you are desparately in need of splitting your forces between SH or Balinda, because loosing either of those will result in inevitable loss, when horde starts to defend.

.:. Retribution Paladin Hideout .:. http://cromfel.battlefield.fi/

 

Myonax

Agreed... I was playing on my level 65 Pally and only lost 1 av, since he was 65 I was healing people guarding towers and capping snowfall when it had 30 seconds left to cap for alliance for the first time. The combination of those two things I went 7 and 1. Then the next day I was going to work on my druids honor so employed the same strategy, the only issue was that alliance was consistently guarding snowfall with 1 or 2 people and I could never get it back and got the typical "horde don't cap snowfall or we lose" from bg chat. Horde needs to control snowfall or the following will all happen:

1) Glav will die.
2) Iceblood GY will be taken.
3) Iceblood tower and towerpoint will be capped.
4) Alliance will back cap Stonehearth.

Horde has to realize the snowfall is the key between a 30 minute 250 point win/loss and a 40 minute 500 point win. I got disgusted and stopped queuing for my av when horde scored a miraculous 250 point win to alliances 450 point loss. We had none of their tower and stormpike towers where still 2:35 seconds from capping when they killed vandar

 

Poggrid

I played a fair number of games this weekend. Horde never controlled snowfall, the first three points above happened, and the last only happened once, by a very determined paladin and rogue combo. Even in that game, Stonehearth was retaken within thirty seconds of the timer starting for Alliance. I'd say my win-loss ratio definitively favored the horde.

If you had enough people stay back on D, then maybe the scenario you posit above could happen. But that doesn't seem to happen; even when Alliance has a lot of D, we never seem to make it out of the valley leading up to Icewing Bunker. Having people run back from IB GY to try and attack from behind means that IB GY is probably going to get rolled.

 

Sando

But if you play the 'alliance defend SH horde defend IB' game then horde have a clear advantage, they have an easier 'boss' in Balinda, SH bunker is basically given to horde for free, and IB gives you a free exit without having to go past the flag and attacking alliance to get back on the offensive. Unless Alliance both takes IB and holds SH, and that's not exactly an easy proposition, then the horde should win this type of fight most times.

Since assuming equal skill/participation the chances of Horde and Alliance taking SH/IB should be roughly equal in any given game, and that unless both of those fights go alliance way then horde will have a large advantage, why should this be the predominant strategy for the alliance? And while i've seen both sides win both those battles and force the other team back to SP/FW completely, i'm yet to see alliance come back from it, yet horde manage to on a semi-regular basis. This is mainly due to SH having it's choke point on the northern side next to IW bunker, and the distance from SP to SH given that it's not only further as the crow flies, but a circuatous route starting at the back of a cul-de-sac at SP. Compared to FW to IB with a straight run and much less of a choke-point coming into IB, without having to fight up-hill giving the defenders a LOS advantage.

 

xonk

Also the fact that snowfall graveyard is still on a 5 minutes timer whereas all the other non neutral graveyards were brought down to 4 doesn't help alliance offense group.
In reality, if both snowfall and IBgy are tagged as fast as possible, IBgy will cap before SF does because of the timer.

And if Alliance defends SHgy, basically we forfeit our chances to take IBgy since all the horde will rez there.
Inevitably, this puts Alliance on the defensive whereas the game is barely even started.

 

berg

I do not follow you here. You are describing an early stalemate like it is a bad thing for the alliance. Surely a stalemate is better than handing us a GY, 2 towers and balinda. Struggling to defend one gy while struggling to take the other is how the map is supposed to work. I'll grant you that reinforcing SH is considerably more difficult than reinforcing IB but everyone knows this. The solution is to 'over' defend SH early on and not lose it. Handing us SH is the worst mistake that can be made.

I played 13 av's on a terribly geared alt this weekend. In only 3 of those games did the alliance receive any bonus honor. Those 3 games were all in the 62/125 honor range and all a result of ~20 early offense killing towers. Without the graveyards to support the offense though, the map always winds up red by the end.


I hope Alliance starts playing correctly soon. Since allies get nothing out of AV on BG9 the Horde queues have literally gone from 1 minute to 15 minutes in the last 2 weeks.

 

Angerz

Horde have been absolutly dominating stormstrike AV games. Alliance people shout out all kinds of strats, most of which never work (rush RH, slow capping starting with IBGY, etc), none of which focus on D.

I only won a few games this weekend, some loses were complete steam rolls.

I think 3? of our wins were using what I like to call the ultimate alliance strategy, turtle stormpike GY. There werent many AFK players, so it was 30 active players choking the bridge. We didnt kill galv, we blew up like 1 tower and lost 2 towers and belinda and still won by 200 reinforcements.

AV has 4 chokepoints, IBGY and SHGY and then the bridge and the entrance to the upper horde base. The GY chokepoints aren't very strong. The upper horde entrance has a few LOS issues that alliance can use to their advantage.

The Bridge is just mighty. High Ground is easy to control, Horde funnel into a small focal point, no LOS issues for alliance healers, flag is very close to reentering the action, etc. Horde have to enter down the path, ride along the top and jump down, or go all the way around to behind the mine and come up from the rear, but again, you enter into the main fray, just from the other side, but not a meaningful distance away.

Maybe I'm just wrong and delusional from listening to alliance whine all weekend and lose even more, but those games were fun watching the horde just rush into a wall of death.

 

Melador

Of course it varies from game to game and probably BG to BG, but I've never seen a stalemate result in an Alliance win. It's always a grind where Horde caps one more tower than we do and we lose via reinforcements.

The only Alliance wins I see are when it's turned into a race and Horde don't make an attempt to back-cap IBGY from us. If we capture and hold IBGY, cap the nearby towers, later pick up Galv, and rush to kill Drek we win. If we lose IBGY, we lose because we're stuck at the uphill bottleneck and never put together an offensive force again. And if we defend SH, we're unable to take IB, and we lose. I see a lot of Horde advocating Alliance defending SHGY and claiming that giving up SHGY is a horrible mistake, but it's definitely not a mistake in my experience. In fact, it's the only way I've seen Alliance win.

 

Myonax

The first three happening is a significant amount of honor change is my point. You get honor for galv, capping the two towers. That is 250 honor alliance gains and horde loses. Even if they loose the AV they are guaranteed that 250. As horde I don't want to give up 250 honor to make the game 10 minutes faster.

 

◊ Praetorian

Look, there's no magical solution that will always guarantee a victory. Ultimately, with basically no NPCs in play, on some level it actually does boil down to PvP. Is there a strat that will always guarantee an AB win? No, you still have to kill the defenders and cap the nodes. But what Alliance does in the majority of AV games currently is the equivalent to giving away Smith in AB and then complaining that you always lose (of course, amusingly, Alliance PUGs love doing this in AB too...). The presence of good healers makes all the difference here. Yesterday I was in AV that was dragging and I wasn't sure why since we had pretty good map control. Everyone was stuck at Icewing Bunker. So I leave defense and go up to the SH GY choke and start healing. We push to Vanndar and kill him 10-15 minutes later after burning both base bunkers. The difference? Me. Not that I'm so amazing, but I hadn't thought to really look at the scoreboard during the game. At the end though, I looked at the Horde stats and realized that I was first with ~500k healing done, and #2 was... a warlock. With 50k healed. #3 was also a warlock. #4 was an elemental shaman at 30k who probably just healed himself sometimes. There literally was no one healing on the entire team, except for me. If I'm not in that AV, Horde probably loses on the basis of that alone.

Anyway, every time I say "defend SH GY and attack IB GY" the response from some is "but with the Horde we kill at SH respawning at IB, our offense will get overrun and we lose the Field of Strife anyway." But that assumes that your offense doesn't manage to contest IB GY.

Let Horde send 25 to SH GY and keep 15 back, and have Alliance send 25 to IB GY (with 1-2 tagging Snowfall on the way and keeping an eye on it so no one player can ninja it back) and keep 15 back on D. Whoever breaks the others' defense first wins. If Alliance contests IB, then all the SH casualties respawn at the Horde base and the offense is crushed. If Horde contests SH, then all the IB casualties respawn at the Alliance base and the Horde offense is crushed. And the winner claims the Field bunkers and Galv/Balinda. Shocking, that it might ultimately come down to a simple question of who wins the group battles.

Instead Alliance tends to give us their important strategic nodes without a fight, so even if Horde actually sucks and loses the skirmishes that do occur, they still end up with a superior overall position.

 

Compton2

Perhaps the holiday weekend affected this, but the games on my BG on Saturday and Sunday were markedly different from the 2.3 games up until that point. Essentially, all of my last 20 games was some variation on a pre-2.3 style race. Horde never seriously defended IB and alliance never seriously defended SH. The allies who died on offense would defend at IW, then to SP, then to the bridge. Alliance would send most of its offense to take IBGY, the towers and Galv simultaneously and then rush to FW. Alliance typically won this race. I had about a 75% win rate over the weekend.

It is also interesting that both sides seem to be braving and healing through the warmasters now. I saw a horde win in 4.5 minutes when they didn't even try to cap the DB towers. I was in an alliance match where we heard Van emote and immediately zerged drek with 3 WMs up, eeking out a win. Nobody appeared to be offtanking the WMs either. We were just healing through the damage and leaving them alone.

If Blizz really wants the towers to be meaningful, I think they need to beef up the WMs so you cannot ignore them.

Out of those 20 games, only 1 game ended by attrition (in our favor, in DB, after I managed to ninja cap/burn the East tower, which was roughly our margin of victory)

 

◊ zeidrich

This sort of reasoning is what really ends up losing alliance games.

You defend SH with a smaller contingent. You re-cap it when the zerg moves on. You re-cap it if it ever flips to red. SHB and Balinda are likely going to die. Unless the horde is really sucking. In the same vein, alliance will probably get galv and IBT unless they're really sucking. Reason being: There is no chokepoint to close those off until either alliance has secured IBGY or horde has secured SHGY.

As long as neither IBGY,SHGY or SFGY are red, horde will be respawning at FWGY. If you put a heavy enough defense up at IBGY until it caps, and keep SHGY from going red, you will eventually cut off horde progress. Now chances are you'll have to battle some loudmouth team-mates claiming you're attempting to turtle. But once you have a chokehold on IBGY, as long as you have some people willing to back-cap any GYs or towers that any sort of offense that breaks through can mount. In my experience it's normally a solo or duo team capping. If you can kill them, it's a good 4-5 minute run back assuming they can get through your offense again. If you can't kill them then it's a good chance they may move to another tower/GY to cap if they don't feel that the one they're at is being defended and you can retake it. If they look like they're actually defending it till it caps, you can either get some help, or, if people are still philosophically opposed to defending objectives, just graveyard zerg them. If they don't have food/water or healing occasionally you can wear them down by just going after them.

If you control IBGY and the horde does not have a forward graveyard, and if you can keep the small expeditionary forces from capping objectives, you've pretty much won. If they do manage to break through defense with a zerg, each time someone dies, they'll still res at FWGY. If 30 players try and zerg past your offense, and 10 die to offense, and then 3-5 die to defense, you're donw to 15 or so players on Offense. Each time your defense kills one of them they have to spawn back at FWGY and will get crushed solo by alliance offense. Obviously the good thing to do would be to flip FWGY when the zerg is trying to break through, that way not only do you force them to respawn at the relief hut, you also might split their offense as people come back to try and defend FWGY.

All the while you do the same thing by having one or two people go and flip the frostwolf towers, the relief hut, tower point etc, while you're moving forward. This means either the horde has to sacrifice those (stupid) or send at least a token defense to flip them back (reducing their offense).

Anyways, the thing I like about this BG is that a team of 5 players who work together are pretty much unstoppable. Since the movement of the zerg is so predictable, it is very very simple to recap objectives, or to toggle enemy objectives solo. With a partner you can overcome any solo defender. Any more and the enemy would need an organized defense to stop you. If you go well behind enemy lines and start capping things, chances are they will come to defend it, but only one at a time. By the time they decide to organize and come as a group to you, chances are the tower will already be capped.

My personal strategy goes something like this:

Game starts, mount up and go to SH GY, zerg flips SFGY, heads to Galv/IB Area.
I disrupt around the flag. I keep them from capping as long as possible. Divine shield often means I can do this for 15 seconds or so. I die.
I respawn at stormpike. I travel up the hill by the little logging camp, and jump down following the edge often bypassing the whole zerg and getting back to SHGY. Often at this point SHGY is undefended and I can recap it. If this is the case, and we have a few people on defense, we've pretty much secured the game. Any dead offense is now respawning at frostwolf, while our dead offense is only at SH meaning we have a easy time reinforcing IB.
If SHGY is defended with more than 1 person, I head to SH Bunker. If this is undefended or lightly defended I retake it.
Typically by the time stormpike is contested defense is light enough on SHGY that I can retake it easily, especially with a little help. Again if this happens, it means all dead offense is respawning at least at FWGY and a mediocre defense can eventually retake SPGY. Most of the rest of my time is spent trying to retake undefended objectives.

If the horde is pushing too quickly, you want to retake your undefended objectives before they flip.
If the horde is securing each objective they take before moving on (this rarely happens) you want to break a few people through them and cap and hold a forward graveyard.
If the horde is being completely retarded and sitting in one place, you have to bust through and start capping towers behind them.


This of course only works if the zergs are moving in a typical predictable manner. If you have one loudmouth motivating the raid to abandon any defense on IBGY or risk "turtling" and enough people listen to him, it's obviously not going to work, because IB will get retaken, horde will spawn there, SH will be lost for good, and alliance are now behind the chokepoint.

But in my opinion, if your team owns iceblood and stonehearth graveyards, the victory is pretty much determined as long as you're willing to occasionally back-cap.

 

Chucifer

This past weekend, I joined several Horde AV premades and they all devolved into racing the alliance by sending stealth cappers to the Dun Baldar North and South Towers, burning Ice Wing and Stone Hearth Bunkers, Killing Balinda and only bringing Van down when the DBN and DBS towers were within two minutes of capping. Then the entire raid would wait up to two minutes for DBN and DBS to burn down before leaving the battle ground for 126 extra honor. Was it successful? Yes. Was it enjoyable for me because I enjoy PvP? No. It was back to the pre-2.3 method of AV, with less Lieutenants to kill.

Unfortunately, it seems that due to the success of several of these premades, the concept of the 'AV race' was only further ingrained into peoples' heads. Especially those who never caught on to the benefits of Defense.

I can only assume that Blizzard wanted to promote PvP in AV with the concept of reinforcements and the emphasis on towers, but from the BG chatter and flow of the PUG games, not very many people want anything to do with AV beyond getting fast honor and getting out of AV and into the next one as soon as possible.

I can't see any way of minimizing this 'PvE rush' mentality.

 

Angerz

I've noticed the same thing. I am perfectly capable of keeping up 7 to 10 alliance by myself if no horde attack me. Its easier than healing BT trash. I routinely end AV with 500 to 700k healing and the only time I lose is when some equivalently geared healer is on the other side of the fight

Where it was a stalemate, I would ride up and HKs would flow. I think the only healers alliance had all weekend I saw was myself in BT gear and a few others in some splashing of greens and dungeon blues (obvious hyperbole by the way, but it had to be close). 40 people PEW PEWing is no way to win any PVP, especially with our bad AV strat to begin with.

 

Kasi

It is smart to backtrack and take the bunkers/SH. However in my opinion it should not be defended heavily. What you need to do is send 25-30 on offence and have the rest hold Stormpike. The order should be thus:

1) Take IBGY and the towers around it.
2) Cap mine in the north and hold SP with 10-15 people, whomever is not on offence.
3) Once you know the horde is past SH and is rushing north and IB area is a bit safer, the 25 people should break into roughly these groups.

3-4 each on the towers. 4-5 on IBGY. That leaves about 12-13 left. 10 or so move south to take FW. Then when there is about 1:30 or so left on SH bunker you have 4-5 from the IB area go back to SH and cap it. Then cap SH GY. Then cap Icewing Bunker.
4) This forces horde now to spawn back at their relief hut. You leave a few in the middle to prevent rogues/druids ninja capping and to take back towers/GYs before they cap and then you just crush the horde at FW. This happened for us in a game yesterday and it was very satisfying to get a resounding reinforcements win.

That as I have seen is the best chance for alliance to get an overwhelming win. What happens most often is it is a rush for the opponents boss which horde wins because Galv and Drek are tougher than Vandar and Belinda. But even with the loss you usually cap 3-4 towers and get a 350 point loss in 10-15 minutes.

I echo what others have said here. Gurg's strategy for alliance to win is flawed. You do not want it to be a contest in the middle. The geography in the middle and the difficulty of the middle bosses favor Horde massively. The IB area and surrounding towers/bosses are much easier to hold than the alliance ones. If you get drawn into a fight over the field of strife, you will lose because alliance can not defend all 3 of SHGY, SH bunker and Belinda. Horde can easily defend IBGY, IB tower and Galv. Hell just keep 3-4 by the gy to make sure someone doesn't ninja it and then have the rest move forward and fight just out in front of IB tower. You guard the tower and the GY at the same time, and it is very easy to shift over and guard Galv, especially given how one can easily wipe alliance on him.

Of course the danger to the above strat is if horde heavily guards IB. If 25-30 go on offence, you can break through a defence of 10-15 given you have some healers. If not and you get wiped on IBGY, the game is pretty much over due to the above reasons. If you could get enough offence up to take IBGY and hold it while having enough defence to wipe horde on SHGY that is great. But like others have said its a gamble. If you don't commit enough offence you'll hold SHGY sure but horde will take IBGY back. If you don't commit enough defence well that's fine. You've delayed horde a bit and hopefully still taken IBGY and you can continue the movement south. Hopefulyl the people who couldn't hold SHGY will be at SP and be able to hold there for a while due to superior geography.

 

Arcite

I totally agree that a 10 man group queue into AV makes such a world of difference from what I'm reading here, even from people in my own server/battlegroup, and even from the comments in a bunch of our games of people complaining about losing so much.

We had anywhere from 8-10 people for a number of hours on Saturday night and got ~800 honor per game (won all of them as well), this is next day honor so post-diminishing returns, and most of our games played out the same to start although the endings varied:

To start we'd defend Belinda. Horde kind of stream and trickle in most of the time and 10 (plus a few puggers here and there) people defending Belinda sounds a lot like the horde crushing the Alliance offense against Galvangar, the damage done to the flow is pretty substantial. I think one time we had 20 horde total that came to fight (overall, not all at once), but the only way they killed Belinda was if our team was way down south since most of the rest of the Alliance didn't bother defending her. From there we'd recap SH bunker and SH graveyard/icewing because most of the horde group moved on and either capping SP or impaling themselves on the defense, and even if there were ~5 defending the bunkers, we'd just kill them most of the time. Then we'd kill Galvangar since he usually was either bypassed by the offense or they were doing a poor job of it and then move to further offense, frequently making the difference in stopping horde surges coming up from Frostwolf.

Most of our games resulted in 0 bonus honor for the horde (which I agree is a bit lame even if you are with the zerg and getting HKs) and we frequently whittled down their numbers to 0 through tower caps and kills. A few games we'd bottle the horde up at Frostwolf and because we killed two towers and the captain, we were at a sizeable resource advantage and would win through attrition. The other games we were down capping each of the keep's towers, and then we killed Drek a few times as well. If we had one of our full time tanks (only had a DPS warrior) I'm sure we could've killed Drek more frequently but the warmasters were chewing up the healing. Either way, 800 honor a game which varied from the 15-40 minutes in length depending, was quite fun, but I completely agree with other posters that if you don't have a partial group or people aren't listening, it could've easily gone the other way with only HKs to rely on for honor.

But overall, I wholly support 5-10 group queues for AV, and while anything more than that would be even more unbalancing than it already seemed to be, I imagine you could still have two or three small groups like that making up most of the battleground.

 

Mode

-In my battle group, most of the alliance got the memo about Galvager by Saturday and no longer perform a Retard Rush at the start of the game. Most of the Horde have also caught on, but it's worth having a few people hang around there to pick off stragglers.

-On the other hand many Horde have still not gotten the memo about defense. Unfortunately, sometimes The Race works, so a lot of people are inclined to just suck up the occasional shut-out.

-Back-capping is really, really effective.

-Tower ninjas continue to be horrifyingly effective. I fear that games will become very lopsided towards alliance if group queues are implemented.

When I've seen Lok summoned, while he WAS kind of badass, the real benefit is that he provides a very visible rallying point for the zerg. Instead of dribbling out of the GY one by one, everyone sticks by Lok. Personally, I think the best thing to do for AV would be to make the NPCs like the commander's and Lok even easier to let out. Maybe make Lok summonable just after your team gets 100 kills or something, no blood turn-ins required(Or make blood/meat/armor/supplies tradable). Put a marker on the summoning team's map for where the summonables are.

 

Sando

Oh come on, alliance have said time and again in this thread why an early stalemate is bad for alliance, and the horde response seems to be 'well you're idiots for giving up all those points'. Why a stalemate is bad for alliance:

1: IB is a chokepoint, SH is not, making it easier to defend, as well as having an easy way out without hitting the alliance offence.
2: SH bunker is in the middle of nowhere, and in a stalemate is probably easier for horde to reach than alliance, giving them easy honor and reinforcements, so if the stalemate isn't broken, which all things being equal it wont be, horde have a 60 reinforcement advantage.
3: Balinda is much much easier than galv, so the horde have a much greater chance of killing her than alliance do of killing galv
4: If the stalemate is broken, the horde have a much better chance of recovering, as said in previous posts.

All of these point to a stalemate being a good thing for horde. However, ask yourself who's going to win if both IB and SH have been capped by the enemy with all the towers and Balinda/Galv dead, and both teams have a decent defence? Alliance will win most of those games because they have a huge choke-point to defend in SP/Bridge with 2 towers being involved in the defence.

The best way for alliance to ensure a win on most occasions is to swap IB for SH and make sure it's held, then to defend SP/bridge with either the dead offence being there or people porting back. This takes advantage of horde weaknesses in the defence of FW and takes advantage of the large strength that is the bridge into DB. I've played well over 50 games since 2.3 came out, and this is easily the most consistant win for alliance. If we have IB GY with both towers down and Galv dead or dying, and i look at the map and see 15 alliance defending SP, then i know that we've got a much better than 50% chance of winning the BG.

 

Pyros

I thought they removed all the summoned mobs, never see them anytime because games are ending too fast now, and no one can be bothered to loot and turn in it seems(and I don't blame them).

But anyway, to me AV hasn't changed much from what I played. Still have everyone rushing, and it still seems to be better honor to just kill vandar while losing all your towers fast than defend and win with everything, assuming fast queues. A fast rush win is like 10mins, a "good" win is like 40. Also defending is much harder since you need rather competent people on both defense and offense to win, while rushing you just need enough dps to down vandarr before he downs you.

Overall, maybe the strats have changed if you're not playing with afkers and people who actually care, but I'd say it's still the same BG 90% of the time. Might just be my battlegroup tho. The only fun I find is recalling to base when alliance is on drek, and NS+cyclone their tank to see drek wipe healers.

 

topojijo

There are a lot more afkers than most people realize. I've seen people comment in game "wow we have no afkers" when there were afkers they were just sitting in a spot in the mine the entire game or next to Drek. The problem is definitely getting worse as people don't report them either.

While many horde posters here talk about wins in the Stormstrike battlegroup I was faced with only a 15% win ratio the entire weekend. In most games the horde did not defend IB with any amount of sufficient force so the alliance just rolled us over and the flood began.

 

Scud121

You are so right . From an Alliance point of view (and a healy one at that), after what feels like banging my head against a wall for the last couple of years, and getting huge amounts of "OMG WTF HEALZ NOOB" spam, people are figuring out that live healers are worth a hell of a lot more than dead ones.


Sadly, particularly in my battlegroup, theres a lot of old thinking and very little coordination. The perceived imbalances between Horde and Alliance are pretty much the same as they always were, its just that its a lot more obvious now - on the (admittedly) few occasions organised direction is given, we generally steamroll the horde.

That said, the new and improved actual PvP that takes place is fanatastic, its back to proper Battlegrounds rather than leg it to the bottom and cap the boss ASAP.

I personally would like to see AV pushed out longer, I miss the days of riders and summons.

 

epiphenom

The PvE rush is all about economics. It started out in the old pre-2.3 AV. Actually PvPing in AV was the worst honor per hour; after all the Lieutenants and Commanders were dead, even the towers were a minor contribution to the total. So Alliance offered, in essence, a deal. We'll get out of your way at the start, and you get out of our way later, and we'll all get to cap graveyards, burn towers, and kill every officer, and we'll get out of here in ten minutes. Since AV marks didn't really mean much, it was a deal worth taking, and both sides were pretty happy with it.

Today's AV? PvPing is still the worst honor per hour. All of the honor is concentrated in the towers and captain, so getting into a new AV isn't as beneficial as it used to be, but actually fighting for objectives is still a time-consuming activity with poor return. I've seen my share of crushing 660-0 Horde victories that involve a lot of PvP, and they take 30 minutes. I've seen the new-style race, and it's more like 440-390, but it takes ten minutes. Both sides are still incentivized to accept the deal, and they still do, although the terms are slightly different now. AV marks still don't mean much.

In that, the new AV is really no different from the old one. Last AV weekend on the old 2.2 AV, I would be in there with groups ranging from 5 to 20 people in size. Our preferred tactic in large groups was to lead the offense, establish them firmly on the road to Frostwolf Keep, and then send people back to recap bunkers and defend Balinda, as well as wipe out the Horde offense. Then (as the Alliance zerg was inevitably getting destroyed by Horde respawns), we'd dash back to IBGY and establish a new front line there, eventually pushing the Horde back to the Rock of Durotan and pinning them in while the rest of the zerg finished the job. The wins were dominating. They also took twenty to twenty-five minutes. In contrast, in other games, we simply joined the offense and chain-pulled lieutenants so the zerg had something to devour. Skipping all towers, we drove directly into Frostwolf, killed any NPC of value, offtanked the warmasters and killed Drek'thar, yielding about 60% of the honor of a dominating win in a mere seven minutes. We wound up doing that a lot.

People are going to respond to any incentive that earns them more honor, on a macro scale, if not in every situation. Occasionally the incentives are different for different people. People who have an AV daily are looking at 1k honor for a 30 minute win vs. 300-ish for a ten-minute loss, so the win is more appealing. People who don't have one or who've completed it are inclined to accept fast losses. Typically, this means that Horde will exact enough crushing victories to finish the quests of most of the people, and then settle for races once the proportion shifts to most Horde not needing to win. Alliance queue up and get smashed for a while, and once the Horde get tired of taking too long to win, races start happening and Alliance get their dailies done. It works out reasonably well for all concerned. Actually eradicating PvE rushes would entail a fundamental reconstruction of AV to strongly disincentivize them.