Fortunately for the world at large, Premade AV Enabler still works fantastically for large-scale group Queueing in AV. I've used it with upwards of 10 people, and while there are times when the queues don't match exactly, I can, as raid leader, re-queue everyone until we get into the same BG. This not only assures us a win (99% of the time), but it sucks far less to grind honor with friends than with random people.

As for pugging AV, the tactics on BOTH sides are degenerating to the point where people leave bunkers without defense, skip tower caps, forget to cap graveyards, and let themselves get farmed at avoidable chokepoints(Going low road when there are two highroad options availible? THIS IS MADNESS!). Additionally, afk honor farmers are cropping up like rabid weeds, and it's frankly impossible to get people to report them, and even when you do, what the hell does it do for your team? They're still deadweight, and this "inactive" tag needs to get fixed to the point where people get 24 hour PVP bans if they manage to stay "inactive" for a long enough time. I've taken to reporting people for botting at this point just to get them out of the Queues (seeing the same 18 afk honor farmers in 9 consecutive AVs is really disheartening).

I think the lengthening AV queues from Alliance refusing to participate speaks volumes about how wrong the general populace was in deeming 4k bonus honor from BG dailies was "too much".

Someone with 1 main who managed to deck himself out in maybe 3/5 Season 2 gear still needs more than 75k honor to update his Veteran pieces to the Vindicator ones. Now, if he grinded that out prior to 2.3, he's probably sick of it now, and losing frequently isn't helping. If he did not cap himself before the new season, he's still on the slippery slope of hating AV with a passion, but he's got no choice if he wants to remain competitive in the Arenas.

This is for a guy with just ONE main. How about the people with freshly minted 70s/alts? 200k honor for your Vindicator pieces plus Season 1 gear? The prospect of doing enough AV to attain that is mind-numbing, but moving to the more "enjoyable" BGs makes the uphill climb even longer.

I always envisioned being able to kit yourself in contemporary PvP gear in a month or so as a good thing. People finish their sets, have a grand old time doing their 10 games for the week, then take a spin in the BGs to show off some more. Getting everything you need from the honor vendors would ENcourage, not DIScourage people from participating.

The thing about the dailies too is that it makes it much easier on people with lots of alts. It's no trouble for someone to play a few games a day if PVP is their thing, switching in a new alt as they complete the daily on the previous one. The only problem is that right now that doesn't mean a whole lot and each alt is going to have to grind away individually for 75k honor.

As dps AV is the least enjoyable BG but as a healer (Resto Druid) its my most enjoyable. Sometimes its a rush with little thought. Other times it turns into a good fight and I don't get dropped every 10 seconds like WSG or EotS by rogues. I can throw out my HoTs and keep people alive without immediately being targeted and killed.

This week's AVs (since i got bored of AB weekend) in the Ruin battlegroup have been rather interesting. From Sunday through til Wednesday i lost about 4 AVs total, and most were nailbiters. One came down to reinforcements which we lost by about 7. Most battles went by with Alliance having 10-15 on defense, and stopping the Horde from doing anything much on Vann.

Today however Horde showed me something i have never seen before as Alliance:

They tanked Warmasters. And healed their tanks.

Alliance on the otherhand would dick around outside the Relief Hut waiting for the towers to burn, and you'd hear a lot of "Tank? We got a tank?" "You <Druid> can you tank" "no im dps". "You Warrior can you tank?" "im gud dps i have s2welfare sord".

My Earth Elemental is the most reliable tank i've seen this entire day.

As for the AV in general. I like the idea of small team strike force brigades of death recapping bunkers. When we manage to queue with a couple of mates that's what we do. If we have good DPS we'll try fuck up Balinda attempts also, but usually the zerg is unmanageable unless i'm Elemental with a Warlock friend + a healer.

It's a LOT of fun, much moreso than the same sized group in AB or WSG. So i do really wish Blizzard would add in 5 man queue options for AV. It can't be any worse than using Stinkyqueue.

As far as I can tell, it's really this simple: If the horde put up any D at all, they win. If it's a pure race with no real D on either side, then Alliance win. Sadly, that means it's up to Horde as to whether they win or lose any given game.

Also, it is just me, or do you no longer get honor if a tower caps after the game has ended like you used to? That seemed to change whenever they "fixed" AV to give all the honor it was supposed to be giving. I haven't noticed any increased honor gain, but I'm definitely getting less honor now due to missing those tower caps.

Edit: I totally agree regarding the grueling nature of the honor grind -- AV used to be the one place where I knew I was pretty much guaranteed to get 1k honor/hour, but that's no longer the case. I'd like to Arena more on my rogue, but I'm getting absolutely exploded even in the 1500 bracket for lack of pvp gear. So, because I like playing Arenas, I'm on my fourth AV game of the night praying that this is the one that gets my daily complete, rather than spending my time doing something I enjoy. The system is very, very badly broken.

Whether tanks get healed is mostly a matter of luck. Typically, everyone gathers up outside the room, then a tank runs in front and the healers realize they ought to be healing THAT guy. If it's any comfort, it's not infrequent for the Horde to sit around asking, "Who's gonna tank him?" for a minute or two. Often this stalemate is broken by someone accusing everyone of being pussies and ordering them to just nail Vann, rightly pointing out that it takes less than 30 seconds for a full Horde zerg to drop him, making it literally impossible for him to wipe our zerg before we killed him even if he one-shotted someone every second.

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The Horde on Nightfall have been attempting to emulate the Alliance Rush strat. It doesn't work nearly as well for us, but sometimes it does. What often happens is the alliance quickly cap FW and IB so any Horde that die en route to stormpike respawn at the relief hut. Thus, we accidentally end up with a solid defense force and a really fun, epic battle. If too many Horde die, we end up with really sad things like 6-manning Van.

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I've noticed that Drek usually resets for the alliance at least once per game. Often, this is all that saves the Horde from a loss. This almost NEVER happens to the Horde. Can any Alliance explain what is usually going on when this happens?

I believe if anyone runs out of his room they'll leash and reset him. I've also heard that fearing the dogs out of his room will reset him as well. And yes, it's extremely frustrating for us.

Seriously I don't know how to emphasize this any more than I already have: The mod you are looking for is called "Premade AV Enabler". Very similar to the semi-famous "stinky-queue", this one is graphically clean, and works (in my experience) far more reliably. It's very simple to use, and it makes a world of difference. If you want to queue with your friends, for av, get this mod, tell THEM to get this mod, and it will be easily possible.

If anything from Drek's room goes outside the door, everything evades and resets. Warmasters, Dogs, Drek himself ... doesn't matter; one thing outside means Alliance starts over.

I don't think I've been in a game where it hasn't been leashed at least once.

My personal favorite is when Galv fears you, you run out of the room, and he resets himself. Happened to me two weeks ago.

loving the new ab. 1k/hr honor farming. 20min games. Rushing and Turtling with limitied reinforcements. This is what it should've been all along. I've had games where we ran out of reinforcements and where we forced them to. It's crazy amount of fun and easy rep/badges.

I plan on doing it allot more now than I did before. I can get my welfare epix on my shaman in no time.

I keep revisiting this thread because every day, foolishly, I check out AV to see if it is getting any better in my BG.

Sadly, it is not. The alliance is still full of epic fail in my BG, racing to Galv every time, and generally sucking up the joint. Twice in the same AV I rode unmolested on my pally to the FW RH, capped it, waited there, and right before it capped a rogue, lock, warrior, and priest came and wrecked me. I ressed at snowfall, rode back, did the same thing. That had to have taken about ten minutes total, and at that point the alliance still hadn't taken IB GY. Then Vann died, even with over half the team locked back at DB on defense.

I think what many of the horde fail to appreciate is that the alliance really is simply immune to working with each other. You tell people to ignore galv and to defend GY's, and all you get in response is some NE rogue with 6200 hp telling you to "QQ MORE NUB, GALV IS GOOD HONOR AND ONLY RTARDS SKIP HIM."

It is painful. I am spending Christmas break powerleveling my ud mage.

I understand that this is what directly causes him to be leashed, but what is the underlying cause? The Horde operates with the same mechanic on the warmasters etc, yet we never have this problem. What is different for the alliance? Is the Horde running in and fearing people out? Are idiots running when mobs turn on them? Are idiots fearing the mobs?

Can't you fear the dogs? Wouldn't surprise me if a dog goes on a Priest from healing, they hit fear, dog runs out and Drek resets.

Either of those would do the trick. In short, I think the 'Idiot' option always is a reliable guess when it comes to Alliance. Most likely to Horde side as well, but haven't done much high level PvP on the other side.

I find it frustrating at times on my (holy) paladin as some of the DPS in there are just painfully bad at basic things like guarding caps, rushing alliance rez spots so that one or two people can cap a banner as opposed to a dozen momo's spamming on the banner while the alliance is free to rain down AoE, and the most unforgiveable sin of all... not killing npcs. My dear sweet Lord why oh why do dps classes skip npcs and/or proximity aggro them so that eventually I have almost the entire compliment of Dun Baladur vendors pounding the ever-loving crap out of me because of healing aggro. And... I'd say the number of times people actually come to my aid is about 50/50 sadly.

Regarding tanks for the generals. I'm not sure how Drek is but Vand seems to die a lot faster than he used to prior to the change. Even with one marshall still up you can easily just zerg in and drop him in no time without worrying about tanks and healers. This is actually more frustrating than it sounds because sometimes people refuse to wait a mere thirty seconds for the bunkers to cap which would give us more honor.

Yes most of the time on my priest I have 2 dog's munching my face after about 4/5 seconds into the fight, it would be nice if someone pulled them off me or killed them so I could continue healing the tank on Drek without fearing them off me but it rarely happens.

2.3.2 is changing the warmasters (they will give each others a 20% HP and damage buff - stacking - source mmo-champion) - this should make things more interesting... So if you race down to Drek/Van without capping anything you end up with all the warmasters with 80% more life and damage (or is it 100% - can't remember how many they are - gah!) plus Drek/Van themselves.

This as the serious possibilty of wiping the offense and should help making AV more "fun". Of course it will also lengthen games but it should also actually increase honor per game as you'd have to at least cap a few towers to make sure you can actually take Van/Drek down.

Is anyone on the PTR? Could you report on the change (I'll try to get on myself later today and this weekend)?

I just see this change as hurting the horde more then the alliance, in a game that is a race, alliance already have a pretty steep advantage. Now it will be much harder for the horde to eek out a win when they are defending on the other side of the bridge and we really cannot stop them from getting into our base.

Alliance on my bg can't really pull Drek if there are 2 WMs alive anyway, while horde regularly does Vandarr with 2 up. So this should help alliance in making Vandarr not so zergable.

Now, isn't Van up against the back wall, so that horde can be more forwards? Drek is in the middle of the room. So an early pull, and bad fear puts the entrance just a small distance behind?