Calantus

The towers are very important yes, I did say that in my post. But that only encourages musical towers because the only relevant time is when the tower burns. Up until then the tower is irrelevant. You don't have to fight over towers, you just have to get around to one before it burns and flip it back. Make a group of ~5 back-cappers and they just go around turning towers back. Unless the opposing team sits ~5 players in each tower you will turn them back easily. In most of the games I played alliance and horde would be at around the same progress and then a group of horde would cap back all their towers and they win entirely because of that. I would frequently be in IBT with 3-4 defenders sitting on our asses for a few minutes with no competition. Then suddenly, with only a little time before it burns, 7-8 horde overrun us and then do the same for TP. That is not good gameplay.

If the game was played perfectly in its current state no tower would ever burn because the ability to concentrate forces when on the attack, only 10 seconds needed, and the distance between GYs and towers makes them impossible to defend against competant opponents.

 

• sadris

So how are the marshalls "linked" now? Will it still be possible for hunters to aggro them and kite them away while vandarr is killed?

 

Mistaya

I think I am gaining more honor per game now, and games aren't really longer. As long as people keep dying the countdown ticks, so a "turtle" is really not bad, and a lot more fun than the previous turtle where no progress was being made at all. Here as long as there is fighting there is progress.

As a personal note, I think the new AV is a ton more fun than 2.2 AV. People are actually fighting again, the only mob I feel obligated to tank is gannadar and that's over in the opening minutes, and I've managed to help a bunch of people learn that the zerg needs to park at the towers to advance. A backcapping team of 5-7 is not going to make any headway when the zerg itself humps the tower. Yes it is four minutes and yes, you can convince a pug to guard now that they need to to win.

Musical towers is silly. Guard the tower means everyone guard it.

Just another Tauren Shaman.

 

Efreet

I believe the mines award 1 reinforcement/minute/mine, which may seem insignificant, but games have lasted around 30 minutes for me and that's a potential 60 for you or a loss of 60, effectively taking out human error kill rates going up between the sides (difference in idiocy is rarely that great), and even tipping it in your favor if you control both. However the mines are still buggy and while your NPC may well be in full command of a mine the minimap (and the game apparently) sometimes still shows it as the opposite faction's color.

As to the inequality in terrain, if the horde defend the IB chokepoint they can hold their towers for most of the duration provided 4 or 5 stealths don't all together go and cap the behind towers, which'd effectively weaken the front defense with people going back to base to defend. If they get to IB late and try to defend it they'll likely lose IB tower and still keep Tower Point. If they don't defend at all then you're probably screwed, at least that's how its working this week. :O

 

Tiiki

This is nonsense.

It's perfectly feasible to defend if you have a closer GY than the opposing team.

Alliance on our BG are stupid- we just zerg SH, and wait there, with 20, whilst 10 people disrupt at the back. Once it's burning, same at IWB then move into their base. Only bad teams play musical towers.

The Alliance were getting the hang of it later and leaving 5+ defenders at every cap, and that's when things get a lot more interesting.

Plus, the encouragement to heal built into the system is excellent. A 400 resilience rogue can wreak havoc with incoming spam healing

 

Calantus

If your 10 disrupters got together and hit caps in a coordinated fashin those 5+ defenders per couldn't hope to stop them. The only strategy that would work is the whole offence camping a tower Mistaya pointed out. If it progresses to that level then I'll be happy with the tower situation. Unfortunately it hasn't yet in BG9 alliance and nobody listens so I'm not sure how long it will take or if it ever does. In reply to the bold: I have no control over what kind of team I'm dumped into.

 

malthrin

I just tried my first one - AFKed out 10-15 minutes in because both sides were warring over Snowfall (????) and not moving on to any other objectives. I can see where it has much more strategic potential, which just makes me wish I wasn't solo queuing.

Travian - Resto Druid
Malthrin - Priest

 

Elerion

I feel the new AV leaves less room for individuals/pairs to swing the honor gain in their favor, which is frustrating as all hell. Trying to coordinate 38 other randoms is extremely tiring. With 2.2 AV a strong pair could do a lot to make sure they gained above average honor regardless of the rest of the team, simply by killing officers and taking/guarding towers.

The new AV puts more emphasis on teamwork and strategy to maximize honor (through winning). I consider that a downside to a pug-only battleground. Provided you do not have the benefit of a smart team, the best strategy for gaining honor now is actually sitting in the zerg, soaking up the kill honor. There is nothing else you can do on your own or in a pair that gives you more honor. Sitting in a zerg tab-dotting or click healing is not particularly interesting.

Basically, I think the new AV would be lots of fun with premade team, but it is horrible for pugs. Especially so if you are on a battlegroup where one side dominates.

 

Efreet

Ooh this'd be pretty fun, the SF terrain is nice and the field of strife is always beautiful, not as bottlenecked and dooming as SP or IB. 600 HKs all the way. Various escapades to take random towers and defend them no doubt?

 

Safid

Just did a full turtle where we beat the alliance with everything capped except the last two bunkers and the GY, 600 honor to their 50 honor, but it took around 35m. So again 'dominating' the battleground just isn't worth it considering you can get 4-500 honor in 15m if you just hold one side off at around, say, FW/SP and kill the general.

 

malthrin

Yeah, pretty much. The zerg moved back and forth depending on whether the Horde was making a push for SH or the Alliance was attempting Galv again. My second game was a win, and I think it's going to be a pretty common template: both sides kill Galv/Balinda, we kill both early towers and manage to defend Tower Point. The game turns into a stalemate from there between SP-SH and IB-FW, and we grind out kills until we win. I took the Alliance mine to start and sat in it all game watching player movements and cheerleading. Should be interesting to see how PUG strategy develops.

Travian - Resto Druid
Malthrin - Priest

 

MeCh

They should have added more rocks or something to Av, because getting shot at by 10 people trying to get into attack range is pretty painful, makes me wonder if Siege Engines in Wotlk block LoS.

 

Elerion

This is one of the flaws of new AV. When doing small objectives to help the greater good actually hurts your personal honorgain (you missed out on a ton of kill honor), it ruins the incentive to do so. It works to an extent in AB and EotS because all objectives are large enough that pursuing them helps the team considerably. Keeping a mine guard would be a perfectly good strategy for an organized AV, but is self defeating for the player in question in a pug.

 

Pamine

I played 4 AV games since the patch on the Rampage battlegroup, alliance. It was 4 turtles, first game the whole horde was in galv, we died, they took SF, we turtled and lost. Second game we took IB but they defended at FW then pushed us back and took IB back, and it ended up being a fight in the middle, we lost. 3rd game they were at galv and IB, took SF, pushed us back and we turtled, we lost. 4th game I joined mid game, we had SF but only 4 people were there, 36 others were at the base turtling, I /afk'ed out with 82 reinf for alliance and 438 to horde. I can imagine how it was gonna end. Most of the games gave around 100 honor with the lowest at 82 and lasted around 40mins. Needless to say I used to like AV, now I'm not gonna play that BG much anymore. It's sad.

 

Nerull

When looking at honor people only look at the scoreboard ?
Keep in mind you get honor from kills as well.
I played one game yesterday, we lost, got 275 honor and I get the same feeling as others have written here.
When I checked my honor tab later I saw I gained about 500-600 honor for a 20 minute game, not that bad.

I like it better than the old, killing lieutenants and pulling warmasters out , killing a million npc's in the allliance camp never attracted me much. Even if its a stalemate in which one side defends, at least it should be over with rather soon instead of the hour lasting games. People laugh at it and idolize it nowadays when they speak of the AV that lasted so long, but when they where in it Im pretty sure they didnt have so much fun - it was just good it lasted so long for the rep and nothing else.

 

cusface

I played 1 AV last night and it went pretty much as it did before patch. Differences was that with no lieutenants, people moved faster to SP, and also that we had to wait for all bunkers to burn before engaging Vandar.
The general impression was good, only (big)disappointment was that the Anvil Posse in the Dun Baldar was still there.

 

Shiji

I pretty much love the new AV, they redesigned it in a way that the game can either go extremely fast (and im talking 10-15 mins here), or it can go slow but not 1 hour slow.

Ill give you an example of a couple of games I was in. My first 3-4 games were all extremely fast, we pretty much just took everything on the way to drek as fast as possible while a couple of stealthers went on ahead and ninjaed the relief hut and the 2 towers. By the time we got there the 2 towers were almost capped and we were just about ready to kill drek. Couple these 10-15 games with 450-500 honor and youve got one sweet deal.

On the other hand, youll always come across the games where the horde/alliance turtle, and even when that happens, with the reinforcements mechanism the game wont last more than 30 mins, unless everyone is just sitting there doing nothing.

Now in av you pretty much have to defend towers and gy's or your gonna lose.

 

Roe

If I recall, it used to be the entire raid recieved credit for honor, it was split among everyone regardless of where you were in the BG (or at least the range was huge). Of course, back then you were fighting against your own mates to gain rank, by getting more honor than everyone else. Many agreed with the change for honor gain only if you are near the kill shot area. Maybe Blizz will put it back the old way; then again, it also encourages AFK farming if they do.

 

Goreshot

AFKing isn't as easy as it used to be. At this point I think the benefits if switching honor back to full-raid gain outweigh the costs.

"User is a tremendous douchenozzel"
-Actual EJ Forums feedback concerning Goreshot.

 

aadric

AV is in an adjustment period. Right now the horde are hard wired to pick off as many people as they can on the way to their objectives, but that is currently causing turtles (4x-5x more turtles in my experience). For the immediate future, AV is dead in terms of honor per hour. Maybe both sides will learn to maximize their honor in the coming weeks. You get about 450 honor for a win, assuming the other side isn't /afk.

In any event, not being able to queue as a group into AV still fundamentally breaks the battleground. That isn't likely to be fixed until WotLK, and by that time we'll all be playing with siege units.

 

dilznic

I love the new AV. I've played all three iterations heavily, and this one so far is my favorite. As wonderfully nostalgic as the original one was, I simply don't have time for the massive several-hour-duration games, and this new version is infinitely better than the PvE race that the last version was. People are forced to defend, people are forced to *gasp* actually PvP in a battleground. In the few games I've played since the patch I've gotten the majority of my honor each match from HKs (-edit- still averaging ~1000 honor/hour). I'd definitely love to see group-queue enabled though, even if it was capped at 5/10/15 people. A pug stands zero chance against a 40-man premade in AV.

 

Nayt

My big thing against AV is that I would queue into a 2 hour fight (lame) and see that we were winning, only to get like ~0 Bonus honor and getting HKs from people who'd already been killed 5 times that game (can't remember if DR is still active on honor in BGs).

Does anyone else think it's a good idea to allow you to queue into "New Games" only. I think that would punish people who turtle, because your teammates will not want long games and afk/leave, which will leave you short handed (same goes for the other team). But would that promote more teamwork and faster games and people actually trying to compete? Weird question to ask, but why would anyone want to be put in a winning/losing game only to get 0 bonus honor? (Especially on AV weekends, where IMO turtles had been every game).

"When Nate's in town a feast is down."
Pizza, Gold, Contests and Myself
Twits about School, Dating, Partying and Jackassery
Hunter / Priest / Shaman / Warrior

 

Angeron

Yes, YES! This would make every battleground better, from ab, wsg, eots to av. This way when my team is 3 capping in ab and 5 alliance afk out, we don't get 5 new gung-ho retards who trade caps with a pug for a 30 minute loss.

As a side not, there is absolutely no "bonus" honor added to any of the other battlegrounds, that was a straight-up blatant lie by blizzard. Honor for a win is the same, honor per flag-cap/250point gain/whatever is still EXACTLY THE SAME. They said they'd change it, and honestly they need to.

Though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable; I simply am not there.

 

Amera

In the handful of AVs I have played since the patch, it is virtually identical to the way it was pre-patch. You have about 8-10 alliance afk and the horde wins 80-90% of games in exactly the same manner as before. I've yet to see a game end from reinforcement depletion yet, either. Perhaps this will change over time as people adjust, but for now it seems like Rampage alliance are just content to afk and get their 1 token.

 

Siddown

Based on my limited sample of just two games, I found that if people actually PvP you get much more honor per minute than otherwise.

My first game was just like the old AV, in 15 minutes I got 400 honor or so, but I did have to queue for about 5 minutes to get in. My second game people really adapted to the new AV, we took towers and steathed guarded them for waiting for the back cappers, then fell back and defended while a crew of about 15-20 moved forward. So in 30 minutes we had taken all of their towers, defended our two in our base and I believe capped both mines and came out with 900+ honor.

Now 400+ in 15 v. 900+ in 30 minutes for wins in both might sound the same, but throw in queue times as well, and the 30 minute game was much better from a Honor/minute standpoint...oh yeah, and it was also a lot more fun. It was PvP, not PvE which AV mostly is. So more honor and about 10 times more enjoyable (if not more), means I like the new AV quite a bit. Throw in a 15 minute AB win for the Daily reward and my lvl 65 Druid pulled in almost 2200 honor in an hour. That's not too bad.