Kasi

As for why allies let you run north, well good question. Mainly because so little alliance plays defence its kinda futile to be one of 2-3 people at SP or in the base. You're just going to get steamrolled. Now maybe if you're a stealthy class its a bit different, but I don't have it and I die quickly unsupported.

On the point of Icewing hill, if horde has SHGY and alliance doesn't have IBGY, the game is over already at that point. The upper side going south only works so well, you have to drop down to the road right alongside of Icewing bunker. You can't use that upper road to get past at all, because the high part only extends a bit of the way. The point is there is a choke right at the IW bunker, and if horde holds that with support from SH GY no one is getting through.

Sadly the bottleneck at IBGY is not as bad. Where does one stay to stop people from getting through? Best place is a bit south of IBGY going towards Tower Point. You can stop people running past going either past the GY or past IB tower. However there is an upper road horde can use that can land them just past the GY, and determined runners can get through a lot easier than runners using the high road can get through IW.

We've already gone over why conceding IB to horde while holding SH is a losing strategy every time. That game you lost to the SH defence? Sorry you were just outplayed by a better team or kept suiciding pointlessly on SH. The middle map favors horde. I don't think this point needs to be gone over again. Both sides try stealth, from taking FW to the towers there or tower point. Same thing happens with horde with DB and such. If a horde force of 4-5 just plays roamer they will never take anything, just the same as if Alliance does it. If 20ish people are already at IBGY, taking 5 off isn't going to make or break the defence there.

If horde can make it a battle over the middle, they have won, due to how much easier SH bunker and Belinda are to take than Galv and IB tower. That leads to 90% + of games on SS/BL being 500-100 point wins for horde. Even if alliance can make it into a race it doesn't favor alliance that much. On WW we race nearly all the time, and horde just wins more of them. Partly due to alliance stupidity, partly due to the fact that alliance still likes to take Galv down first before capping middle towers, putting us so far behind on offence that we can't win. How many times I have to tell the raid to not send 20 into Galv when we can send 12 and have the rest push south and cap stuff. I don't go past 3-4 games now where I'm not calling my fellow alliance players morons and idiots.

 

◊ zeidrich

The same point's have been made over and over.

Horde would make the same mistakes as alliance if the roles were reversed. Horde kill Balinda early just like Alliance kill Galv early. The difference is galv can be defended while Balinda can not.

Horde can reach SH Bunker before alliance can. I can blink out of the tunnel, mount up, run straight to SHB cutting all the corners I can, and there will still be horde already inside it.

Getting to IBT means there will already be a defense by the time we arrive.

That said, I can often run within FW camps and cap towers. Horde lets me run by them. I can do this with TP, I can do this with the FW towers, I can even do this to FWRH. But it doesn't make a difference. Just like for you it's 2-3 minutes before someone caps it back, it might be a couple minutes before someone comes and caps those towers back. But as far as I know, there's no bonus for assaulting a tower that gets capped back a couple of minutes later.

Getting around icewing hill isn't as simple as you make it out, and regardless, that is not necessarily the point. Once we have gotten to the point where we are all spawning at SP and horde has SH, we have lost the game. Just because now we have no offense. Even if some of us do get ahead of your offense, it means nothing if we can not get a critical mass to cap a forward graveyard. And if we flip it, it is easy enough for you to take it back, because everyone who dies will spawn again behind the zerg, which gives us a 50/50 chance of even getting past if thats all we try to do.

If alliance owns IBGY, and horde is spawning at FW it's a similar situation, and alliance is likely to win, just because it's easy to assault inner objectives (FWRH, FWTowers) and force a subset of your defense to go recap, and then take FWGY.

The problem is it is far harder to take IB and defend SH than it is to take SH and defend IB. To the point where we do not try and defend SH at all. In fact, all a defense of SH would do would be to prompt horde to ride past and take Stormpike, after taking SH Bunker and killing Balinda.

I think those people who continue to reiterate "Alliance are just bad players, Horde just happens to be smarter" are really missing something.

 

• Juice

Unless you're quoting the WoW forums, I haven't seen much of this here. We horde players remember well alliance telling us we were just bad players when we had a hard time winning, and we knew it was crap then. We know it's the map, not the player skills.

 

Celnathor

I think this is crucial to how the game plays currently. While Snowfall/Galv/IB tower are very accessible to Alliance offense, there's a nice bottleneck that horde can utilize between IB tower and IB GY. On the other hand, the bottleneck on the alliance side is past SH GY - meaning it doesn't aid Alliance in defending SH at all, and in fact can make it easier for horde to hold their position once they've tagged the Graveyard. At the very least, it requires a significantly larger force to adequately defend SH than it does to properly defend IB.

Though as others have said, the defeatist attitude is still the biggest thing that kills the game for alliance(and this certainly isn't only the case in AV - it sometimes shows up in other BG's as well). A game where you're disadvantaged will be a loss unless you outclass the other team, but if your team has people who care enough to play, it'll be a competitive loss with some honor return. Once half your team rolls over and plays dead, you're basically done. While there are some map-based imbalances, there's no reason a PUG shouldn't be able to maintain some honor gain if they play intelligently and actually CARE.

And I think that's what's really frustrating to people. Losing 350-250 doesn't feel so bad. Losing 500-40 and feeling like you never had a chance just saps your average player's desire to actually play. And there's certainly no reason if we're talking PUG vs. PUG in AV, that alliance are losing that badly, besides lack of effort in many cases.

 

TheCutlery

You can bottleneck it south of SH. There's a narrow ramp going up with the cliff going down to Stonehearth outpost on the west and all those little houses to the east. I guarantee you no horde is smart enough to rez at Iceblood, run all the way around west of SH outpost and come up the back side in front of icewing to tag it behind you. We're facing the same obstacles you guys are...players with absolutely no idea what to do when they see an opposing force other than dismount and fight it.

Cyclone is a bit different though. Horde wins probably 60% of the time, it's nowhere near the absolute slaughter it is from what I hear about other BG's.

 

Nari

Sigh.. you should try what you are suggesting.. You can block it somewhat, but no way it is comparable to IB. Archers on the tower, no way around, only one way through (you can go at least 2-3 ways up to SH). It is funny to listen how horde is so adaptive and suppose they will be so dumb not to "run all the way around west of SH outpost and come up the back side in front of icewing to tag it behind you". It just points out how straightforward gameplay for horde is and how coordinated ally PUG should be to push it. "You must do this, return there, recap this, wait for that" and so on. PUG is something like a waterflow, you almost never can turn them back and kill Galva later.. as many suggest. In any case you loose too much time going back and forth when every minute counts, you need to stretch your forces too much to do anything suggested. Horde just needs some def at one point (happy HK farmers) and "waterflow" all the way.

 

Eekpaladin

Since I began honor grinding on my shaman, I've been in several AV games where Alliance lose yet end up with more bonus honor than Horde. Then again, that seems to be exceptionally rare because Horde lose roughly 80% of AV games on Vindication battlegroup. Defense is usually shoddy and they're slow to rush, but there are times that they seem to "rally" around one person (ex. a warrior in mostly season 3 arena gear) and there's usually an abundance of healers. I've yet to see back-to-back Alliance losses, which perplexes me because Horde usually steamroll Alliance in every other battleground I've been in (ex. while grinding for 40 EotS tokens for my shaman's 2 1-handers, I had to play 40 games because we never won).

I'm crossing my fingers that Blizzard will allow 5- or 10-man queuing for AV in 2.4. With the way the battleground is set up now, it doesn't seem like pugs can take (or want to take) full advantage of it.

 

Spatula

The problem with your theory is horde puggers face the same problems... losing over and over to complete the daily, players on your side wearing hellfire quest greens, people on the other side decked out in gladiator armor... Ultimately your success in pickup BGs comes down to luck of the queue, for both horde and alliance.

Also, AV is not a meaningful honor source for horde, because of the 2hr queues. And I would argue that the AV situation actually hurts our overall honor gain, as people leaving in the middle of fights to join AV increases the chances of losing close matches. It's basically the flip of what alliance had to deal with pre-TBC.

 

• Juice

AV is completely winnable by alliance. It's just not winnable when two groups of uncoordinated idiots square off at each other. That matchup favors the horde idiot.

But alliance can do what we did pre-2.3. They can queue in groups of 5 coordinated people in vent who can stay outside of the clash of the zergs at SH and IB and wreck havok. A 5 man arena team up in tower point will burn it without question. The horde only respond with uncoordinated solos - it's just usually enough because the alliance aren't coordinated.

I'm unsympathetic to the alliance crying. I realize the map is balanced against you, but I lived and thrived in this environment for years. I had instant queues, I usually lost, but I brought friends with me, played defense, and kept many towers undestroyed in those defeats. The alliance could do the same.

Edit: My statements reflect my experience in Stormstrike battlegroup where alliance lose 99% of AVs and have stopped queuing to the tune of 2.5 hour queues.

 

TheCutlery

Well, there's one of 2 things going on. Either you're overestimating the intelligence of the random horde PuG, or the Horde on your battlegroup are much better than mine. We noticed last AV weekend that when we were quueing with our 5 man arena team, that we could pretty much "Suggest" something by doing it...something that it would have taken horde twice as long to figure out. There was literally no communction from my group to the rest of the scrubs other than "You guys make sure Icewing and SH burn the first time around and we'll take care of the rest for you." In these games, we could rush straight to stormpike, come around the corner, clear out the alliance and the guards, cap SP and then turn around to see our scrubs running up the pass. The act of getting to Stormpike on my Battle group is no lie, at least a 10-15 minute affair for Horde. They're complete morons. But with my group in there doing what needs to be done, they snap out of their stupor and start to follow the chain.

You're right that there is a waterflow of pugs. What you need to do in order to win is direct the water. Sometimes you don't even need words to do it, you just need to go over the motions with them a few times until they get it. If your side isn't doing what needs to be done to win, then get a group in there that can. I see just as many Orc warriors with a Crystalline War Axe as I do Night Elves. We're not any better geared than you guys are.

 

Rashid

The majority of alliance players used to go to AV to grind honor. A reinforcement grind in the middle of the map leads to a 45+ minute game which yields 200-300 honor (minus HKs). Why would an organized alliance team waste their time on such a game when they can get up to 2000 (minus HKs) honor running Eots premades instead?

And even if you dont care about the honor, constant 45+ minute uphill battles are fun only so many times before you dont queue up anymore.

The reinforcement loss on captains and towers/bunkers is making an imbalanced map even worse. Its poor game design to enhance imbalanced elements even more. They need to give both sides a flat 200 reinforcements to play with and remove reinforcement loss from captains/towers/bunkers. That way the side that is better at mass pvp wins, not the side that is favored by the current map imbalances.

 

Lodekim

It works, you can still get honor out of AV this way yes, it'll just lead to same thing anyway, because right now a 5 man queue in wsg ab or eots is pretty much a sure win, which has been what I've seen happen on stormstrike a lot now.

 

Duilliath

Okay - I said earlier I wanted to see a screenie of an Alliance victory with 500+ and Horde on <100.

I was in such a fight today (540ish for Alliance, 60ish for Horde)... Forgot to screenie it, but I honestly have no clue what the Horde were doing.
Someone barked reasonable orders in the Alliance chat (1-2 defend Balinda / 3 get FW / rest get Galv (!) and keep the towers clear).

Horde wiped up to 7 (!) times on Balinda. Galv had a defense team but it was wiped out.

Alliance side had over 10 AFKers, but I don't know how many there were on Horde side.

What should've happened with those orders was horde wiping the group @ Balinda, Galv defense wiping offense there and that group of 5 shouldn't even have made it to FW.

But they did. Horde did take back towers a couple times, but in the end they burned. Alliance started noobing around at the end due to no tank until I cussed 'em out and told 'em to start zerging already. Some 'lol-dps' warrior with the Horseman helm and s1/2 Mace "tanked" Drek and he went down on the 6th attempt after repeatedly getting reset.

Was Alliance going a good job here ? No - basically the only right thing was to wipe Horde at Balinda and taking back those towers. Going to Galv is a tactical mistake. FW shouldn't have fallen to 5 Alliance. So even if we won, I can't say it was due to immaculate play from our side.

 

• Juice

If you have enough people to premade etos (15), then you won't be executing AV with a 45 minute reinforcement battle. And it won't yeild only 200-300 honor either. Thanks for the strawman example.

I know this because in pre-2.3 when the horde had the disadvantage, I would premade AV with a guild here on MalGanis and we'd wreck the alliance to the tune of 600-0. Today that's common, but back then it was unheard of. We did it, and so could alliance if they were equally organized. Those were 18 minutes = 600 honor games. Good luck doing better than that anywhere else.

Make an imbalanced map even worse? You mean, take a map balance for the alliance and balance it towards the horde? Cause that's what happened. And only in 2 of the BGs are the alliance incapable of winning. I completely disagree with your suggestion to alter AV. I wouldn't mind seeing them move the reinforcements from 600 to 1000, to give the team that's down early time to bounce back (like when the opposing team is at the aid station/relief hut) - but not by completely removing the static nodes and their capture value. If you want that scenario, go EOTS.

 

Phantasmal

The two situations are not comparable for two reasons.

1. When the Horde were getting steamrolled they were getting respectable honor payouts. -- With typically faster queues and guaranteed honor points from NPCs, there would never be a reason to stop playing AV because you were probably outpacing Alliance honor gain with wait factored in. It's pretty easy to then take a bunch of people who will be queuing anyway and convince them to try to push for a win.

2. The current Horde strategy was just as effective back then. -- The problem was that without reinforcements, you could be too effective and create an Alliance turtle which was in no one's interest. A 5-man strike team as you describe would be just enough to slow down the Alliance offense and keep Drek alive without sending so many back to Stormpike that the Horde offense wouldn't be able to get to Vanndar. Telling the Alliance to do the same thing now is pointless unless you can point to Horde midfield vulnerabilities, and I'm not really convinced they exist.

 

Melador

They'd need to do something with the honor values to compensate for that, because if I started a game and didn't immediately see it going to plan for a 10-15 minute rush game, I'd just afk out immediately rather than wait for counterattacks or for 1000 reinforcements to get ground to zero. And I'm sure I wouldn't be alone.

 

Goreshot

Something to consider that many Alliance players may not realize is that it is common knowledge for Horde players to stay away from Snowfall and let Alliance "keep" it, particularly if the Horde players are in a preform. The reason? If Horde "wins" on defense, they will essentially wipe the entire Alliance raid. If the Alliance does not have Snowfall, all of them will rez at Stormpike or the Aid Station, leading to a turtle by default (and a horrendously long game won by attrition). The only way to counteract this is to allow the Alliance to cap Snowfall and then let the people who survive the longest during their offense (who are probably also the better players) STAY on offense by letting them rez at Snowfall rather than forcing them to start all the way back at their base or Stormpike.

The map design is so skewed at the Alliance portion of the map that the Horde willingly go out of their way to let them keep a graveyard (to the extent that other Horde players will openly chastise players who cap Snowfall) in order to maintain their own offense and ensure that Alliance does not turtle at natural chokepoints by default. This was true back when there were no reinforcements, and this is even more true today where the last two graveyards, the mine, and the Dun Baldar Bunkers are often the only things standing between victory and defeat.

Contrast this with the Horde side of the map, where Alliance can easily take Coldtooth mine unless people willingly station themselves there. Where Frostwolf Graveyard is by far the least defensible graveyard in the game, and Alliance players can simply bypass that graveyard completely, run unscathed into the Horde base, and begin capping towers and/or the Relief Hut and place pressure on the defense to spread itself out (which is why smart Horde players treat FW as a delay and concentrate defense on the base - because once Iceblood GY is lost, the only chokepoint left is INSIDE our base).

The truth is that if you had two preforms on both sides that were equally balanced, Alliance would more often than not win the game purely by attrition, because while both sides would defend what they had, it is much easier for the Alliance to push all the way to the gates of the Horde base and fight there, while the Horde will probably get stuck at Stormpike and be forced to send "stealth teams" to try and cap North and South Dun Baldar (which will then be recapped shortly thereafter). Alliance defense has none of the pressures that Horde does, having to ACTIVELY (as in people need to sit there and wait) defend several strategic points along a large swath of ground. So while both sides would be locked in stalemate, Alliance would more often hold both mines and two graveyards (Snowfall & Frostwolf), and a significantly better defensive chokepoint and "killing zone" in Stormpike and "the Bridge of Death". And this is assuming the 5-10 people they send to zerg the towers/Relief Hut don't succeed in burning one of the towers or even keeping the base, which is only unlikely in the event you are facing another preform on the Horde side smart enough to have people in the base and keep them there. These pressures force Horde defense to treat everything between Iceblood and the base as "dispensable" purely because they are almost entirely indefensible in the long run.

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

 

Kasi

Good points. I agree anything between IB and the base is pretty much impossible to defend as horde. On alliance now on WW, we try to make our side take Relief hut before FW GY because if FW has any defence it will be that much harder to root them out of the relief hut. The thing is alliance has realized the same thing with regards to the middle. SH Bunker and Belinda are pretty much impossible to defend, thus holding SH GY has little meaning. We want to funnel you into the fun that is SP GY plus the bridge. As long as you defend and hold IBGY (which honestly isn't that hard against any alliance pugs) they can't win.

If you did have two preform teams facing off against eachother, I think the advantage would be for the horde. Because for the alliance advantages in late game to mean anything, they have to get past middle game. An even matchup would lead to a stalemate in the middle with both sides holding their GYs but with a far higher chance of Belinda/SH bunker burning. That will lead to a slow attrition win for horde. Best move for alliance in this case is to send their best 10 through and avoid SP and hit the relief hut. Once there maybe bring in a few more and horde can't retake it without losing IBGY. Yes Horde does have weaker targets to defend further south, but alliance has their weaker ones in the middle. If horde controls IB area and has a few backcappers, they are going to win unless outplayed.

 

TheCutlery

Do the alliance have to deal with multiple 60khp mobs in the horde base? I ask this because now it appears to actually be completely and totally impossible for a horde pug to walk into DB without killing half of the base. I've paid attention to this, and it seems that the NPC's aggro on any horde in combat with an alliance -- you don't even have to do damage to them (the NPC's). On Cyclone, this is really the only thing stopping Horde from winning 90% of the matches, because every game our entire force literally has to spend 3-5 minutes clearing DB of NPC's so our healers can drink and we can get on Vann.

It's gotten so bad to the point that I actually put recklessness back on my hotbar specifically to pop just to clear out the stupid vendors and all that crap a little quicker.

 

Spatula

Yes. And in fact, nothing is stopping the alliance from doing the same sort of thing in the 600-0 battlegroups, except for one thing...

No, because half your raid is afk. When you lose every match, most of the people queuing have no interest in even playing. They just show up to leech what they can while watching TV. I don't really know what motivates the alliance afkers these days in Stormstrike (getting the token?), since they're sure as hell not getting any honor.

And you know, back in the day anyone actually defending objectives on horde (i.e. trying to win) was called out, ridiculed, and insulted in chat for slowing the game down.

Not even one.

 

Phantasmal

Juice was arguing that a small group of people on the same server could group queue and singlehandedly shift the balance to an alliance win because the same thing worked when the Horde was the losing team. AFKers really aren't a factor since both sides have always had them regardless of who was winning. If Juice is right, his strike team strategy should have honor payoffs regardless of the AFK situation.

Most of the people in AV are only there for honor. Winning doesn't matter to this vast majority if it comes at the expense of honor gains. I can't understand why this continues to surprise people, but if you ignore it you are never going to address the balance that really matters when you want to keep both sides playing.

 

Sando

Why has this thread started deteriorating into a 'qq alliance you suck' thread? It's been pretty well established what the imbalances with the map are, quite well explained and even diagrams drawn up. And yet now we've got people coming in telling us that alliance suck and should learn to play, that the alliance strats are just clearly wrong and they've only tried 1 strat, or that the only problem alliance have is that they have lots of AFKers, or the best one of all, Horde are clearly just better at PVP than Alliance...

Can people please stop making up blatant falsehoods and actually read the thread before posting. There is an obvious need for change in the map, actually discussing that might be more useful than just telling alliance players that they suck. The fact that people are falling for incredibly broad stereotypes is pretty disappointing.

 

Chulak

I think the new AV is great. After hating that battleground from my first experience with it, I find it odd to say that it's now my favorite. I've managed to grind a total of about 60k honor out in the last few weeks, and about 80% came from AV.

The new game is one of group synergy and tactics, and I think much more like what Blizzard originally envisioned for the Alterac Valley. Strategic defense has been the single largest contributor to all the truly decisive victories I've experienced, and a disorganized team or a 40 man zerg is doomed to failure. Some games still feel like they're dragging on, but the reinforcement mechanic prevents it from getting out of hand. More than anything else, I find the sense of a grand campaign to be much more tangible, with battles being fought on many fronts at any given time.

I've been seeing great results on Horde defense with two people guarding the Relief Hut (Since the Alliance can just ride right up to it and will almost always send an advance team of 2 or 3 to do just that), 2 on Frostwolf Graveyard (for the same reason) and the rest of the defenses forming up at Iceblood and waging a slow, steady retreat as necessary with backcappers. Leaving one or two to defend capped towers prior to destruction is a must.

All in all, when we play smarter than the Alliance we win, and when they play smarter they win. I think we win more often because we're getting the afk crowd out more quickly.

 

◊ Praetorian

Here's an interesting question:

I recently leveled an alt through the 50-60 range, and took every opportunity to queue AV to get a head-start on marks and honor when I could (plus doing all the AV quests is awesome exp the first time). Stormstrike battlegroup. Same queues. Same strategy -- try to defend Galv/IB at the start, while pushing on SH GY. The result? Horde lost more than half the games, and the ones that we won were very, very close, often coming down to a margin of a few dozen reinforcements and both sides getting equal honor after a long game. We'd often lose Galv and IB despite defending, and we'd often lose SH GY after tagging it initially. If both happened, Horde lost every time. If one or the other happened, then we were in for a close game, either race-style if we traded SH for IB, or stalemate-style if we both kept our GYs.

Why is that? These are largely people with level 70 mains in the battlegroup, more or less the same pool of players, using the same strat, with very different results. I honestly don't know what the answer is. I tried to figure it out, but I couldn't really pinpoint anything.

 

Spatula

I don't think I've seen more than 5 afkers in a stormstrike horde AV raid since the queues went up past 1 hour. I haven't done AV on alliance at 70 in the stormstrike battlegroup but I'm sure that number is much, much higher for them. Especially when I see a grand total of maybe 15 alliance assault IB the first time around.

Similarly, back at level 60 when alliance won nearly every AV, I can tell you while both sides had afkers it was far, far worse on horde. People want to win. When they expect that they have absolutely no chance, many stop trying.

A small group can certainly make a difference (making sure a tower burns, or keeping a bunker from burning, for example) but in my experience the map dynamics (and the rest of their teammates) prevent them from winning AV single-handedly. But I haven't set foot in AV in a while, and it does depend on what kind of players are on both sides - there's no 100% tactic because you're playing different compositions of players every time.

You seem to be reading a different thread than the one I have been. In any case, you completely missed my point at least, which was that the only thing stopping alliance from getting some honor out of a loss (via zerging Galv, IB tower/GY, & TP) was the number of afkers they typically have in a match.