seminarca

Thanks for the writeup.

Past week or so, I've constantly come up against the same strategy and it goes one of three ways:

a) We manage to successfully defend and hold IBGY and IBT, their spearhead shatters and scatters, and from there we mop up survivors and respawns and push for an eventual win. [what I assume to be a full Alliance pug]

b) We may lose IBGY, IBT and eventuall TP. They might get Galv as well. Brief skirmishes south of IB to FWGY, eventually we lose that and are pushed back to the two towers. Eke out a slow win over time.

c) We get smashed at IBGY. After the IBT TP and Galv lull, FWGY, towers and RH are taken quickly and we lose. [what I assume to be, at least, a partial premade]

I mostly defend these days and it's hella fun as long as we're not getting steamrolled by a coordinated offense.

 

Ngita

Fun for half the players?

Horde arent happy they have to queue for 2 hours. A dc or crash and its back into the queue again. If Horde win 350 to 250 because alliance played well they still arent happy because they wanted to smash the Alliance for making them wait 2 hours. If they get smashed by a organised group after waiting 2 hours they are even less happy.

Alliance face rampant afkers because of instant queues. A signficant proportion of the raid is just playing for a token so fast game, win or loss is in their best interest, and if they are just playing for tokens chances are they are undergeared. So anybody trying to win is not going to be happy in the longer term because the face such a uphill battle.

In the meantime the afkers have shifted to the other bg's. This and the fact that alliance are no longer playing av leads to a increase in premades. Horde start forming premades themselves to counter and of course the afkers are more concentrated in the smaller % of pug sides.

The ongoing effects are still working themselves out but the post 2.3 landscape pvp is much more of business and a lot less casual, any individual games being more fun is buried in the increased grind especially for new 70's who cant get into the 200 resilience minimum pvp organised groups.

 

• Argium

Being in the same BG as you, I've found alliance are actually a lot stronger nowadays and combined with AV weekend queues are down to 35 mins for horde.

What I've found is that alliance winning or losing comes down to Iceblood Graveyard. If horde can hold alliance at that choke point (including preventing as many alliance running through to Frostwolf) then the game will goto the same old turtle at Stormpike with horde willing by a large margin.

If alliance can secure Iceblood Graveyard that usually means they can also capture the 2 adjacent towers and kill Galv easily meaning the honour for each side would be pretty close.

On another note, one thing I noticed in a match the other day was bonus honour isn't awarded at the end of the match if an alive tower is capping, only if the tower is "safe". I haven't been able to confirm this cause of the queue time, but that seemed to be the case as we had destroyed all 4 alliance towers, alliance had 2 of ours capping and with a Van kill win we only received 440 bonus honour.

 

deadlights

I understand the situation... I'm talking about fun outside the context of the honor grind. The actual games themselves.

People are so used to the dissproportionate amount of honor they were getting from AV since the NPC nerfs that it's become the only reason they go there, where as people used to go to actually play AV and avoided it while honor grinding to GM/HWL. And now that people are showing an unwillingness to queue for AV at all because they aren't getting the same honor it might be beyond fixable at this point.

I wouldn't be adverse to them simply scrapping AV and slightly buffing honor gains in the the other BGs to compensate for the increased grind time for vindicator gear. At this point people are just trying to find ways to fix the honor farm but that doesn't really help the actual battleground be what it's suppsosed to be and consequently I doubt AV will ever be fixed if that's the approach people continue to take.

 

Caligula

I was just about to post this. It's like they're saying "We almost PvP'd in AV and it was horrible! Damn the other team for not allowing us to completely bypass them to allow the most honor per hour!". Really that's been the underlying sentiment for the whole thread though, thinly veiled by a overlay of "is it fun?". If you reread it, almost everyone is just looking to find the fastest way to farm their honor. I still don't understand how completely ignoring the other team in a "gentleman's agreement" is a fun way to PvP.

Why are you all grinding honor for PvP gear if you don't want to engage in PvP. Just for arena? This is a serious question, not a troll.

 

Melador

Yes. I've got a full set of Arena gear on my druid and capped points, and I still look forward to and really enjoy playing my Arena matches each week. If I could do the same on my other 70s without having to grind honor in BGs, I absolutely would.

I'm sick to death of AV at this point, but if I want to PvP with friends in Arena, I've got do the grind, and AV remains the highest honor/hour for me, so it's what I play.

 

Elendril

Arena and *competitive* PVP, yes. The majority of the time, pugging battlegrounds is not fun except insofar as it provides a sense of being that much closer to getting the gear I want so I can actually be competitive in the PVP I do consider fun. I have a freshly 70 warrior (3 days played at 70 now), and I've been grinding the hell out of AV because that's the fastest way for me to get to the point that I can legitimately play arena. The nature of the arena reward system (weekly point awards) actually exacerbates the problem of feeling compelled to get the best honor per hour - if my goal is to play arena, the longer it takes me to get honor, the more arena points I'm missing out on because I'm not competitively geared. If I decide to just play when I can get friends together for WSG because I enjoy that play experience, I won't get enough honor gear nearly as fast as if I just play AV and hope for race games, so I end up playing the game format I do not really enjoy because it's necessary to play the one that I do in a reasonable time.

 

Vain

If you are just starting in arena (e.g. on an alt), you really need to grind a LOT of honor gear to get off the ground floor. Even the bottom of the barrel teams now are wearing full S2/partial S3. Therefore, these people want to get as much BG honor as fast as possible, so that arena is actually fun for them, instead of a curbstomp. It's not that BGs aren't fun, it's just that arenas aren't fun until you have enough of the honor rewards to not get completely destroyed.

 

SanSul

Still getting an epic every 3 days is still far and away superior to other alternatives, also considering that the average day in PvP costs me about 15g total in repairs, and no other costs.

Yes it is a large grind, but a dedicated player can easily get 10+ epic items within a month of hitting 70. Making the grind even easier will simply invalidate PvE even further, its bad enough that PvE gear can be a liability in PvP.

Blizzard doesn't extend reputations to alts, or gold, or gear, so its a bit unrealistic to lighten up the honour grind simply because of alts.

 

deadlights

The way pvp in WoW is headed, they might as well turn it into a FPS.

 

malthrin

I disagree. A playstyle that causes me to smash my keyboard in frustration at pug stupidity is not even slightly superior. I'm another SC reroll who had intended to delve back into arenas (I've got an s2 paladin I gave away early in the season), but gave up and focused on PvE instead. PvE gearing with an able group is equally fast and immeasurably more interesting. Does the lack of a group requirement for the PvP grind justify how much more tedious and painful it is?

Travian - Resto Druid
Malthrin - Priest

 

Melador

They can? Assuming the average piece is, what, 14k honor, that's over 4k honor a day, or 4 hours per day under absolutely optimal honor-gaining-pugging-BG conditions. It's realistically more like 5 or 6 hours since you're going to get into some slugfest AVs or lose some AB/WSG/EotS games. And that's doing that every day for a month, not skipping a single day.

Your definition of "easily" differs pretty significantly from mine.

 

Elendril

See, a lot of people have very different understandings of what realistic honor per hour is. One day last week I got 20k honor in a day when I was home sick from work. I played perhaps 12 hours, exclusively pug AV. That's certainly on the high end of honor rates, and not something I'd expect on my normal battlegroup (this is on my alt warrior on Icecrown alliance), but it's far better than 1k per hour. I have 3 days played at 70 and have Vindicator neck, ring, bracers, and boots, with almost enough honor for S1 shoulders, along with 50ish badges and some karazhan epics (so a lot of that time was not spent battlegrounding).

I think one of the big problems that makes the PVP grind feel so miserable is actually the lack of join as group for AV. Yes, you can 'countdown queue' or whatever, but that doesn't work if you have any sort of queue times. AV is currently the best honor per hour for anything besides a premade group, and it's FAR more enjoyable with even one more person. Honor grinding feels a lot worse than, say, instance grinding for blues both because there's no sense of immediate gratification if an item drops and because it's essentially a solo activity if you're trying to do it efficiently. If I could easily group queue for AV and actually have a small group I want to play with to go around and try to achieve objectives, I'd enjoy the experience much more.

 

slitz

Is it just me or have this trend changed though?
Normally we (alliance) win 8 games out of 10, and the only time we lose is when horde decide to either block us at Galv or defend Iceblood/Tower point.
The last couple of days, this has been the case and pretty much all the games I've played. Now horde is actually winning 8 games out of 10 since they've decided they don't want to race anymore.
Makes it quite frustrating to play around for 30-40 minutes and gain 150-200 honor, compared to the 15 minutes for 400-500 honor 8)

 

• Argium

That's pretty much it. If alliance can cap IB gy that usually gives them access to 2 towers + galv so that's a decent slab of honour there evne if you lose. If horde defend though it can be pretty difficult.

 

Cwealm

Probably for the gear. Then they will park that toon, and send in their undergeared alt in "of the monkey" and stink up the battleground for th enext two months until that toon has everything available, then move on to their rogue alt and start gearing it up. That is what the idiots in my guild do, and it makes me mental. They finally get to the point they can actually, you know, contribute to the battle in a meaningful way, and they park the toon and "get some gear for their alt."

It sucks.

 

Amourette

Please excuse me for the tangent- could anyone explain what happens in Alterac Valley when the game ends and a tower gets destroyed afterwards? Would you receive the extra honor even though the game is technically done?

 

Mode

It used to be that way, but they hotfixed it a couple weeks ago. If you'll remember, there was a day or so where no-one was getting -ANY- bonus honor.

 

Amourette

Ah, indeed. Thank you.

 

Melador

The most frustrating thing about alliance AV isn't the obvious map imbalance, it's that no matter how many times we say it before the match starts, it's pretty much impossible to get alliance offense to skip Galv and hit IBGY full-force.

In fact, I think the worst part of the IBGY/IBTower/Galv clustering isn't that they're easy to all defend, is that they're so close together that it's impossible to get everyone to resist going after him when they run right by his bunker entrance. And of course, when offense splits and is promptly wiped by a much smaller defensive force, BG-chat gets super ugly and obnoxious.

I can sort of understand why horde would get fed up with losing quickly (even though it's good honor/hour) and want to win some, but I don't get why they wouldn't just go for rush games on bonus honor weekend when you get extra honor for finishing a game. 40 minute standoffs are especially unprofitable this weekend.

 

Eekpaladin

I had an abnormal AV game today. Alliance did their usual split rush for Iceblood and we all wiped; I'd say half of us went for Galvanger, most of the other half went for Iceblood Graveyard, and about 5 made a futile rush for Frostwolf Keep. We wiped so bad that Horde defense even ran up and grabbed Snowfall graveyard. Next thing you know, all 40 Alliance are resurrecting at Stormpike Graveyard.

The reason why I say the game was weird is because, when a few people started saying "just sit on SP" in BG chat, Alliance actually listened. An hour later, we ran out of reinforcements, but Horde wasn't able to cap anything else. And honestly, if Horde are going to put up a stiff defense at Iceblood, I don't mind making them wait over an hour for a win even if it screws my honor/hour. While I don't think this losing strategy will catch on (I've almost had it work before...), it could potentially discourage a lot of people from even wanting to do AV if Alliance did adopt this strategy en masse. Having 40 people camp the area makes it really rough for a sizeable offense to make any headway.

 

Darken

One of the problems in av is (as mentioned before) player mentality.
One of the reasons that people do the mob thing, is because they fear
getting killed.. yes it sounds stupid, but there you go, thats how I see it.

Two different av's yesterday:
1. Galv (yes mob wanted to do him first), got reset 3 times, before going down.
We had near zero people ressing in sp/db which meant horde just walked in and took it all.
At Ibgy - tp, people were moving at snailpace, determind to not let one single horde pass them.
and then lose the bg, by fighting just before fwgy until horde won from reinforcements.

2. FW keep, pushing to get past the choke point, people didnt ride through!
They stopped to kill each and every horde they ran across, which meant that horde casters
actually got to use the base design to their advantage (like the days of old), standing on
the elevated points and to the east, so east tower archers could help out. It was like me and
two others that were the only ones actually riding through the chokepoint and up to the towers...
it took so long to get people to mount up (some where just standing inside the choke point
waiting for horde to show up) and get a move on, that while we got one cap and one burned,
we didnt even get started on drek (well people managed to rush into his room) before horde won.

On cyclone its a matter of 2-4 people trying to cap ibgy and hope they can hold out until the mob
has finished with galv... its kinda fun watching the minimap seeing all those dots tickling into his bunker
i bet he is pretty ticked off that blizzard removed his bouncers and the sign that said: "Max 15 people"

*bleh*


edit:
Saw this topic on mmo champ:
An intense ending to AV
check out that screenshot! wow.

 

Opioid

Some data from a post in the wow forum

 

Goreshot

Coming from the Vindication Battlegroup, I'm actually kind of glad there's at least a tiny amount of hard data supporting the idea that, as a population, the Horde there are among the worst PvPers in the game.

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

 

Melador

Well, I don't know if it's so much that they're bad, it's just that everyone would always rush, so alliance would generally win. We also had 10+ minute queues, whereas I'd assume horde queues were about instantaneous.

This weekend though it's pretty different, I've played 18 AVs and won 5 of them -- there's a lot more horde D at the IB chokepoint lately, a lot more long games, and alliance queues have dropped to under 5 minutes, so I'd say Vindication's shifting to where most of the other battlegroups are...it's just slower than the rest.