Kamaegwyn

Most games I was in in Vengeance last night followed the pattern

15 ally to SF - Galv - IBT - IBGY - TP. Bypass any horde resistance of more than a token few.

Rest push to RH, tagging FW if no horde is there. If a bigger force is dug in in horde base, wait until FW caps and people from the first group come down.

If horde is dug in at IBGY, fall back until SF caps, and have a few stealthers bypass the blockade and start tagging towers / graveyards down south, forcing horde to soften around IB and send people further south to defend.

It's fine to harrass horde at IW bunker or SH bunker, but under no circumstances can Ally lose a DB bunker, or it's usually over.

Alliance won 9 out of 11 games this way, the other two were lost because people didn't listen. With horde holed up in the base and the DB bunkers secure, Alliance usually wins through reinforcements.

 

BrTarolg

An interesting "counter" to a few scorched earth attempts on EU (alliance still have 10 min queue times in AV - its pretty balanced really) is that i often see a good chunk of alliance (usually 5-10) run striaght to cap FW and relief hut, and get the timers ticking on the two towers after.

Because of the early caps, the horde tend to respawn pretty far away, or at the very least, ahead of those graveyards, and often find very little incentive to come and recap (even though they should for an easy win).

Once those are capped, either alliance get a significant advantage on the reinforcements, or it simply becomes much easier to break through any horde defence and get working on drek

 

Lodekim

So they've listed some changes for AV in 2.4, and I didn't see them posted here yet:

WoW Forums -> Alterac Valley Improvements in 2.4

Depending on how well they buff Balinda it could do a lot to balance the zone, but I guess we'll have to wait and see.

 

Shinanigans17

AV has been around too long imo.. now its just filled with new 70's farming honor miserably for their s1 gear.

 

Shinanigans17

blizzard needs to put the queue as group function back in.. then it may be interesting again.. for a while.

 

SanSul

A slight map change and more NPC changes for AV. How many times does it take for Blizzard to figure out that is so far beyond what people are asking for. 2.4 has be delayed so long, they could of easily mirrored the map by now, but they refuse to do so. These new changes just kinda confirm they don't really care about players AV experience.

So basically...

SH GY, SHB and Balinda are still far to spread out. IB versions all remain close

IB Choke point remains which is the main reason alliance no longer que.

Vann exploit remains, correct me if I am wrong on this

30min+ turtles of alliance at SP still remain with no way to bounce back if your entirely on Defense, and gain almost no honour

Honestly, how is "killing more horde offense" good for Alliance. Buffing Balinda directly makes life more difficult for Alliance offense dealing with spawns at IB GY, or Relief Hut, which is even easier to defend. Blizzard can make all the darn changes they want, but there is only one change that matters to the majority of people who would even consider queing...honour.

If at the end of the day AV is still the lowest honour/hour battlegroud for many alliance battlegroups, people won't que and Blizzard's weak changes would of been a total waste of time.

 

Talgog

Allowing Alliance to actually reach SH bunker first makes a large difference here. It does away with a gimmie Horde reinforcement edge.

Good luck exploit pulling Vann with warmasters alive with the stacking buff. Even if you could do it with the positioning in the room at present, Vann would probably be untankable unless you had T6 with one or more warmaster buffs on him. IIRC the value of the stacking buff was 20% health and damage each.

 

Mode

Here's how I think it'll go:

Initially, many, many Horde will continue to try to rush. Because we can no longer actually hope to win a rush thanks to a more bad-ass Balinda and an inability to hit SHB before the allies get there, the Horde win/loss ratio on most BGs will crash and burn. We're talking 20/80 or worse and some of the losses will be brutal 600-0 shut-outs.

However, after the initial teething period, most Horde will look at the failure of rush and say, "This shit ain't working" and start defending. Horde Win/loss ratios on most BGs will grow to resemble those on Stormstrike/Bloodlust, which will also be somewhat less horribly lop-sided.

 

Grazdak

I think the 2.4. changes will pretty much balance things at least in my battlegroup ... Alliance still has a late chokepoint (Dun Baldar bridge) in comparison to an early chockepoint (IB Graveyard) for Horde. Alliance has the advantage of a very un-rushable base in comparison to a completely defenseles base for Horde.

Usually what happens on our BG is strongly dependant on how efficient Horde defends.

If 20+ Players form a solid defense at the IB chokepoint and also retap Snowfall, Alliance gets forced into a turtle at IB and looses in a horribly drawn out game, mainly due to their undefensible first bunker. Might be that putting the Horde starting point further back will change this a bit, I don't think Stonehearth bunker is fundamentally worse for defense than IB Tower. Even with a solid wall of Players in the chokepoint, also defending IB Tower rarely works on our BGs.

Such a massive defense usually no longer happens on our BG anymore - I think people got fed up with hour-long BGs.

Currently in my experience things have reverted pretty much to the "old" ways.

Either Alliance rushes with 10-15 players towards the Horde base, the rest of the zerg group takes the EB-Area. If no or very few Horde players defend, this results in pretty much all towers and graveyards being taken at once, while Horde gets delayed by a token defense at Dun Baldar and is generally slower in killing the buffed Balinda and Van.

The other case is Horde keeping a token defense at IB (about 10 People usually) who take down the rushers and makes sure they get only slowly pushed back to base without any rushers slipping through. In that case, Horde usually wins with 2 Towers lost, sometimes defending their base towers, sometimes not.

 

Talgog

I think this will end quick rushes to Relief Hut/Aid Station by all but the most organized groups. If you still have four warmasters up, it doesn't matter if you can single pull one because he will be at 200% health and, more importantly, 200% damage, which makes his Whirlwind very dangerous to most classes.

Not impossible to deal with for highly organized and geared groups, but for your average AV, ouch.

You pretty much have to cap the towers with this change. After a few massacres by Warmaster, people will learn to not even try for the super-quick wins.

 

Grazdak

Rushing is still useful - you can tap the base towers pretty much the same time as the front towers, so overall you have four towers down earlier. True, pulls with warmasters will become even more difficult, but rushing still has its uses if you can cap towers and maybe the graveyard there.

 

• Argium

In Bloodlust alliance currently get a lot of 0-200 losses (in other words, it's fairly close) so these balance changes might tip things back to pre-2.3 again. :|

 

shazzbott

Personally I'm looking forward to the removal of honour diminishing returns. A one hour turtlefest could earn you a lot of honour as long as you get the kills in.

 

Rej

Nightfall has been seeing mostly Alliance wins, following Grazdak's scenario. It takes a very smart Horde group to correctly counter the default Alliance strategy - which means we've had a meager win ratio.

I don't think the changes are likely to fix any real problems. The Horde will continue to see constant losses, and more people will attempt to botch the game into a turtle so they can farm honor. Queue as group would be nice, but they haven't shown any signs of adding this in.

 

frber

One of the major problems with AV though is that its boring to defend towers. In particular if nothing happens. Sure you can say that the towers at alliance base hurt alot but a single Rogue can stealth there and kill all the archers without anyone knowing he's there. Unless you keep people guarding the NPC archers.....but none wants to do that.

It would likely improve if they gave each tower a good set of NPC's that stay close to the flag. Fight anyone who gets close, announce when they are under attack, and that will recapture the bunker if they reset; and who will respawn if the bunker is successfully defended by a player.

That way you'd only have to approach your own bunker as a defending player when its under attack.

Sure it would be harder to capture an objective. But answering calls for Help would be certain PvP. It doesn't have to be really strong NPC's. Just something that is certain to keep attackers busy for a minute or two to give defenders a chance to arrive.

Would also be a nice chance to give out bonus Honor. Could give out 20 Honor to everyone near the tower when said NPC's are killed. Giving an incentive for attackers to go for them.

 

Taantric

These changes will do nothing. Blizzard still does not get it. They need to also mirror the defensive advantage of IBGY, IB Tower, Galv and Tower point in their alliance counter parts.

Ok so the alliance can now get to SH bunker quickly to defend and while the alliance is defending SH bunker, it is trivial for the horde to go via the other route and cap Icewing bunker on their way to SP. Alliance simply cannot defend SH Bunker, SH GY, Balinda & Icewing bunker without completely sacrificing all offensive capability.

It is ridiculous how much more the Horde front is defendable compared to the alliance front.

For god sake, how hard can it be for them to just f**king mirror the map? They done that exact thing with the three other BG maps. I personally think some high level designer(s) probably have some stake in this and it would be too much of a humiliation to admit a mistake and get this fixed. Reckon the same guy did meeting stones also?

 

Talgog

Someone's a newbie.

Towers used to have large, and I mean large, numbers of NPC infantry inside them along with stealth detect owls (dogs for Horde). This was on top of the forward towers of both sides having a badass elite in them (who was removed more recently). Suffice to say, a rogue was never going to take an old AV tower/bunker solo, let alone hold out and interrupt recaps.

Way back when, there were also very large numbers of NPC's stationed in the trenches on both sides of the Field of Strife - and in SH village. These were originally elite and respawned, which made both forward graveyards supremely difficult to assault and made charging up through SH village not a viable option most of the time.

Lots of fighting on the long slope road, basically.

The mine mobs were also all elite, as opposed to uber weak Victory Rush bait.

Essentially, every single objective was dramatically harder, but the bunkers were extremely so. Every where you see a lot of open space in a tower/bunker, there were troops there.

-

Generally, if Lake Wintergrasp resembles AV 1.0 with heavier weaponry to deal with elites and turtles, I suspect most players, the overwhelming majority of which never saw original AV, will be very happy campers. AV 1.0 was *fun*. You could never count on winning a given battle while you were available to play (I personally saw Dun Baldur withstand a seige for 8 hours; the aid station by itself held out for two) but there were a lot of fun things to do. Goblin shredder, training Korrak, cavalry, headhunting lieutenants if you were a hunter or warlock, hunting infantry for lots of cash and drops if you weren't, etc.

There was also no way to control access down the map. The valley itself was significantly wider and you could hit Iceblood Graveyard from the east easily (except for the elite).

 

frber

Ah no I remember the old AV very well. I liked having NPC's defend the places for you. Its no fun waiting at a bunker that Horde aren't actively attacking.

I do think the game would be improved if the bunker by default had 3-4 Elites (dangerous like a single heroic ramparts pull maybe) that can't be kited out of the bunker and that will recap towers if reset; just to stall an attacking force long enough for opposition to arrive so the defenders so it require more PvP to capture a tower; instead of getting the initial capture more or less for free and then only needing to prevent a recap by interupting the ones trying to take it back.

 

Grazdak

We have seen our own share of losses due to extensive Alliance rushing. It is not that hard to counter if you get one or two active PvPers to help you. Try to motivate some people to defend at IB. If you get 10 people together, defend there and make sure nobody gets through. Rather fall back and let IB/TP go down than letting the rushers get through.

If no defense shows up at IB, things are tough. If you have one or two people to help you lurk around the TP-Area and take down a single rusher or three (get someone with good slowing capabilities to help - I love doing this with my Ret-Paladin). Some guys will inevitably get through - after you have taken some out, port back to base with the AV-Trinket and hope you can manage to delay the rest of the rushers long enough to have some people respawn at the Relief Hut.

Alliance rushers will often ride through to the south corner behind Galvangars bunker and wait for more people there to take out the guards at Relief Hut. Try to kill them in ones or twos before more arrive. If you can't manage that harrass them to buy time and scream for help . Try to add the graveyard guards or to move the fight into the range of the tower archers.

Sometimes you can buy enought time for the offense to overtake the alliance defense, sometimes you can even manage to hold Frostwolf Keep with the respawn.

For a long time also harrassing the IB and TP Towers and retaking them has worked for us (Horde) - ride along the edges of the BG and try to bypass the Alliance zerg. Two or three PvPers can often retake a tower when you get there at a 2 min timer. Lately this rarely works anymore in our BG, most of the time Alliance now properly defends the bunkers. Horde often does not though, luckily most of the time the Alliance does not get it, I can't count the time where a proper recaping efort with 2 or 3 people from Galvangar would have killed us

 

Soladoras

The changes to the Warmasters that will make taking towers almost mandatory to kill your opponents General will mean diddly poo, since you still don't have to even enter a base to get a 600-0 bonus honor win. The removal of DR is nice, although about 18 months too late, but this is all much ado about nothing, until they mirror the BG.

 

Valerys

It is ridiculous to consider this an advantage when the Horde in 90% of cases does not defend their front at all.

 

Aciara

Outside of premades it's 99% on BG2-EU. You can always say defence, but nobody (or nearly nobody, as 10 people can't really delay 30 at IBGY) does it, and horde subsequently loses nearly every game (apart from premades of which there are alot, so they destroy the numbers).

Wash the spears . . .
. . . while the sun climbs high.
Wash the spears . . .
. . . while the sun falls low.
Wash the spears . . .
. . . who fears to die?
Wash the spears . . .
. . . no one I know!
- Aiel chant

 

Duilliath

The fact that you chose to ignore your strong points doesn't make them any less strong.

Though I suppose the game itself will barely change. It'll still be a PvE race to get the towers to burn and then kill the boss. It's the fastest game and thus the most honour/hour.

 

Valerys

Actually it does, strong points aren't strong just because, they are strong when made so by the Horde defense.
The thing is, when Horde ignores their strong point (IB), it is nullified. When Alliance ignores their strong point (DB), it doesn't matter because it will still delay the Horde offensive significantly by virtue of more powerful bunkers and NPCs.
So in a stupid PUG vs stupid PUG game (the majority of AVs), Alliance has a clear advantage.

 

Amonra

Sorry, but your argument makes no sense. If nobody is defending, then there are no strong points in the game. Unless a lot of the horde suffer from vertigo, then its not realistic to suggest that an undefended DB bridge will slow up the horde offensive.

As for the stupid PUG argument, on Rampage at least (and on a lot of other battlegroups) the horde have long since grasped the concept of splitting their forces so that some defend at IB while the rest capture SHGY. It is a pretty simple strategy to put into practice. The fact that IB is a strong defensive point while SH is weak helps the horde with this strategy and prevents the alliance successfully pursuing a similar strategy.

The changes to Balinda will help the alliance defend SHGY because the horde can't keep up pressure on SHGY while a token horde force kills Balinda. They will need to focus on one or the other which enables the alliance to focus their defense in the same area.

The change to the horde starting position will somewhat help the defense of SHB in that it won't be an automatic loss because the horde got there first. However the fact remains that it's equidistant between the horde respawn at IBGY and the alliance respawn at SHGY which makes it very vulnerable to attack. IBT has no similar weakness.

Overall I can't see these changes having a significant impact on AV.