Whenever the Horde turtles, someone inevitably quips, "You guys are playing like Alliance!" Does the Alliance have an equivalent slur?

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The ninjacapping of the in-base towers is complete bullshit. If Alliance starts to catch on that sending a few people into our completely open base = win, we're done.

We have: "Why are you guys fighting them? Just let them win so we can get a new game". This has given rise to my favourite thing to say ever now: "Why? Do you have another game you need to be losing in?" It's a big hit with the crowd and can get me called a noob for a good 10 minutes if I milk it right. It would probably be more but we tend to lose within 10 minutes once it's gotten that far. It's basically the most fun I have in AV now. I've pretty-much stopped surfing the WoW forums and instead use AV to fuel my desire to absorb stupidity until I rage up and lash out. Everyone needs a little rage session every now and then.

I doubt Blizzard will go on letting the map favor the horde for two years like they let it favor alliance for two years. So given that do any of you ever think well see a mirrored map version of AV?

This is so true. Send like 2 rogues and a resto druid into the Horde base and tag the towers while we're on offense and our "defense" is fighting around Iceblood/Galv. Two minutes later, after nagging in BG chat, 1-2 people will go back to try and retake them. If there is any defense at all there and it's not just an uncontested cap, the people who went back to retake them will die. At this point they'll scream in BG chat about how we have X alliance in our base and they need help. By the time anyone listens, the towers have burned and Horde is down a huge chunk of reinforcements.

Personally "Leave SF alone NUB11!!11!!!"" After the defense has moved north from IB/Galv through SF and posted up at SH and we are 300 ahead with the entire Allinace raid force stuck on the road north of Icewing is my favorite.

I'm my battlegroup there seen to be enough intelligent horde to not only have ten-fifteen automatically go to Galv and start patrolling incase they try to sideswipe IB but two or three will hang out in our base to ward off the solo ninja taps.

This phenomenon happened last night in my AV where the Horde defense was holding the wooded area north of Frostwolf, protecting both the mine and Frostwolf graveyard. We had held off the Alliance for a good 15 minutes and the moment a few Alliance (5+) rode past us by skirting the Horde starting cave and jumping the wall, all of our active defense had no choice but to give up the mine and FWGY to recap both towers and the Relief Hut or do the same involuntarily minutes later. Just this one action moved our entire defense back a significant distance and made the match a much closer race.

Interestingly, if you die on defense and the Alliance captures the Relief Hut and your closest graveyard is Stonehearth, get ready for a very very long trek back.

I think a lot of people are assuming that their AV experiences are the same for everyone, when that isn't necessarily the case.

I've played about 20 or so new AVs, winning probably 30-40% of them and I've had the total opposite experience to you. Not once have we won by killing Drek. All of our wins so far have come by taking IB GY and it's associated towers, and then eventually getting FW hut, or just camping the FW towers long enough to cap one or both.

I've also twice successfully taken the FW towers as a resto Druid with a group of 3 other DPS exactly as described and that's worked fine too. You just need a good Resto Druid and a team of 3-4 other players to go with them. They don't even necessarily have to stealth in as you can usually get through undetected in the early game if you just rush it at the start.

Not true at all.

In my older more PvPcentric(2.0-2.1 timeframe) guild we would group queue and get 36 people into an AV. At the time the ONLY way we could reliably break the alliance Zerg was to split in half send half to SF and the other SH force a turtle and use LoK/riders/ground assult to break the damned turtle.


This is equally applicable to the alliance right now.

IF you go say 30/10 30 to SHGY and 10 SF and stop the horde offensive you've stalemated us pretty much with just SH bunker...a bad place for the horde to be. The chances of anyone bothering to go and check out SF are slim untill we have crushed an offensive at IB or Galv.

Now you start gathering your heads off, if you manage to progress beyond SH tower and start taking IB tower..get a ninja team by you've forced the horde defensive with no foreward res point (remember we go back to FW now if IB falls).

Now just farm the turtle...thats exatly what the horde is doing to the alliance right now.

Right now the prevailing tactic is still rush rush rush till you can't, then start arguing tactics. The main difference is that the horde adapted a little faster and relized that a token D is enough to tip the scale.

They can get away with grabbing FW and the relief hut while they're at it. Horde might get FW back, but chances are if you've got 4-5 people through the relief hut and those 2 towers are as good as yours.

I agree with #2 the most. I think if horde just taps snowfall for a moment while alliance is chasing IB that it has a profound impact on the game. Now alliance has to either wait for caps or push on and risk respawns at stormpike.
At this point I think some psychology comes into play and people who respawn 2 minutes from where they want to be just give up or find something nearby to do even if it is not what is best.

Yeah alliance can definitely win by reducing reinforcements to 0. Yesterday when I did the daily on my rogue, the game ended with iceblood tower and stonehearth bunker destroyed, alliance controlled snowfall GY and IBGY, and all the rest of the nodes under their original owners' control. The game ended with about 180 alliance reinforcements remaining. edit: I think tower point might have capped right before the game ended, but it was at the very end.

The game started with alliance defense wiping horde on balinda with snowfall and IBGY taken, pushing horde back behind our front line. Neither side really made any ground on offense after that since horde was ressing at FWGY and we had a good 10-15 alliance killing everyone that tried to run past to go on offense for the horde. The slow trickle of players that actually made it past were easily taken out by the 5 or 6 people defending SHGY and snowfall.

For a while I've been wondering what the yeti boss inside the Alliance cave is for. 100 reinforcements? Perhaps the harpies will launch an assault!? I've soloed it down to ~70%, so I think a healer+tank+dps could take him down easily.

I can imagine there's a similar boss in Horde cave - anyone seen it?

In my Battlegroup (BG8? Shadowburn) I've seen a lot less AV games going on (even when the Shattrah PvP daily is AV). In the 14 games I've played so far I've been in one winning game. And the Horde still got like 300 honor, which IMO is lame. Sure everyone hates doing something for ~30mins and not getting a "big pay out," but I think the change is good, if you suck you need to think about why you suck and worry about it when you queue up next and learn. Things I've noticed.

1. Healing - Even if I don't try my hardest and heal for 200k in a 20 min game I'm usually leading Alliance healing, with ~3rd place down in 5 digit numbers.
2. Alliance players don't listen (to new ideas) Everyone still zergs South, and I feel like I'm trapped in the "Kill Galv he gives tons of honor games" way back when.
3. There's ALWAYS 10 Horde guarding IB and 5+ Guarding Galv....when combined with #1 means.....
4. People die in the first 5 mins, complain, make it look like there's 25 people on defense, when really they're getting "GY camped" and are AFK/Not trying/Dying and costing us reinforcements. This adds up, sometimes we get IB and the past few games we don't even get TP and we lose. Most of the games I've been in are 0 - 400 (Horde wins!)

This IMO means people will get mad that they're not getting as much honor as they're used to (Read: seeing the numbers on the scoreboard at the end), stop queuing and start doing Organized Battlegrounds (Whoot!) I'm trying to predict when AV will become as fun as 2 hour WSG turtles with hundreds of people AFKing and and cycling more kids in.

Basically this thread has given me a few tips for my: "Yo noobs, this is how you win AV" macro to post at the beginning of each AV game...I hope it works.

I cant really agree with this, atleast for my battleground. I'm playing wow since closed beta and had my FAIR share of all battlegrounds at time and been disgusted by old AV for quite long. Since the change the battleground is finally quite enjoyable and actually fun with atleast 2-3 good people which you can rely on. Horde is definetely winning bit more in my BG than alliance does (atleast from my own experience), but even the 40:60 winning ratio for horde is quite fine with me. Biggest problem at the moment is that half of alliance raid doesnt get the new rules, but bit of explaining at start before the gate opens can help with that.

EDIT: Oh, and queues went from 15-20 minutes for alliance to instant, which is quite welcomed change aswell.

I take back an earlier statement. I have won one game by reducing horde reinforcements to 0. Just 1, in the many games I've been playing since the patch. So while it is doable, it's still mainly a horde thing. Usually when their defense kills our offense and then traps us at STGY. Horde have an advantage since belinda, SH bunker and icewing bunker are down. So even if we turtle at STGY, it's over. This happens *A LOT*.

And the horde base is just as well defensible as dun balder. There is a very nice choke point on that ramp that leads up to the 2 FW towers. We have to go across that way. Ranged, especially hunters, can stand up on the towers and add t the firepower of the NPC arrchers cutting us down. We've been held off by that for quite awhile. If the horde defense of 10+ people are camped there, it's as bad as the dun balder bridge.

Anyway, while the new AV is pvp oriented, it's not *fun* for a lot of alliance. How fun is pvp if you constantly start at a disadvantage, and lose 75% of the time and get almost nothing for your time, while the other side gets everything? In this new AV, I've discovered that the alliance basically have one shot to have an offense. If that fails, we're done for. If the horde offense fails, it's not as hard for them to push north again.

I think this is the real crux of the problem for Alliance, especially at the moment. Alliance do only really have 1 shot at offence, they have to take and hold IB, if that gets retaken, the chances of an Alliance victory are basically 0. The reason is that Alliance cannot reliably defend/counterattack SH, horde will almost always take it with relative ease. Not only that, but the alliance will typically lose these games with very few bonus points.

Now if Alliance can take and hold IB and then successfully defend SP, they'll win either through attrition and the fact that they have a much easier run at the second pair of towers, thus taking 160 reinforcements from horde, and having an easy cap at the horde mine. This is the basic gameplan for Alliance at the moment, if both teams are caught at FW/SP, then Alliance should win most games.

I think there needs to be some changes to SH/IB depending on what sort of game Blizz wants to promote (and yes, whatever changes are made, equalisation of the bases needs to be made as well). If they want to promote a bloodbath in the middle, with Horde trying to capture SH and Alliance trying to capture IB, with either capture swinging the game in the favour of the capturers, then SH needs to be more defensable, moving the forward bunker back closer to SH would be a good start. If they want both teams to cross over, and commit say 25 offense and 15 defense, the sort of game that is happening now, a race with real defence, then they need to make IB less defensable, moving the front tower forward would be a start.

If you don't like alliance turtles, don't take all the Graveyards. It really is that simple. Stop killing Belinda and rolling up to Snowfall with ten people and wiping out the defense there.

Mines provide one reinforcement per minute.
As far as quests go, the seasoned defenders can be nice to have, although I've been mainly playing in the 51-60 bracket where their usefulness is probably much higher. They make a real mess of anyone below 55. I've seen the ice-lord summoned once in new AV, when the Alliance force was turtled in the pass leading to SP graveyard. His impact on the outcome of that game wasn't that great (Horde won faster than we would have done without him). In a more closely matched game I could see him reducing the opposition reinforcements by at least the same amount as a tower before getting kited off to oblivion.

I don't really see the point of all this bickering. AV is not going to be balanced short of a complete map overhaul, at which point it wouldn't really be AV anymore. Changing NPC/tower mechanics or adding reinforcements etc is still not going to alter the fact that its a horribly designed map with unclear objectives and decidedly unequal points of interest.

I'm just hoping that they add a new map in WotLK that could possibly serve as the spiritual successor to AV not just in format but honor gain (azshara crater anyone?).

I'm not sure about anyone else, and it is only the first night of the weekend, but on Vengeance there have been no less than 10 Alliance members in the Frostwolf base within the first 4 minutes of the game, with no game exceeding 16 minutes in the past 8 that I've played. Iceblood and Frostwolf Towers were taken and the rest of the offensive-blitz (BG chat indicated there was very little to no Alliance defense) rushed straight toward the relief hut. Generally speaking, the changes to AV had been enjoyable up until this point, but if this is a new trend, it's actually more of a rush than the last iteration of AV. Is it simply because the AV weekend ensures twice the honor that this is even feasible/beneficial, or could this be the start of a new and more ridiculous in-and-out grind?

Ugh.

With AV weekend here and the weekend warriors out, it really shows how AV has changed.
Quite a few people on Alliance side haven't caught up and insist on suiciding at Galvangar.

I must say this really detracted from the AV weekend for me at least. Was hoping to eek out a bit more honour on my rogue alt, but not quite sure if I can stand running AVs which clearly are doomed straight from the start.

Might be me, but it in my recollection, Alliance caught on faster with the previous AV incarnation - though that might just have suited the generic Zerg / PvE centric Alliance minds more than the actual concept of defense.

Yep. The new av is awful. Horde have no incentive to leave any graveyards alone. They can get to their two towers without any real opposition (alliance choices are to defend icewing and turtle, or let horde have it and lose the turtle).

This makes me laugh, though:

Same with everyone in my guild, and it drives me crazy. Gear up your alt in pvp so you can... park it and then gear it up again in a couple of months. What would really rock is if people would gear up their mains and then, you know, play them in the BG's to win.