Another thing- Could someone explain how the honor works. I have been in several AV's where I have received zero honor and the horde has received 600 when they won, yet every time we win, the horde still seem to gain the same exact level of honor.

Sorry if this was covered earlier.

6-month seasons mean any serious PvPer's "main" is almost surely honor-capped by now, which also contributes to the overall quality of the people playing BGs right now.

AV in 4 weeks will probably be a bit different.

On my end, Horde have been remarkably quick at adapting, and it's pretty shocking. Almost every game starts with someone asking for ~12 people to speak up and defend Galv/IB at the start, we make sure that ninja'd towers get recapped, and we defend all three Field of Strife graveyards. The wins are dominant. (And it's not because of map imbalance, it's because we're employing a smarter strategy and executing it.)

You get honor for every tower/bunker you hold at the end. You get honor for your captain being alive. You get honor for holding mines. You get honor for every tower/bunker of theirs that you've burned.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your Alliance wins have not been ones in which Alliance kept all 4 of its bunkers, Balinda survived, you killed Galv and controlled the entire map north of Frostwolf?

Yeah, makes sense. Didn't think about that. I am capped but playing for fun. Not having much atm.

I didn't phrase it right. When we turtle and win, the horde gets comparable honor. When they turtle and win, we get no honor. Or at least that is how it seems. I will pay more attention and get back. Now that I think about it, it is probably because if they turtle, the turtle more than likely happens on the side of IW bunker and SH bunker and Balinda, so they are able to cap it.

I am simply trying to figure out a reliable strat atm. I usually try to defend snowfall, but since the patch, the horde just roll up after balinda, wipe out snowfall, then IB tower, then IB GY, then TP. We end up back at Dun Baldar, and I have to spend 20 minutes listening to the recriminations in BG chat wishing I had a cross-realms ignore list.

Defend Stonehearth Graveyard. Do not lose it. Ignore Galv, send ~15 people to contest IB GY, 5 to Snowfall, and the remainder at SH GY. Get people to actually do this, and you will see much, much better results.

I really miss the old school AV to be honest, yeah it was a pain when the games would NEVER end, but there was so much to be done in old AV. From the Rock dude at Snowfall GY, to collecting Rams and Wolf Pelts for Riders, the Druids, the ultimate creatures, the Flying guys, the upgradeing of troops.....none of that stuff happens anymore so it feels like the same AV over and over again.....

i do like that theres more competition for the game now though, the PvE style run to the end wasnt really any fun either. but Blizz needs to keep looking at it, and figure out a way to incorporate all the coolness of those old AV bits back in.

That sort of gameplay just doesn't work in the current inter-realm queue system with people looking for quick honor.

Expect to see it revived, from what Blizzard has said, in Lake Wintergrasp in WotLK -- an outdoor persistent PvP zone that should be like the old AVs, with a battle constantly ongoing and lots of stuff to do.

I actually play that alt. However, after a full exalted grind to the majority of factions, I couldn't be bothered repeating it on the Rogue. It wasn't till Heroics @ honoured that I could actually expect to gear up from PvE, hence the focus on PvP there.
Won't raid with her (much... other than the odd Karazhan), but can enjoy her in PvP.

My druid gets geared in pvp as well - but didn't really need anything in particular once I got the Veteran's gear.

Same. I enjoyed AV most as, quite frankly, Alliance was hit or miss in AB and running WSG as a Druid in a PUG is not the one of most enjoyable ways to spend your time as far as I'm concerned.

In AV one could muck about, play offense, defense, tank some if you felt like it and walk out 20 minutes later with a bit of honour. That has completely changed these days.

I've had 5-0 AB pug wings, I've had 9 minute WSG wins and I'm lucky to win one AV in three.


That's key. Every single AV I still see morons yell "Go Galv! We get honour !". And 5 horde wipe 'em there and Alliance goes home empty handed. I honestly hope it's just the weekend warriors that haven't been in the new AV much and that this doesn't develop into a permanent feature.

Yup - I do enjoy the new PvP version more... but as stated, 0 honour games aren't overly appealing as a reason to keep playing.

Couldn't agree more about the mines and queues. I think a simple 'join as group' would do just fine. Don't let Raids join - just regular groups. And 1 resource every minute (I think it is) doesn't quite add up in 20 minute games.

I can't wait - I for one enjoyed the epic 2-3 day battles. I just didn't enjoy trying to get Marks from there, which I do hope Blizzard will manage to avoid this time.

Fifteen AV's today. One win, 13 turtle losses, one total domination loss. Alliance has absolutely no clue what to do, and the horde seems completely content to win 34-40 minute turtles, because they take every graveyard every time.

Hope horde likes long AV queues, because if it keeps on like this, alliance will just quit.

I don't think defend SH is the key, at least not on our BG.

From doing some today it seems the key is to:

1) Take IB GY first. No ifs ands or buts. Defend it heavily (5-8 people) til it caps.
2) Branch out from there and take the two towers.
3) Harass Galvangar, but don't engage. Mainly just make sure the horde holed up in there don't go elsewhere. If you want take it later after IB and its towers are gone.
4) Don't defend Stonehearth. It still does the same thing it did before and brings the horde en masse in on IB.
5) Hold and defend Stormpike with 8-10 people.

Basically just hold them up enough at SP so alliance can overcome the initial slowness of their starting position and take FW. If you can get to the point where both sides only have the last GY and 2 towers left, alliance has a good chance.

Even with that, there was still one game (my last for the day) where we didn't defend IB after taking it, lost and got crushed. I afk'd out since that was the last I had planned to do.

That being said there was still some very very fast games. A couple were over in less than 12-13 minutes as both sides played no defence and went for the WMs fast. If you have a good tank or two this can work, since the end guys have so much less health now. This favors Horde though since Vandar is easier than Drek.

Overall I got 3100 or so honor for the day. Only 2 wins, maybe 5 losses? One win through domination, one through killing drek. 2 losses from the 12 minute AV game, 2 losses where we slowly pushed south but were just getting relief hut capped when we lost, and 1 where alliance messed it up and blew the game entirely.

Have they altered or completely eliminated the weekend holiday bonus honor in AV? I've played a bunch of games today and don't seem to be getting anything more than from normal weekday games.

Group queued with a bunch of folks from my guild tonight. Our strat was for the ten of us to take IBGY, TP, and IB Tower, let thm cap, then loop back and take galv while getting the rest of the raid to rush the RH.

Of course, you try to explain that to alliance, and they argue, but we went 8-1 when they listened, 2-2 when they did not. For some reason, idiots want to charge Galv off the bat still.

I did not notice any bonus honor either. I played only one game but in that we killed galv and got nothing else and ended up with I think 60 points.

There's definitely bonus honor, but I can't really figure out where it's coming from. I did 2K an hour even with a loss thrown in there.

I thought this was covered before. But if not, let me say it now: This is not a good idea. Speaking as an alliance member here:

Been there, done that.

I tried this before, and listed my results earlier in the thread, so you can backtrack if you missed it. However, I"ll sum it up: If we defend SHGY, then those 15 Alliance people get overwhelmed by the 35 angry horde spawning in FWGY. Alliance that are killed, respawn in SHGY, as snowfall hasn't been taken yet either. The horde gets IBGY back. About 20 of them then proceed to sit on IBGY, preventing it from being taken. The other 20 take SHGY while the alliance throw themselves at it like sheeps to the slaughter. Eventually, SHGY gets taken anyway, the allliance offense is dead, and we content ourselves with another 0 honor loss.

See a problem with this?

I will admit, it has worked one time only, partially. We managed to hold IBGY once after killing the first horde offense. However, on our trip south, the horde escaped to make another offense (something they can do, that we cannot), took SHGY, and from then on it was a race to the finish. All the SHGY defense did, was prolong the game by 20 minutes, and allowed more racking up of honor kills. We won the game, but barely.

The issue is the icewing chokepoint, which makes SHGY more defensible from Alliance coming from SPGY, as opposed to the horde coming from FWGY.

Remember, you're horde. You don't see things from the alliance perspective. Once our offense is crushed, we can't form another. The horde can. That is the biggest advantage in the game right now. Before 2.3, even if our offense was crushed, we could turtle SPGY for awhile, do turn ins, and make use of those druids, flyers, riders, etc. to bust out, and allow a small squad to start ninja capping. We can't do that now, because we run out of reinforcements before those can take effect.

I really think the reinforcement idea is a bad one. AV already has ways of dealing with long games, via the afformentioned flyers, riders, icelord/Ivus, etc. Towers should just be worth extra honor. They should never be destroyed, but instead, just switch sides, spawning arrchers like GY guards when one side gets control. I think you'd see more fun in AV, as each team would devote some forces to guarding their assets, while still trying to kill the general.

Mines are one reinforcement every 45 seconds I believe from the time the NPCs do the yell, meaning if you capture it 20 seconds after it does the tick, in 25 seconds you get the next tick, both mines means you gain 2 reinforcements every 45 seconds.

been mostly getting alliance wins this weekend, but very strange ones - the end result is very often a nearly totally alliance dominated map... and nearly equal reinforcement scores. Winning by a hundered reinforcements in a game where the horde has capped nothing what-so-ever while every tower and both mines are in alliance hands imply a seriously loopsided HK zerg somewhere on the map doesnt it? I never see it because I usually go around ninjaing towers and GY's but I had several games like this.

Played about 10-12 games today on my 61 Horde paladin: all wins except for one. However, I am starting to notice that during the holiday the momos are coming out in force. Pre-holiday I saw more of the defense oriented action Gurgthock was talking about. Now, however, the unfamiliar (or those too lazy or disinterested to read patch notes/PTR forums) are simply racing to the general and a lot of the wins were for very little honor: ~300ish.

The problem I see with most of the arguments about the map imbalance, is the assumption one side is as good at PvP as the other.

Alliance, just for the most part, doens't win the majority of matches for any BG in my battlegroup--they didn't on the other battle group I was on either as Horde. During August for a brief period there were certain days the win ratio was actually pretty decent and I would have days were I won more than I lost. Since then, I find it difficult to win a few matches in 3 or 4 hours, regardless of when I log in to play (and I have a ton of free time).

If the matches were close and I didn't constantly see horde dominating the boards in kills or healing, then I might see the point. If I didn't see Horde haelers going untouched, if I actually saw people willing to organize on Alliance side as a common thing, I might be inclinded to believe otherwise.

The main issue right now is the perception, and reality it seems, you need to go Horde if you want to experience more consistently serious PvP and not get your butt handed to you. With the ease of which you can level now, and no need to really raid to have good PvP gear, on first impression I don't see this trend changing any time soon.

I don't know if this is a trend on your battle group, but we seem to have a plague of people shouting the absolutely wrong tactics at the beginning of AV just to fuck people up. Things like "All form up and charge the SP Aid station, stop for nothing, no D". It's been pretty vicious this weekend.

After a day of trying a number of different things, two strategies worked fairly well:

1.) Send about 10-15 to IB GY. Ignore SH and the horde towers and snowfall. Get IB GY and defend the wave of horde. keep a token defense at SP. Send the rest rushing to the relief hut. hen take TP, IB tower while still defending IB GY, and when those cap loop back and take Galv. We also had a team of three running around retaking IW bunker and SH Bunker.

The horde had no clue what to do when no one showed up at Galv. We took IB GY, IB Tower, and TP, and then saw ten horde roll out of Galv's room wondering why we were not there so they could wipe us as usual.

If you do this, it generally leads to a 15-25 min victory.

2.) Defend SH GY with every man. Wipe the horde at SH. Wipe the others at Balinda. Take Snowfall. Send a team of 5-10 to keep taking back SH Bunker and have that team sneak up and kill Galv. Have a rogue or two run around in FW RH and the FW towers capping and stealthing, not to burn the towers, but to just piss off the horde and force them to send some folks down to retake them. Make sure you get both mines. At that point it is a war for attrition.

Again, the horde had no clue what to do, at least in my Battlegroup. I don't think they had ever been wiped at Balinda before. they just fell to pieces, and it was very satisfying knowing the recriminations and name-calling that was taking place in horde BG chat.

The first is prolly the better strat, but the second one is OH SO SATISFYING. The second obviously leads to a turtle, but you can see the frustration in the horde. They were simply coming at us in small waves after we wiped them, just trying to ride through (much like what happens to us when they wipe us at Galv and then stay at IW bunker and dot you up as your ride by and then have one hunter multishot you and kill you), not even trying to engage. You could literally read the Horde BG chat as they were bitching at each other. It was glorious.

The second strat takes longer, but it is much more honor. I had something on the order of 30 killing blows and 200 hk's on top of whatever honor we got (I am capped, but my guildmates said they were getting like 900-1k honor just for that BG). It was such a lopsided victory that I took off my pvp gear and put on my raid gear because I was running out of mana chain-sheeping people to dismount them as they tried to run by so my melee could pick them off, and I simply was not being touched by any horde. Plus, it was thoroughly satisfying after having the horde turtle us and do the same thing all day. We knew they were miserable, and that was a good thing.