A Plea For Ashran Alliance: Enough "Rush Mage"

PVP Battlegrounds
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For those not interested in my reasoning, here’s the summary:

Those on Alliance (including merc mode Horde), please stop demanding that we “rush mage” at the beginning of Ashran. It is a dumb gambit.

Please read the rest, if you run Epic BGs a lot as Alliance right now (merc mode Horde too, please).

Reasoning:

I’ve run 100+ Ashrans since Shadowlands has started, as I used to be a big fan of it back in 2016 and I decided I wanted my Alliance characters to have the Nemesis titles my Hordies had. I probably run 5-10 Ashrans an evening. The vast majority I enter, I see someone say something like this:

“So all go left, rush mage, then ogre, then win? It’s the only way I’ve ever seen us win.”

Let me be the first to say: this is coincidental. I’ve won many, many Ashrans this expansion (and lost even more, heh), and here is the definitive list of what wins Ashrans:

  • Sticking together
    • No stupid 1000 honor questers
    • No AFKers
    • No overextending
  • Protect your team’s healers
  • Other buffs (flower, orb, etc; nice but not essential)
  • Luck
    • Sometimes their healers/dps exceeds yours, sorry

Here are things that can help, when timed well:

  • Ogre
    • Obviously killing Ogre uncontested is great, but if the other team doesn’t engage, you’re probably looking at a win anyway
    • If the other team does contest, the second team to show up tends to win
    • Managing flags once you’ve gotten ogre is huge
    • Healing ogre / Bursting ogre down matters
  • Protecting your mage

Now, note the last one. “But Monza”, you say, “isn’t this whole post about not caring about mage?” No. The goal is to get people to not rush mage.

Killing the other team’s mage is a one-time hit of -50 resources, which is great, however, getting their mage first doesn’t stop them from getting yours eventually, after stomping you mid. A team that sticks together, pushes, protects healers, deals correctly with ogre, etc, will always have an opportunity to seal the deal later on by killing mage, once they’ve pushed down mid successfully.

Doing it first is a gambit, plain and simple. People are relying on destroying the morale of the other team early on, assuming that they’ll go “bleh we’ve lost, just feed so we can get in the next one”. I’m pretty sure the Horde have caught onto this, and either ignore that we go after their mage (because we tend to get throw off from Combustion Nova and wipe with little help from them), or they know that they likely have a free shot at ogre unless all of us actually manage to not get thrown and burn mage down (which is exceedingly rare in PUGs).

The reality of “rush mage” is 20 of the 30 go, 15 die almost immediately, and the 5 that know what they’re doing most likely get overwhelmed and die, leaving us broken up for ogre. The Horde then ride in with their flowers from dark woods, grab ogre, push us to our mage, and we lose over 20-25 minutes. If we win at the push, we’ll eventually get mage. If we lose at the push, it won’t matter that we got mage.

At this point, I’ll take pretty much any other strategy, as long as mage becomes something that happens after we’ve locked in the rest of our situation. I think when we engage Horde elsewhere (Dark Woods, mid, etc) and show that we have the heals/dps numbers, everything else falls into place and we have a much better shot (close to 50/50). Ogre doesn’t win the battle for either side, but people complaining “gg” as soon as we lose Ogre certainly sucks. People begging to feed when we’re actually only down 10-15 kills sucks too.

I’ll probably put together some canned macro or something to say at the beginning of an Ashran to help quell this “rush mage” fanaticism. Believe me when I say this, though: if the only time “you’ve ever seen Alliance win this” was when they rushed mage, you probably would have won with that group of 30 anyway, while all of those times you’ve tried to rush mage and got murdered by Jeron and 2 Horde, you might have had a shot if people were there to contest ogre, or stuck together elsewhere.

Thanks for reading(!), if you got this far. I’ll see you in Ashran.

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Good post, but most people don’t read the forums, but thanks for the effort in putting this together.

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Thanks. Yeah, I considered putting it in a higher traffic forum, but decided I’d rather get a few actual-BG’ers to read it than get a bunch of noise from GD or whatever.

Even if a handful of regular Ashran players like me read it and take it to heart, I’ll be happy. Having another voice or two pre-game disagreeing with “rush mage” goes a long way. Most people are in there for free Conquest and don’t know what is going on. A few people barking the right orders can help a lot. That is who this post is trying to reach.

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I recommend you copy/paste this into the “official” feedback thread, found here:

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/feedback-epic-battlegrounds/16669

I don’t think they read very many of these other “standalone” feedback threads, unless they happen to get lots of replies/pages. A perfect example is the recent flood of Wintergrasp complaint threads, but still no balancing/tuning or action from devs.

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Hmm, this is more feedback for us (the playerbase), than the actual BG or devs. If you think it’ll get more eyeballs on it, I can link it in that thread, but it feels tangential to me.

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Songflower is huge and needs to be contested/taken by alliance. Someone did a comparison somewhere and just accounting for main stat it is like having 2-3 extra pieces of gear.

Alliance needs to deal with horde having instant access to it and just rush there or proceed to be outmatched the whole game by 15% bonus stats. The issue is by the time we get there they already have it up so the battle is already lopsided.

The mage rush is supposed to be a trade for horde getting to walk right up to flowers (no bias here) but since Jeron is actually a boss encounter (clearly no bias here) it ends up being a coin flip as to whether or not everyone gets boosted off and dies anyways. Meanwhile Rylai can be solo’d by any class with self healing.

I’m nearly certain the ability is actually “Living Bomb” which requires a random group of alliance pvp’ers to pay attention to debuffs. Horde call this a “learn to play” issue despite having to deal with no mechanics whatsoever in this BG and never needing to learn to play. Run to flowers, smash, they win.

Alliance loses more Ashrans because they are behind as soon as the gates open.

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Your winning rate on this map is statistically low.

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Some of the very same posters in this thread will indeed suggest to Alliance players to “go google to learn abilities”. Some have also suggested in other threads that the only reason Horde goes to the Dark Woods is because “it’s easier to flank Alliance” and “not many people get the flower buff” while ignoring the flower buff is like having 3.5 extra ilvl 200 medallion trinkets or (almost) an extra two-handed weapon.

I’ve made a thread for general battleground suggestions, including what I think it will take to at least make Ashran an equal playing field. Take a look here and see if you agree:

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/the-big-battleground-feedback-thread/818765

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I agree with the OP, although I play horde. Whenever I lose as horde, its because the alliance actually stuck together and held high ground usually past Ogre.

About the flowers: Yea, it seems horde has better/easier access to them, but doesn’t alliance get a fat haste buff from the mines?

If we move the flowers, I don’t want to see a second patch of flowers at Ashmaul burial grounds. They need to move the flowers to a more central location so that actual pvp can take place regarding them. Perhaps something like the dying ogre spawns 20 flowers as he dies or something.

Just adding extra stuff that’s not pvp related (like flowers in Ashmaul) would make it more like old AVs and not pvp centric. Bad idea.

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Yep, your changes in your feedback are solid. I don’t think making it longer (250) is necessary, but I like the mage and buff changes you propose.

I think making Tremblade & Volrath actually viable win conditions again would help a lot too. Other than ogre, people tend to ignore the flag’s position, and even if you push to F5 and remove the gladiators, you win on resources well before Vol/Trem is even at 90% HP.

Perhaps making so they actively charge F5 when the gladiators fade (and the mage is dead?) would not only make flag position and movement important again, but would provide a sort-of Mercy Rule for when a team is getting dunked on. Last night, I had a round where we won by 120 and another where we lost by as much. These don’t need to be farming or feeding slogs; just let the boss rush the group and get killed, and we’ll try again.

While I’m talking about it, the 1000 honor quest is an anti-pattern. Please switch it to something like “get X honor kills while your team has the Ogre’s favor” or something.

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Yes please. I’ve never seen the Alliance kill Volrath, or at least not since WoD or something. And although I’ve personally killed Tremblade 3x this expac, it is incredibly difficult to do.

She’s so far back in the alliance base, and by that point the Alliance are usually down to like 20 resources left, so it’s hard to secure the kill. I’ve even seen her evade as she gets close to her bridge, and then reset. That’s incredibly frustrating.

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lost 3/18 games, i’m gonna switch to horde. :smiley:

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Same here. I’ve been in on a number of Tremblade kills, it’s difficult but do-able once you stomp/trap the Alliance into their base. Once you push them back far enough, you can have a ranged go tag Tremblade and bring her to the entrance, where a tank can pick her up.

On my Alliance characters, the only times I have gotten a Volrath kill has been with the cheesy backdoor strat. It’s almost impossible to complete the Volrath quest in the “typical” Ashran match, I’m sure we all know why :joy:

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I don’t understand either of these posts, contextually. Did you actually read my post?

I’m not complaining about win/loss record, I’m asking my fellow Alliance BGers to choose better strategies instead of parroting bad ones. The Alliance win significantly more when we avoid “rush mage”, which is the whole point of my post.

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The Solar Sphere is easily accessible by Horde as well. Equal distance for both factions, at least as far as I’m aware. Basically never contested though.

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Everything you metioned also seems to apply to horde as well.

What I would like to point out is the poor design of this map. Buff and firemage knock-off are two things that always make us in a bad position.

Apologies that didn’t read your post carefully, will do shortly.

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Yep yep. I can’t speak for Horde side, but “orb” doesn’t come up often in Alliance chatter, maybe once an evening. Either people are mad that we wiped on mage or ogre (often), or we’re dominating so it is mostly “wow, these heals” or the like.

If both teams are sticking together and actually fighting on the road, you can usually tell who’s going to win by just looking at the relative velocity of resource loss. Ignore the 50 point differential from any dead mages and just see “oh they’ve killed us 30 times to our 10 kills on them”, and there’s your answer.

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Horde plans for alliance to rush mage. Our plan at the start of every Ashran is to grab flowers, defend our mage, kill ogre, kill ally mage, win game.

Even when the alliance tries to go to the woods first, they usually end up getting wiped there. Then we proceed as I mentioned above.

At the start of the xpac, alliance were winning Ashran pretty consistently. However, it’s been weeks since I’ve seen them win. And it hasn’t even been close.

The way they were winning early on was with good tanks and great heals. They would just push horde back until we ran out of resources. Outside of changing how Ashran works, heals and tanks are your best bet.

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I’d say I’ve been winning in Ashran at about a 70% rate. Alliance can def win the bg, if they stick together and don’t give up.

Yea, it needs tweaks:

The mages need to be more equalized regarding their powers.

The flowers need to be moved to a central location (not a 2nd set of flowers for alliance.) Or removed, that’s fine too.

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This tracks perfectly with what I imagine Horde’s strategy was; thanks for confirmation.

I don’t think we (Alliance) “lose” (wipe) in Dark Woods very often, honestly, it is more that enough Alliance aren’t aware that ogre is “next” and half the time we’re late to the party and don’t contest. Alliance will just fail to regroup and then it is a bloodbath once ogre gets involved.

I also agree with this. Another simple metric for “do we have a chance” is just looking at the healing breakdown maybe 50 total kills in (ignoring mage resources). If the top 3-4 healers are all Horde, we’ve lost. If it is an even mix, we’ve got a shot.

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