Alterac Valley balance changes, patch 8.1

PVP Battlegrounds
148

You can lead a horse to water…

This new GY is NOT the change needed but it IS an improvement IF players take advantage of it by playing defense instead of the old backcap game they played for years. Getting alliance players to change tho…

It’s more like leading stubborn old mules to water.

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149

You see Ivus more because it’s a response to the “oh god we are stuck behind SHGY and now lose” situation ally end up in when things go bad. Druids break turtles.

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150

The solution to the problem in AV is brain dead simple, yet Blizzard refuses to do it.

BGs need to dole out a constant reward as you go in some way, like other games do. With a bonus at the end that grows bigger the longer the game goes.

Winning should get you more, but all or nothing how you end up with this toxic mess. It gets even worse when fast stomp wins are more rewarding than hard fought ones.

This also solves the problem of people afking out at the first sign of a loss (and who can blame them?), and the problem of factions dominating some BGs.

2 Likes
151

I think the best solution is to make a terrain change at IBGY. A snow ramp that allows access to the current IBGY rez point from the field of strife. The rez point for IBGY should be moved to the high ground next to TP to allow easy drop-in defense of the flag cap.

This would remove the “perfect” choke point, a single point of entry with both the flag and rez point close behind, and make this similar to the multiple ways to get past IWB & GY area

3 Likes
152

I don’t know how the devs sleep at night making a bg not symmetrical and expect balance. If you want to play dev and solve all the problems of the bg then start by advocating they make it symmetrical. The bg can never be “balanced” until the bg is symmetrical.

2 Likes
153

The BEST solution in my opinion (that I know we have brought up before over the years)…setup the systems to swap sides.

All your NPCs and “Flags” I assume are labeled in code. Randomly / To each side…assign a flag to the NPCs and what not…so sometimes Horde start in the north and have to “retake” THEIR base.

Everywhere an Alli NPC spawns…spawn the equalivalant Horde NPCs. GY / Tower Flags…the same.

  1. Some maps…like AV…(and IoC) should SWAP starting sides from time to time. Hell…make it a weekly change thing, sort of like Warfront control.

  2. To help with faction imbalance…in RANDOM BGs…factions should just be mixed to even out Q times. 20+ on Horde VS 4mins on Alli. :frowning:

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154

Unfortunately, patch week fell on BG week. There are a lot of people who have no clue, even in the smaller BGs atm.

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155

If I remember correctly the advantages of AV for either side were something like:

The horde had better tower positions but were too impatient to turtle the game and win. Thus with the current NPC buff they actually are useful again.

The alliance has an easier time to get to the horde base quickly. Which in the time of the super weak NPC and when blizzard was pushing the Zerg version of AV meant that alliance won a lot.

That’s the version I remember at least

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156

You’re mostly not wrong. The race to the bases was only a second or two difference though. I thought that was easily fixed by letting horde mount a few steps sooner.

Plus horde only needed to partially turtle, like with maybe 20-25 at IB area and send the rest down to our base to cause trouble. Should have been easy wins for them with about a 30-45 minute commitment but they didn’t want to for almost a decade.

4 Likes
157

The best and most effective Horde strat was always Scorched Earth. That’s what we ran ages ago and it was successful until reinforcements were added.

Turtle at IB, break the Zerg, Win

4 Likes
158

This is exactly what I suggested. With two ways up the choke loses strength.

159

I will only accept the change to SHGY if Froswolf is surrounded by a moat with a 50yd bridge as a single point of entry AND the alliance have to make their way through all of FW without cutting up the hill aggroing EVERYTHING along the way.

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160

There’s a second way into DB.

It’s 2018 you don’t aggro everything in DB anymore.

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161

Read as Michael Peña: Damn, for a second I was all like “no it’s not, that was last year, bro”. Then I realized that 2019 is still like three weeks away and that I may have accidentally post-dated the check I wrote to cover my rent. Man, my landlord Mr. Johnson is going to be pissed. But now I’m happy because Christmas hasn’t happened yet, and I have that to look forward to.

1 Like
162

I have been in favor of this for ages, it would be super fun to try playing from the horde side.

Keep the NPCs the same too, so the horde can see how much more 'fun" Galv is than Balinda.

163

That first day and night was absolutely awful for alliance, which made me freak out because, well, I want to play FUN AVs, not beatdown stomps, lol. Things seem more back to normal (pre built-up SHGY) now, so I have a feeling that patch day AV was just full of alliance baddies trying to get free conquest or something. They are mostly gone now, thank God, so the rest of us can enjoy our AVs in relative peace from terribad leechers. :cowboy_hat_face:

164

Remember when the alliance sided battleground known as Alterac Valley was left untouched, because the devs said they couldn’t modify AV without it significantly breaking things?

I guess a year of solid alliance tears just washed that little complication away.

165

Just rofl-stomped alliance in AV. Still not sure why there are so many horde tears… :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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166

The Horde complaining about AV in this thread are stuck in 2010, prior to when Horde started to play terribly.

It’s not that they’re bad players, the issue is they BL’ed AV for 8 years and don’t know everything that’s changed.

They read on the forums Horde is winning again and decided to queue up. They lost a game or two and that was enough to convince them nothing changed. Then this map change was made and this thread happened.

If those players took 5 minutes to go to https:// wow.gamepedia. com/Alterac_Valley#Patches_and_hotfixes they would discover the changes made over the last 6 years.

3 Likes
167

It’s almost like they haven’t already made multiple changes in there … to address horde tears.

The odd thing is, I didn’t see players complaining about shgy. It was IBGY that was causing complaints as well as years of asking them to fix the back door(s) into DB. They took all that feedback and made a change nobody asked for. :woman_facepalming:

Imagine when horde complained about Stormpike bowman if Blizzards response was to change the Horde archers instead.

2 Likes