I play both factions and Jeron’s knockback plus small tower size really favors us as Horde versus whatever Rylai does. Rylai has an ironic voice line of, “Thought I was a pushover like Balinda? Ha!” but the sad truth is she is. While old Balinda could be downed by a group of 3 with interrupts, Rylai stands the same in comparison to Jeron. There is little to no coordination required for the frost mage while the fire mage needs a significant amount for handling the living bomb.
While I enjoy killed Rylai with a handful of people, either both mages should have knockback effects or neither should have one.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen Alliance, myself playing included, lose a 50 HK lead after half the team is knocked off Jeron’s tower and lose to a team of 4-7 on Rylai behind everyone. It’s an easy AFK out. However, as Horde, I’ll manually queue just to farm HKs and Shred of Insanity to upgrade the Void Focus.
I appreciate the smaller team size (yay no lag) and melee buff in the road but the mages are really not balanced for this 25v25 version.
In before those two people I had this debate with a couple of weeks ago come in with “ZUG ZUG YOU CAN GOOGLE TO LEARN ALL ABOUT JERONS ABILITIES NOOBS, THE HORDE DOES AND WE ARE JUST BETTER” who completely ignored the fact that aside from a knockback being incredibly powerful on a mob in such small vicinity, he also does more raw damage than Rylai, can summon multiple adds who each deal significant damage on their own, and the only thing of note Rylai does is cast a 5-second mass polymorph to heal all of her attackers up to full.
This line when testing Ashran in beta was amazing because she actually killed people. Nowadays the reverse is true and Balinda can actually kill people and Rylai’s most useful role is to give Alliance players mage food.
Alliance tower mage remains completely useless. Just spawn her as already dead and dock us the points at the beginning to get the auto-loss over with in a timely fashion.
The more I play this game the more it feels like Blizz keeps going out of their way to sneak in these subtle advantages for Horde. From AV NPC health and numbers discrepencies, Horde getting to be on defense (autowin) in WG 99% of the time, Songflowers and Earth Shields spawning on Horde side of Ashran, Horde tower mage being a beast with a massive knockback off his tower vs Alliance tower mage being a useless punching bag that 5 Horde can down in no time…
Playing as Alliance in Epic BGs is quite literally playing the game on hard mode. At least have the decency to make the rewards reflect the challenge.
And get rid of Mercenary mode already. It’s a terrible “fix” that reinforces and even promotes faction imbalance by removing the one downside to playing as the dominant faction.
I do find this one to be strange. I’m playing horde mostly now and we’re almost always on defense. However, the rare occasion we do get offense we still stomp the alliance and win in like 10 minutes.
Smaller team size sucks IMO. Less lag and perhaps some imbalances, but let’s face it, Trashran is just generally bad and boring overall. Whatever the case, I do not want blizz to get it in their minds that leaving it 25v25 is the ‘fix.’ Buncha other things are still laggy as heck and they don’t care.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m well aware that Horde are likely to win without these additional advantages. But we’re seeing them over and over and over. There’s only so many times we can accept these as oversights before they start looking more and more like underhanded intent.
As for your AV experience, allow me to share with you my last Ashran experience. Not a single healer. People kept quitting, people kept getting filled in, and still not a single healer. Without exaggerating, we cycled out at least half our team and never saw the first healer.
The point here is that Horde have a far greater pool of players to pull from, are far more likely to get a solid number of healers and meta specs, and have a far more knowledgeable playerbase that understand what needs to happen in each BG.
When you have this kind of advantage from the start, it is absolutely disgraceful that the Horde continue to be on the receiving end of these “unintentional” map advantages time and time again. But keep patting yourself on the back. Job well done.
The alternative is that a billion dollar company just so happens to be consistently insanely incompetent but only towards one of the factions, near always benefiting the other.
