I am 100% horde until the day I die (and have never and will never roll an alliance character), but the cave situation in AV is a disaster. How is it possible that Blizzard is ignoring the most obvious imbalance in any WoW PVP map/scenario ever implemented by this company? Can we get a mod or somebody on the developer team to at least comment as to why the AV map is being left in such an imbalanced fashion after being out for 6+ months?
If there’s some rational purpose to this, then I’d like to hear it. You can fix this situation and preserve the AV 1.12 map by just changing the graveyard order to make the cave the graveyard of last resort. Note this should apply to defenders on both teams only as well as the defensive GYs.
i.e. Horde on south half of map rez at cave only if horde has lost all 3 of its defensive GYs. Same applies to alliance. The “no changes” notion isn’t a good enough reason to keep this mess.
[Edit: I am also in favor of adding a 2 or 3 second additional timer to the horde gate opening at the start. A combination of these two changes: 1) cave graveyard is not used by defenders until all defensive GYs are taken by the other team, and 2) adding a 2 or 3 second timer to horde gate opening at the start; would fully fix the map without needing to touch the cave’s physical location.]
All manner of terrain glitches/errors are addressed in 1.13.5 but the single biggest game-breaking error is still left in the map? Why?
This imgur is an image of the AV map with the lines between the cave and other points.
imgur . com / kpJgd08 . jpg
AV 1.12 is completely broken by the fact that the horde cave rez allows 2x as many people to rez closer to IB GY than any other GY on the map, and it gives that larger rezzing group direct access to both IB GY and FW GY defensively.
It is far more difficult for alliance to hold IB GY or FW GY for this reason. Even a smaller group of less than 20 horde defenders can easily reclaim IB GY and FW GY before they cap from a much larger group of alliance. That isn’t possible for the alliance at SH GY since they rez much further away.
Thus, horde has a straightforward offensive strategy of taking SH GY after alliance leave (or overpowering their turtle if they don’t go on offense) and establishing that as our forward operating graveyard. There is no equivalent for the alliance on the south side of the map because they can’t take and hold any of the southern graveyards against the horde cave rezzing defense.
Any sense of balance is destroyed by this fact. And this is the reason why there’s no offensive meta for alliance. Other than having a premade (like Incendius was doing) or severely imbalanced teams enabling alliance to take and hold GYs, there’s no winning strategy for the alliance side.
Yes, there are other reasons why the horde win rate has run all the way up to 95-99% (rankers queue up on the horde side but don’t on the ally side outside of AV weekend; there’s more rep grinders on the ally side) but it all starts with the fundamental map imbalance created by the horde cave rez.
Either tell us why the developers believe the map is balanced or change it if there’s no rational basis to leave it like this.