AV Cave Rez situation

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.

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What is the distance of alliance cave to SPGY?

Are you really going to point to the horde cave in relation to FW, when SP is virtually a simple hop off of the hill, and exists smack dab at the end of the bridge choke?
Horde Cave is to IBGY, as Alliance Cave is to SPGY.
FW and SH cancel each other out, as they are both ridiculously easy to cap.
Horde’s best choke close to mid field, while alliance’s best choke is at their base, overwatched by 2 towers and a stationary elite and roaming elites behind.

I agree that the cave res mechanic should be changed (hell, I support taking it a step further and start the games in each faction’s bases), but your (and others) arguments are BS. The beeline map lines are nice and all, but does not show the whole story.

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I’m starting to feel like Misadventure is being paid to troll every av thread

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Do you have anything to add besides snarky ad homs?

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Yep!

Comparing cave->spgy distance vs. cave->ibgy is irrelevant.

Ones a forward gy the other is not.

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Being forward or not does not make something relevant or irrelevant.

You know what else is not a forward GY? FW. Do you know who brought up FW? The OP.

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Guys. Just report, ignore, and move on.

EDIT: We did it fam.

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In your own words.

Why is the hordes forward gy as close to the cave as the alliances defensive gy?

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SP GY is irrelevant. The entire alliance team is walled off at the IWB choke by the time the SP GY jump comes into play. The game is already over when 40 alliance are choked north of SH GY.

But my solution (making cave GY of last resort only) solves that too.

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Although this topic gets brought up too many times, I agree. 2 hour queues on Horde and 1% winrate on Alliance is lose-lose for both sides. I don’t get why people want to defend the current state of AV. Horde GY needs to be moved back.

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It would be a win for everybody if the cave rez situation is changed. We’d get more balanced games and the AV queue would come down to a max of 30-40 min.

Games would be much faster if both teams had a base rush mentality instead of the current meta. Alliance would go back to queues faster, more alliance rankers/geared players would queue.

I don’t get why any horde wants to die on the hill of preserving this imbalance. A 99% win rate with this boring scorched earth meta is bad for everybody.

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Did we finally get rid of the troll

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and yet in your op

you chose to bring up the cave’s usefulness to FW, the horde’s non-forward GY.

Aaaaand there it is, the true agenda.

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SP GY is irrelevant though, even if Alliance takes it back they can’t push and reclaim SH GY with the choke as it exists without pre-made levels of effort and coordination.

The only thing retaking SPGY means is that we get to do the dog and pony show of farming each other and shooting through mountains in our effort to lose a little more slowly.

I get the impression that you don’t play much AV so none of this actually affects you much. Queue times don’t matter if you don’t queue up in the first place I suppose.

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It honestly doesn’t even have to be this drastic. Just have both sides always rez at the nearest graveyard unless no graveyards are owned. This would be a step in the right direction.

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My concern would be flipping things from horde dominated to alliance dominated. IBGY is a strong defensive position, even without 20 at a time cave spawns, but FWGY is garbage for defending.

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SPGY is not the correct comparison to IBGY. Your question should be “What is the distance of alliance cave to SHGY?”

Answer: Much further than horde cave to IBGY. Glad you asked this very important question.

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we know, buddy.

we know.

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Oh, I think it absolutely needs to be fixed because I think it currently is broken AF. I just don’t have much faith that they won’t completely fubar it in some other way in the process.

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This is the biggest issue, that choke is a killer a small group of horde can keep sending lone players heading south back into the quagmire.

I don’t think anyone can disagree that playing Alliance in AV is very challenging these days.

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