The most effective, in my mind, is a full rush to the FA hut. However, you need to get 20+ people past any defense and soft cap the hut ASAP. Then you need to camp both the flag and the recall point to stop people from slipping into Drek’s house, as well as rez everyone who dies there.
At the same time you need the rest of the team to turtle north and stop any horde advance. I’d say they should all fall back to the bridge and turtle there.
But this basically calls for a premade because you’ll never get a pug to coordinate like this. People will sit at SH, they’ll sit at SF, they’ll take towers, they’ll have little battles on the way.
You end up with 5 or so in the horde base, they get overrun by horde recalling, everyone south of SH dies, SH is lost, and now the BG is done for.
That’s the crux of it all: because of map issues alliance have to try crazy strats whereas horde can use simple ones. Sure, the map only gives a bit of an edge but it’s enough to tip the game in horde favor, interact with the overall faction issues, and get the win ratio to where it is today.
And I think you are right. Changing that would at least make the BG salvageable. If alliance have a decent chance at getting a GY south of IWB choke, that really does change everything.
It’s up there. The fallback to the alliance cave when SP is capped is pretty bad too. It should send alliance to the Aid Station instead so they can continue to defend.
Really, there should be 3 fixes:
Adjust gate opening so teams meet mid Field of Strife.
Caves should be GY of last resort.
You should be sent to the closest available GY by time of travel, not as-the-crow-flies.
There’s a bunch more AV issues but these are major, non-controversial ones and fairly simple fixes. And none of them require any direct changes to the map itself.
But Blizzard obviously doesn’t care one bit about AV or Classic or they’d be doing more to fix the problems.
No you don’t, doing the full trade just makes for faster games.
This is a war scale BG that can take hours to win. The initial trade that alliance commonly do cuts that game time down to be about 30 minutes because they chose to almost completely ignore defending and go full offensive from the start. This is a strategy that was adopted to cut down on game duration, it eventually led to the race meta as it evolved. And this is part of the reason alliance lose so much. They are still trying to play the race meta to some degree instead of treating AV as a war scale BG.
Ideally you hold SPGY send some guerrilla tactics teams down south to draw horde away from IBGY or SFGY and then make a push to take them when the horde have to much of their forces focused on recapping the south. But this is a strategy that plays into expecting AV to last HOURS.
Alliance don’t want long games, hence the “trade” meta to cut down game durations drastically.
And I’m again not saying the map is perfect, the SF Rez at ASGY should be fixed 100% and a few other issues. But that loss rate is not only the maps fault. Part of it is on the alliance not using strategies that counter the horde strategies (because of the game durations it would result in). Part of it is que times, exc, exc, exc. Many other factors. The map is not the only cause and that’s what I disagree with you on.
If map was balanced people would gladly play 90 minutes games.
Heck when I was getting my hunter exalted we had a 2 hour game.
We beat ice boi 2 times, pushed killed the bat riders, literally no one left. We all stayed and it was fun. That game was my Only win from neutral to exalted on my hunter. Which is funny because I ended up getting the bow reward for the rest of my grind.
If alliance didn’t want longer games why was it horde that had to change the race meta? Why didn’t alliance change it?
It’s more efficient with the alliance que times to have fast games, you personally might want long games, but the majority of alliance that give up after 20-30 minutes? They don’t want long games.
The race meta was very early and it was due because people were trying to rank on both sides.
After pre-mades were nerfed for Alliance then it wasn’t worth doing AV because nobody ranks an AV.
in fact if you made this an equal map horde wouldn’t even rank an AV anymore.
What’s funny is you’re acting like the same meta wasn’t there for horde. when ranking came out everybody wanted to rank for the items as fast as possible you guys were no different I hate that you keep pretending we’re different.
The longer the que the more you want to maximize rep/honor per each AV before going to the next regardless of looking like a loss.
It is the same player base, the que times change the efficiency strategies to cause the difference between faction behavior. This has been explained to you before, and will likely be ignored again.
Remind me again the horde que times when AV first came out??
They were instant.
They didn’t go from instant to 2 hours until AV was broken for Alliance.
Since the map was broken people stopped playing AV on alliance side.
Since alliance stopped playing horde que times shot up…
Not sure what is hard about this, this is yet ANOTHER SYMPTOM OF THE IMBALANCED MAP THAT YOU CANT COMPREHEND.
Ranking was only done in AV at the start when ranking got into classic and both sides had 7 minute wins and losses.
Currently for horde or alliance NO ONE WHO IS RANKING IS TYPICALLY SOLO QUEING FOR AV.
they would be premading wsg or AB. I’m not sure why this is hard to understand.
The people on BOTH FACTIONS aren’t RANKING VIA AV. They are doing PREMADES.
You keep pretending horde and alliance play AV to rank. NEWS FLASH, THEY DONT.
Reading is difficult. I already flat out told you that is not how Horde play it and we haven’t played it that way really ever. The only time Alliance get 40 rushing SHGY is when you stay at SHGY. Period. Horde aren’t going to ignore Alliance riding by and slam 40 into SHGY. If we do, you win a rush game.
.
Seriously. It is beyond me how you honestly think 40 Horde to SHGY while Alliance send 30 past us is somehow going to end well for Horde.
You trade graveyards, then while it’s soft capped you send 15-20 horde back to IBGY and whittle the alliance down with your cave rez.
Alliance have no southern graveyard, they die they are sent to SPGY.
Horde die they just get sent to cave. Sending 8 waves of that into the alliance at IBGY before it hard caps is how you send all alliance at IBGY to SPGY and now you have 95% of the map.
Oh I agree that horde usually don’t slam a full 40 into SHGY. They don’t need to unless alliance have turtled up there.
What’s far more common is horde play some D not necessarily anything coordinated just whoever feels like it, soft cap SHGY then mop up alliance.
I literally just explained it. Once horde have soft capped SHGY they have plenty of time to mop up any alliance south before something hard caps south.
You aren’t getting me. If you run 30 by us and we don’t stop you, you aren’t going for a GY. You are going for Drek and if we take our sweet time getting SHGY, you win because we won’t get enough to recall in time to defend. These are facts.
Except the same applies, even if alliance run all the way to drek. Horde still have time to soft cap SHGY and then chase them down. With no premades and solo drek pulls broken they have plenty of time to do so.
Some D? Did you even read what I wrote? We don’t play “some D”. We intercept. It literally isn’t about SHGY for the opening. It is about stopping your offensive in its tracks so we get an easy game. For a guy who likes to talk smack on other people not understanding Alliance strategies, you sure don’t understand Horde strategies and responses at all.
BAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. No. If we wait to soft cap SHGY and you got 30 by us, the only way we stop you is if you play it stupid and stop at IBGY. You keep riding, we lose. Period.
Sorry that’s just flat out wrong. Horde have plenty of time after soft capping SHGY to get enough back south to prevent a zerg if they want to. The exact same issues apply to that as apply to taking IBGY only worse.
You don’t seem to understand that once SHGY soft caps alliance cannot get any reinforcements back south giving horde plenty of time to clean up any alliance stuck south.