1 of the times it was a superior group. The other 2 were just about what I would expect to see. Not really any players that stood out as “dayum, that person is good” types.
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But again, the goal isn’t to hold IBGY at all. It is to force Horde into responding early and then pushing SFGY and hard capping it with a force of 15ish while maintaining SHGY. I mean, I guess it could be selection bias, but it isn’t like I haven’t lost other ways. This was the one way where I honestly thought “they actually understood Horde tendencies and screwed us with them” though. I wish I had a screen grab of some names from those games. Would be nice to hear how they got people to do it lol!
That’s the key right there. Being good enough to hold off 30+ horde at SHGY while holding SFGY. If you have the right mix of players it’s possible but it takes having great heals in both groups, as well as hunters and mages tying up the SHGY group trying to assault.
And it can be broken but you need the horde to pivot and assault SFGY hard at some point. Honestly, a good horde group would fall back a bit to the north field of strife and use that deathball to slow alliance from going south while assaulting SFGY. Once SFGY is taken they can go back to the normal SHGY assault.
But there are a lot of variables here, I’ve seen it work and I’ve seen it fail far more times than it’s worked. It’s more complicated to pull off than the horde turtle which translates into more losses than wins for the alliance.
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Literally everything is more complicated to pull off than the horde turtle. #sigh.
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Edit. That sigh wasn’t for you. It was for the state of the BG in general.
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I think one of the main problems is when they got rid of the “lanes” in the original AV. There used to be additional paths on the east and the west sides which you had to pass some elites to use. It allowed a group to go along them and bypass a turtle. If there was more of that then there would be more strategy needed to win the game.
For that matter it’d be great if there was a reason to assault and hold multiple points instead of this very linear BG. At least in the later AV they had the reinforcement mechanic which rewarded a group that could hold a point very well and cost the enemy reinforcements. You could win on a defensive fight if you had smart players.
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Opening a second path south that bypasses the IWB choke would definitely be a decent alternative to changing the cave rez as that would make losing SHGY much less disastrous.
The problem is that I doubt we get any physical changes to the AV map that aren’t present in TBC or later.
i.e. Only thing they’d physical touch are things that would flow naturally with BC classic and beyond.
Which is why we’re here advocating for a respawn change since it’s easy and just requires some coding without touching the actual map.
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I also think this. Hence the spawn point rez change maybe happening. I don’t see them moving the cave though. Honestly I don’t see them changing the spawn point either. #sigh
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Three things would help:
- Delay opening of south starting gate a bit so teams meet at the middle of the Field of Strife.
- Define better rez point fallbacks. Caves are only when no other GY is held and dying at SFGY sends you to SHGY or to SPGY if you don’t hold SHGY.
- Randomize starts. It’s an asymmetric map, give both teams a chance to try both starts. That evens out any leftover differences.
You’ll still have problems with queues and faction issues but at least the map problems won’t contribute to it. Then the other issues could be worked on.
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Yeah, I can see the first two things being possible. I’m not sure they’ll swap starting points though since that’s really not a thing that would carry over well in classic to BC or beyond.
Yes, it’d be more fair obviously, but I think just getting a delay to the horde gate opening and fixing respawns are the most easy fixes that everyone would agree on…
Sure, pick the low-hanging fruit first then move on to the more complicated things. But I don’t think randomizing starts is something that would hurt later expansions. And I don’t think it’s very difficult to accomplish. Pretty much every NPC on one side maps to another, just swap them and make sure any quests follow the starting sides appropriately.
I understand, but neither WSG nor AB does that (though they’re obviously much closer to being 95-99% mirror maps comparing North/South unlike AV), so I don’t think side switching is on the table if anything is.
Those should do it to if we are being completely honest lol. Less AB than WSG, but there are differences from both sides. I know I know. Different era before MOBAs, but still!
None of it’s on the table or Blizzard would have done it months ago. They are just raking in their cash for little effort, this game is in maintenance mode.
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So basically you already have a slippery slope list of other things to blame losses on if blizzard caves to making cave changes that do nothing to the win rate.
(disclaimer: I still agree that the cave respawn system should be adjusted, and FW respawn should be fixed)
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I mean yeah, but it still feels like they have people that take time into looking into whether these things match the intent/expectation in vanilla.
AV 1.12 is a weird issue because it wasn’t present for as long as other parts of the game specifically given how much AV changed across vanilla.
Once again, the map is identical as the one from 1.8 to 1.12. It became hot garbage when in 1.8 they began to strip it down into hot garbage, both map wise and npc-wise.
AV is fixed. What other explanation can there be?
This is the 2005 version of AV. Blizzard has changed it since then (they are not “ignoring” this). But some players asked to play the “before the Blizzard fixes” game. That is Classic. That is what you are choosing to play (and complain about).
You don’t need a mod to repeat “this is not being updated” over and over. You can do it yourself: this is not being updated.
Does that logic also apply to alliance dying around SF GY and being sent to DB Aid GY?
I feel like that’s a competitive problem even if it was present in AV 1.12 (and would like to know if anybody has checked that).
I mean Blizzard has made changes to the queuing process and patched up “wall hack” like spots in WSG as well as the ability to MC people out of WSG/AB.
I feel like this is an issue where some changes make sense (to respawn order) and wouldn’t affect the physical map.
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Blizzard has made plenty of changes to Classic with the justification that if the original devs had known, they would have changed it. If this AV meta existed back in Vanilla and the problems at IBGY had been known, the devs absolutely would have changed the map.
So given the reasons Blizzard has used to make changes to Classic (like the Ectoplasmic Distiller) , they have given themselves no excuse to not change AV.
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