AV Map needs changing (coming from a Horde player)

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Yeah, we’ve all seen the alliance posts, but after running 50+ AV as horde (only losing 2 to probable premades before the latest stealth fix to queues) since the original fix was made, it’s clear to me that the horde cave needs to be moved south. It becomes more obvious every game I play as the current horde/alliance metas becomes further refined each day.

There are some other problems that the alliance faces at the moment in AV such as fewer high ranks/geared players queuing and more AFKs compared to horde, but the map is right now basically the single biggest problem.

There is no alliance meta that can counter the horde’s rush to SH GY while clearing all alliance south of Bal. Horde reinforcements arrive quicker than the alliance. Horde take initiative and attack near Bal and either wipe the alliance or slowly break them down while quickly taking SH GY.

Horde has a full 60-90 second head start on capping SH GY even if alliance makes it to IB GY. And even if the alliance grabs IB GY, horde is rezzing a bit too close for alliance to be able to hold it.

At this point the only thing alliance seem to be able to do is stealthily send groups south to kill LTs/Coms while avoiding the towers for fear of bringing in 10+ horde recalls to take back towers. That is not a healthy meta because it acknowledges no realistic possibility of actually winning the game.

None of this has anything to do with skill but rather the way the map allowed the horde to develop a dominant meta based on efficient control of SH GY. I have no idea why this meta never developed during vanilla (when horde mostly avoided taking SH GY), but the AV 1.12 map clearly lays out a blueprint that allows the horde to wipe everything south of Bal and then force the alliance to their starting cave.

I think we were all blinded by the brutal efficiency of the winning alliance premades to the fact that the rest of the map shapes up very poorly unless the alliance brings a perfect group comp (tons of paladins and mages) and just completely wipes the horde and then takes IB GY and systematically rolls to Drek (or skip IB GY and just go for a 6-7 minute Drek pull).

TL;DR: the map has to change because the meta is broken, and there’s no realistic expectation that the alliance can put together a realistic winning strategy without perfect composition.

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What’s the counter to the current horde strategy.

We can reach the alliance near Bal every single time and start wiping some of them if they try to run past. We can cap SH GY 60-90 seconds before they can cap IB GY.

If they try to ambush at SH GY, they’ve basically done our work for us by putting all of them in one place for us to just keep them there until we overpower them and take SH GY.

I don’t see how alliance counter that and I’ve played thousands of AV games since vanilla.

Everything in AV comes down to which side gets initiative over SH GY/IB GY and which side can defend them or take them back more easily.

It’s blatantly obvious that those factors all weigh on the horde side due to the cave being way too close to IB GY.

Yes the map does give some advantages to alliance such as the archers hitting everything near that east side of strife, but that isn’t anywhere near enough to counter horde’s natural positioning.

The map favors us pushing them into SH GY and then capping it and blockading them at IWB choke point. There is no alliance meta that can counter that due to the cave position.

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Even that is pretty easy to avoid. You can get out of range pretty easily by going a bit more towards mid. It’s not like the Horde has to travel that close to it.

Yeah, if you’re attacking SHB then that’s part of the attack. You’re going to have to face the archers. But if you want to go north it’s really not much out of your way to avoid them.

Contrast that to IBT, there’s absolutely no way to avoid getting plunked for a long distance as you pass it to get IBGY or anything south. In fact there’s pretty much no way to heal up after IBT because TPT takes over immediately. You just have to run the gauntlet and hope you survive. You probably won’t because you’ll get jumped at 1/2 health somewhere in there.

Now, the Horde does have their difficulties in the BG. I’m not denying that. However, it’s pretty clear that there’s a perfect storm of issues going on here when the Alliance win ratio is so low.

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:joy::rofl::upside_down_face::crazy_face:
Good one.

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Imagine for a moment. That horde had a graveyard that is choked in on all sides with a mountain that we safe spot on while we farm you as you spawn.

Then we can talk about how it takes literally half the time to reach the first enemy bunker for horde.

How about Iceblood Graveyard being almost directly connected to the Field of Strife? Not to mention you can’t get this GY as alliance without being choked out by towers with archers.

Hell, the very towers themselves are better than Alliance bunkers. You have to run and get trained by 3-4 archers while attempting to run to Iceblood Tower. Then you have to run through the archers while taking melee damage to the face. Meanwhile, horde take damage from 1-2 archers and can just run right up and cap.

The glaring advantages that horde has are apparent by looking at the map, and by having a brain.

Oh! Alliance also suck and just run from PvP. That’s besides the point though.

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You always show up in these threads claiming that the map somehow favors Alliance but never actually explain how.

There’s no realistic adaptation to the current meta of Horde rushing SHGY and bottling Alliance in other than to have substantially better gear and coordination than the Horde (i.e. premading). The SHGY flag is on the Horde side of the IWB choke. The IBGY flag is also on the Horde side of the IBT choke. That means that it’s much, much easier for Horde to hold SHGY than for Alliance to hold IBGY. As the Alliance has tried adapting it’s becoming clear that this imbalance is actually the biggest issue with the map. It’s compounded by cave distance to be sure (which makes it easier for Horde to cap SHGY and defend IBGY), but if the terrain features around SHGY and IBGY were evened out I suspect you’d see a significant drop in Horde win rate. As it stands: it’s almost impossible for even 25+ Alliance to hold IBGY, and very easy for the same number of Horde to hold SHGY…even while it’s contested they actually spawn closer to the SHGY flag than Alliance do.

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You forgot to mention that every alliance graveyard is a death trap once the horde have reached the flag, while every horde graveyard has a convinient backdoor out. Even if we do reach ibgy, we can’t farm you on the spawn, you just rez and hop down and if we try to chase, it’s a long way around filled with Archer towers to get back.

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Of course the map is Horde favored. Everyone knows it. The only reason anyone says it’s not is basically just trying to defend an advantage because winning is more fun than losing. You basically have to deny something as much as possible to create the illusion that people are wrong. If you say something enough you may even start to believe it yourself so I wouldn’t at all be surprised if some ACTUALLY believed it.

But anyway, nothing is going to happen. The moment Blizzard moves the cave, that’s a real change and there’s no plausible deniability the way disabling premades had. It’s a REAL change and would open the game up to more. So IF Blizzard does it, it will basically be Blizzard saying that they’re ok with making changes going forward. And that’s the message everyone else is going to get too.

But I digress. Nothings going to change and as soon as I’m exalted I’m never stepping foot in this awful BG again. I seriously can’t believe how disappointed I am in AV. After having people gush at me about how great AV was during BC I expected so much more.

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The towers/bunkers thing is probably closer than either side would like to admit. There are advantages/disadvantages to how those are.

But nothing compares to the SH GY/IB GY situation with respect to defending them with reinforcements or holding them.

There is no way to spin that it’s far easier for my side, horde, to defend IB GY with fast reinforcements from the starting cave.

As far as the format of the GYs go, I don’t necessarily think that’s as important as the specific distances/ability to defend the flag while contested, but I do get how it is more frustrating for alliance to be enclosed in and farmed at SP GY/SH GY compared to horde which can try to escape after rezzing.

The important thing to me is just that right now the horde meta of going straight at SH GY is not counterable. There is no alliance strategy that can break that other than being a premade or having better geared players or better group comp (i.e. one of those random matches where horde has no healers).

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The map is horde favored because horde has 1 plus hour queue times while alliance have queue times less than 5 minutes (rough guess). If queue times were even then less horde would try to maximize their honor by GY camping SH GY and fields of strife. It’s all about HPH so when horde get the queue pop after an hour and 20 minutes waiting, they come to play hard. In vanilla servers we’re mostly balanced so queue times werent as bad as they are now. If both queue times were under 15 minutes we would be seeing the “7 minute AV Meta” where horde would purposely lose after getting balinda and all the LTs before alliance would kill drek easily.

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What’s worse is that even if the Alliance don’t try and cap anything, Horde will usually notice that the honor numbers are going up for alliance, and come try and gank them anyway. This gets extremely frustrating for Alliance that even though they’ve already given up, they can’t even be given the slightest bit of courtesy to scrounge for scraps of honor.

Something I think people need to remember - this is a game, not a war. The goal isn’t to make your opponent quit playing. Things like driving them back into the starting cave and camping them while denying them any honor are pretty rotten (and many Alliance would probably do it too at this point if they could, to be fair).

As to why this meta never developed during vanilla, 1.12 wasn’t really in long enough under the old honor system for it to occur. I was Horde when this map was live content, and I distinctly remember suggesting that we try to do this, only for my teammates to refuse because they wanted a quick game, win or lose, and doing this forces a turtle and a long game, even if Horde are likely to win.

I imagine a lot of why this meta developed now has to do with the long queue times combined with the vanilla honor ranking system. I agree with you though that changes will be needed, because otherwise I don’t see things improving on their own. I see fewer Alliance wanting to play, and those who do finish their grinds (or abandon it early) will avoid AV like the plague.

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This is a factor. As a player that plays both horde and alliance, I agree. But there is more issues than just the queue times at play. Horde want it badly, I get that. However, Alliance are completely at the whim of the horde as to when the AV ends. So, by that logic, if they can only get a queue every 30+ minutes as well, you would figure they would fight harder to reduce that time and go for HPH. That’s just not the case.

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That makes no sense, the horde queue is a player created problem, if the streamers had chosen to roll alliance for the challenge and had alliance been the more populous faction, horde would have instant queues and map advantage.

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It is a World of War…

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Yea your Alliance toon is a level 14 to troll on forums with. Get lost, the AV map drastically favors Horde both in terms of the cave and chokepoints

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The main reason why AV was never this imbalanced in vanilla was the horde wasn’t going for SH GY every game perhaps because as you mention queue times were much shorter. Why go for SH GY and 30 minute games for 5k+ bonus honor if queues are short? It does make sense that the development of this “zero sum game” style meta has come hand-in-hand with 1 hour queues.

That’s literally the single most important factor that’s warped the meta to this point. It just becomes more obvious every game we play that the horde are continually refining that meta and now it’s uncounterable.

But the map itself does need changing regardless of queue times. Everything in AV comes down to how reinforcements can defend positions, and right now it’s much easier for horde to take SH GY while defending IB GY in large part due to the cave position.

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We’re real people, playing a game. It’s like some people never learned the lesson as kids that, if you’re enough of a jerk to people you play with, they won’t want to keep playing with you.

Get over yourself.

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Im interested in this alternate reality you seem to live in.

The archers wont aggro you if you approach from the center of the map (the terrain as you ride up the ramp prevents them from even having LoS on you), and if you hug the hill, they cant hit you. There aren’t even any facing the back 180 degrees of the tower - one faces out towards the center and the other 4 all face towards Galv. Once you get around the hill towards where the IBGY flag is, there arent even any archers pointing your way.

Meanwhile, a smart ally defense at SHGY/IWB can use the IWB archers to riddle the Horde with arrows, since they range to just FOUR yards shy of the SHGY flag.

You can ride around the back (east) side of TP and there are no archers there. If you hug the wall on the west side, they cant range you.

Mostly its people chicken-heading because they all “know” its rigged and they “know” they are already going to lose. The Horde had this issue for weeks when the allies were cheating and exploiting their way to 7 minute wins. You’d get into a BG and people would just be like “ZOMG A PREMADE GAME OVER MAN WE LOSE” and of course we’d lose.

Every single time i managed to convince people to actually put a fight, we’d win or at the very least drag it out into a 30-minute slog, robbing them of their 7-minute cheese. About 50% of the time we did that, the premade would AFK out rather than sit in a slog.

You can do exactly what the Horde anti-Drek-rush strat was: Keep a lot on D, and have a ~10 man strike force south burning towers. Sit them until they cap. The Horde cant recap them with 10 guys sitting in them unless they pull 10+ guys off the big O push at SHGY, which means that they let up on pressure there and wont take it.

It works just fine.

Burn the towers, and THEN cap a GY south. Or cap some towers and a GY and force Horde to choose which to take back (and then contest it), or theyll be forced to pull so many off O to recap them all that it will stall.

Its really not as hard as the whiners make it out to be They just might actually have to not be whiny quitters and try.

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As I’ve said to others before:

Please, if it’s so easy, make an Alliance character and show us how it’s done.

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Nobody here can control their faction, but I do think we owe it ourselves to remember that it’s a game. The main reason I’d like to see the cave moved back a bit is just that it would probably dramatically increase the quality of AV competition. Sure I’d be winning less than 96-99% of the matches, but that’s not important to me when one half of the players (alliance) don’t want to queue because the map is tilted.

I just think AV would be way more fun than it is now if the metas were at least balanced, and only a map change can enable that. Right now the AV meta is completely broken because nobody believes that there’s a winning alliance strategy due to the fact that every match starts with horde completely controlling everything south of IWB within 10 minutes.

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