To be fair, there are winning strategies for Alliance, but they don’t really work with pug groups.
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1.5 AV was seriously way better balanced. Just implement that instead.
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I just wanted 1.5AV. That’s one of the main things I wanted in classic and here we are making dozens of threads per day about how crap AV is at the moment.
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It makes perfect sense. A player has more motivation to win when they spend an hour and a half in queue compared to a faction that has faster queue times. It’s a player created problem by both horde and alliance. Alliance abandoned servers like mine (stallag) before and after phase 2 while free transfers were still active and even after paid transfers were introduced. Now stallag is a pve server with roughly 45 alliance lvl 60s active.
Alliance streamers that were “serious” when phase 2 dropped have either given up on ranking, quit the game, or transfered servers. It was fun at first in phase two, but clearly a ton of people didn’t know what they were signing up for on PVP realms. Maybe blizzard should have posted a PSA beforing launching PvP servers.
None of this is realistic when both sides are pug groups. Why? Because it’s far more natural and easy for the horde to concentrate on a singular strategy of taking SH GY while wiping the alliance offensive and then choking them at IWB than the alliance counter-strategy which is going to require separated strike teams.
That just doesn’t work in practice in BGs. Most people (both alliance and horde) play with a mob mentality of trying to just follow other people to an objective.
I have to constantly remind people in chat (horde side) to focus on wiping allies off spots or to stay in towers until they cap or stay by SH GY/SP GY until it caps.
The horde meta is very easy and natural for your average pug player to follow. Any sort of alliance counter would require a high quality composed alliance team that acts like a premade. That’s not balanced at all.
28 Likes
While you’re threading this intricate route you’re getting hit by horde defending this choke. Yes, there are things you can do to minimize the archers but it’s nigh impossible to stick to those paths while you’re getting beaten upon by other players.
Now, I absolutely agree about using IWB as a choke. If Alliance holds there and gives the offense a chance to take IBT and burn the archers then you have a shot. However, just try convincing people to split like that. Some will go for the IBGY, some will fight Galv, some will take and sit at SFGY, and so on.
You need a good 15-20 to sit at IWB and SHGY, a good 10 to sit on IBT, and a dozen more rezzing and running south to reinforce the offense. When you get 20 people out of 40 who actually try you just don’t have the numbers to make it work.
Believe me, I’ve advocated such a strategy many times with variations and it never seems to gel.
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Very big true
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AV reminds me that the developers really love Horde.
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The Iceblood choke is the greatest defensive position in the entire BG, even taking away the cave advantage. Plant the Horde raid down there at the start and you really cant lose lmao. It would take a very bad team composition to lose that position. Like, once you wipe them at that part of the map it totally breaks their will and half of them will quit.
5 Likes
I mean, they eventually moved the Horde cave back to help a little with fairness in later patches after vanilla… So maybe they just loved them in vanilla? LOL.
But in any case. The real way to fix AV was to make you take one GY at a time progression style instead of allowing skipping graveyards. That would force PvP fights at flags and choke points and eliminate backdooring npc wars. But its never happened even though it was suggested from day 1.
Lol. First of all you can approach SHGY from the east so IWB is more or less irrelevant. Second, if Alliance send 10 people south to cap things, the Horde will wipe them. Sure that relieves pressure from the defense, but that doesn’t ultimately gain Alliance anything because even if they then try to capitalize on that by capping IBGY, Horde will just recap that because there’s not really a choke on Horde side of that GY (like there is on Alliance side of SFGY).
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They moved it after alliance did a full on boycott to the point where almost no games were happening.
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Sadly that’s probably what it’s going to take here again.
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They (We) should reach Bal before you, unless bad pathing is taken.
Unless you dont show up, no one should be running past you.
Should be pushing to wipe you at Bal.
But i do see in lots of videos, people in fact, running right passed.
No one turning around etc, which always seems very strange to me.
Some days, that is a very generous number
1 Like
Why to show how wrong you are?
It’s not just the starting position of the cave, the entire horde position at IB is just flat out so much better than the alliance position at SH. And those first GY’s determine the entire course of the game.
All the cave starting position really determines is that horde can get to SHB before alliance can. But since SHB is in a completely useless position who cares.
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How does one side trying harder make the run from spawn to objective faster? How does the horde trying harder make ibgy have a backdoor out? If I try hard will my mount be faster then yours?
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If blizzard won’t give us 1.5 AV, at this point they may as well give us 2.4 AV. Move the cave south.
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Yeah but in any BG, everything comes down to 1) who gets initiative, and 2) how fast rezzers arrive at locations to provide support.
And that’s where the current cave location is a problem: horde can cap SH GY around 60-90 seconds before alliance caps IB GY, and horde rezzers at cave can hit IB GY too quickly.
3 Likes
But it’s not just distance, SHGY is stupidly easy to assault vs IBGY.
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Those types of differences are not as important though over long games. The flow of people is the single strongest determinant of positioning advantage over a long game.
Once the LTs are cleared any GY can be assaulted by a single person. Some classes can even assault GYs while the LTs are still up.
I get that there’s a million complaints about every unbalanced detail of AV, but most of those details don’t come close to adding up to the importance of the horde cave location.
3 Likes