Ok but the shaman vs paladin argument is no less relevant to the topic: faction imbalance in AV.
Paladins, fear ward, escape artist and stoneform?
Are you seriously trying to suggest this is a counter or in any way balanced to horde racials???
LOL.
Oh Chuck.
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Yes.
As I said, ignoring classes Horde racials are superior. Bring in paladins vs shamans and the faction imbalance becomes marginal at best.
It’s simply not why Alliance lose AV.
Oh Chucky, let’s break down WOTF versus Escape artist as you suggesting they are balanced. (hint: they are not)
The entire point of CC roots for a druid is to create space. Same with Mages. Every fraction of a second counts, especially if you are trying to stay on a druid.
1 has a casting time the other does not.
You get the difference in how each situation plays out and a player reacts to either a nova or a fear? One has instant reaction time and CC break, the other a casting time.
That’s huge. And I’ll explain why.
In AV (as I’m sure you are an AV pro) during stalemates and stand offs, a popular echnic to break the front lines is to dive in, AOE fear and dive out. Fear specifically, not frost nova. Because the goal of fear is to have the opposing players run into your forces to get obliterated.
This doesn’t happen as often alliance to horde players as all the undead instantly break the fear, saving their front line and negating the technic.
Frost nova snare is great if you want to advance your force but the opposing side can also press their forces in making it not as an effective technic as fear bombing.
Dwarf priests do have fear ward, that’s true! but now you are relying on their actually being a priest paying attention to you personally and that they are dwarf, AND that they have fear ward up.
Versus knowing you can hang in the front line because your WOTF is off cooldown. Allowing you to be responsible and reliant on nobody to get you out of trouble. Which is the case with 40 random players playing together.
escape artist is handy except it’s cast time still insures that if you are chasing a target, they will still get space. versus WOTF where there is no space created.
Nevermind that fear bombing is used far more often in AV then nova bombing.
And that’s precisely because of how the mechanic of fear works.
Shall I break down how Shamans are actually a much stronger healer in AV then paladins now?
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Naw dwarf priest master race fearward for ally desperate prayer as a secondary the ability to break blind too with a stun cleansing trinket. Dwarf priest is the goat bruh. When I fear them it just says immune better than wotf fo sho get more dwarf priest in your groups.
If you’ve got two massive groups charging into each other your AV group has already failed. Smaller scale PvP in towers is how you AV. Destroy the enemy towers, back-cap your own, defeat the boss.
Ideally your group would split up evenly between the four towers with a few to kill Balinda at the start. Typically you’ll need more in the two center towers and less in the far north/south towers, but this isn’t always true.
Literally everyone that isn’t killing Balinda should be inside a tower or heading towards a tower until it’s time to kill the boss at which point you either go to do that or defend towers.
Have people teleport to back-cap as appropriate.
Basic AV strategy. If you’re not following this you’re doing it wrong and racials are pretty irrelevant.
This of course requires that people know how to AV, they communicate, and they actually want to try and win. I can’t really say whether or not Horde are any better at this. I haven’t been AVing recently. So I’m not saying Alliance are just bad at AV. I’m just saying that they can win and that racials do not prevent them from winning.
Are you serious with this???
Of the handful of AV’s alliance have won is due to them not allowing Horde to have SF. You know this. I know this. It’s why when alliance makes a big push at the start to SF and takes it over…immediately the ENTIRE 40 man horde team comes back to try and recap it.
It’s why you take SF at the start and oh looksee! Blizzard was kind enough to insure that you can get there and have the flag capped before the alliance can make the ramp. Or did you not ever question why it is that you always seem to have SF capped first?
Gonna guess probably not. (we won’t even talk about map imbalances yet…lol)
At any rate, the path to victory for both horde and alliance in it’s current states each start with a massive 40-40 fight. If either side just gives up SF it’s a path to a slow defeat.
So would you like to try again, minus the B.S.?
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Yes. Butting heads 40 vs 40 constantly doesn’t win AVs. It never has and it never will. That’s not the objective of AV.
This only has an impact because it makes it more difficult for players to push past wherever the mass head butting is occuring. It makes it more difficult to take towers and thus makes it harder to defeat the boss, which as we all know is how you win an AV.
Heading off the group or preventing them from taking a specific graveyard will only ever be an effective strategy when the other side is not playing AV optimally, which is usually the case seeing as we don’t have pre-mades.
But this is absolutely not and never will be the optimal AV strategy.
Remember when Alliance had pre-mades? What did they do? They charged the boss. They did not head off the Horde, prevent them from taking graveyards, or really put up much defense at all.
This is an effective strategy as well, but still not optimal. It was probably used because it was easier for people to understand and harder to mess up. Coordinating a four tower split is more difficult.
Well lol, I’m not sure if you are aware of this…but it seems to be the strategy that has gotten horde a 90+ percent win rating.
So maybe you should go talk with them.
At any rate. Reality is that if the alliance puts up any kind of fight at the start, it’s a 30 on 30 or more battle.
So since that’s the case, would you like to amend your suggestion that it’s advantagous to have to rely on there being a dwarf priest in the battleground who has fearward up AND will premptively cast it on you.
Or
Simply have WOTF?
lol.
Such fail many lulz.
Sorry man fear ward can stop more fears form a single dwarf than wotf ever could try again dwarf priest is OP. Having to try and fear into teams fear warded up is an uphill battle allies wouldn’t know about. Dwarf priest are the GOAT. Lower cd too. Also 5 seconds vs forever for fear ward not even close bruh undead get a crappy dot that cost more mana than any other spell and instantly dispelled for 0 dmg not even worth casting if not shadow lul.
Sounds like someone needs a nap 
I’m not aware. As I said I haven’t done an AV since I got exalted. I probably won’t be PvPing much until after Naxx comes out and I’m done raiding. So it’ll be quite a while.
But if Horde are charging the boss there’s a very simple way to counteract that.
If they’re able to kill the boss with towers up and have most of their group at the boss then you need a large scale coordinated recall. You’ll want to recall immediately after they pull the Drek. Wipe them and take back the GY.
If they need towers down to kill the boss then back-cap towers one at a time with a group of 5-10 targeting the towers closest to being taken first. Split only if absolutely necessary to get towers back.
Of course these basic strategies are rarely followed for a variety of reasons. People don’t communicate. People don’t listen. People don’t have much of an interest in actually trying to win. And surprisingly people are completely unaware of optimal AV strats despite AV existing for 15 years.
But I have seen these strategies utilized Horde side with pugs. It’s not impossible to get into a good group that actually listens and understands basic AV strats. Maybe it is more difficult Alliance side. I’m not sure because I haven’t been there in Classic.
Well I didn’t suggest that. So no I don’t think I will. I stand by everything I said. Maybe try to stop inferring things that aren’t there.
You are trying to tell us all how AV goes without having actually played AV as it’s being played right now?
The horde using this strat are sitting at a 90 percent win rate. And you wanna tell them that it’s a failed stratedy?
Ok I think I’ve read enough.
Does anyone else wanna chime in and explain to me how alliance racials are just as good as horde’s are in PVP?
Anyone?
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Why did you summon them?
Right, but in this specific scenario he was comparing racials directly to class abilities. It would be a different story if it was a larger scale argument, but it wasnt and instead was very 1 to 1 which, again, race != class.
Feel free to escape artist out of the thread if you want too. 
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Too late, stupid cast time.
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The AV meta doesn’t have much of an impact on optimal strategies. And strats are always just a reaction to how the other side is playing anyways. It’s a matter of knowing what to do in any scenario, which I do. I’ve been playing AV for 15 years. I know what is effective.
As I said, a strategy may be effective but that doesn’t make it optimal. The meta becomes whatever is good enough.
You need to listen to what is being said. Your conclusions are not absolute and you’re just as human and capable of error in ideas as anyone else. Don’t let your arrogance fool you.
I’ve said several times now that Horde racials are better overall. I don’t know why you keep trying to argue something that I’ve more or less agreed with you on.
Really? Because it doesn’t sound like you know what’s going on.
Currently the tug of war and the entire map starts and ends with control over SF.
If the alliance bypass SF and head to IBGY with the bulk of their forces, horde will swing down and clear them out from both SF and their starting cave. (the cave, which spawns more players at once than a GY can…but we won’t talk about map advantages…lol)
Oh and this is another one of those large scale fights you don’t think happen…
I’d love for you to try and explain to me how to counter the new strat while avoiding large scale conflict.
Not that small scale conflict doesn’t make a cast time just as good as instant cast…but I am just trying to see what’s going on in that brain of yours.
Contention over SF is never a good idea. But with pug vs pug and the map layout it’s going to be advantageous for Horde. If Alliance fight it off they don’t really gain anything. If they lose they take it from both sides. It’s sort of a lose lose for Alliance. So it’s obviously not the play.
If the meta right now is fighting over SF then the meta is very advantageous for Horde.
What the Alliance needs to do to minimize this advantage is first of all ignore SF. The majority of them should skip the center towers and head south. Pile up in the southern towers and focus on capping those first while recalling as necessary for back-capping. Then and only then should they focus on the center Horde towers if necessary before finally defeating the boss.
If the Horde are taking SF it should be easy enough to avoid them at the beginning of the battle. And skipping the center towers more or less eliminates the Horde’s sandwiching map advantage if they have SF.
Like I said, it’s all about the strats, moves and counter moves.
Where are you getting this? I never once said that mass battles don’t occur in AV. I just said they’re not part of an optimal AV strat.
I’ve been in AV once or twice in my 15 years of PvPing. Believe it or not I’ve seen a few field of strife mass battles and participated in many. Crazy huh?
If the Horde are highly effective at forcing large scale head to head battles there should always be enough stealthers to cap the far towers. They should be able to get through at the very least and either successfully take the towers or force enough defense to effectively break whatever choke point everyone is stuck at.