Thanks for the lively discussion, everyone! Some updates:
Alterac Valley
We feel Alterac Valley is in a pretty decent spot. We've seen a dip in Alliance win rates, but want to give them time to re-adjust and strategize after the changes. We'll continue to monitor things and make changes where necessary.
We realize players have a passion for some of Alterac Valley's classic mechanics (Ivus, Lokholar). While we have no immediate changes to announce yet, its something we may adjust in the future.
Hi.
Speaking of Lokholar, are you aware that in the year 2018 he's completely immune to frost damage?
I realize no one has summoned him since Vanilla (when immunity was a thing) so maybe this has been overlooked, but he was summoned in the AV I was just in and I couldn't do anything to him.
I don't think I've won AV as horde in over a year, so what does a 'dip in alliance win rates' mean exactly? are there battlegroups out there where horde actually wins a respectable amount of time or what?
You may have noticed we've been doing some updates to Alterac Valley and Isle of Conquest recently. Our goals with these changes are to both improve the gameplay experience in these battlegrounds and to also design them around a longer duration format. We feel that with the longer match length, players have more room to switch strategies in a match, change from offense to defense a few times, etc. to provide a, well, more epic experience.
With that, we're looking to you to give us feedback on these changes.
Here are some of the changes recently (through hotfixes, so they are very recent):
Alterac Valley
Increased the number of Reinforcements by 100.
The NPCs health and damage will match the players level and gear, which will result in a more consistent difficulty.
Isle of Conquest
Increased the number of Reinforcements by 100.
Increased the health of the walls significantly.
Increased the damage the Siege Engine, Demolishers, Glaive Throwers and Keep Cannons deal against players. (The Seige Engine in particular will now be pretty scary!)
Increased the siege damage dealt by the Siege Engine and Demolisher. (The Ram ability will deal a lot of damage in particular)
The Refinery and the Quarry now generate Reinforcements more frequently.
Increased the health of the "bosses".
We welcome your feedback! Please focus your feedback on the gameplay in the map, in particular the pacing, balance of different mechanics etc.
Thank you!
You've done all this that is awesome now its the time to add wintergrasp and tol barad to the epic battleground list you know the stuff that goes unused in the game that will also bring back players and bring back more pvp that is what this expansion is about so please please tell the boss guy that you want too add these to the epic battleground list !!!!!!!!
Finally won an AV when alliance back and forward attacked IBGY and Snowfall GY Defending. It was then defending stoneheath bunker back to defending snowfall. With extra things going on on defending SHGY etc. Lots of people were looting corpses and we did get champions from scraps for the 30%. Was pretty close and we scored a lot of kills when horde tried to take SH Bunker. They burned it which even'd up the score.. Eventually we got Ivus first then stormed in at the simultaneous time rogues took over Frostwolf Relief Hut.. So maybe strat was involved there but anyway just putting it out there
Thanks for the lively discussion, everyone! Some updates:
Alterac Valley
We feel Alterac Valley is in a pretty decent spot. We've seen a dip in Alliance win rates, but want to give them time to re-adjust and strategize after the changes. We'll continue to monitor things and make changes where necessary.
We realize players have a passion for some of Alterac Valley's classic mechanics (Ivus, Lokholar). While we have no immediate changes to announce yet, its something we may adjust in the future.
Thanks for the info. Yes, alliance DO need to re-adjust and strategize. But honestly, horde do not have to much at all. Strong defense is pretty much a guaranteed win for them right now unless they are simply overpowered by a better geared/healed alliance team.
What I'm wondering is if BfA gear and/or adjustments to classes and specs will change things up. I hope so.
Giving up? Every single AV i've joined today is over before I get there.
I am not joining fresh AVs I am joining complete !@#$shows with 10-15 people less on my team than horde because everyone has been quitting and it's making me join these AVs to try and balance out the teams.
The most recent one had horde with about 600 reinforcements and Alliance had 50 left. I literally just alt tabbed and waited for it to end for 175 honor.
AV is a complete joke right now. Anyone who says otherwise is either completely full of it or are just desperately trying to delay the eventual hotfix so they can farm as much honor as possible while it's free because they play horde.
You're saying nothing. What is going wrong?
No offense but this just seems angry that horde has gotten smarter. All the AV's I qued in we have tried to wipe Alliance before they reach Galv, storm SHB and hold it under all circumstances while smaller teams backcap towers, get mines and go up north to grab random #@$@ to distract alliance(rogues and druids).
Don't even have to kill the ally captain now, it's better to wipe alliance first than disperse. Certainly it doesn't work always because sometimes the Alliance teams are really good and Horde are dumb or some other reasons...
Horde have a big advantage due to ibgy choke point. Galv/ibt/ibgy are all near each other whereas ally structures are spread out. If horde turtle at ibgy i dont see ally ever winning.
Well, this is as expected. The changes massively favor Horde, because reasons.
It's already bad enough that the faction imbalance exists to begin with, AND stacks upon itself. If you have more people who PVP more, and also more healers being as "balanced" (comically overpowered) as healers are, in the Horde... then it attracts even MORE of both. The ONLY way Alliance even won BGs, and it was really only these 2 BGs, was because of impatient players on both sides leading to a mutual objective zerg, so the Alliance who wanted to win were at least smart enough to try to queue IOC and AV.
Isle of Conquest: Yay, the Workshop is now all-powerful, which means the entire Horde can just go mid and deathball up, which they were already doing... but now they just do that and win, instead of losing for not capping more locations. It reinforces the problem of other PVP modes: The Healer-Stacked Deathball being easy wins in unrated BGs, and brings it to IOC as well.
Alterac Valley: The map of AV is already just so insanely ridiculously Horde favored. The Horde can easily take Icewing Bunker, play defense, and starve out the Alliance by cutting off their access to the entire map because the Icewing chokepoint is half the size of Tower Point's. Add on the fact that it is much easier to hold a Bunker for 5min to permanently destroy it than it is to hold a Tower for as long due to the differences in size, shape, and line of sight... and well, that just compounds this. Even assaulting Frostwolf Village requires going though a tiny literal doorway with poor LOS, literally uphill, at a terrible camera angle, also within range of attackers from both towers. The Dun Baldar bridge wishes it was half as difficult to siege. So why did Alliance win AV so much? Impatient players mutually zerging, which nullified all the Horde's massive advantages. What does it matter if towers are easier to reclaim if no one comes to defend? What does it matter that Icewing chokepoint locks the Alliance out of 60% of the map and staves them out of the game... if both teams are just in each other's main base? What does it matter that Frostwolf Village is twice as hard to siege as Dun Baldar if no one's defending it?
So basically the Alliance's only way to actually earn Honor in this game got gutted, and now PVP gets to be even more Horde favored and Horde dominated than it already was, which means more people seeking to PVP will do so on Horde characters, further compounding this imbalance.
Horde have a big advantage due to ibgy choke point. Galv/ibt/ibgy are all near each other whereas ally structures are spread out. If horde turtle at ibgy i dont see ally ever winning.
Exactly. This is the problem with all the non-mirrored BGs, they ALL also incidentally favor the Horde. Edit: And I'll throw in basically the 1 thing going "for" Alliance in AV, and that's that you can defend Iceblood + Tower Point captures more easily than Stonehearth + Icewing caps. That really doesn't make up for how easy it is to go all-in on Icewing and completely cut Alliance off from access to 60% of the map, which incidentally means a free cap on Stonehearth anyway... but you can, when capping offensively, hold Iceblood+Tower Point more easily if capping both at once.
- AV I covered above.
- Arathi is well known for how easy it is to defend 3/5 locations from 1 centralized chokepoint which has no Alliance equivalent.
- Twin Peaks has multiple glaring issues. It's easier to run flags downhill than uphill (multiple mobility skills and ticks like levitating are easier to use going downhill). AND for no reason 1/3 of the Horde bases openings is a canal of death, leaving the Horde base with only 2 entrances to the Alliance base's 3.
- Even Eye of the Storm which is "mirrored" has multiple issues. The Mage Tower is fat, making it almost impossible to defend from its cliff sides, yet alone pull back out of LOS, whereas the Blood Elf Tower is thin and defensible from its surrounding plateau. Furthermore, more sides of the Ruins can be scaled from below to bypass or sidestep defenders than the Fel Reaver, though this one is far more minor than the Tower issue.
So you combine every imperfectly mirrored BG being Horde favored... With the Horde already being more popular for PVP... Which compounds by attracting more dedicated PVPers to Horde... And you get this. Even if those BGs were all fixed, PVP would be Horde favored because it's already Horde favored and has thus attracted an imbalance of players.
There's no way to fix it, but it would be nice if they didn't ruin the only 2 BGs where Alliance could earn Honor at a lackluster rate. Makes it miserable to try to get PVP exclusive cosmetics and reputations.
Alliance has the biggest advantage in AV because of DB bridge choke
What a joke. You just go and capture both mines and bleed the Alliance out for an easy win. I'm not sure I've ever seen an Alliance contained in DB behind the bridge ever come back and win unless Horde players literally threw their corpses across the bridge at such a rate that even holding both mines can't fix it.
Much as I made a point of what a nightmare it is to siege Frostwolf Village due to a literally ONE DOOR WIDE chokepoint with horrific LOS which is ALSO in range of 2 towers... if the Alliance is in such a spot, they too should simply bleed the Horde out by taking both mines. It's simply that the task of actually sieging the city if you wanted to overwhelm the defenders is FAR easier on that bridge than through that tiny tower doorway.
BOTH teams can bring Ranged and Healers to bare when pushing across the bridge. The Alliance can't LOS through that tower when sieging Frostwolf, only the Horde can bring their ranged and healers to bare effectively.
Honestly, if either team is pushed so far back, they've likely lost so all that is moot compared to the problems with Towers being far easier to re-cap than Bunkers, and Icewing Bunker cutting off 60% of the map with a chokepoint almost half the size of Tower Point and Iceblood Graveyard's.
As I've noted in every post so far, PVP is Horde favored, which attracts people more interested in PVP to the Horde, which is a self-perpetuating recipe for imbalance. Even if you fixed all the BG-inherent imbalances, which almost universally favor Horde, you'd not fix the self-perpetuating player imbalance issue. As the saying goes "the damage has been done" and it's been done for more than a decade now.
The only thing these Epic BG changes do is shaft Alliance players who are just trying to farm some cosmetics or reps. If you changed Honor gains to be agnostic of wins and losses, and rewarded for participation and objectives... that would go a long way to at least balancing out Honor income and allowing people trying to farm things on the Alliance to do so without a 50% income handicap.
Chromey, in regards to AV I agree the map favors horde but you and I have had completely different experiences. I love the challenge but often times horde doesnât make use of the advantages. When they do, there are ways to break though that mini choke and capture ibgy.
I donât want them to sacrifice game quality for honor by making it a Zerg run again. It seems like most people like the changes. They can always increase honor gained too. I and all my friends queue epic because we actually like PvP and love the giant fights.
I did say my best solution was to make Honor gains agnostic of victory, and gained primarily from participation and objectives.
That way, you never really have to pretend you're "addressing" the glaring imbalances which exist and compound on themselves that you can't fix anyway. THIS whole bit with these changes are addressing Horde who already have double the honor farm speed, but not the core faction imbalance issue, which you can't fix. And, of course, addressing none of the map and terrain issues... because your bigger PVP playerbase doesn't complain about their favored BGs. I wonder why that is... very mysterious... I mean I'm not saying they could've fixed Arathi anytime in the last dozen years, but they probably could've fixed Arathi literally anytime in the last dozen years.
In any event, fixing the reward structure would be FAR more productive. If you made Honor gains agnostic of victory, you could also encourage player participation on both sides, regardless of outcome. Plenty of people just immediately give up on any disadvantage, and plenty of people who win are basically just bystanders to what a larger group is doing. I know plenty of MY own AV wins were basically just me riding with the main group, chilling in Frostwolf Village, then killing Drek'thar and basically never having to even attack anything but a few npc tower guards.
As I noted previously, it's a pretty massive flaw that you get more honor losing in some stupid dumb meat grinder in the middle of AV than you do from say... taking Mines, or defending a Tower from back-cappers who may simply never come leaving you "nothing to do" because you're sitting on and objective doing your part for the team.
I queue epic because I love my ranged dps and, well, that's very unfavored when you have to deal with essentially any melee whatsoever. I'd rather either be in a giant safe group, or able to go off and get mines, or manning a cannon or something... than to actually have to play out the complete fun-slayer of dealing with someone who I can't escape with more damage, more dps, more burst, more mobility, more cc, and more sustain than me. Seriously, it's really un-fun with how one-sided it is. I do recognize that's pretty much how it needs to be so melee aren't strictly obsoleted by ranged, but when you're solo queuing uncoordinated BGs, it's a death sentence.
We've seen a dip in Alliance win rates, but want to give them time to re-adjust and strategize after the changes. We'll continue to monitor things and make changes where necessary.
This has nothing to do with strategies. You buffed Drek and Galvanger more than you buffed Vanndar and Balinda; of course Alliance win rates went down.
You may not realize you buffed Drek and Galv more. However, just as Horde are more interested in and do more PVP, as evidenced by the faction imbalance in war mode - love it when blood elves realize they should be fighting for the Alliance and do the mercenary thing in battlegrounds - Alliance are more interested in and do more PVE. That means Alliance has higher average ilvl so your gear adjustment buffs the Horde NPCs more.
If you want the former more balanced win rates, you need to buff the NPCs according to 80 person average gear, not according to opposite faction gear. While you're at it, buff all NPCs by the same factor, not just the captains and generals.
Incidentally, thanks for being open about what you're seeing. It's really nice seeing Blizzard pay some attention to Alterac Valley for once.
The additional Isle of Conquest changes I like. I was in one very fast game but I'm concluding that the map is inherently too "small" to make that battleground really feel epic the way AV could. I'm happy to get Isle of Conquest battles over with quickly so I can spend more time in AV, though.