didn’t you hear? 120 lvl sync in the new twink. Blizz decided if you have friends that SUB and are ok with you steam rolling levers then it’s ok. Just have your 120 friends queue with your low level character and you win!
you only Play Korraks Revenge? Thats ok too as Azerite traits and essences work there too. Queuing with your 120 Basement BOI fam friends will result in your win! Get it? got it? Doubt it!
Can we get the dun baladar north and south bunkers regarded as part of AV? When you die (on either team) you can immediately res on top of your body so fights in these bunkers become who can loot someones body fast enough before they insta res. You also dont see BG messages or the BG map when you go inside one of these bunkers.
You can body Rez anywhere in AV (any BG) as long as your corpse hasn’t been looted. I think that the exception is Seething Shore but I bet you can body Rez if you can drop from the ship. I haven’t tried that yet. If it was an immediate Rez it was most likely a Shaman or a Battle Rez.
I have also noticed the issues with the maps while in those towers. Makes it hard to track the game while trying to figure out why you are looking at a world map of Azeroth.
…maybe the PvP devs got laid off? 
Wouldn’t surprise me with this trend towards cost-cutting and more grinds instead of enjoyable content 
They’ve been afk from this thread for quite some time now, after a while you do start to wonder/get concerned. It’s been ages since a blue post or update in this thread.
Is anyone there? 
What Moonwind means is our spirit isn’t sent to the GY, it spawns where we died, in the DB towers usually. It’s really bad for both sides. If the Horde player is faster, they get an insta-res and can keep fighting. If the Alliance player is faster, they loot the corpse and Horde has to run back (in spirit form) to SP in order get the Return to GY button to “activate”; if it is clicked in DB it does nothing. It does my head in that such a massive glitch was completely overlooked when the new patch was developed. As Warzug has iterated, it is painfully obvious that the PvP devs (assuming there are any) are asleep at the wheel.
I know right? As far as I know, the Priest’s bugged “Greater Heal” ability was STILL healing/topping off vehicles as recently as last week (during bg week)
Anyone who’s been playing epic bgs lately knows the game is full of random bugs/glitches, but PvP devs are nowhere to be seen
Like I said… I’m starting to wonder if maybe they got laid off to “cut costs” or something like that 
" [With regional restarts] Ashran team size reduced to 25 (was 40).
Woot! I’ll take it as a temporary “update / improvement” for now. Keep the updates / improvements coming Blizz. for Epic BGs! 
They’ll have to adjust the health of tremblade/volrath to compensate for reduction in overall damage done, cause only a 40v40 bg’s amount of dps can get through greater heal’s healing (in my opinion). And other healing obviously. If blizz doesn’t notice this, they are just causing more problems than they are solving.
NPC’s needed a buff with 8.3. No need to adjust anything. Fewer backdoor kills is a good thing.
They do listen to the player base.
Was up spamming Southshore vs Tarren Mill til like 1 AM last night, just now noticing/catching up on this thread.
Ahem…
This is actually a bad change imo, and will hurt Alliance teams more.
Lowering the team count to 25 players from 40 players will make certain Alliance strategies almost impossible Observe…
"Backdoor" boss rush strat
Won’t be possible really with the reduced raid-wide DPS of a 25-man raid versus the “full” DPS of a 40-man raid.
Especially considering that this strat relies almost entirely on speed and working fast, it’s unlikely that a 25-man Alliance team will be able to kill Volrath before Horde comes back to wipe them.
Jeron “mage rush” strat
Alliance struggled enough killing him with a 40-man raid, but now with a reduced 25-man player count it’s unlikely they will be able to put out enough DPS to kill him before Horde comes back from the Dark Woods. So another dead strat.
Dark Woods “ambush” strat
Part of the reason this strat became (somewhat) consistently successful is that a full 40-man Alliance raid group - if grouped up closely in a tight deathball - could often overpower the 30-35 Horde tunnel visioning on the rare elite in the woods.
Despite the Horde having eaten +15% flowers, the surprise and speed of “suddenly” getting hit by a full 40-man deathball right at the start often caught Horde PUGs off guard. If the teamfight in Dark Woods was won, then Alliance would gain access to the stat flowers, and their momentum would hold for a while.
With a reduced player count, the impact of the flowers will be much more noticeable. So now Alliance won’t be able to rely on superior numbers in the Dark Woods (to overcome Horde’s +15% increased stats advantage).
Conclusion
Get ready for more “straight PvP” matches in mid where side-objectives don’t matter (and “straight PvP” is what Horde excels at), and get ready for even more “Alliance always loses Ashran” complain threads 
If they intend to keep this 25-man format for this bg going forward, I think they’re gonna have to nerf the healthpools of the bosses/mini-bosses to “match” the reduced team size. I just don’t see any other way to keep this bg balanced - because most of Alliance’s winning strategies are geared for a full 40-man team.
And of course, 40-man teams on each side make for a more “epic” feeling. The 40-man format should be left alone imo, try to find other solutions to teamfight lag (better hardware, better coding?, etc etc).
Good.
Good.
No, the NPCs were already squishy. 25 people might actually make them matter.
The only legit concern you have in my opinion is the following:
but it’s interesting to me that your solution is to nerf everything else but the flowers?
I suppose you could argue that with reduced players, the Alliance might actually have a chance of getting some of them now… even if it means going all the way across the map and the entire Horde team already having them.
So you are “against” having a variety of different winning strategies? You’re fine with a “straight PvP” (what Horde excels at) slog on the main road?
One of the things I enjoyed about Ashran is that there’s no “one” way to win, there is a number of alternative/winning strategies other than “just go mid and fight”.
Backdoor boss rush was a fun strat, it was an adrenaline rush actually pulling it off, it was exciting when people “finally” got their Ashran quest done. I guess now this quest will simply be impossible to complete for any new people/returning players who haven’t done it yet. The “kill Volrath” quest will now just collect dust in people’s quest logs.
Backdooring the boss is the equivalent of killing the bosses in Alterac Valley with all four towers still up. Those games aren’t fun, and as a player who has upward of 30-minute queue times, for a game to end in 5 minutes with no actual PvP sucks just because players kill an NPC.
They excel at it in Ashran where they get innate advantages. I did just fine as an Alliance player over the last week in Tarren Mill vs Southshore where both teams are on equal footing. Which brings me on to my next point…
Aren’t you constantly petitioning for Tarren Mill vs Southshore - a straight deathmatch - to be added to the Epic Battleground rotation? Why is that different to Ashran without the cheesy ways of winning? I’d say Ashran with all of its toys, mini-bosses, power-ups and final bosses has more engaging gameplay than TMvSS.
This PvP season is going to last for a long time and that quest is seasonal. The brawl version of Ashran will have come and gone a number of times for people to get that quest done if they care about 150 conquest points that much.
No comment on this? “Let’s reduce the health of several NPCs” vs "let’s reduce the effectiveness of the Songflowers? 1 change vs several?
Disagree friend, I found the backdoor wins quite exciting and fun. Of course, I imagine the Horde on the other team might have a different opinion of those games
As for killing the boss in AV without doing the objectives/towers (in other words, “cheesing it”), I would say that’s just the reward for good execution/good play. If a team is smart enough/competent enough to kill the final boss with some towers still up, more power to them.
If they don’t like losing in such a way or complain about it? Then the losing team should’ve done something about it/responded (this goes for both Ashran backdoor and killing Drek/Vanndar with towers still up). Don’t be bad, and you won’t lose to such cheesy strats, pretty simple.
It’s PURELY a learn 2 play issue to lose to such strats, in my opinion. Backdoor is ridiculously easy to stop, all it takes is one Horde player saying something like “BACKDOOR INC” in the chat to warn his PUG teammates. If PUGs are too lazy to do that or to respond to what’s happening? That’s on them.
No, I would say they excel “in general”.
I’ve played enough 40-man bgs to see a pretty consistent pattern of Horde having higher “Damage Done” and “Killing Blows” in game after game after game after game.
Occasionally there are outlier games where the healer count is lop-sided (say, Horde gets 2 healers to Alliance’s 8), but those games tend to be the exception… since regardless of your faction you’re not gonna fare well with a 6 healer disadvantage.
Yes, I also played a few SS vs TM games where it was a “total blowout” and we stomped Horde by like 90 points, but most of the games were not like that.
I wasn’t really comparing Ashran to SS vs TM, just pointing out that I enjoy the “variety” of different winning strategies that Ashran has. There are multiple ways to win in Ashran, which I like. And yes, some of us actually like the “cheesy” strats you seem to dislike.
I was mainly pointing out that with these “alternative” winning Alliance strats getting indirectly nerfed by this hotfix, more Ashran games will now devolve into a “straight mid fight” - which Horde tends to do better at.
I mean, maybe they could nerf it to 10% or something, but I think the flowers are fine in the current 40v40 format - since not all of the Horde PUGs actually pick one up. Also, they are technically accessible to both sides, it just that they are closer to the Horde base.
My main concern is with this “new” 25v25 format we’ll have a situation where “most” of the Horde team is powered-up on flowers, so their impact will “feel” much more noticeable than before.
15-18 Horde PUG players having +15% stats in a 40v40 teamfight might have a negligible effect on how a teamfight plays out. But 15-18 Horde PUG players having +15% stats in a 25v25 teamfight is a pretty big deal.
15-18 players being powered-up on flowers, out of a 40-man team, is like 40% of the team.
15-18 players being powered-up on flowers, out of a 25-man team, is like 70% of the team.
It will be more noticeable now, just simple math.
That may be true but the fact of the matter those strategies aren’t intended hence the towers buffing bosses in AV and the gladiators being extremely powerful in Ashran. Gear scaling has made that strategy possible and Blizzard has in the past taken steps to prevent it.
In epics, sure, when 50% of the maps hold imbalances, 25% is based on vehicles that inflate damage and kills and is a revolving door of players and then Isle of Conquest which has a much more even win rate. In normal battlegrounds these discrepancies don’t exist.
… I don’t know how to respond to this. If you can’t see how 45% of a single team getting a powerful buff that stacks with all the other buffs before another team can even target them is unfair, there’s no point arguing it with you. Must all be down to pure talent.
I doubt they made any tuning changes.
Just did my first post-hotfix Ashran with the new 25-man player limit. This was on an Alliance toon (for the faster queue times).
So the Alliance PUGs decided to go with the mage rush strat, we went to Jeron and started going to town on him. But my goodness he seemed to have so much health, we only managed to get him to around 67% before Horde started trickleing back in from the Dark Woods.
So we get wiped by the returning Horde mob, and people started afking out as soon as we fell behind 25-27 points on the score. I afked out myself just now. Luckily the botched mage attempt only lasted like 3 minutes from start to finish, so not much time wasted.
I’ll do another one in a bit, gonna go do some weekly chores/world quest stuff for now.
Deserter really needs to be 30 mins and account wide.
No it won’t. Everybody will be killing trem 10 times a day on march 25 when the classic ashran brawl comes out. Last time I did that brawl, either side kinda let the other have the boss, whether they were busy winning an event or it was a win trade situation.