Seriously, I’m tired of the Horde having a huge advantage in AV until TBC opens up. You stopped The Alliance from being able to que up in large numbers together, fine. You gave us though a broken AV and it gets incredibly tiring trying to win when the Horde has clear advantages. It has come to the point where only Alliance masochists want to play because they want to try to get rep. Horde ques are over an hour while Alliance are less than 10 minutes because you have to only want to get rep since it’s nearly impossible to actually win.
Don’t think there are Horde advantages, watch this video and see for yourself that The Horde, with this AV, clearly has huge advantages over the Alliance and I don’t want to wait another 6+ months for the TBC patch (if we get TBC) to fix it.
It is a good point that Blizzard went out of their way to prevent alliance premades while leaving substantially everything else the same. Why didn’t they just leave it?
Horde are so terrified of having an even playing field that they will soon bombard this with nonsense about alliance losing as a result of afkers/bots. They ignore the imbalances and the fact that people afk as a result of the awful situation alliance have to put up with.
They want their free wins and will cry n moan about it.
At some point it does become a self-fulfilling prophecy, though. There are absolutely major map imbalances in this version of AV. But too many alliance players go in believing they can’t win and that it’s futile to try when that’s not the case. I do think the win rate would be better if more alliance players wanted to win and didn’t give up so easily.
AV needs to be fixed or tweaked or whatever. It needs to be a competitive BG for both sides to have an equal chance of winning. I’ve been playing it nonstop for the past 2 and a half weeks, 10+ hours a day(with long queues) and have only lost twice. And both those loses? It came down to a literal healthbar race with the alliance just barely pulling off the win and the horde still managed to have more bonus honor.
I won’t pretend to know exactly why Horde has such a strong winning % in this one battleground, but I do know it’s not fun for both sides when the outcome seems predetermined every match.
There are a few factors as to why the Horde has like a 99% win rate in AV. There are definite imbalances as the video I posted shows.
We can’t even get to our first tower before the horde is arriving to it.
I have a 100% mount and when riding auto equip: Carrot on a stick, boots with Mithril Spurs and gloves with Minor Mount speed. I arrive at Snowfall GY just as it’s being taken by The Horde. As shown in the video the Horde with a 100% mount can get to midfield almost 20s before Alliance can.
Iceblood GY is much harder to take than Stonehearth GY. Iceblood can only be approached by running through a choke point past the first tower. Alliance has taken Iceblood in the past but the problem becomes the Horde can just overrun the Alliance by sending people back who initially die but rez at their spawn point, a very short distance from that Graveyard.
Stonehearth is much easier to take because it has two paths leading to it and one of them does not go by a tower. Horde can pinch the Alliance this way and again as the video stated, once the Alliance dies, they are put twice as far away from Stonehearth, spawning at Stormpike so once Stonehearth is taken it becomes almost impossible to get it back because now the Horde usually has Snowfall so after dying they are seconds away from getting to Stonehearth.
Stormpike is almost impossible to defend because the Alliance cannot get back up to the high ground while the horde who has run up past the lake can just take the high ground and fire down at the Alliance. Horde can just shoot down at spawning players, have mages jump down and nova spawning players.
Many alliance players aren’t there for the PvP aspect. They just want to get their rep and get out these days. Since the que is literally minutes, they farm HK’s and Rep and due to the imbalance that’s all they care about. Many will just go afk once the initial push is done because they know it’s impossible to actually win then.
This is not to say the Alliance can’t win. I in fact won three AV’s just today. To win any Alliance with a 100% mount has to run to the right of Snowfall GY. You run past all the objectives and directly into the horde base. You take the relief hut and the two towers and have everyone who dies farther up on the map corpsewalk to the Relief Hut. There your force has to try to hold off the Horde until the hut caps and both towers. Pull some warmasters back to the relief hut holding it until they are all gone. All this while fighting horde. Once only Drek is left, half your force goes in to fight Drek, the other half stays outside fighting the Horde.
Winning gets you about half the honor Horde gets even if they lose because they are able to do the PvE aspects like kill Belinda and the LT’s while your only goal is to get to the Relief hut and hope you can hold it. If you can’t, you lose.
I’ve played a lot on both sides. I agree that they should have changed other things at the same time, or at least during the recent second fix.
However, the AV meta at the start was so bad. I thought it was just bad for horde but I was reminded when talking about it on my servers Discord recently that many alliance hated it just as much. Those same alliance don’t play what’s become of AV so that was probably better than this, but it was still bad to be told to not fight and all that stuff.
Be sure to add in the fact that when horde die at IBGY they respawn at the cave 20 at a time much closer than alliance respawn when defending SHGY. This is the single biggest problem with AV. The horde spawn super close 20 at a time vs alliance far 10 at a time. This allows them to go all in at SHGY and not care if they lose IBGY in the process since the waves of 20 horde ressing at the cave will guaranteed be able to swamp the alliance and take it back. Alliance has to worry about defending SH WHILE taking IBGY since if we lose SHGY there isnt an easy mode cave to bail us out. We have to fight uphill in the worst bottleneck on the entire map to deal with.
ya, I have been thinking lately like the OP said that blizzard has no plans to fix this and will just wait for BC to come out for the changes to drop. Which stinks for us.
Tbh I think a lot could be solved if horde didn’t go to their cave from IBGY. They should be sent to FWGY instead imo. Alliance don’t spawn at our spawn if we die at SHGY. We spawn at SPGY. Blizz needs to make horde spawn at FWGY if they die at IB. I do think they should move the cave though. It’s crazy that they can crash into alliance as we’re passing balinda.
Alliance can totally arriving to the first tower before horde is arriving to it. I have done many races and alliance with epic mounts can get a little ahead of shgy before horde arrives;
I agree horde can reach midfield something like 20s before alliance. However, it doesn’t give that much of an advantage. The only strategic advantage Horde being middle first gives is winning faster. Think about it : nothing prevents alliance to push back the horde at this point.
The tower helps defending iceblood graveyard but alliance can just take it on the way and it becomes useless quickly. I agree iceblood choke seems an advantage to horde though. As for the rezzing issue, rezzing in the cave or at frostwolf gy it takes almost the same time to reach iceblood gy. Actually, it’s faster from frostwolf gy since you can mount as soon as you rez (38 seconds at fwgy vs 41 seconds from cave).
Actually, Stonehearth does have a tower who can shoot horde a little bit from balinda’s side but I agree it’s mostly avoidable if you’re being careful. I’m not so sure pinching alliance at stonehearth gy is that much of an advantage since it divides horde’s force but let’s take for granted it does for this conversation. Now, spawning at Stormpike gy it only takes 48 secondes to come back at shgy (41 seconds horde side from cave to ibgy) so pretty much the same time and far from the game breaking everyone is saying. It looks way longer but it’s actually not.
I disagree that Stormpike is almost impossible to defend. Actually it’s usually where alliance have their most effective defense. Alliance has a choke and on top of that a cornered one making it very difficult for horde. Plus alliance can take advantage of rezzing and shooting through the mountain. It takes a very good coordination for hordes to use the high ground and having mages to jump down and nova spgy. It barely ever happens and 9 time out of 10 horde just take spgy by normal fighting + lok + commanders
That I totally agree and it is the main reason in my opinion why alliance loses av. Rankers gave up some months ago when they could not abuse premading av anymore and all went premading wsg/ab for better hph and, in a vicious circle, alliance thinks av is hopeless and barely tries.
Well people usually complain of the so-called distance difference but ok I’ll give you that being able to rez 20 instead of 10 is an imbalance in horde favor. But in my personal experience, it’s very rare you need more than 10 rez at any gys.
