I just realized, one of the saddest thing about 1.12 AV was the removal of Black Lotus and other various herbs and mining nodes from AV.
I used to love being able to make a little bit of gold gathering herbs/ore while PvPing in AV, and the possibility of coming across a Black Lotus however rare made the game that much more exciting.
AV wasn’t just another bg, it was an open world raid battleground filled with awesome things to do.
The current 1.12 AV is so depressing, everything good has been taken out, it’s all watered down to the path of least resistance, just so the cattle can get from the start to finish and collect their honor as streamlined as possible.
Of all the changes to AV, this was one that was pretty popular during retail vanilla. People hated alts that came in and fished instead of fighting.
It will also be nice to see the pserver meta of fully flasking go away. No more than 336 BL per week, and that is assuming it is picked the moment it spawns every time. Will most likely be much lower than that though.
The first thing I tested in beta AV was the mob drops. They all drop silver (max was like 6) and nothing else. The harpies and gnoll things I mean. The gnolls can be pick pocketed for heavy junk boxes
Oh and during one game a loot window popped up for a lvl 57 green cloak. I dont know what someone killed to get it though, maybe the ice lord npc?
I think Blizzard didn’t want people not participating actively in the PvP. It’s a nice idea since having a long-running battleground that is an entire zone where you can do additional things is pretty neat (like a better Wintergrasp), but I can imagine why Blizzard wouldn’t want that.
I don’t think it was that bad, the respawn timers on nodes were quite long, at the start you grabbed a herb or two while everything was spawned but after that the place was mostly barren for the rest of the game.
I’ll agree with you fishing in AV was excessive and stupid since you literally afk, but herb and mine did not remove you from the game at all.
I don’t know if there was any possible way to fix AV and botting/afking. It just was honor grind, and AV botting was the most effective mindless way of doing it for quite a few (since it was very widespread).
I remember some games, where half the raid never left the cave (all botting or afk, occasionally hitting space bar to jump). I guess they weren’t farming black lotus though, they were literally just standing around.
Then came in reporting feature, so they stopped standing and just walked elsewhere to be afk. AV was always a mess, now I’m starting to remember it.
I think only way to fix it would have been 0 honor for those who are in the bottom 10% contribution or something like that (based off damage/healing). That would have fixed honor afk farming instantly (0 honor every time).
I’ll be honest. I really enjoy PVP in AV but if you can grab a quick Arcane crystal on the field of strife in the first moments before all the the alliance and horde battle… I’m cool with that.
Classic is missing millions of black lotus spawns, which is having a serious impact on prices. Need to increase spawn rates and locations to compensate. Taking away millions of cheap flasks is a pretty huge change.
