Hey guys, so my group and I have been 5-man queue’ing into AV as 3 Holy Pallies/Hunter/Warrior and using macro’s to command the Alliance into using actual strategy. Here are my observations from games:
About a 13% win rate. All our losses and wins, the Alliance had at least 30% more HKs than the Horde, sometimes double or triple.
How all games begin:
Stack up on SHGY out of LOS and jump out to wipe the Horde 3-4 times while they cap SFGY. This is primarily what gave us the HK advantage.
Strategy A:
Once Horde cap SFGY, we move to IBGY and hold it until it caps.
Strategy B:
We send a team back to do druid turn ins and escort druids to summon our nature boi.
Here is where the disadvantage towards Stormpike starts to show.
If we use strategy A:
- The Horde spawn cave is really close to IBGY, so they can safely recall 10-20 people that can continuously throw their bodies at IBGY to wipe the Alliance. If they die close to Tower Point, they spawn in their cave. If they die closer to IBGY, they will spawn at SFGY. The next Alliance spawn is all the way North, so any death puts us at a bigger and bigger disadvantage. And no, capping SFGY is not an option, as the Horde cave is closer to IBGY than SFGY is.
Compare defending IBGY to defending SHGY (the ally version of IBGY), the differences are glaring. Even if the Alliance do get SFGY, it is no better a spawn point than SHGY when it comes to advancing on IBGY. But if Horde get SFGY, it is the perfect spawn point to throw themselves at SHGY.
If we use strategy B:
- The druids park themselves in the open in the Field of Strife, and Horde spawn from IBGY and from SFGY to prevent the nature boi from spawning. The Horde spawn points aren’t so much a problem as the fact that the druids park themselves in the open in a spot with no possibility to LOS at all.
- On horde side, the shamans park themselves up a hill, out of line of sight, in a position much easier to defend.
After using both strategies, we have decided to stick to strategy A which allowed us to consistently cap IBGY after Horde get a new spawn point at SFGY. Our next step is to cap IB Tower and Tower Point. We usually have about 3-5 people in each, while the main raid advances on FWGY and goes for Relief Hut most of the time.
2 things can happen here;
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Sometimes, the Horde recalls 30+ people to defend, and only keeps 10 on offense to try and ninja bunkers. If this happens, the game most likely turns into a turtle.
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The game becomes a race. In this case, the Alliance gets a solid 30% chance of winning. This is because by being forced to give up IBGY for strategic reasons, the Horde get a 3-4 minute head start on Bunkers. The Ally win condition is literally to ninja bunkers back.
Some observations:
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Peaking into Van room vs peaking into Drek room… The Horde can pick off players guarding Van without him or his WMs aggro’ing. The Alliance cannot.
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Defending a captured Bunker flag vs Defending a captured Tower flag. Once captured, the Ally need to maintain constant LOS on the flag to defend it. In a Tower, you have to be inside the actual enclosure. In a bunker, you can get constant LOS on the flag because of how exposed it is.
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Yes, I admit that there are some Alliance players who have adopted a defeatist mindset (mostly from Grobbulus for some reason), and spend the entire game holding druids or AFK’ing waiting for it to end. I would say 1 out of 5 games will have a considerable cluster of these players. 4 out of 5 games, the Alliance team will begin listening to our callouts once they see the leaderboard (the first 5 minutes will show about 60 HKs for Ally vs 8-10 HKs for Horde). But even then, these games will end with us having almost 2x more HKs than Horde, but will be a loss because of how all the little disadvantages can snowball.
Either way, by adopting these strategies, even though they are a very low win rate, we end up having fun. Most people message us saying they were glad to be in an organized AV and getting more HKs than the Horde for once.
SIDENOTE ON HOW WE AVOID A TURTLE
If the game does turn into a turtle because the Horde decide to recall their entire raid, we do the following:
- Set a rally point on circle (myself) and have the entire raid ride down to Drek for an all-in. This has had a 0% chance of success, with the closet Drek getting being 23% HP. BUT, this speeds up the outcome of the game, and prevents us from spending 1 hour in AV.
None of our games have been longer than 40min using these strategies.
Win or lose we have fun either way, our entire group hit exalted in week 1 of AV when the games were short. We queue to rack up HKs and give the Alliance some form of hope to win, or a loss but at least with lots of honor from kills.
