I was very excited and worried about phase 2 being released once I saw layers removed. First off, I play on alliance and there might be a slight or moderate horde bias on my server as well, but horde say the same thing but this is probably because the server is just way more populated than we have ever been used to in pre-BC and people are running around in groups of 3 to 5 to 10, 15 even 20+ despite it being inefficient honor and usually when 1 person gets ganked by a group they will automatically feel that they are outnumbered.
This is also the case because this usually happens at key traveling points, such as flight paths, boats and zepplins, although there is a horde advantage to having zepplins over alliance with their boats and I’ll get to that later. When you just land into an your faction’s city or flightpath location and its completed dominated by the opposing faction, you will probably feel that your faction is outnumbered and can’t control their own territory and for some they feel its not even safe to leave safe parts of ironforge. These high traffic travel points can be good when you’re in a big alliance squad sailing in from menethil to theramore and surprise 3 rogues or something. Lately though, if you want to get to the other continent from Ironforge there is a group or raid of horde waiting at menethil, another group at theramore, and if you’re unlucky, a group hiding in the boat. This is the current pvp meta. The other meta is farming BRM travel zones as a group (BRM, Searing Gorge, Burning Steppes). EPL, WPL, Gadget and winterspring are also hot zones, with light’s hope and chillwind camp being camped too.
The thing that bothers me is that horde zepplins are clearly favored in this meta. They have goblin guards that shoot you off the boats and nets (might be wrong on that one and that might be only tanaris/gadget/bb), these NPCs have a better arsenal to assist the horde more than theramore and menethil auto attack guards could ever do for the alliance, and their zepplins are either right outside of a major city or in the middle of one (Gromgol, STV) if they wanted to defend it and are not as easy to invade by the fact that boats are at ports that can easily be invaded without stealth. Still though, no where is truly safe, you are potential honor for someone or a group of people and that’s okay. I like the PvP aspect and it’s what I still want but holy cow when its on a heavily populated server its almost unplayable.
I don’t have a clear solution or suggestion and I don’t want layers back either. Maybe making the alliance boat guards a bit stronger or give nets or guns can make things a bit more bearable for traveling but that just pushes more groups to another high traffic zone making and that might be too much change for some people.
Maybe BGs will help reduce the amount of camping, griefing and raid groups there are out there but I think we will just have to wait and see. But in general, I say yes please bring BGs sooner than later and also break the spy addon. It’s too strong and you’re in a clear disadvantage if you don’t have it. Every class is now a hunter with track humanoid but with info on level and class. If there is anything that is a change its the fact that this addon is a very strong UAV for world pvp. Also guys, please try to balance your servers factions if you think they are unbalanced. Take the hit so we can have better servers and better experiences for everyone. There are plenty of servers that strive to do that and come out with great success.