The winning strategy for horde is to simply zerg SH GY from IB with 30 players while 10 horde defends south. So it takes at least 30 alliance to defend SH GY and only 10 can attack.
This horde strategy is only possible because of SH GY position, accessibility and the impenetrable choke point from north once SH is capped.
Alliance does not have the same map advantages if they try to turtle, because alliance can only turtle at SP and at that point the game is practically lost.
You are mixing “advantage” with “motivation”. You can be the most motivated team in the world, if your team is occupied by defending a critical strategic point over the whole game then there is very little room for any winning tactics.
How much more? Are you telling that winrate is 50-50 at weekends or just a slightly better than usual?
On weekends more rankers join to AV so there is a better chance for alliance team setup being luckier than horde and in those cases alliance simply overgear the horde team and can wipe them several times at mid field and eventually reach horde base.
But that requires a lucky setup.
In case of even teams horde has 100% win chance because of the map advantages (if they don’t make any fatal mistakes).
Omg, again this illusion of “even teams”… You do know that without rating in the matchmaking, then one side will almost ALWAYS be “better” than the other, right?
There is no counter tactics against the current horde meta it’s that simple. Either your team is overgeared so half of your team can handle the full horde zerg while the other half progresses to south or you just keep fighting at SH and eventually lose because horde summons Loki, which alliance cannot prevent, guess why: because of the map.
Of course there are never even teams, but alliance team has to be at least twice as better geared than horde to have a slightest chance to win. That’s why it is called: horde advantage.
That sure seems like one possible way. How many times has that been tried on the Alliance side, do you know @Bempri ? For that long as well?
I know Alliance tried to play like premades after they were mitigated, but after just a few days there were already threads saying “it’s impossible” and “horde map, just give up”. Which again, blamed the map when anything went wrong.
No tactic guarantees a win. Not for the Horde side, and not for the Alliance side. So test it over a month or two, in every single game you play, with that many trying that hard. Then you can say you’ve tested it properly and grit your teeth.
But if you’ve got people not even trying in the first place, then you’re essentially playing OUTNUMBERED which has happened far too often ever since premades were mitigated.
It was even a thing before premades were mitigated, did you know that? The common problem with the solo queuers who tried to queue into premades, but ended up with just a bunch of other solo queuers, on the Alliance side. They never tried, they just gave up.
That only works against a team of unmotivated Alliance where 1/3 of the team is afk leeching. If you have a full Alliance team of motivated players wit the main objective to WIN, those advantage Horde have at start is useless and Alliance can cash in on the Advantages they have while invading the Horde base and defending SP GY and their base with a handful of players.
Yes Horde have the advantage at start. No question about that. But you win the game by killing last boss, and Alliance have the advantage in defense and offence at the bases.
If 30 horde keeps attacking SH GY then alliance need at least 30 players to defend it.
If the alliance team has no major objective disadvantage compared to horde (no more afk-ers, no more lvl50s, everybody is just as motivated, etc.) then they can eventually push back horde to mid field, since alliance spawn point is obviously closer to their own graveyard.
But as soon as they reach mid field, the reinforcement distances are evened out, and since SH GY can be attacked from multiple directions alliance has to split the team into two groups, one is defending SH the other keeps pushing horde.
This leaves the alliance attack team getting outnumbered, because horde does not need to split its team to defend IB.
So then horde pushes alliance back to SH until the two alliance team unites and push horde back again to mid field. This goes on and on until horde summons Loki and that more or less ends the game as soon as Loki reaches SH.
That’s why it is pointless to talk about alliance advantages:
The alliance base can be easier to defend, sure. But when all alliance players are blocked behind the IWB choke point what difference does it make?
Horde base is easier to attack, sure. But when all alliance players are blocked behind the IWB choke point what difference does it make?
Private servers are a different story because they either included another iteration of the bg and/or had class and mob mechanics which worked differently than here.
Vanilla WoW was a completely different thing, most of its time AV was on the pre 1.11 patch which meant a lot more mobs and elites aorund placed so that the map asymmetry was automatically balanced, plus a lot of exploits weren’t known and weren’t exploited this much.
You sure are going far with your hypothesis. How many times has that actually happened? Are you basing the ability to push or not, on the many times it hasn’t been like that? (i.e. the part about “no major objective disadvantage” stuff that you brought up)
Seems more like you’re inflating the impact of the map in that specific hypothesis, while downplaying the impact of the PvP ability itself by basing it on the many, many times Alliance have been playing with the rep farmers and quitters.
Are you in write only mode or what? I’ve described how it works: shorter reinforcement route only matter directly next to SH, if alliance wants any progress, they need to split up, while horde can go in one zerg group.
Have you even played Classic AV on both factions? Have you ever played Vanilla AV outside Classic? You don’t know the basics, but here you are, making false stupid claims that have no base in reality.
But whatever, blame the map if that makes you feel good. You are wrong and delusional though.
I know for a fact, based on years of experience, playing several different version on different servers, both faction, also in Classic (I’m grinding exalced as alliance right now, again). The reason Alliance are losing so much in Classic AV is NOT due to map balance. It’s the reward and queue system.
Anyway, I’m gonna prove it soon. We can play war games and settle this and prove once and for all how balance or unbalanced the map is with randomized teams from the same faction fighting in AV.
My claim is this, the MAIN reason Alliance are losing so much in Classic is not map balance. It’s the queue and reward system and the fact that alliance are more pve focused in general.
He is more or less making the same argument that I made further up in this thread, in fact I took some ideas from him. The basic idea is that alliance rankers abandoned AV when they couldn’t premade anymore because they need to do WSG/AB to be competitive in the ranking system. On horde it’s different because of queue times… Ofc, the win rate made alliance rankers leave even faster and made horde rankers join more, but it was nowhere near what it is now.
Since there is no proof (win rate is not actually proof of anything and because teams are so imbalanced in AV today it is hard to even judge the map imbalance now) you are also just saying that you know better. Both are good reasons for the state of AV and none of us can really prove which actually is the main reason. However, I would say that without the honor system and queue difference where you compete against your own faction it would probably never turn as bad as it is now. If the map was balanced better, hmm, I don’t think it would actually matter much as long as we still have that honor system and queue difference. Too bad they changed BOTH the honor system and the map in TBC, lol.
OP is oblivious to the fact that he has been playing against 20 active players in AV. It’s comical. No wonder they added a fake pvp event in bfa for those type of players.
Quite shameful that Horde has such players that lack any mechanicals/strats required for AV. Winning as 40 zugzugs vs 20 good people isn’t a good show when the map favors you in every smallest way that is imaginable and we are at half-strength.
There is proof enough why your queues are longer than ours and why we lose more often. No one on Alliance side will ever say something like, “I win 75% of my AVs.”.
Simply fixing the honor gain from it and the map would solve the issues, but nah, Blizz favors Horde more anyways.
Honestly they wouldn’t even have to change the map. Just changing the way respawns work would be enough. For example sending Horde that die when IB is softcapped to FW instead of the cave, sending Alliance that die when SP is softcapped to AS instead of the cave and for the love of god send Alliance that die at SF to SH instead of AS.
"The reason Alliance lose 100% of all AV pugs is that they don’t defend SH GY "
This is the topic’s title and I’ve written a detailed description how the fight goes at SH GY and what tactical options alliance really has (not much).
And his answer was about how much more he played AV than me, so he knows better.
Yes, well, he is right that you can’t really base it on the current state AV is in where the horde team is stronger 99% of the time. I’m not going to argue about what is the best tactic because I don’t know, but for sure what alliance is doing isn’t working. Maybe there is a proper response from alliance and maybe not, but I really doubt they have tried everything.
If the horde team is stronger 99% of the time, there’s nothing that alliance can do anyway.
I’m not saying that I know the best tactics either because there’s none, that’s the whole point of the unbalanced map.
And “be twice as strong than your opponent” is not really a strategy, since an individual who sign up for a pug BG has no control over that.
So to summarize it: alliance pug has no chance, because horde team is always have better geared players, but even in rare cases when the team setup rnd favors alliance there’s no chance of winning because the map unbalance makes it impossible anyway.
So afk-ing and rep farming is currently the best tactics that alliance can do in AV.