I have been a BG leader for some time. From the private servers I played WOTLK and TBC on, to now - in wow classic. Yes I know I am on a PVE server, because I can play 2-3 hours per day at most and I anticipated phase 2 will come out before I hitcap 60. I also didn’t remember I can’t switch to a PVP server once phase 3 comes out, so I am stuck here - oh well big deal. Lets get onto the topic.
My experience as PVP-er in WOW and some critical thinking and analysis of the map - has led me to some conclusion about AV and why it is ruined for alliance at the moment.
Before I begin, I realize Hordies will start to talk “sh*te” that allys are bad, awful etc. etc. and while that may be true - in current retail wow the highest rated pvp players in the top 100 are always ~50/50 split between alliance and horde, so trust me - there are good players on both sides!
Also - hordes, realize that you had a 49% winrate in AV when you cryed about allys being able to premade, so if we have a 15% winrate now, we deserve to be heard, so please don’t start hating, but maybe discuss what Iam talking about. I am pretty certain that you realize that it is not normal for alliance to lose 8 out of 10 games in AV - and lose badly, no matter how bad alliance is at pvp. At least somewhere, somehow a bunch of bad hordes should group up more than 15% of the time…
A lot of people from the horde side have tried to make the arguement that the intangibles are screwing over alliance. Things like - give-up mentality, whining, AFK’ing / losing on purpose etc. etc. I absolutely agree that alliance players like to whine, but so do hordies. You whined a bunch about facing premades when we could premade. People like to whine - so do I, although I try to not do it as much. However when you have a 83% winrate for hordes in AV there is obviously a bigger problem going on.
I have led over 100 AV’s just in classic so far. Before the changes I had a descent ~69-70% winrate as a leader and an overall 51% winrate premading. So basically I would win leading 7/10 games, but it would balance out when other peeps would lead - probably due to luck most of the time, not my immense leading skills. To be honest ~5 weeks before the change the meta - RUSH DREK was impossible. Hordes found out that if you whipe even just 25% of the alliance players by zerging into them, and trap them, you can win the game, as we have 0 gravyards south and we will wipe eventually and be born back at stormpike.From my experience 9/10 games that ended up with allys wiping meant a loss for alliance, no matter how hard we fought to regain ground from stormpike. Remember that statistic I will come back to it.
Because of that exact statistic I don’t believe the horde starting cave is an issue. Being a bit closer means allys are on the defending foot at the start, but that isn’t that bad. It means we should have an initial battle and in general, that isn’t so bad. So the starting cave is not the issue in my book its a PVP BG after all. Because hordies figured it out, alliance had to start doing the triangle strategy - taking all towers, moving slowly throughout the map - play it how it is supposed to be played. This allowed the horde to pull off a 49% winrate overall, which isn’t that bad if you think about it.
Now the changes occured and because you - the playerbase is a lot better than in vanilla, we could actually see how big the map imbalances are. On even footing we have one side dominate over 70% of the time… that is insane - absolutely insane. No matter how good / bad alliance players are, these are just odds that show something isn’t right.
As a BG leader my winrate has dropped down to 12%. I am probably going to leave the game if I am honest, it just isn’t any fun at the moment.
As a person who has played the game a bunch I would like to talk about the problems I see for the alliance faction, and why that happens. I will leave intangibles behind, and focus on what seems really unfair as map progression, and where I see the teams that I lead struggle against impossible odds. I will go progression by progression and hope you can follow along. Hordes I am certain you will realize and gain a better understanding as well, as to why you are no longer losing in AV. Lets have a civil discussion and not a sh*tstorm of people shouting at eachother that the opposite faction is bad. I concider myself an OKEY player, and if more players like me leave - it will become pretty old pretty soon in AV for you too hordies. So lets find a way to fix this rather than call out names and hate on each other.
1. Stonehearth vs IBGY disatvantages
See I have no problem with hordes arriving to mid first, because at the end of the day the story goes, that the dwarfs are trying to defend the valley from the horde pushing from the south. It makes sense in the lore. We can’t have a battle if we don’t have an agressor, so we surely need that.
The problems begin after the battle. If alliance win, and in my groups that happens 90% of time - the first battle that I lead (as I often defend balinda) we win it. We most often get to Galv, and in 80% of cases kill him. Afterwards hell begins for us. See IBGY has several unique advantages for the horde:
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Hordes don’t need to go through the flag to get out of the GY. They just dump down and go streight down. Well this alliviates the choke-point. When hordes push SHGY we are just choked out with nowhere to go.
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IBGY flag is facing south, and only a narrow passageway close to IBTW gets there. So this is a perfect choke-point for the horde. You can sandwitch us in the zone where the archers are shooting us, because you can drop from your GY down and push our backline. The next wave of horde respawners will push towards the IBGY flag and we often wipe. Now even IF we manage to not wipe and cap IBGY usually the last team of born hordies have jumped down already and are choking the IBTW passageway. The reason that is so effective is because while defending the flag -we cannot see that passage way and we cannot effectively defend IT And defend the flag as well. If we start chasing the “chokers” the hordies from FWGY will recap IBGY and if we stay at flag - other allies cannot pass, even if they go in groups of 10! So we are choked out - and we lose the battle no matter what we do. Furthermore getting from FWGY to IBGY is quicker than from SHGY, because allys from SHGY need to go through that passage way (the choking point) and they arrive at lower resources (hp/mana) since the archers have shot them a couple of times, even if there are 0 hordes there (which btw NEVER happens)
Now lets have a look at SHGY:
Hordes have 2 paths up from both sides of balinda - so no effective way to choke you out. You can push into respawn spot, and we have nowhere to go! Furthermore, even before you push - you can choke respawners out, with AOE spells, and we have no way to drop down and come arround from the back, or choke the revived hordes from IBGY which are trying to get there. It is an face to face battle with allies having the disatvange of being in a narrow pathway. There are no archers on your backs, no choke points - nada. There is just no way to survive a consistant push - especially when we are born in groups of 10. And when we die - its a 15-20 second LONGER path to get from Stormpike GY to SHGY, as opposed to being a shorter or similar distance as it is from FW to IBGY. This means that every ally grop that arrives - an equivalent of 1.5-1.7 horde groups of 10 people arrive at SHGY to fight. That is just unfair and we have nothing to do, but get pushed back!
So far - we get choked out at your GY and we get choked out at our GY. And it isn’t looking good for us. We can’t advance, we can’t defend properly. It is really hard to get IBGY, but keeping it for 5 minutes is even more impossible, unless 20 people managed to pass in the initial push.
The problem is - it gets worse as we dive further in.
Icewing Bunker Vs. Towerpoint
Next choking point is ICEWING BUNKER! See when you take SHGY there is not much we can do to take it back again. Simply because ICEBLOOD is closer than Stormpike. Not on the map, but remember how you can drop down from ICEBLOOD and go streight, where as we need to circle arround a huge hill to get arround from Stormpike? Yep - we travel ~15-20 seconds more than you do, so by the time we arrive at the battle, you have had ~15-20 seconds more to push us back and defend SHGY! Meaning the longer the battle continues the more YOU WILL push back rather than we can advance, because by the time 1 of our groups of 10 arrives, you have 1.7 groups of ten arrive, so in 10 seconds you will have 10 more people than we do there. As time progresses, you just overwhelm us.
Towerpoint is a potential choking point for the alliance. The biggest difference is that FWGY is a lot closer to IBGY than Stormpike is from SHGY. From Frostwolf you can arrive a couple of seconds sooner to crossroads than you can from Stonehearth to Iceblood. So in essence we are fighting spawners vs spawners at Crossroads, as its supposed to be, but we are fighting at a dissatvantage if Hordes take SHGY. Now lets get into the smaller dissatvantages of that zone.
See at Crossroads, you have 3 ways to get in - through Tower Point, through the pathway and through the burned down tower. You can continuously pressure the flagpoint at IBGY through casters at the burned down tower, and you can continuously pressure tower point through the outside. So if alliance are fighting at crossroads and a group ot 4-5 people jump from the burnt tower, we need to retreat to wipe you, or you might recap the GY if we continue fighting. By the time we have dealt with you - crossroads is back in your possesion and we need to push again into you - until we get IBGY. If we let you by, you will choke us at the chokespot, so that isn’t an option either.
At Icewing Bunker, as a contrast we have not 3, but only 1 way to get in. We can’t defend it from outside as you have the highspot on the bunker and we are going up a hill. We can’t push to take back SHGY from anywhere else except the narrow pathway next to the bunker. It is another CHOKING point that cannot be won.
Combining all that with the fact that our GY is further away than ICEBLOOD Gy is means we can’t defend it at all.
Stormpike vs Frostwolf
If alliance reach frostwolf gravyard we usually take it. Now frostwolf is as close to a fair battle as it can get. Its an open space, you respawn and push into us and we try to push back. Noone is sandwitched, we just have a battle through the forrest. Usually froswolf is not as defended if we reach it, so we take it by the sheer number of people that we have, I wouldnt say its by skill as i don’t know - thats an intangible I don’t want to talk about. Now lets compare it to Stormpike.
Stormpike has a corridor to the flag. You are born at a chokepoint again. The problem is, the advantage of the mountains are not to the people defending, but to the attackers. Horde can go up the cliffs and up the hills and start choking us more than we can choke them out because all the climbing spots face to the south. We can’t climb up the hils from the north and baricade the mountain - at all. While we get slaughtered, remember this is the 4th choke-spot so far for us, compared to 1 for the horde. Also adventurious hordes start to backdoor our base and take our bunkers while the others just farm us at the Stormpike respawn point. We are again on the backfoot and getting choked out.
The only saving grace you could say is the bridge. By the time you reach it though, we are born in the starting zone (the cave) and morale is low. Most people try to push south to get a couple of leightaunants before we lose. Even if we try to recall we cant as you usually have rogues waiting outside the cave to gank respawners who are alone. If we were to spawn at base when you take Stormpike - then the bridge could have saved us for a bit, but we don’t… and its a loss.
I think something should be done with the layout of AV. It is not fair to have 5 choking spots as a horde player, and have only 1 as an alliance and that being Crossroads. And even if we are worse players than the horde (which I doubt that you can make as a claim, but okey) we still should be able to get at least 4/10 games on average, and we should be able to fight back on an even planefield. In my mind Blizzard just ruined AV for the alliance, and a bunch of PVP players will just leave the game for good. I am probably one of them. I believe that premading allowed us to communicate as alliance and we were able to OVERCOME these shortcommings by having a small advantage of our own. Remember when I said that once we wiped south and came back to Stormpike we can’t do anything done further then that even as a premade vs a pug. Well there are 2 chokepoints between Stormpike and SHGY, so being in a premade, just doesn’t give enough of an advantage.
I hope this gets fixed soon, or I will go back to playing something else… I really hope we can get an even planefield and I want for both factions to have fun. Surely an 70+% winrate for one faction is not fun… and its approaching 80% fast.
I hope we can get some good discussions going on - enough of that blameculture BS, and alliance and horde fighting over who is better. We have good players on both sides. Lets get some ideas going on how to make it fun for both sides too!
Peace out!
- Bubblez
