f13.net

PvP is skill, PvE is lol scripted stupid mobs
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=1295819659&sid=1&pageNo=10

The "scripted" encounters are as random as what you find in arena:

Warrior - resto druid.
Warlock - resto druid.
Warlock - shadow priest.

Rinse and repeat, this is the fantasious and diverse arena scenario.

Well, in 3v3 it's warlock + priest + healer, so much different, yeah!

In 5v5 it's warrior, shaman, pally, priest + random. Here, we found the "you never meet the same combinations"

I find more diversity at doing Archimonde than at doing 2v2 and 5v5 (played 3v3 too little to make myself an idea).


Enjoy raiding for what it is, get over it and go kill bosses. PvE is fun
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=1380898258&postId=13807241335&sid=1#35

Enjoy raiding has a steep price. In arena "terms", an identical PvE experience would mean:

- Place NPC near the arena NPC
- Put options in that NPC like the arena NPC options: you choose your preferred instance, no attunements asked.
- Then you select the exact boss you want to do, skipping the others and the lower instances
- You are instantly teleported inside the raid instance, before the boss, no booooring trash to kill first.
- You are handed free mana when buffing, you are handed flasks and consummables for free of course
- You failed. You get 300 "PvE points" for that week. No repair cost.
- You succeed. You get 900 "PvE points for that week"
- You leave the instance. You go to Area 52. You choose your PvE weapon. No competition, no random chance at never seeing it in months.

This is equivalent PvE to arena PvP.

Well, excluding the fact you still have to stay there for 4-5 hours and with 25 people of course


"LOL skillz0rz play for fun killing bosses not for the gear"
Does it really hurt PVEers that people have PVP epics? Does it hurt PVPers that people have PVE epics? Or is it all down to e-peens?
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=1295819659&sid=1&pageNo=11

Those arguing about "doing PvE for the fun of killing the boss" as excuse for arena free gear are playing the wrong game.

THEY should quit WoW and go play a first person shooter, for the frags.

The others, correctly, pay a *RPG* game. RPG games are about improving *YOUR* character and his stats.

RPG = You like to improve your character over time, there's *pleausure* (call it e-peen) at doing it, and you are right at wanting pleausure because you are indeed playing a RPG game.

Since WoW is quite limited, the only way to improve character at max level is gear. No castle, no statue, no "Illidan Destroyer Gazebo" to put in your garden. Just and only gear.

Hence if you want to RPG and improve in this RPG, the only way is gear.

Hence, those willing to improve in gear are right, the others talking about "the fun" (which indeed is a part of the RPG) as pure intangible success are wrong.

For those wanting intangible success, non lasting "pleausure", there's CS, Quake and so on. RPG players, and WoW is a MMORPG want tangible and lasting improvement for their character *in addition* to adventuring around.


PvE is for killing bosses and have fun at it
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=1380898258&postId=13807241335&sid=1#35

Despite we are a decent guild (Illidan down and stuff), since S1 we have issues at recruiting classes, expecially the "easy mode arena" classes.
We had to resort at seeking and getting people cross realm but even this is over now.

Just, no dog wants to PvE any more. It's just not worth the effort for everyone who wants to have more than just PvE.

Once you are done with a boss, you leave and suddenly are in a pure PvP situation (PvP server players), be it at grinding or doing dailies or arena or battlegrounds all you meet are PvP situations.
You and your imba 10k mana, 6k hp healing set WILL be destroyed by the first random.
You and your imba raid holy spec WILL be devastated and violated.

So, sure, you get happy for the 10 minutes of a new boss kill (becomes boring grind from the next week onwards). All the rest but those 10 minutes suck royally.

For the average raider:

PvE spec sucks at fun and you only scream when you are easily crippled by a blues random.
Grinding in PvE spec sucks
Repairing for 50g per raid sucks
Buying 2 flasks, 20 mana pots, elixirs and oils per raid sucks
Arena in PvE spec sucks, and respeccing every day is impossible if you don't play 12 hours a day.
PvE gear is pointless outside instances. Oh yeah *for some classes* you can grind motes fast, yay.
You revel with your PvE gear... oh wait, the photocopy of you standing nearby (with a sligthly different tint, yeah!) got a better weapon for PvE than you and doing PvP only.


How did arena ruin PvE
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=1380898258&postId=13807241511&sid=1#42

Go back some months.

- Middle S1: becomes evident that doing arena is the way to go, better PvE weapon, almost as good set for some classes as PvE.
- The 25 players finished Gruul (the nerfed version of course) but now crashed in Magtheridon. Progress died for weeks, many quit.
The promise: you get unlocked for next 25 men and you get some lousy T4 chest.
People trickles away incessantly, both going for arena or to enter the one guild that downed Magtheridon. Getting new people is HELL: they must fight against the worst idea in years, trials of the Naaru aka trials of the guild officers.
There's no words to describe the infinite pain at getting a new recruit doing all the heroic unnerfed SL, SH on timer and so on.

- S2 comes, guilds still stuck on Magtheridon so much that Blizzard has to remove the attunement and even then 30% guilds ever killed it.
- S2 comes, your guild still stuck on Magtheridon while S2 gear is HUGE. People keep trickling away, incessantly.
- Your PvE hunter friend quits and rerolls warlock for 2v2, your mage friend rolls warrior for skillheraldic activities.

And nowadays, you can be an Illidan guild all you want, you won't get new (capable) people fighting to join any more.
If we had not to constantly replenish people, regrind with them, re-attune, re-do low instances for them etc every other week, we'd killed Illidan 2 months ago.


Why arena gear opportunity cost >> PvE gear
Even admitting arena would be hard (LOL yes it is at 2k rating not at 1500 yet you get everything at 1500 and at S3 you'll just pay a boost), arena gear is:

- powerful. Like the best PvE gear
- useful. Unlike the best PvE gear. Basically PvE gear is worthless but in 25 men, you remove it and put up arena gear the second you zone out and then go in outworld / grinding (ganking) / arena / battleground with PvP gear.
Unless you are so idiot to use your "imba" 10k mana, 6k HP healing gear to grind outdoors and face the dire consequences, on all the possible ways.

Moreover, being in PvE spec sucks for everything in game bar 25 men raiding.

Basically, PvP gear covers and is useful for the whole game except (but it's still decent for some classes) 25 men, where PvE gear but not weapons, is better.


Arena gear is so good compared to vanilla WoW PvP gear that was inferior to raiders', you had to raid or die
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=1381188254&postId=13807241022&sid=1#37

Would have been so easy to fix that.
Just provide "next season" vanilla WoW PvP epics that would be balanced with AQ40 and Naxxramas.

Instead they broke all with this dual gearing system, with broken resilience (affecting classes and even specs in vastly and unbalanced ways - crit builds anyone?).

And still, had to provide S1 - S2 - S3 else we'd be back to the very same issue (PvP gear being gimped vs PvE gear) despite resilience and all the TBC crap.

Basically they added a new level of "complexity" and broken-ness on top of the only fix needed: update PvP gear thru the months.


I took 1 week to get 452 PvE epics but I take 40 weeks to take full S2 at 1500 rating
Grats, you leeched on the efforts of your / another guild and leveraged on their months of expenses and wipes. Now they don't need the drops any more so you get every benefit and gear in one run (if they drop that is).
Grats.
Taking 40 weeks to get full S2: besides it's almost impossible to be SO BAD to stay 40 weeks at 1500 rating (I got above 1600 without even trying to play), after 40 weeks I still only have 4 >= tier 5 armor pieces, you get a full set and weapons. Only 2 tier 5 because I had to earn it with endless wipes, endless daily raids, be so lucky to have the item drop and to have enough DKP to overbid on the always 3-8 competitors.
I had to spend 24,000 gold in expenses and repairs since Karazhan, how much did you spend for your 1500 rating full set?

Last but not least: why should you even get a SINGLE epic in 4000 weeks if you barely floated at 1500? That's the true definition of spineless, deterministic welfare.

The one thing that I am noticing is that through PvP, and even heroic badges, I can acquire equal or better gear than running Karazhan or even Zul'Aman. With some time and effort I could basically gear up a toon to "skip" the 10 man content.

Complete BS.  PVP gear is for pvp and raid gear is for raiding, what the raiders want is being able to dominate in pvp with their raid gear like pre-bc.  

I think they need to seriously re-evaluate respec costs. Blizzard has been talking about making people who aren't specced to tank able to tank, and letting people who aren't specced to grind be able to grind.  This will create all new balance headaches, and the healers will still suck at grinding and the arms/fury warriors will still suck at tanking. I think they should just make it easier for people to be prot for PvE and arms for PvP.

Once again you are comparing pvp gear of a higher tier to lower end pve gear, obviously if you are in a kara guild season 3 gear is going to be a huge upgrade and by the same token if you are decked out in tier 6 pve gear you wouldnt down grade to season 1 pvp gear for pvp.  I pvp and raid, my guild is currently at kael and my 5v5 was around 2150 before we started using it to gear our alts with a 7/3 split and as a hunter i have a separate bag with pvp and pve gear with zero crossover.

WotLK which is probably a holiday 2008 release.

I think you're pulling that Holiday 2008 number out of thin air. There's no way it will take that long. I'm still thinking Summer 08 release, just in time to pick up the kiddies who are getting all that free time out of school. If they wanted it in the holidays they would have pushed for this season, not a year from now.

Did the Vivendi specifically state "WoW Expansion" as the major release, or did they state that "Major Release of Blizzard title - estimated sales 8million"?

Because they could very well release SC2 before the WoW expansion (though there has been little press about that game since the big korean party last summer).

Sunwell probably won't be out until February at the earliest, and unless they go for a late august release of WotLK, that will still only give them a Naxx to BC window for people to do the content. Thus why late 2008 seems most "logical". It also would coincide with the 4th anniversary of the original release.

That is not to say it won't come earlier, but I find it unlikely that it will be out by "kiddies with free time" time.

As a raider, you'll probably come round to their way of caring. They'll nerf the hell out existing end raids to progress more than 1.5% of people into Sunwell. Then if you tarry too long farming the now simpler instances or things don't go well for you in Sunwell, they'll do a PvP-lite giveaway of BT end quality PvP epics before WotLK 71-80 starts dropping superior greens. This pattern should be familiar by now.

The Sunwell is supposed to have a new 5 man dungeon as well, no?

I certainly wouldn't mind a new 5 man to run.

...and? I'm not one of those people who hate other people getting epics or epic-lite. I don't give a shit. I relish the journey to the kill, not the loot itself. After I've cleared a place, my own personal hell is farming it for gear to get to the next challenge. You think they'll put more than 5% into Sunwell successfully? I sure as hell don't, and I don't care.

Doesn't that just imply that you will care about raiding the Sunwell - for the journey to the kill and so that you dont have to farm the shit out of BT et. al. after it is simpler and past its sell-by date?

The question I'd ask is: Would people even bother to do Sunwell if it wasn't itemized?  I would, but I'm betting most wouldn't.   People like a slot machine in their MMO. 

The question I'd ask is: Would people even bother to do Sunwell if it wasn't itemized?  I would, but I'm betting most wouldn't.   People like a slot machine in their MMO. 

Doesn't that just imply that you will care about raiding the Sunwell - for the journey to the kill and so that you dont have to farm the shit out of BT et. al. after it is simpler and past its sell-by date?

It does imply it, but most folks when faced with that choice won't do it.  I'd rather *not* do it afterwards just because it's so trivialized by a few levels/ gear and I like the challenge but I would do it if only to see the bosses and the area.  (BWL had some of the best atmosphere around Chromaggus' room, and I heard Naxx was even better.)  Fuck, I'll still run MC/ BWL if there's pick-up groups, even though the places are useless to me.  (Nobody wants to do Naxx pugs tho.  /sadf.)

RiP on Coilfang Alliance server had 30 people online Saturday night.

Many calls for PvE raiding, goto Gruuls we got enough people on, got enough healers, and tanks on, and DPS.
Raid did not happen.

People were to interested in BGs and Arena, 5v5 won out over 25man raid. Was sad. We were 6 people in guild short of going.

My old guild on icecrown disbanded due to attrition; we were one of the top raiding guilds back in the AQ/Naxx days.

If all you want to do is pvp then you'll want all your gear to have resilience. The vast majority of raid drops are then worthless to you so why bother?

Raiders though can use the arena weapons so they come and get spanked once a week for points to buy a weapon.

Arenas have something to lure raiders. Raids have nothing to lure arena PVPers.

I'm going to solo my gnome rogue to 70 seeing as much as I can (currently 65).  When I'm finished, I'll level a horde character to 70.  Then I'm betting I'm done.  Without 4 other people to play with consistently, there isn't really much hook to this game.  I guess that makes sense... MMO's are all about the social. 

Now... do I play my troll hunter or my cow druid?  Decisions decisions.

I've heard the average life of a raiding guild is six months.  If you beat that, you're doing well.  Unless you have a lot of really close friends together in a guild, ordinary stresses magnify and the members reform into other groups.  I wouldn't be surprised if it was some well-known sociological phenomenon.

90% of the people in my little guild think arena/PVP is too much of a pain in the ass to bother with...a couple of our rogues and one of our warriors are grinding out some weapons but they're not interested in the armor. I think it just depends on the people in your guild really.

As for the PvE game, there definitely seems to be a brick wall in content after you get past Kara/Gruul.

As for the PvE game, there definitely seems to be a brick wall in content after you get past Kara/Gruul.

Also not every class should be wearing pvp gear in the arena, the paladin on the top 5v5 team in our battlegroup last season wore a total of 20 resiliance which came from his pvp trinket, the rest was top end pve gear.  The weapon thing goes both ways though, if you are just starting to pvp you'd be better served getting some ZA weapons and saving your points for armor.

There's a definite step in difficulty and coordination after Kara & Gruul.  In early raids you screw up (and aren't the tank or healer) and you only kill yourself.  In fights like Magtheridon, Astromancer, Voidreaver you screw up and you're killing a good 4-5 other people.  You get a glimpse of this in the actual Gruul fight, but it gets worse.

For example, Mag's fight has 5 cubes that need to be clicked at the same time to stop him channeling a blast wave that will kill everyone in the room.  If one person can't get to their cube or is too laggy to click, everyone dies.  It's also not as simple as "just reclick"  because it puts a debuff on you so that you can't click again for 2 mins.  So you're rotating teams of 5 people out every other blast wave.

The step in coordination is something they won't be able to nerf to make it more accesible. At least not without removing the debuff itself, which is what makes the coordination so required.

It might be true. This one, however, lasted way back into EQ and had run for years and years. I joined in WoW nearly after launch and raided for over a year with them and quit not long after TBC came out. Eventually, they just couldn't field the numbers or get the interest anymore. From talking to people who are still in the game, it really seems to be a pattern.

I believe they removed the debuff last patch.

I'm going to solo my gnome rogue to 70 seeing as much as I can (currently 65).  When I'm finished, I'll level a horde character to 70.  Then I'm betting I'm done.  Without 4 other people to play with consistently, there isn't really much hook to this game.  I guess that makes sense... MMO's are all about the social. 

Now... do I play my troll hunter or my cow druid?  Decisions decisions.

Nebu, your post has been bothering me, but I don't have the experience to give you an exact answer.  I get the sense that there is a large amount of solo friendly content even at the level cap.  I haven't played a lot at the level cap though, since I have alt-itis and I tend to end up in raiding guilds for some reason, and end up skipping a lot of it.  But I keep finding out new things to make a mental note to do once I get to 70.  Things like all the quests you didn't do as part of the leveling process (especially Netherstorm and SMV), daily quests, rep "grinds" which are mostly not grinding nowadays, playing the AH, fishing, crafting, then of course arenas and BGs.

I strongly believe arena gear is welfare epics, and season 1 bought for honor points is easy mode no respect earned.

I'm not looking for 5-7 nights of raiding 3-5 plus each time.

I would offer one further and that is the slow shift to a five and ten man emphasis. You can now get gear equal to tier 5 in ten mans and with heroic badges. They're launchinig with four, I think, ten mans when WLK hits. More Heroics in WLK. I've said it once but I'll repeat myself: they're not dumb and everybody better be really, really worried at what market research they have that's pushing them to change they're strategy. Everyone's busy making a WoW clone based on now when Blizzard is already shifting gears.

So far, in my limited experience in ZA (very limited, we threw together 10 folks just to see inside one day) it's a giant tease for my Balance druid. "Hey, this place it outdoors, feel free to root. Oh BTW, anything not root immune has ranged attacks ><"

At least I can hibernate the bears!

The reality is that smaller is better in terms of raiding. I don't really have more fun raiding in 25 mans than I do in 10 mans. However, it's a hell of a lot easier to get a 10 man functioning correctly, and everyone with 10 hours a week to play in 2 hour increments could pulll it off if they had a medium sized guild.

The only problem so far with the 10 mans is the ridgidity of class assignments. ZA went a long way to improve this where Kara failed.

But I do care about wretched little miscreants who afk or purposely fuck up the battlegrounds that I'm playing in.  That really bothers me because it affects me directly.  Those afkers are leeching off my effort.

They ruined AV. They should revert AV and take the reinforcements idea and move it to WS where it would actually help with endless turtles.

To fix AV they just need to make people who get the AFK debuff get booted from the BG and get deserter.

[snip]

Fun Fact: Before Balinda's waterpet, rogues could solo her.  :uhrr:

And it is, in my experience, biased in favor of the Horde now because of the way reinforcements work.

The map has never been biased towards the horde. That is typical alliance whiny-mode.

It's not a conspiracy. Most people just want the best honor per hour and that's not in AV

If AV still gave the best honor per hour most people would ignore the few calling for boycotts and pour back into AV.

Stuff like this makes the point of battelgrounds worthless, stop min/maxing and just play the damn game for fun. Not trying to cause a fight but, I believe you are absolutely failing the game with attitudes that exist like that.

Why give best honor per hour, why not just hand you when you log in all your welfare epics.

Stuff like this makes the point of battelgrounds worthless, stop min/maxing and just play the damn game for fun. Not trying to cause a fight but, I believe you are absolutely failing the game with attitudes that exist like that.

On my battlegroup, I think only EoTS is even close to 50/50 (still tilts Horde). I understand Horde queue times are rising steadily as Alliance bails on AV, and people only hit the other BG's for the daily quests or tokens. Unless they change honor costs to reflect massive nerf in honor from AV, Alliance won't be queuing for tokens either. Then the Horde will just be scratching their asses waiting for a BG to pop as the Alliance fucks off and finds something more fun to do.

I mostly do an EoS now and then for fun on Stormstrike and the horde in EoS just keep getting worse. The other day alliance won 8 of the 10 matches I played. Even on bad days we usually win more than half lately.

I can't decide if the well geared horde just never leave AV now, or if it's that they get so much honor in AV now that they're already maxed on their mains and we're seeing their under geared alts out farming tokens.

Bullshit. I notice you didn't try to argue the point, though.

The SH-SP road is a natural choke point, and it keeps the Alliance easily bottled up while the Horde reinforcement counter ticks to the win -- because Horde steamrolls SH bunker and Balinda. Alliance can't the bunker and Balinda (especially as Balinda is so freaking easy to kill), and really can't effectively defend SH against a determined Horde push.

Horde reach SH bunker before Alliance can reach Galv, and the Iceblood GY/Bunker/Galv setup is easy to defend as a whole -- especially as two people can force an Alliance wipe on Galv.

The setup of the map, coupled with the way reinforcements work, gives the Horde a huge advantage. Furthermore, Horde tactics pretty much dictate the game -- and a now common ending is something like 500/600 Horde honor to less than 100 Alliance honor.

You can call it "Alliance whiny mode" if it makes your epeen grow. I suggest enjoying the fuck out of it as Horde while you can -- it's not going to last longer. Until then, expect your queue times as Horde to continue to grow.

Which is frankly a point I made prior to the latest changes, that if the battlegrounds as a whole aren't at least changed to do rough gear-matching 

I've come around to thinking that Blizzard should merely issue gear points to people for being logged in, no matter what activity they are doing.  But then, I don't respect anyone for their gear - the biggest douchebags I've met often have the very best gear. 

I don't care about welfare epics or easy mode or how someone "earns" their gear or if they buy it off eBay.

But I do care about wretched little miscreants who afk or purposely fuck up the battlegrounds that I'm playing in.  That really bothers me because it affects me directly.  Those afkers are leeching off my effort.

Is Balinda easier than Galv? Sure. Is galv that hard though?

All of the problems with the map can be overcome by using a strategy *cough*defend SH GY and Icewing bunker*cough* that overcomes those deficiencies. The idea of fighting other players in AV is so foreign to most players these days, especially alliance, that they just wig out and cry "the map is imbalanced to horde". If the map was seriously imbalanced I would not have been in 5 consecutive winning AVs as alliance where we won handily with all the towers capped. The key difference in those games vs. the dozen or so I have lost since the changes?: Defense at the SH GY / Icewing bunker.

Blizzard has ALWAYS done sly little things to bait people who wouldn't otherwise be interested into getting involved in PvP.

Blizzard has ALWAYS done sly little things to bait people who wouldn't otherwise be interested into getting involved in PvP.  Making PvP gear attractive to PvE players is just a more blatant version of that philosophy.  WHY they do this, I can only speculate as my crystal mind-reading thingy broke last week.  My guess is it's probably a mixture of reasons having to do with players providing content for each other plus a desire to reduce queue times and such.  But THAT they have always done this is very apparent, at least to me, my wife, and several friends, all but one of which never PvP, have NO interest in PvP, and thus are very annoyed every time Blizzard tries to trick/tempt or otherwise manipulate us into a PvP situation. 

That said, I find it ironic as well as both sad and amusing that in this particular case, Blizzard's attempts to get more people involved in PvP actually has a negative impact on the play experience of the people who really want to PvP!  Generally it's to the benefit of the wolves to recruit as many sheep into their game as possible.  But in this case the sheep can, in very limited circumstances, ruin the play experience of the wolves instead of vice-versa.  Good for them!  But too bad the team/sport PvPers get screwed the worst in the process.

The lesson I wish Blizzard and all MMO developers would learn is, don't try to force (or "encourage" or "trick" or "convert" or any other manipulation)  PvE people into trying PvP.  It's like trying to teach a pig to sing.  It's doomed to fail and will only result in annoying the pig and frustrating the teacher! :lol:

Revenge of the sheep. Many people play the game for different reasons. I play to see and kill new things, others play to maximize their potential gear for their character. Others play for the fun of PvP. Snidely telling one group they are playing the game wrong just makes you look like an asshole.

er, what?  The only group I claim to be playing the game wrong are the wolves who get their jollies ganking sheep, something that really only barely applies in very restricted circumstances in WoW. (see numerous other debates about PvP where the terms wolf, sheep and gank are defined)   Oh, I guess I'm also willing to say the sheep who find themselves compelled to participate in PvP out of lust for the shinies only available there but who do it in a way that deliberately ruins the fun for everyone else there for the PvP are playing the game wrong.  How that makes me look like an asshole escapes me, but oh well. I think that term is more appropriate for anyone who gets their jollies by deliberately ruining someone else's day in a frikking game.

I dont see how defending sh could possibly ever help.  You can't defend the bunker, horde get there first and their gy is almost as close to it as ours so if you make it a turtle at sh gy they win.  Theres no way alliance can get a single horde target if you start killing horde at sh gy and sending them back to ib gy, its simply impossible.  The only alliance wins ive seen lately is when the offense rushes ibgy before galv and manages to hold it and theres enough defense at sp gy to hold off the horde o until we manage to catch up to their two tower advantage, nothing else works.

Alliance should get sf at the start, that would make things even.

Yeah, it's really the 500-600 to 0 wins that are doing it. Who the fuck queues for that shit?

You can't even fix this by doing a random map-flip, as everyone will bail if they're in the Alliance starting position. What a clusterfuck. AV isn't worth the time anymore, and it was the ONLY place for decent honor to buy gear. Trying to grind out enough honor for the BG gear in WSG, AB, or EOTS isn't really an option.

Blizzard -- at the very least -- needs to either nerf Galv or serioiusly fuckiung buff Balinda, move the Alliance starting position up some to mirror the Horde's -- and either totally rearrange Galv/IB or totally rearrange SH/Bunkers/Balinda.

The way the map is set up, all the funnels and conflict points favor Horde until you hit the bases proper. But since you don't need the bases to win, it's meaningless. So if the battle is bottlenecked at IB, the Horde can defend the GY, the tower, and Galv (jesus the disparity between Galv and Balinda is really obvious now) without having to move very far in any direction. The Alliance, on the oither hand, has no hope in hell of trying to defend Balinda, SH, and the bunker. They're too far apart with too many paths to each.

Actually im pretty sure that they removed a ton of useless stuff that was off to the sides on the old av, there was a complex series of caves on both sides of the field of strife that arent there anymore.

The Harpy and Yeti caves? Those are still there unless your talking about something else. They removed all the NPC trolls from the zone, used to be little villages everywhere.

The way the map is set up now, you have to NOT SUCK TO WIN.

Seriously, AV is fine. Hear me, FINE. As in, NOT IN THE STATE OF BEING UNFINE. In order to hear me actually substantiate this, you can read below.

my most recent forays into AV have ended up about 50-50 wins/losses.  But it's really not much fun. 

It's intended to be a 50/50 win-loss ratio. If horde truly did have a huge advantage, then the win-loss ratio would be skewed in their favor, which it apparently isn't.

It's intended to be a 50/50 win-loss ratio. If horde truly did have a huge advantage, then the win-loss ratio would be skewed in their favor, which it apparently isn't.

On my server, my most recent forays into AV have ended up about 50-50 wins/losses.  But it's really not much fun. 

After a couple of year of 60:40, 70:30 or 80:20 ratios in the favour of the Alliance, any changes which bring the win:loss ratio closer to parity are naturally seen as favouring the Horde.

There is a site that polls the win/loss through a add-on or some such as well. Digging for it now.


-edit-

Here it be : http://www.warcraftrealms.com/bg_list.php?id=0&lb=7

Dumb question: When I was in beta, the more serious PvP oriented folks tended to play horde in favor of the alliance.  Is this still the case and could this be skewing things at all?

It's not the fact that the horde win in AV. Its that the alliance loses take so long and give so little honor that if you're alliance you get better honor per hour in any other battle ground. Pre patch AV both sides got almost the same honor per match, win or lose.

At least when you get rolled in AB, it only takes 60 seconds :)