f13.net

Nobody pee'd in my Cheerios, but last night I waited 48mins and change to get into AV only to be rolled up in <15mins.  Faction doesn't matter (was Horde), but my question is -- didn't they fix the QUEUES? 

I've ping-pong'd so much in and out of WoW that I don't remember when the Queues were supposed to be lessened (start of cross server BG's?) but it just hasn't seemed to have improved in the last 4 weeks of re-subbing.  WSG I find is usually 5-15mins, AB 10-15mins, AV 20mins and counting. Anyone else find this? 

I'm asking b/c I'm wondering if there's something potentially odd with my connection that is dropping me or something to make my position in the queue suck.  I don't know how they rank queue time (FIFO?) but I figured it was dynamic.  Any suggestions?  other than WAR?

Which battlegroup are you in?

EU-Misery has nearly-instant queues.


Looking at the statistics I know my BG is actually pretty evenly balanced population wise. What I suspect the problem to be is horde players queueing for 3/4 instances, thus one person actually sits in 3 queues, slowing entry down for everyone else. This is also why a lot of horde BGs start off at a numerical disadvantage, as a player's slot is held for 2mins, or until they click "leave queue" (which I suspect few do, most will just hit "hide"), thus with a 1min setup, there are a bunch of blocked slots at the start of each BG, being used by people in other BGs. This may be utter bollobks by the way, but it's my strongest suspicion, since census data doesn't suggest that there is any overwhelming population imbalance on most battlegroups, certainly not sufficient to explain a lot of these gaps.

45mins is a bit ludicrous though.

Are you queueing up in a group? "Premade" groups are matched up against other premades by the new queue'ing regime. As a result, there aren't so many premades anymore, and so that queue takes longer to pop.

This is the only thing I could think of, except that I don't think you can queue as a group to AV can you?

My longest wait times in the Vindication Battle Group is usually around 2 minutes.

Stormstrike alliance it's rare to wait over one minute. Often instant.

Damn you all  :awesome_for_real:


Yeah, I usually queue up with my wife as a group (join as group).  Is that a "pre-made"?  Why would that slow us down?

We're on Turalyon, US.

Edit: Stormstrike BG

No, the long queue times kick in when you form a raid and try to queue with 6 or more people. I often do AV with one her person and it's usually less than 1 minute.

You can now. But as Aargh pointed out, it's only if you're in a raid group (6+) that causes the "premade" queueing to kick in.

So if you got in a group with one other person, and it took 45 minutes to get in, that's bad timing and/or a sparse battlegroup.

This is pretty much the reason. There are tons and tons of Horde queuing for BGs now, and not a lot of Alliance anymore. Horde timers are longer now than alliance, which is a complete reversal of the old times.

Most everyone in my guild has WoW burnout so there's rarely more than a couple of us on lately. I see fewer people in general standing around the battlemasters too. So you have less WoW burnout on the horde side? I'd have thought numbers would have been down equally.

The latest has been for Alliance to stealth into Org and snipe from roofs.  I realize this is old hat, but last night was my first time seeing them atop the roofs outside the hall of the brave in the valley of honor.  They were sniping us flagged coming out.  Or at least I got owned on my way to wait on the queue by fishing....

Nightfall Alliance has had unusually 'long' queue times as of late for AV.


Waiting 3-4 minutes these days  :ye_gods:

In our server, we alliance always fail in AV.

We win a bit less than half of the AVs I've been in lately.

But a 10 second queue followed by a loss has to be far less annoying than a 40 minute queue followed by a loss.

 Rampage BG (I'm on Whisperwind) queue times are usually just a couple of minutes. Rarely more than 4. Generally about 1-2 minutes.

As for Alliance winning in AV, well, overall I"d guess it's about 50%, maybe with a slight advantage to Alliance. There's a lot of stupidity Alliance side which usually results in Horde victories, but I've seen an awful lot of undergeared Horde lately as well. If I can get a guild premade team, we'll back-cap and that generally screws the Horde pretty badly. They're not used to seeing that sort of coordination Alliance-side--which is shameful when you think about it. Rampage Horde also tend to like turtles, which could go either way. An uncoordinated/clueless Alliance team will often lose in reinforcements, but an Alliance AV with a premade team or two will roll up a Horde turtle much more often than not.

AV weekend this coming weekend, so this stuff is on my mind...

It's on my mind too.

After last night I started monitoring for when I had a long queue time how people performed.  After 4 tries, and I will generalize, it seems that for players that have long queue times they fail far more quickly than those who had shorter wait.  Stupid theory, and impossible to prove, but when I had a long wait and other people bitch in /bg also about the queue we seem to fall apart very quickly (e.g. running all over, no D, etc.).

Rampage is my primary battlegroup.  Oh lord I hate Rampage as Alliance.  it's always sucked ass, and it's the only BG I'm on where the Alliance consistently loses to either a Horde Turtle or blatant stupidity. Horde's begun pally tanking w/ at least 1 WM and Vann still up.. do we set up a tank before the game starts or ensure the healers are south? No, of course not.  we stand around waiting for both FW towers to cap and then wonder who's tanking and if there's healers.. and hey, how.. *Horde Wins*

Yeah, there's been a lot of that. Usually, though, there's a horde recap team and since no one can be bothered to cap IBGY or reinforce IBT or TP, well...lose.

Horde generally has more premade teams and better coordination. When's the last time you saw a prot pally Alliance side? I can remember...it was three weeks ago and in the Eye. And she was horribly undergeared. I recall one guild AV outing where we backcapped both IW and SH bunkers, massacred about every hordie coming up that road, then lost with only two bunkers capped. We were like...damn, someone had some inspired tanking going on. Alliance simply doesn't field these sort of tanks in AV.

On the other hand a guildy last night was on his prot warrior (T5+ geared) and took on Drek with two BMs up...and won. Pretty cool and I wish I'd been in his instance to see it. Obviously, if you really want to rush Drek with BMs up you'll have to bring your own tanking team as a premade. Counting on the other Alliance just isn't going to happen. I've seen too many AVs lost even with all towers capped because no one could find even a crappy tank. Worse, I"ve had to tank Galv four times this last week as an enhance shaman because our lousy PuG tank couldn't hold aggro. That's simply pathetic--and all too typical.  I did have fun doing it, but stiill...

On Nightfall, the Horde has taken to aggressively back-capping the IB area after we've killed Galv and the bulk of the force has moved on. The thing is, all this seems to accomplish is a delay of the game, since everyone who just got killed at the IB area recaps the IW area in turn.

This is assuming we don't have enough D at the IB area to begin with, which we often do.


So the score will still be the same, we'll still win, but it'll take 30 minutes instead of 11.

/shrug

Last time I saw one was me, the last AV weekend. I'm not horribly undergeared for Prot, though.  Unless you consider anything >T6 undergeared. Been trying to get my priest some gear and honor prior to LK, though, so I haven't played the pally in a while.  Amusingly, there were actually too many tanks that weekend.  I fought for aggro on Galv against a few other pallies and a couple of wars on Drek.  Haven't played WoW in a while either, tho. Too busy getting ready for vacation, whee.

But yes, Alliance never takes tanks into AV, ever.  Even though everyone seems to understand it's a PvE rush, the  plate classes all seem to find it too beneath themselves to even bring a shield.

We just have a druid do it. Always a few ferals ready and able.

Shit, I'll tank galv on my Moonkin.

A good bear is hard to find, though. My last Galv tanking adventure came about when the pheralz drood couldn't hold aggro. Same old song. Shitty players and the shaman gets to tank.  :drillf:

More seriously, I have seen some truly great bear tanks. I just don't tend to see them nearly often enough in my AV instances.

The only issue I see regularly with tanking in AV, is the 2h warrior that thinks he's going to be a hero and taunts off the actual tank for no good reason.

In fairness, he goes down like a sack of spuds.

 :why_so_serious:

Some favorites AV quotes:

• "NORHT!@!!"
• "I gotta quest first"
• "We need SF GY first"
• "We only need 2 more for Bal"
• "Where is everyone?"
• "Where do I spend my honr points?"
• "Offense always w1ns."
• "L2P nub -- go D yrslf"

And the funniest line I heard at prep the other night: "Forgive us Father for the Fail we are about to Commit".   :awesome_for_real: 

Clownshoes.  Utter fools.  Consistently.

Well, if they're protection specced, why would they be there?  You'd need either mediocre PvE tanking gear to handle it (because there is no warrior set of PvP tanking gear, and the pally set of tanking gear is a joke) or some high-end PvP stuff, and you'd be getting mediocre PvP gear out of it.  So you'll get raped repeatedly by anyone on the opposite team for the off chance that you might get to tank the one guy in the instance who needs it (assuming the towers flip and your random healers don't suck etc.) and for this, you'll be rewarded with gear you won't use.

I have a Paladin and a Warrior, both, and running AV prot spec with them is just painful.  Granted, when specced for damage, they're not exactly PvP powerhouses either, but at least they aren't completely useless outside of the last minute of every other battle.

And you're playing hordeside  :awesome_for_real:

Why is running AV prot spec painful?  If your answer is "Because other players waste me" you're doing AV wrong, sorry.  Any AV where I have more than 3-5 player kills is a failure and time is better served /afking and waiting out the 15 min debuff.

Honestly, people trying to kill me when I'm on my Prot Pally is laughable. Not quite as laughable as when I try to kill them, but nearly so. I had a good stay of it recently, when I was gathering up points for my Paladins Season 2 Mace/Shield (some of the best upgrades for a Prot Paladin, especially those who don't do 25's)

Every game was about the same. I would crusader ride myself to Galv, usually be there 10-20 seconds ahead of everyone, begin tanking Galv if no one was around, or if Horde were camping, I would wait for a few more of my side to show up, then begin tanking Galv (its amazing how useless the Galv camping horde can be when Galv isn't loose to wipe out all our squishes). Since I was tanking Galv, he would be in a proper position and would not fear anyone outside the room, which in turn would mean he would be dead in under 20 seconds once everyone piled in.

From there I would head to IB Tower, or GY, or TP, sit on a flag and spam rank 1 consecrate for 4 minutes till it burned. 50/50 on a rogue trying his luck against me. Rogues being super easy to kill as a Prot paladin.

Then I would Crusader my way to FW Keep, doing a drive by on FW GY to train the guards away for some one slower then me to cap. By the time I would reach FW Keep, both FW Towers will have burned, or be dropping soon and RH will have just turned to us, so it's pretty much a Direct line into the keep and begin tanking Drek as soon as I see more then 3 people inside. Once again, since I'm tanking, the stupid fucking wolves will be stuck to me as will any Warmasters that haven't despawned yet, which will prevent them from being dragged outside and resetting Drek. Drek dead in 20-30 seconds.


400+ Honor for Alliance
200+ Honor for Horde
Entire game length, 11-12 minutes.



Now my Prot Pally in EoTS... that was pretty damn frustrating. At least I could be useful by just existing at a node, if nothing else.

You ever have one just stop after about 10 seconds as if trying to figure out why he's suddenly at 50% and you're still at 90%+?  It's hilarious.

All the time.

Visually there isn't anything to separate us from Holy Paladins until you actually engage in combat and Prot Paladins are just so rare in PvP to begin with.  :grin:

I'm on Nightfall, horde on The Venture Co. 

I hate you alliance bastids!  When did you learn how to play AV!?!

From what I've seen so far this weekend, it's still a work in progress.

You simply can't tell Alliance teams anything. They do not listen and/or do not comprehend. Then there's the undergeared factor on both sides. AV is really pretty much an opportunity to gear up with epic items. So you see a lot of folks fresh at 70 thinking this is a viable alternative to running Kara/Gruul's/Mags. In a sense, they're correct, but it's going to be a painful experience. Then there's just simple stupidity, which is in good supply Alliance-side. Some is just new folks learning, but some people just can't be educated. At all. Ever.

The worst two things I've seen regularly repeated this weekend are 1-5 going to Galv instead of doing what they're supposed to and 6-8 disappearing after IBT and TP towers are capped. Worst is the AWOL G8, which should be taking IBGY and breaking up horde attempts to rally near the two towers. Then there's total lack of coherent thought and determination in face of the inevitable Horde turtle. It's mind-boggling and frustrating.

I'm surprised Alliance is able to stay near 50% wins in AV on Rampage. Of course, I'm sure the Horde has it's own issues with idiocy. I've seen a few things they've done that really shocked me as well.

Inevitable Horde turtle ?

I fucking wish.

Our Battlegroup is a complete bunch of Horde retards.  Really.

Alliance kick our butts 95% of the time.

The problem with the whole "group 1 do x, group 2 y" style of direction is that, while it has a noble motivation it ignores many blindingly obvious flaws. Mainly that group composition in BGs is random and horrible. If my priest is grouped with an all-green survival hunter, a fury warr and a couple of mages there's really no way in hell I'm going to either follow them anywhere or care what happens to them unless they have astonishingly good gear. Added to this is the fact that half the time the direction is awful. For instance the whole "Get Mine, LM and stables" mentality in AB always fails unless we sufficiently outgear the opposition to steamroll the horde off BS. Anyone who even thinks that we can ignore BS gets my automatic disrespect.

the other thing that annoys me is when these self-appointed leaders berate some group for not completing an objective they had been assigned, completely disregarding the possibility that the other side countered them. It's like the lone person at FW GY shouting "run north" to everyone stuck at SP GY when there's 15 horde sitting at IB killing the people trying to get through.

Frankly the better strategy is to try and find 4 other good players and make stuff happen. When the best 5-10 players in a BG coordinate they can ruin a disorganised opposition. You don't need a 40-man premade to win AV, 10 will do it easily. Just let everyone else get on with what they want to do imo.

Actually, it is more or less "because other players waste me" (in addition to "trying to seriously tank something with a random cross section of 70s is an exercise in frustration").  How is that "doing it wrong"?  I do AV because I hope to get some PvP gear, and I want PvP gear because it'll hopefully let me PvP at a decent level.  If the Horde is stuck in a fourty minute turtle, that's more fun to me than three "Cap Tower, sit at top of stairs until you see fire, run to Van, win or loose, collect points" style matches, because it means more actual fighting and less staring at a gray flag waiting for it to cap.  Might be not worth as much honor (though since diminishing retuns was removed, it's still pretty nice), but it's way more entertaining.

There are some BGs I cannot stand (like Warsong fucking Gulch), and in there, yeah, I don't care.  If I'm there, I'm just there for the marks.  If we can win, great, if not, hurry the hell up so I can get my marks and get out of there.  But if someone else wants to play "hamstring the druid" for an hour trying to defend our flag, fine, more power to him.  It might cramp my rate of return, but whatever, it's not like I'm in some sort of race to get an S2 set or anything.  What am I going to do once I get it?  More AV, probably.  So I might as well have fun while I'm there.

I'm on Doomhammer, we've known how to play AV since it first came out. The BG Clusters only lowered our old win rate, of like 98%.  :oh_i_see:


I haven't played much on other Battlegroups, but the defining difference between Nightfall alliance and other groups alliance, is sheer stubbornness. Back during that stint where on all the other Battlegroups, the horde was turtling the fuck out of the IB/Galv Area and winning 600-20 Honor games over 30 minutes. On our Battlegroup, two things would possibly happen in that same situation.

1) We would just break the initial turtle attempt and play as normal.
or
2) We would fail to break the attempt, and the Horde would end up with 40 of the most stubborn, dug in and annoying alliance you have ever seen.

The horde would win... eventually, but eventually was well into the hour+ range of time. Sure you'd get one or two alliance whining the ENTIRE time "OMG LET THEM WIN FUUUUCK" but the rest of us would be like "lol shut it, ZERG ON BROTHERS" or a few of us would explain why these horrifying turtle games are required. "If you make the prospect of a turtle so damn horrible, the Horde will just go back to racing, where win or lose, they get way more honor and can go on with their lives in 10-15 minutes."

Suffice it to say, the Horde rarely attempt to all out turtle like that. The only times I've seen it happen, are when you face a Horde Pre-Made AV squad. BWL and one of the 'A' realms on nightfall, Altar of Storms I think, are pretty nasty when they bring in 35 of 40 from their server. There still far more content to just out race us though, with some strong coordinated back capping. What's probably way more demoralizing for them then us, is we still win maybe 30-40% of those PuG vs Pre-made AVs. Or the ones we lose, we still burn 3-4 towers most of the time. Half the time, we don't even know we are fighting a pre-made until the end of the game.


What are the Horde Queue times on Nightfall anyways? For Alliance, anything over 2 minutes is considered 'long', some days its pretty much instant games.

Instant AV.  Other battlegrounds are 3-4 minutes tops, I think.  Can't remember the last time I didn't have an instant AV.

What I've noticed is that the morning non-AV-weekend games are the best for horde.  I don't know why, but my stats for AV are better in the mornings than later in the day.  And I just hate AV weekend, because that's when the people who don't usually play get in there and fuck everything up.

What's your toon's name?  I'm on Merri and Laleche (usually the latter).

Most likely to run across Sturmvogel my Druid. Laser Turkey  :drill:
My Paladin, Seraphia, only shows up when she needs a new weapon/shield.


All the BattleGrounds on Nightfall have 'windows' of awesome and suck for both sides. I find if you do EoTS During the afternoon, it's just non-stop wins for Alliance. Like, 4 cap steamroll wins. The horde don't even get a full compliment of players half the time and its just a massacre.

SRSLY.  :awesome_for_real: Actually it depends on the battlegroup. But Nightfall and Vindication suck for Horde if AV is your thing.

I just recently moved my level 62 PVE druid off Steamwheedle Cartel (Stormstrike) to Earthen Ring (Vindication) and rushed him up to 70 for BG purple collection. Mistake. Should leveled to 70 on Steamwheedle and done the AV weekend there. BG weekend does exaggerate the deficiencies in a faction, and the listed 2-1 victory rate for alliance on Vindication is at 3-1 this weekend. Its making it slow to grind my welfare epics. Meanwhile, over on Stormstrike, its practically reversed.

Still, hadn't done any BGs before this weekend on that character - now have done over 100, have the 27,000 honor kitty mace, and the 14,500 honor hat (and burned some 80 marks on the wolf and the standard).  Might be able to pull out the gloves before the evening is over, provided I don't get another long chain of losses.

On the plus side, it seems like Alliance are hopeless at AB & EotS on Vindication. So that'll make life easier for other stuff.

I had not played in BGs for about 3 months now.  A bunch of my guildies were hitting AV hard this weekend, so I decided to go along.  A group of 5 or less of us would wait anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes to get in.  Most of the time we would win and it would be around 20 minutes.  A few times a turtle happened, which made it go to like 45 minutes, but the honor farming was substantial so it was all good.  It was fun overall.

My queues on Nightfall/Alliance for AV were slow all weekend. 3-4 minutes!  :ye_gods:

queues seem better for me now, played too much over weekend

people still largely retarded.  We kept winning just on numbers


there really needs to be more awareness of the tactics.  I tell the chat for people if unsure to visit the wowwiki AV tactics page -- several people thanked me.  Odd.

I'd be content if people would just watch flags without me babysitting 3 nodes at once.

The only other thing I would ask of them, is to understand WHY we don't cap FWGY right away, and when it becomes irrelevant if we do. They just parrot back the 'talking point' blindly, without any comprehension at all.


Like, if 25 Horde have parked their asses inside FW Keep/Towers, the time for not taking FWGY to prevent a turtle has LONG PASSED.   :uhrr:


I don't even care if they manage to execute the strategy properly or not, as long as they get the base idea of WHY we do it.

Yeah, I have no problem with the folks who rant on and on about not capturing SHGY during the initial rush. It makes sense not to because of the rez mechanism. However, once you have a heavy Alliance defense, and you've got Horde rezzing in the tunnel, it's time to get some graveyards. And when somebody does, you're guaranteed to hear:

[Battleground] [Leetzorz-Some PVP Server]: lol u nubs captured shgy this si why we always lose

I don't know if I've ever even seen Nightfall Horde *not* cap SHGY. Both sides have taken to riding past and ignoring Snowfall lately, too, which just makes me go  :uhrr:. I can't stop myself to get it, I'm needed to tank Galv!  :ye_gods:

In the modern AV, if you're back to rezzing in the tunnel it's game over pretty much. The reinforcements system means you're probably already getting curbstomped and there's no time to turn things around.

I've really grown to dislike the most current incarnation of AV. I wish they would make the honour/hr equivalent in all BGs so I could just do AB and WSG for honour now.

Snowfall is a moot point in 95% of the games. We cap IBGY and engage Galv nearly simultaneously and if we fail so badly at the IB area that we wipe, its better for us to rez at SP/Baldar so we can backcap and turtle the fuck out of everything. A Total failure at the IB Area (complete wipe) means we retake the entire SH Area and the game has a soft reset.

A Partial failure means we hold IBGY and people rez closer regardless. The change to not rezzing in the starting caves till you own NO GY's, lets a handful of knowledgeable players really manipulate their entire side. 

I've won more then one game because the only GY we've held onto was the Relief Hut, so when our Turtle Broke at Baldar, everyone rezzed at the Hut and zerged Drek down to beat the Horde who were still waiting on Towers and Dealing with Marshals. I imagine those games really piss them off. It's also why once the IB/TP Towers Burn and we have the RH taken/contested, we basically abandon IBGY to the Horde stragglers.

No, it isn't terribly surprising no one gives a shit about Snowfall anymore. It's for solo people to cap so they can feel useful.  :grin:



K9, that isn't strictly true. If everyone in the tunnel zergs their main base to defend, they can hold onto those last two towers for a long, long time... and since your enemy was so successful at kicking your ass to begin with, they'll have almost all pushed their way to the front. Which means a much smaller offense can take and hold enemy towers and cherry pick a useful Graveyard to shift your Turtle Defense into all out suicide Offense.

The game will take 2-4x's longer then the 'norm' doubtlessly, but it IS entirely winnable. Don't need super co-ordination either, just a willingness to Shit up Towers for an hour  :oh_i_see:

The reinforcement loss form actual deaths is pretty damn slow, it's almost all tied up into Galv/Balinda and the towers.



I've spent way to much time in AV.  :why_so_serious:


PS. As to why our Nightfall horde cap SHGY? That may be something a anomaly with our battlegroup, since if Alliance actually rez at that GY, we immediately backcap SH/IW Bunkers, instead of trying to rejoin the offense right away. We'll also make an effort to NOT cap the GY itself, since it's a convenient place to farm rezzing Horde. (With the Bonus side effect of keeping them away from Dun Baldar)

Yes, the Alliance on Nightfall have killed the guards, not capped the flag, and farmed the horde as they respawned in small bunches every 30 seconds. The Record is something like 35 respawns before the Horde figured to NOT rez until another wave or two had died to join them. The Average is only like 5-10 respawn waves.

We also gleefully gank the Horde as they ride past the IBGY Ledge while the towers are still being burned. That is a personal favorite of mine.

Horde ganking at SHGY/IBGY is what makes AV fun. Really fun.

A five man premade camping either of these two areas can make hordies' lives a living hell for the duration of the BG. At least until they finally get a real zerg together somewhere and have a serious go at it--which doesn't happen too often. The downside on Rampage is that Alliance defense is often so incompetent that they continually fail to recap DB bunkers, much less SH and IW. There're a couple of reasons for this, but regardless of why you see it over and over again.

Interestingly enough, after AV weekend was over, Rampage Alliance was on a real winning streak in AV. It was curious since the teams I was in seemed very undergeared, yet almost flawless rush/Drek kills were the rule. All I can surmise is Horde was fielding simillar teams with even less experience than we were.

The reason to cap Snowfall is because it usually caps a minute or two before IBGY, and it provides a rez point for the people who manage to die from whatever defense the horde mounts down by RH. Heck about 2/3 of the time, when I leave Galv's room after killing him, we haven't even clicked the IBGY flag yet. Every extra body down there helps when we go to fight Drek; I've had at least 3 losses over the last few days where Drek was under 10% health when we lost the race; if we hadn't had 2-3 people stuck rezzing at DB in the early going, the difference in DPS could have been made up and we win those games. Snowfall is anything but pointless.

We're constantly telling young Hordies not to cap SF so Alliance can spawn mid point and not zerg us from the North.  Surprising how they rarely listen.

Except now those people rez in the middle of no where and don't contribute to they delaying defense at Baldar and you would've lost at 15% instead of 10% since the horde would've gone faster. The horde want us to Rez at SF, so we are out of their way. If you are losing so many people as to hamper the over all offense, then you don't want them streaming in from SF in a congo line, feeding the wipe machine 1 NE Hunter at at time.

Either they Rez at IBGY+ and are immediately useful, or they Rez at Baldar and are immediately annoying for the Horde.

The only truly advantageous thing about SF for us on our Battlegroup, is its pretty close to SH Bunker. It's still maybe a minute out from anything though. Having it capped also means when defense fails, it rezzes in the middle instead of up near FW Keep.

A lot of those people who rez up at DB don't really contribute to defense though, they just ride on south anyway. They're just doing it from twice as far away and have to go through a zerg to do it.

A lot of people also just stand in the cave or don't watch the flag or attack the warrior while ignoring the druid healing him etc... At least at Dun Baldar, they're speed bumps.  :oh_i_see:

They'll also rez much closer if/when all our home GY's are gone and they get sent to a front line GY.



It's not like SF is capped when people die to the initial RH rust to begin with, contested yes, but not capped.

I think you're underestimating the difference even one DPS more on Drek makes.

Not at all, I'm just discounting the amount of relevance Snowfall provides in terms of getting that extra DPS to Drek.

Maybe in the past, but if you've been forced back to the tunnel odds are you're down on towers too, which means you're down on reinforcements. Now while death through reinforcements is slow, its really impossible to make up any deficit. There isn't enough time in the current incarnation of AV to turn things around as you say, if you shift people to zerg offense you'll loose Drek, if you turtle you'll die on Reinforcements. Basically getting sent back to the tunnel is game over these days.

This does of course require some idiot to cap IB or SH GY (from both sides perspective) :p

Snowfall has been pointless for ages now. There was a time when having that extra foothold on the field of strife was useful, now not so much.

As a final point, Horde on Misery have really got their shit together and are using protadins well. I guess Van having two less adds than Drek helps, but in most AVs I do the horde starts on Van when they only have 2/4 or 3/4 towers down and they're winning constantly because of it. For some reason allies cannot pull this together :(

When I'm tanking there I typically will start with 1 warmaster left precisely because Horde is jumping in earlier and earlier. I'm a prot warrior though, so if there are more than 2 I can't really hold them effectively with the kind of PUG dps you get in AV. As it is I'm already usually using my taunt every cooldown in there if I have to tank Drek and a warmaster by myself.

There's another hidden disadvantage for the Alliance there, too, actually - Drek now resets if someone runs the damn dogs out the front door, which happens a lot. Vanndar needs to get over his fear of birds and get some pets or something, so we can all have the joy of some idiot hunter who can't find his feign death button kiting a wolf out the door when the lord is at 50%.  :drill:

The wolves are bloody annoying. In a successful Drek engagement, usually one of two things happen: a feral druid gets with the program and tanks the wolves, or a well-geared dps type like a rogue, fury warrior or enhance shaman (that's me) steps in and tears the miserable curs up.

The main thing is to keep an eye on them and prevent them from getting on the healers. Hunter pets or strong dps should be able to handle them with little trouble. If they can be tanked, great. If not, kill them pronto.

A hunter pet on each deals with wolves no problem. They don't actually hit all that hard and they are pretty easy to kill. My Moonkin will chew through one in seconds.


It is purely the fact they will reset Drek if taken outside. Non-Paladin tank begins on Drek, wolves be line to priest, priest reflexively AE Fear, wolves get sent outside, everything resets, half the raid yells at the non-existent noob that took Drek outside the other half dies to Drek running free while the Non-Paladin tank tries to regain agro.

I'm pretty much hating AV these days.  This is the worst incarnation yet.  I really wish Blizzard would bring back original AV as an option, so that people could choose to play current AV, original AV, WSG, AB or EOTS.

That way, the honor farmers get their honor, nothing is taken from them and those of us who actually enjoyed original AV could still play it.

All 10 of you.

The path of least resistance for honor, alas.

Yeah, as much as I would like that, it just wouldn't work.  I doubt there'd be enough people in an entire battlegroup that want to do oldschool AV 1.0 to keep it running regularly.

I'd do it even if it meant a 2 hour queue.

There are more people than you think who would play.  Some of us actually play battlegrounds for the fun of it.

The secret to doing this is to never grind honor and to not treat it like a job, but like a past time for fun.

On second thought, you're right, maybe there are only 10 of us.

Maybe Blizz should make the Azshara Crater (assuming they ever get to it) into a PvE-race type BG like the present AV. Then AV could be reverted to the Good Old Days for something different to ward off boredom. Or vice-versa. I wouldn't much care, but more options is more better.

At the moment, I'm mostly out of things I need from PvP honor. I'm also a little tired of PvP (honor farming) in general and I rip through the dailys in about an hour or a bit more (depending how much fiddling around I do). I could use something else to fill the wee hours I typically play in. I'd like more badge runs, but at 3am that sort of thing is hard to come by. World PvP is pretty dead on Whisperwind, so anything new would be good.

Back in the day, Alterac Valley only used to open up on Earthen Ring US on Friday nights. Sometimes the battle would last all weekend and the victory would only be achieved by player attrition. In fact the bulk of AVs were won when the other side had too few people still awake. Unfortunately, before Blood Elves, this meant Horde victories were the stuff of legend, since they would run out of players much quicker. Role-players like to play humans and elves and to a limited extent, undead. So if even ER could manage to start up AV before battle groups and Horde elves, there's probably enough people who would play.

If the 'old school' AV battle grounds were to be be comprised of players from all servers in the US, there would easily be sufficient interest for regular games.

I'd be interested in old school AV, but those queue times of old kept me way out of them.  Good or bad, it isn't even possible for me to wait 2 hours, let alone play in them for hours.

In "old AV" 2 hours would have been an incredibly short game.  Like Righ said above, I've seen many an AV that lasted an entire weekend.  As in, Play for 8 hours, go sleep for 8 hours, come back and the same game is still going so you play it for 8 more hours.  And that goes on all weekend.

Yep.  The longest AV I ever participated in from beginning to end was 27 hours, and I know some went on longer than that.  I heard of a 40-something hour one.  That's one even I wouldn't have been able to stubbornly fight through the entire time.  But that's the problem with bringing back oldschool AV.  Even if you liked it back then, the people that will actually queue these days for the 2-6 hours it might take to have it come up, then play for the 20+ hours it might take to achieve victory or defeat are almost nonexistent.  There's probably all of ten of us who both would jump at the idea of going in there and fighting for a full day or more, AND are actually able to.

No, there are enough people. There are even enough people who want it back and are prepared to whine on the boards about it recently:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=7903583043&sid=1&pageNo=1

Its really a matter of whether there are enough people to make it worthwhile for Blizzard's developers to pull the old AV out of the source code archive and compile it up. And when half the planet is prepared to keep paying you not to do anything new, it really isn't. :)

Pardon my ignorance, but the last time I played AV was 6-7 months before TBC came out, and I don't recall any 20 hour battles, much less any that went over 1hr.  What constitutes "new" AV from "old" AV and when was the change made?

AV's had a -lot- of iterations over time.  The NPC's were mostly removed some time before Burning Crusade, but the original AV had many many NPC's everywhere, and they respawned throughout the entire battle.  This allowed a defending force to slow advancment of the enemy.  There was simply no way to ride through and 'race', the best that could happen is if a warlock managed to get all the way to the relief hut with two others they could set up a summon point.  That was about the only time the forces could possibly avoid fighting each other tooth and nail over every foot of ground and every graveyard and tower.

As you can imagine, with two forces of 30-35 players (you could count on at LEAST 5 players on each side not actually participating in the battle, either fishing, farming harpies/gnolls, or some other useless activity) supported by well-positioned NPC's that handled the defenses until the player reinforcements arrived to fight off the assaults, it was very difficult to take objectives - you had to FIGHT over them, and hard.  Both fortresses were almost impossible to break into, as well.  Frostwolf Keep was vastly better defended - instead of an open ride through the lower area and much of the upper area, the entire lower village and upper keep was packed with NPC's.  A mage and a couple hunters could seriously hurt any incoming force just by rooting them and getting more NPC's involved in the fight.  When fully defended, it was a nightmare for the Alliance to crack Frostwolf.  Dun Baldar was also much tougher to take than it is now.

There have been roughly 6 incarnations of AV, I think, perhaps more since I've lost track.  The first redesign, some of the side areas were removed from the map and it was trimmed.  The second, Korrak was moved out of the field of strife (I think that was the second) and more of the winterax trolls and syndicate were removed.  At some point after that, Korrak, the trolls, and syndicate were removed entirely.  Finally the NPC's were almost entirely removed, and that's when the whole race-mode started, and then the recent change adding reinforcements and such.  I've probably missed at least one redesign in throughout all that.

The Original AV was much larger, had hundreds of NPC guards per side, hundreds of 'PvE' NPC's around the map, a mini-Raid boss, semi-permanent landmines and many Elite 'lieutenants' per side.

Basically, go into current AV, and look at any area of the map where you see 'defenses'. Those static Siege engines, the spikes in the ground, the pre-burned towers. All of that was covered in NPC Guards, and usually led by a Elite Lieutenant NPC. All the NPC Patrols? Multiply the number of them by 5-10.

The other thing, is all those elite NPCs, those were worth points for a long time. So even if you COULD 'race' to the end and bypass them, it wasn't to your own benefit.

It was designed as a static non-instanced zone. Then someone realized every PvE server had a 2:1 Alliance/Horde ratio (if not worse) and they hastily turned it into a 40vs40 instance... A zone designed for hundreds of players and permanency was turned into a Win/Loss Resettable instance.  :awesome_for_real:


Yea, it's had more changes/alterations/adjustments then you can shake a stick at, TWO stick even. Maybe Three. 

Don't forget that the first few hours of the fight were almost always spent being trounced by Korrak (http://www.wowwiki.com/Korrak_the_Bloodrager) in Snowfall Graveyard.  He was removed in patch 1.10 when they made the first major AV overhaul, which is also was the Dungeon 2 set quests were introduced (so well before TBC), which drastically changed the way AV worked.

I want to say he even respawned eventually.

He did, it caused many a offense failures too.


"Alright guys, we almost have this, just need to get those last few horde out of FW..."


*Korrak spawns and announces his presence*


'OMg korrak, I need my spear!'
'LFM KORRAK'
'EVER 1 MEAT @ BLAINDA!!"

"nooooooooooo /cries"