f13.net

I played about 6 games last night.  Won all 6 games, some easily, some hard fought.

Generally, my battlegroup has a fairly even score for wins/losses between the two sides.

Granted, it's a small sample but is there some disadvantage to Horde side?

Not that I've been able to tell so far.

It seems to me like the game is settled currently in the first 5 minutes. Whoever gets siege on the doors properly wins. This will likely change as people "get" the airships.

I played once yesterday. We flew around on the ship and bombarded things. I couldn't figure out what the hell to do when you parachuted into the castle until I noticed the bombs hanging around. We ended up losing on the boss because we got wiped once inside the castle and the Horde caught up.

I just can't stop thinking of it as "I love Conquest".

I think it's the early Piers Anthony "Isle of View" influence.

You just had a good streak Xanth.

This BG is pretty fun, and makes good use of vehicles. My only gripe is that it is in serious need of some tuning. Currently, if one side zergs the Hanger sufficiently to collapse whoever the other side sends there, they can easily get 15-30 people inside the fort within 2-3 minutes and that's pretty much game over. I realise that Blizzard have worked hard to move away from the 14 hour AV matches of yore, but some of these games are just too short. BGs should be tuned to take around 10-15 minutes, the current incarnation takes half that, and with games that short the amount of time spent queuing and in the pre-fight buffing becomes disproportionately large.

Still, overall I give it 6.5/10; it can definitely be improved, but the fundamental concept and environment are very well done.

Winning strategy seems to be:  send most everyone to the Hangar, get on board zepp, drop into opposing fort, take down walls from inside, kill boss.

Not as much fun as taking all the bases and having battles around the bases, though.

That seems to be the feeling in my batlegroup too. It's not really very fun. I'm sure the BG will see more tuning in the coming weeks and months though.

There's a pretty simple counter strategy to the airship drop in, just defend the keep flat out. It's real easy to pick them off as they drop in all over the place scattered and disoriented. They can't capture the keep GY till a door is down, so they'll rez at best, back at the airship and have to wait for another pass.


It's just the Airship is the totally awesome new toy  :drill: , so everyone is flocking to it.

They need to do something better with the docks. As it stands, they are pretty useless overall.

The stealth catapaults are pretty cool. I reckon if they removed the ability to parachute in from the airship, and left the airship as the awesome bombard platform it is, then the docs would be balanced, as the catapaults would then be your best way to break the gates from the inside.

How do you get Siege Tanks by the way? I haven't figure it out.

The Siege Tank becomes available after you've held onto the Workshop for X minutes. Don't know the exact time yet. It's like 3-5 mins though. It's a damn beast too.


The Glaive throwers and StealthPeoplePults are both extremely valuable, but they are just overshadowed by OMG AIRSHIP PEWPEWPEWPEWPEW right now.



It's like how in AV when it first came out, Ivus/Lokholar were the WOO BIG DEAL bad asses! Yet the Special Infantry or Ram/Wolf Riders were far more effective. Once people realize there are seaforium bombs at the workshop and you can just bomb the doors from the outside just as easily as you could from dropping in and doing it from the inside and etc.


With that said, AirShip Cannon-erring is  :drill:

Ran this a couple of times with my hunter. I likes it. :)

After playing a bunch more, I've come to the conclusion that the Glaive throwers are way more valuable then the airship.


The Two of them, can tear up a Keep gate from Full to Zero in roughly 3-5 minutes... from OUTSIDE keep cannon range.  :oh_i_see:

They also 2-shot players, which is pretty  :awesome_for_real:. Kind of fragile though...

People just don't grasp the catapults at all.


At BEST, they fire themselves in the keep, but leave the catapult right on the road in front of the keep cannons.


Move them 3 feet to the left and another 10 people can follow in like 15-20 seconds.

The OTHER thing I'm finding really annoying.


People, it isn't enough to simply EXIST in the enemy courtyard, you need to actually drop bombs on the gate for it to work!


25 people in their courtyard, 5 of us dropping bombs, 20 camping the 4 horde in their GY.  :uhrr:

I had one where people kept taking the bombs and trying to bomb the inner keep gate, not the front gates.

But then I had one with two of us in the courtyard on top of the keep occupying about half their forces. Priest shields me, I jump down, pick someone off, demonic circle back up when they rush me <3

The people who can't seem to ignore roof campers are so  :uhrr:


Move 5 feet away, they can no longer threaten you in any way!

I think, therefore I am.

Conversely; I don't think, therefore I am not.

See?  Existence is half the battle!

Edit: Don't added to second maxim.

People are adapting to this BG, way, way faster then any of the others.

It's what, day 2, and I already have people using glaive+pults to clear the turrets, smash the door, collect huge bombs and let the Demolishers ram the door.


I'm sure the Horde that were giddy about the airship drop in with their bomb line were more then a little bit surprised when their door went down at minute 4 of the game.  :oh_i_see:

Demonic circle is just fucking broken for that simple reason.

It is the only self teleport / distance gain / close type ability that ignores Line of Sight and pathing mechanics.  I wouldn't mind it so much, if say Blink worked the same way, or if i could feral cat charge (which with a leaping animation should work) up to the strange places locks can stick their portal, but as it stands, it pisses me off WAY too much when locks can stick the damn circle in impossible to reach places and port to it from pretty much ANYWHERE within range.

/rant off

sorry, just had to vent on that.

Yet most warlocks would trade that ability for the ability to use it while stunned <3

Charge used to ignore LoS, and just find a path as long as the target was withing the range.  I remember when I was a noob warrior, at the bottom of the troll cave in southern Desolace, charging all the way around the ramp back up to the top.  It was pretty awesome.  It was also changed shortly thereafter to require a LoS check.

Charging up almost sheer cliffs is still fun though.

No bear missl :(

The Glaive Thrower is absolutely brutal.

And my team insists on turtling in our courtyard while I solo the enemy door down to 2% before someone finally manages to kill me while I do so. Idiots.

I played one game of this the other day.  Was my first PvP in Lich King actually, since I don't really care about WoW PvP at all.  It was mildly fun.  It seems like they didn't learn much from AV though.

In what regard?





So after 200 odd games, some thoughts:

Them nerfing the Seaforium bombs to be expended on use helped to balance out the nodes some, but the workshop is still virtually useless without the Docks/Hangar to get people inside to take out the keep cannons. Demolishers seem to be at worst, distractions, at best, DPS adds for your Glaive throwers. The Workshops only really awesome bit is the SteamTank.

The Glaives are the clear choice now, with everyone fighting over the Dock instead of the Hangar. Well, almost everyone. We still get people who think the Hangar will win it all (with them bitching the entire time about how we will lose and we are all idiots. Then the enemy door goes down at minute 5 and someone will go "good thing we took the hangar!"  :why_so_serious: ). The main difference between the Glaives and the Airship, is the Glaives are counter-able even if you can't capture the Docks. Very fragile, but still without question, the fastest way to take out a keep door. The largest flaw, sometimes a real winner will end up driving one or both throwers. They'll sit in cannon fire, attack the wrong door, not attack the door at all...  :awesome_for_real:

The Side Doors on the Keep have only 75-50% of the HP of the Center Door. That isn't really obvious unless you spend a lot of time breaking various doors. Two Glaives throwers, both attacking the West Gate, will take down the door in 4-5 minutes, depending on Quarry/Oil-Rig bonuses.

The SteamTank, is a God Damn BEAST. That thing can kill a zerg flat out in 10 seconds or less if all the pilots/gunners are competent. The amount of AE Damage it can deal out is just staggering. Broken more then a few turtles with that thing. The SteamCharge alone will literally cleave a path through the enemy, sending them flying in all directions and taking 5-15k damage in one go. Of course, half the time Captain XxDarkShadowAwesomexX will be the one who manages to grab the thing and spends 5 minutes driving in a circle chasing one lone hunter.

The Airship is still fairly useful, but it is very costly in terms of man-power. You need 6-8 players to man the guns, then you need another 5-15 to drop in for proper Bomb usage and cannon killing. Even with all that, it's still significantly slower then the Glaive Throwers. The main advantage to the Airship, is as long as you hold the Hangar, you can't stop it. A small but dedicated defense team can take out the throwers rapidly and really delay the enemy offense, but the Airship will just keep circling and eventually, you will get a door down.

One of the largest issues I'm finding, is getting people OUT of our fucking Keep already. If your offensive force fails at all 3 siege nodes, it is a giant bitch to get people to actually go back out and assaulting again. They just happily run out the door to be farmed and rez in the keep again. All the while bitching about how we all suck, always and forever, and why <faction> never wins blah blah etc. I've had too many games where a small team of us will take down the enemy gate, a good 10 minutes before they take ours down, but we can't kill the general because there's only 2-4 of us and no one will move to the enemy keep. So far the best way seems to be to just let the enemy take every node but their own Keep GY node, and once they assault our keep, all our players Rez in the correct keep and we maybe Zerg their general in time.


In other news, I got my Tabard of Conquest. /epeen

You've won 100 games already? Damn...

Glaives are fucking retarded.  Their range enables them to hit the door outside of the range of the defensive cannons.

Alliance understands this on my server.  Horde does not.

I haven't won a game since the first day.

That's sort of the point. Hell, I'd be happy if they nerfed defensive cannon damage but extended the range. As it stands now, there's no point in taking the middle siege engines at all due to the cannon damage.

I soloed a glaive as a holy priest. Glaives are sort-of balanced in the sense that if you get a couple of players on them they go down crazy fast. The problem is a lot of people don't register that the glaives are quietly hammering away at the gate

I did a bunch of IoC today, and the thing which actually beat us quickest was a 10-man premade using the catapaults. They coordinated and were over the wall and bombing the side door so fast people didn't really register.

They are very easy to kill though, you just have to go out there and do it in person. Sometimes I just end up suiciding myself against them a few times, it isn't pretty, but they die.



If you join a game before it starts, the best way to get as many people where you need them to go is just repeating something like:


"Go to the Docks, Protect the Glaive Throwers, Attack the WestGate (It has less HP). The Workshop sucks, the Hangar Sucks (it has been nerfed). If we take the Docks and Protect the Glaives, we'll win in 9 minutes."


Don't demand it, or start the all caps crusade. Just put it out there like you are stating facts, water is wet etc. People will start to pick up on it, and once you win a few times like that, you'll see people repeating it in the next game before you even have too, usually with a lot of exuberance and excitement.

"Guys Guys, Take the motherfucking Docks, we've won the last 8 games in a row by owning shit up with the glaives throwers!!!!"
"Docks or Bust you bitches woooo!"
"EVERYONE 2TEH DOCKZ FUUUUUUUUUU"
"What about the Hangar? :("
"FUCK THE HANGAR 2 TeH DOCKS, DO U WANT 2 WIN U FREAKIN NOOB?"
"Docks PLox, for cereal"

But still repeat your own calm spiel, Docks, Protect Glaives, West Gate etc. Good chance someone will recognize you and vouch for you and then you'll have 20-30 people who will be willing to actually listen and adjust to the changing situation. Always be the good cop, but don't whine and don't be a passive aggressive bitch. When ever possible, ask for specific people to do things. "Can someone take <blah>" will get you no where, but asking "JoeJimDK, you are right beside the quarry, can you cap it quickly?" will get you results probably 75% of the time. It makes the player feel important and vital, being acknowledged as a individual. 

When someone starts whining (100% guaranteed, even in the most perfect victory ensured games), don't feed it. Just keep on as business as usual. They'll eventually tire themselves out and look like a douche once the enemy door goes down or whatever. If they don't tire themselves out, or are spreading the whine to other people, I usually shoot out a "Less QQ, More PewPew! Please and Thankyou!". This works like 80% of the time, don't ask me why exactly, it just does.

Probably the most important thing though, is to NOT shut up. Keep constantly reminding everyone of what they are supposed to be doing. "Need more glaive defenders please and thankyou!", "The Enemy Siege at the WestGate needs to be killed, please and thankyou!", "FrankJackGlaivePilot, please move back 10 yards, you are in keep cannon range!".

If people have questions, try to answer them, but don't be a prick about it. Don't talk to them like little children, even though they probably ARE little children... but as soon as you start that "you are so stupid, listen to me as I speak slowly and carefully", you'll engage their Emo Rebellion ability which just shits up the entire team chat.


/Cat herding 101


It actually works though, is the fucked up thing. If I stay silent at the start of a game, and no one else is herding, my win rate is roughly 50%. Once I start the basic spiel and keep giving people reminders as to what the fuck they are supposed to do though? It goes up to 80-90%. The wins will start to feed the system and it's lulz all around.



K9, each win is on average, 8-11 minutes, so it doesn't take as long as you would think. Couple hours every other evening or whatever. I do admit I played the shit out of the BG the opening weekend, so that probably sped things up. Usually got 10-20 wins every night I played.

 :rofl:  Sooo sad, but sooo true.

I have won 2 of 16 games so far.

I hate Nightfall so much.

Are you Horde?  Do Arathi Basin, you'll win 90% of the time.

Catapaults need less HP imo.

Did that BG last night on my alliance toon.  It took 6 plays for me to get a win to complete the daily... WTF?

Why does horde get an advantage?

They don't get an advantage in AB, it's just that for some unexplainable reason the Alliance is extra stupid in that BG.  On my battlegroup at least, Alliance does very well in AV, Wintergrasp and now IoC, does fine in WSG and Strand, but completely and utterly sucks at EotS and AB.  It has something to do with the Alliance's inability to grasp the concept of defending the nodes that they capture.

This would be an awesome suggestion, except I'm trying to get IoC marks so I can do honor turn-ins.  :|

Horde will always get to the BS flag before the allies in AB, but it's a marginal difference, and not really enough to give you time to cap against a determined ally also racing for the flag. Otherwise the BG is probably the most balanced. For the record I have a 50% win-loss ration in almost all BGs, except AV, where I loose more (as alliance). I'm pretty sure overall win-losses are close to 50-50, its just that people remember the losses more than the victories.

I'm slightly above 50% win rate in all BG's, as Alliance, in the same BG (Nightfall). AV being the exception, where we seem to just steamroll and win 90% of the time.


The real Horde advantage with AB, is that BS+Farm+LM is a superior trio to hold. Break that up and you won't have many issues as Alliance.


EotS is simply a matter of who has more FoTM and Healer classes. The fact one side always seems to start with 5v15 doesn't help.

The only real standouts are AV (33%) and Island (22%ish).  I'm not too concerned with island just yet, I figure I haven't played it enough to tell how bad it is.  The rest vary from slightly over to slightly under 50%.

I'm actually below 50% on AB.   :oh_i_see:

Actually, with DKs and Path of Frost, the Alliance now has the quickest way to the BS.  It is literally a straight shot out the gate, across the water and up the ramp.  You can have the flag capped just as the horde start coming across the bridge.  The trick is to actually get people to follow you.  Ususally, you have the unfathomable GM/LM split.  I have never understood that one.

I think that each individual battlegroup has its own set of superstitions that turns tiny advantages into overwhelming ones. Everybody prefers a win to a loss, and gradually every player (from the bitter veteran to the PvE folks grinding honor) shifts towards those places where they can reliably expect a victory. Since the sides are fixed, all the best Alliance players wind up in one set of battlegrounds, all the Horde in another. They play over and over again, honing a particular strategy to the point that even the uninitiated can see exactly what needs to be done. If they don't, they'll realize they're all alone and die quickly and frequently.

Every once in a while an organized group on the losing side, or an unlucky draw on the winning side, will lead to a surprise change-up... but don't bet on it. Battleground choice is largely a free market, so the game is rigged by the invisible hand.

It's not map imbalances, it's mob psychology.

My limited personal experience supports this.  It seems like the time of day really dictates my winning percentage.  If I play certain BG's during primetime, I almost expect to walk away with a loss.  I can play the same BG after midnight and it's like a completely different game.  I'm enjoying playing between midnight and 2am, the people are not quite as well geared and seem easier for some odd reason.

Why is it that rogues feel the need to jump and strafe all over the place while attacking?  I can't see any reason why it would help.  Then again, I spent 6 years dealing with circle strafers in DAoC. 

You can get a bit of "can't attack target" mitigation through that, especially if fighting keyboard turners/casters.

If it is a dagger rogue they might be jockeying for a rear positional attack like backstab, in theory, but generally its to try to minimize the number of swings you get on them.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/23/Phantomlimb.jpg)

I'd agree on all of them... except AV.  Capping Frostwolf Relief Hut vs Stormpike Aide Station - Advantage:  Alliance.  By such an unfathomable margin it is absolutely ridiculous.

I see Horde cap the Stormpike Hut faster than Alliance caps the FW more often than not. There's no real advantage to either side in AV nowadays.

There's no advantage because these days any DPS class can twoshot the archers, so who cares about them.

Against an actual defense, Alliance wins. But nobody defends in AV anymore.

-Alliance archers can hit Horde all the way at their relief hut equivalent.  Horde archers cannot remotely do that.
-The Horde super-NPCs are all out of the way and very difficult to accidentally pull.  The alliance ones are EXTREMELY simple to accidentally pull and almost every AV match involves AOEing them down.
-Alliance can just run into any Horde tower and cap it without killing a single archer.  Horde do have to kill archers in Alliance towers.

There is no easy way to put this: The alliance on your server the most miserable failures in WoW.

Or maybe your horde are just terrible failures. Isn't this a clever argument.

No side has an advantage in the current AV incarnation; all the tears about how AV favours alliance are years in the past now.

Alliance side archers leash at a reasonable range. The cap trick is to ride past the flag up to the rez area, turn around and cap. The archers will have promptly ignored you now.

Heck, the alliance typical run is to swarm into the keep and about 5 people go up each tower and waste the archers immediately anyways. Should work for Horde as well.

New humor for me is IoC starting with the stupid 20v35 matches randomly again.

Horde finally figured out how to play on the Vengeance battlegroup.  I'm surprised it took them a few weeks, usually bgs are about even.

We're back to longer games on Vengeance, with people fighting everywhere - mainly docks and hangar.

The tears years ago about AV imbalance were Alliance ones - which is why they moved the Horde starting point substantially further south than it used to be.

For terrible players, AV is much easier as Alliance. Yes, you can strafe around to cap towers as Horde without killing archers.  As Alliance, you press autorun, click random butan and cap.  Yes, you can get killed midgame as Horde, run from the entrance cave to the Horde base and defend your general against the opposing rush.  As Alliance, you respawn right in position to add your 15k health to the human shield, even if you are too stupid to realize you should do it.  In the rare event people actually defend from the beginning, Alliance has a large advantage in that it has only one defensive choke point, it's blazingly obvious, you respawn in position where even the worst players are in position to defend, and  NPC archers will interrupt opposing healers.  It's also a shorter run from the starting gate to the opposing captain for Alliance than Horde, which makes it easier to slow up the opposing side.

Now, the above is a very small advantage when players are good.  But 99% of BG players are terrible players.  Which gives a sizeable advantage.

That being said, that inherent advantage is tiny compared to the power of psychology.  Once a BG gets the "the other side always wins" reputation, participation plummets.  This is an even bigger deal in AV than the others, because it's a 40-player BG.  On my battlegroup, Alliance "always" wins AV.  Since WOTLK, I've earned well over 300 AV marks (can't...stop...collecting...useless...shit...).  I've won 35 games, according to the achievement tracker thingie.  Only a tiny part of that edifice of failure comes from the inherent advantage -- mostly, it's because "allies always win AV" so we get 40-vs-20 games where most of the 20 go in only hoping to lose fast enough to get their one mark and re-queue.  I'm sure there are battlegroups where "horde wins all the time" and the situation is reversed; no inherent advantage is going to compensate for that.

This has changed in the past week due to BG experience.  This makes games almost always 40-40.  It also makes the winner determined largely by "who has the fewest lvl 71s mooching xp" which is pretty even among the factions.  

AB favors Horde.  SotA used to significantly advantage Alliance (from a metagame, honor-per-hour, POV), but they fixed it.

I'd like them to apply a similar fix to AV and AB - just have the starting positions randomized (this would take some work since they'd have to flip the AV NPCs).

I have to confess that I don't see how anyone has an advantage in most of the BG's.  What I can conclude from my recent experience is that the side with one decent premade group will win the BG.  Most of what I observe in BG's are a bunch of people just running around randomly while some guy spends the entire time in bg chat calling them all names for doing so. 

To date, I've done every BG at least 20 times.  I think the win % for alliance is hovering about 5%.  Sadly, my hunter is a dwarf. 

The horde base choke point is actually quite good, however the number of times I've seen it used well I can count with my fingers.

The area in question is the ramp just before the FW towers, earthbind totems and frost traps can wreak sheer fucking havok on the alliance offense there, good melee DPS can use the lower tower to LOS casters and alliance healers, and the jump-over spot in the upper wall can be denied to the alliance by a competent mage/shaman/hunter.

Yes, the area there can be made into an effective choke point, but it's not nearly as good a setup as the bridge to the alliance base.  There is absolutely nothing blocking the ally NPC archers' LoS and they start hitting you from halfway across the bridge all the way until you're up in the Stormpike gy spawn area.  In the horde base you can take cover in the building below the towers, then make a mad dash for the relief hut and by the time you get to that tiny bridge back there you're out of range of the horde archers.  The bridge to the alliance base also makes all the knockback effects and other tricks very effective, Blastwave, Thundershock, Typhoon, MC.

Having played both alliance and horde over the years, you'd have to be blind or deluded to not see all the asymmetrical differences in AV and how they can benefit one faction over the other.  However, whether people take advantage of them and whether they end up having a significant enough impact to regularly effect the outcome of matches varies quite a bit from game to game (and battlegroup to battlegroup if there's a strong enough culture of "side X always wins/loses").

I don't really like this one for some reason. What's more, there's always 3 times as many AVs running as IoCs in my battlegroup. Did this flop?

There's three times as many AVs as anything else because AV is where all the XP leeches go.

I still don't see the advantage of the bridge over that FW choke point.  The bridge has a much closer spawn point in SP GY once the horde have it.  It is also much harder to take as it is right at the front and you don't have to have dedicated defenders.  Additionally, getting to it for the defending attacker is much harder.  You either have to leap off the bridge and take that hit or come down around the back taking a very long ride.  While the archers used to be significant, at 80 they do so little damage compared to the massive health pools.  Additionally, while the placement of NPCs is much worse in the Dun Baldar, you don't need to bother with them to get to the towers.  You do not need to bunch up once you cross the bridge.  You can easily ride around and behind either tower as well.  Frost Wolf is a continuous tunnel.  Additionally, the bridge right in front of the FW RH is a terrible LoS machine.  Does the siege tank in DB work the same?  And fuck Drek's house.  Why does he get the two damn dogs?  And why is the GY not right the fuck on top of it like DB making quick runs into it for horde defenders very easy.  And why the hell does Drek stand in the middle of his room making clearing defenders out without aggro'ing him nearly impossible?  Again unlike Vandar who sits in the back of his room.  The damn back wall is in caster/hunter range without aggroing him as well.  I know because I've died on that wall numerous times while Vandar stands there with his thumb up his ass.

And fuck the choke points all favoring the horde.  The alliance get one moderate choke point, the bridge.  The horde get a strong choke point at every GY other than Snowfall.  Each Alliance GY is wide open from several angles.  The worst horde GY is Frost Wolf being on the plain.  But even then the terrain funnel works to send the alliance in a single direction.

The ride through tower isn't want screws up LoS at the FW choke point, it's actually the Gate between the two towers. The reverse Drawbridge door blocks 75% of the archers from hitting anything.

Wow yeah, AV is completely ruined with level 72 retards and people multiboxing and shit. I can't believe level 80 isn't a separate bracket. What the fuck.

It also makes an excellent perch for healers and ranged DPS.

All the level'ers crack me up, it's like I have cheat codes when I walk into a 1 vs 4 inside Dun Baldar south and they are all green con.

What's funny is, I ran an AV tonight and saw afk 80s, but all the noobs were going CHARRGE and helping fight. It was kind of awesome.

Which is how I hope it will be when I start to level my shammy up to 80 from 70.  Not sure I want to quest through Northrend for the 5th time ;-)

IoC still just doesn't click with me. It's too much of a generic "cap vehicle spawns, blow open keep" thing, like a small boring Wintergrasp. With a bunch of really stupid "launch yourself over the walls in a catapult (and be instantly ganked by 8 guys)" gimmicks.

I'm with WuA. I might actually have liked this one were it just a capture the nodes, but I hate the keeps. It lets scenarios happen where even if your side controls everything, a secret raid with pve kitted out guys on the opposing side is enough to win.

It's partly because we've min-maxed the fun out of the BG just so we can Win faster, partly because the keeps themselves are failing to provide any kind of actual defensive advantage to the strategies we've come up with.


The Keeps big defensive tool are the cannons. They are devastating against any siege or players inside their range.

No one goes inside their range anymore  :awesome_for_real:



Either people are out ranging them with Glaives or Airship, or just bypassing them with the catapults/parachutes. Once the enemy is over the wall, the guns are moot unless you get lucky and they bug out and aim inwards. Also easy to take out once one or two guys climb up the tower and just manually beat them to destruction. The Guns themselves are often hindered by their own keep geometry, especially on the Alliance keep.

Nothing else about the keeps is actually helping the defender. The walls are huge, so even if you manage to drop onto the actual rampart, you aren't actually in range of anything outside or inside the keep 95% of the time. The Alliance keep specifically is useless in this regard, since the Walls/Towers/Gates are all giant LoS blocks for enemies to hide around. The Horde keep is better, but still very poor.

The GY spawn is extremely easy to camp and provides the defenders no benefit, with the GY flag being deliberately across the yard.

The courtyards themselves are massive empty spaces with no tactical value for the defenders. They entirely favor the attackers, in that the people dedicated to bombing the door can be safely out of reach and between a nice buffer of random people in the middle.

The InnerKeep building is useless to the defender until the outer gate is down. On the Alliance end specifically, it's detrimental since it allows easy perching access. The Horde Keep roof is further away from the spawn or flag points, and has a wall high enough to make using it as a perch difficult.


It's only when the door is down and you have to defend the KeepLord that there is any benefit... but by that point, it's usually moot. (Once again the Horde lord room is superior for defense, due to one entry point)



It comes down to the best way to defend the keep, is to not be in it at all. Attacking the Airship node or killing the Glaives will do much more then anything you could do by staying inside. So the keep door is just a speed bump, a delay mechanism. Not a real strategic objective.

I'm disappointed with the keep geometry, since at first glance it seemed to be better then a lot of the old AV buildings. I thought blizzard had actually designed it with people using it in mind. It just isn't the case though, they went with style over substance again.

I've heard that AV is a very good alternative (xp/hr wise) to Northrend with the BG for xp change.

Fair warning, though, you'll hit 80 with none of the several thousand gold you'd have earned along the way, and weapon skills and defense don't level in pvp.

My brother is leveling an alt by questing off Jame's leveling addon for 15min, then doing an AV, etc..  He says straight AVs in the 70s were yielding about 9% per match. 

If you combine questing and BG use, you should have a LOT of quests left at 80, which leads to a heck of a lot of gold from them. 

So you do AV to avoid questing for XP, then go ahead and do the quests anyways for gold?

 :awesome_for_real:

I suppose it saves you from doing the same daily quests every day for a while at least.

I imagine a lot fo the chain quests would pay a shitload more gold at 80 than the dailies, too.

Correct.  Most of the 5-9g quests turn into 13-16g quests @80. 

As someone who has finished getting to 80 by Grizzly Hills and 10 quests into Zul'drak multiple times, this is very true.  I earned 16k I believe is what the total came out to when I finished all of Icecrown.  Get a character with 2 gathering professions and you can imagine how much this will go up.

For S&Gs tonight I took my 75 mage (full rested) into AV twice. 

Start:  618324 xp, 3162 hr
After first win: 738129 xp, 4369 hr
After second win: 870037 xp, 6156 hr

Capping towers netted 18000 xp - try to get your group to do as many as you can.  Either way, that's 250,000 xp for 45min playing.  Not shabby.

Yeah, I've been leveling my [newly faction-changed  :awesome_for_real:] orc warlock by using a mixture of Jame's leveling guides and AVs, while trying to get into instance groups (kinda hit and miss there).

I started at level 70 with full rested xp... by the time I hit 76, I still had 500k rested xp left, and just started on dragonblight quests. And that's on a battlegroup where horde typically lose AV unless they're in the cross-server vent-organized group. :p

For real, this one is just everyone rushing the docks and then rushing the gates. All that shit about "Oh people battling over the quarry for precious reinforcements!" and "Brave souls catapulting over the walls to assault the keep from the inside!" is just so much empty fucking masturbation as far as I can tell. It's like it was designed by somebody who never played the game before.

People still totally catapult inside. It's just not a very fun job really.


"Ok, whose on cannon bitch duty?"

I have no clue how those catapults made it past the alpha.  Maybe if they were mobile spawn points, but in their current state you might as well just stick a funnel into your ass and bend over.

Your analogy is both disgusting and makes no sense.

The funnel prevents excessive stretching and/or tearing. :ye_gods:

EDIT: Or, if you prefer: LOLZGANGAZZRAPE, TEABAGTIME!

I still have no idea what you are talking about.

Using the catapults launch function more than once is generally an indication that you are, in fact, retarded, because by the time you hit the ground there will be a number of the opposite faction waiting to pound your ass in a non-consensual fashion.  Of the people there, a few will be alt-tabbing out to MSN or pron sites and so will not immediately get around to the business of wrecking you until the one or two retards who think they're doing something important by guarding the courtyard begin attacking you, at which point a few of the AFK'ers will hear the sound, alt-tab back to the game, ravage you in seconds, and then resume their business of wanking while teabagging your corpse.

EDIT: Or are you all on servers where Catapult != Angry prison sex?

We use the catapults to launch 10-20 guys over the walls at once. If we don't have the numbers for whatever reason, we'll launch ourselves directly onto the nearest Cannon Perch and take those out.


Unless one side is being royally schooled on the outside, the inside of keeps are generally very lightly populated with defenders.

My battlegroup is the same as Fordel's; catapaults are damn annoying when used in a coordinated fashion.

Does not compute in my battlegrounds.

This, and the propensity of Battlegrounds later at night to fill up with masses of honor leaches alt+tabbed out with "sound in background" on.  I've seen AV's with 15+ afk'ers in my battlegroup late at night, and the same in IoC.  When the aliance starts pushing the horde base it fills up with defenders and the afk'ers often wake up, which means the horde is capable of meeting you numerically, while still being able to zerg from their spawn point, and still being able to blast you as you are descending by your parachute.

Of course, this might have changed, it depends on whether the afk'ers are getting enough honor.

Also, all the AV blah on the last page about chokepoints and archers is bullshit. What decides 99% of AV games is which side bothers to even try recapping/defending towers in the first place. Forty guys run in each direction, cap each tower as they go, and then sit in front of the general's bunker waiting for someone to say "ALL IN" and playing with their dicks.

What's more, I like it that way. Me and my buddy can run back up, recap a tower, defend it from a couple random guys who come up hoping it's some cheeky lowbie, and suddenly the two of us alone have thrown a significant wrench into the other side's works. They might send some guys capable of getting it back, but it'll take a few minutes, and once we rez we're going to go defend some of our captured towers to keep them from recapping and preserve the lead we've created.

Whereas if we're doing the same thing in AB or EotS or something, ninja-capping a flag just means we'll add about 12 points to our team's score before the squad of 5 guys that have been jogging the 200 feet between objectives comes along and rapes us.

Lowbies and all, AV is still the best BG. It's the only one where a guy can sneak off from the zerg to go be Rambo and have a substantial chance at making a real difference.

It really depends on the Battlegroup and make up of each individual game.  On my battlegroup, both sides tend to have at least 2 (sometimes 3-5) people per tower/bunker defending it until it caps.  The alliance are really good about this since typically the horde will have a lot of gun-ho wanabe heros who will try to save the day by recaping stuff and they've learned the hard way.

However, sometimes even recapping a tower is a futile effort if the zerg at the main base is geared or organized enough.  I've seen both sides manage to kill the end boss with 1-2 towers/bunkers still up.  In fact the alliance on my battlegroup seem to do it on a regular basis.   :oh_i_see:

With the current AV I couldn't honestly care if I win or lose; I'm having much fun 2-shotting level 74s with my Shaman.

4+ is the norm in most AV's I'm in. If you want to recap you either need to be a cheeky bastard with a trick, or a really well put together squad.


My personal favorite is Typhooning all the defenders out through the window.  :drill:

The Horde in my battlegroup are generally (though not always) sloppy enough in AV to make being a backfield Rambo viable. Plus with a large chunk of each team being comprised of near-useless lowbies, the troublemaking potential of 2 or 3 coordinated 80s is magnified.

IoC has the exact opposite problem a lot of the time.


Like you said, in AV, it's possible for a small group of guys to really turn a game around.

In IoC, it's possible for a small group of guys to just totally screw your team. "Here, let me drive this crucial glaive thrower right into the horde zerg and die, surely this will save they day!"

OTOH, if you then turn around and do all those quests you skipped, you'll make approximately fourty bajillion gold, with the exp->gold bonuses.

My wife and our 2 friends used to do this during our Friday/Saturday night gaming sessions (before we quit wow and started playing Titan Quest). 3 coordinated Mages and a healing shammy can do quite a lot of tower capping, recapping and holding.

Dumb question: Are the marks from this BG worth using for anything?  I've been buying WG and honor gear for pvp but never once thought to use the marks from this BG for anything other than the "Concerted Efforts" quest. 

Concerted Efforts is all they're good for as far as I know. Same with Strand.

Kind of what I thought, but I always seem to miss things in this game. 

Thanks for the quick response.

There's the PVP mounts as well. 

AFAIK those still only require 30x each of the original BG tokens, I don't think they added any of the later BGs to them.

Correct, those are just WSG, AB and AV still.

Among other changes, AV honor/xp cut in half. Basically not worth doing anymore. Somebody get embarassed at IoC having 1/5th the players of the 40v40 from 5 years ago?

I knew about the xp nerf, I didn't realize honor got hit too.

A little heavy handed, imo.  A better fix would have been to split 70-79 into one AV tier and 80s in another.  80s would continue to play on an even field while at least some of the 70s would have to actually play to win the match.  They can't all /afk, right?  That way my 80 DK can at least win a match now an again. 

They did that too. The forums are full of a bunch of level 60 twink tears that nobody else gives a fuck about.

I found the sub-80's were much more likely to be actually playing than the 80's in the AVs I played.

Not seeing any nerf to honor gained in AV, 1200 for a fairly routine win. Separating lowbies from 80's is fine, saves them getting curbstomped as much.

I'd go to AV to feel godlike after a bad run in the other bgs.  What a moodlifter it was!

I played WG on my hunter last night for the first time in a while.  All I can say is that I'm a LOT more effective in BG's when I have someone in group that actually heals.  It made for a fun night.