Isle of Conquest

[Soulflame]

I have won 2 of 16 games so far.

I hate Nightfall so much.

[Nevermore]

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

[K9]

Catapaults need less HP imo.

[Nebu]

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

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?

[Nevermore]

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.

[Soulflame]

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

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

[K9]

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.

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.

[Fordel]

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.

[Soulflame]

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.   

[dd0029]

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.

[pxib]

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.

[Nebu]

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. 

[Hindenburg]

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

[Ingmar]

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. 

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.

[Nevermore]

Battleground choice is largely a free market, so the game is rigged by the invisible hand.

[Soulflame]

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.

[K9]

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.

[kildorn]

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.

[Gobbeldygook]

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.

-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.

[K9]

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.

[kildorn]

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.

[Xanthippe]

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.

[El Gallo]

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.

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).

[Nebu]

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. 

[Sheepherder]

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.

[Vash]

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").

[WindupAtheist]

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?

[Nevermore]

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

[dd0029]

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.

[Fordel]

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.

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[Sheepherder]

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.

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

[Fordel]

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.

[Ingmar]

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

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.

[Selby]

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 ;-)