Isle of Conquest

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[Ashamanchill]

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.

[Fordel]

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 



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.

[Jayce]

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 ;-)

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

[Ingmar]

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.

[Hawkbit]

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. 

[Fordel]

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

 

[Malakili]

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

 

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

[Merusk]

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

[Hawkbit]

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. 

[Selby]

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

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.

[Hawkbit]

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.

[Zetor]

Yeah, I've been leveling my [newly faction-changed  ] 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

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[Fordel]

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


"Ok, whose on cannon bitch duty?"

[Sheepherder]

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.

[K9]

Your analogy is both disgusting and makes no sense.

[Sheepherder]

The funnel prevents excessive stretching and/or tearing.

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

[Fordel]

I still have no idea what you are talking about.

[Sheepherder]

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?

[Fordel]

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.

[K9]

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

[Paelos]

when used in a coordinated fashion.

Does not compute in my battlegrounds.

[Sheepherder]

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.

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[Vash]

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.   

[K9]

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.

[Fordel]

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. 

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[Fordel]

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!"

[Azazel]

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.

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.

[Azazel]

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.

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.

[Nebu]

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. 

[Ingmar]

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

[Nebu]

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.