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Osiris' Rogue Guide v3(New)
Stealth FAQ (EU)
Grinding Guide 1.0
The Balancing of Alterac Valley
I remember when Alterac Valley first came out. You would enter a battleground and play for hours... strengthening troops, completing quests, summoning huge elementals to fight for you. You would leave the battleground later that night only to find it still going on the next morning. Changes were made to the honor system stressing fast honor and win or lose AV became a 12 minute lighting match to the other sides General.
During these lighting matches it became clear that the sides were not fair. At least thats the way it seemed. 90% of the time the Alliance would win in our battlegroup and I heard the same from several others. No matter how fast we raced breaking into the Alliance base was and is still harder then breaking into the Horde base. Blizzard seemed to think the sides were balanced, a lot of people just wanted mirror images... whats more fair then that.
Fast forward a year or two and Blizzard has tweaked a couple of things about the honor system. First honor is instant, you can leave a battleground and purchase something with your honor immediately. Second there is no diminishing returns on the honor that you do make. No more grinding out 4k honor at nite and logging into see you got an adjusted 3k honor.
There were a couple of changes made to AV in 2.4 as well. First the moved the starting spot for the horde way back to make the distance to objectives even. Then they set the hit points of Balinda and the Alliance General to the same values that the Horde's were set to, lowering them.
I would have thought that one of the direct alterations to Alterac Valley would have been the most telling of how the future battles would play out. It turns out that giving the incentive to defend through increased honor was all it took to swing the balance of AV.
The Alliance have an effective choke at their base as you cross the bridge. The Horde have an effective choke at Galv. However if your zerging past that point on both sides then the alliance choke becomes the unbalancing factor.
If however the Horde hold the line at Galv you find that they quickly have the upper hand defeating the Alliance by massive margins of 400+ resources. The Alliance attempt to use the choke at their base allowing the horde to cap everything in between. None of the changes that Blizzard made directly to the battleground have effected the outcome. However the indirect incentives to defense have swung the battleground heavily in favor of the Horde. I do not believe we are close to achieving any sort of balance in this battleground but I am interested to see what Blizzard's numbers suggest.
Are all battlegroups that previously favored the Alliance in AV seeing this huge shift in power towards the Horde?
During these lighting matches it became clear that the sides were not fair. At least thats the way it seemed. 90% of the time the Alliance would win in our battlegroup and I heard the same from several others. No matter how fast we raced breaking into the Alliance base was and is still harder then breaking into the Horde base. Blizzard seemed to think the sides were balanced, a lot of people just wanted mirror images... whats more fair then that.
Fast forward a year or two and Blizzard has tweaked a couple of things about the honor system. First honor is instant, you can leave a battleground and purchase something with your honor immediately. Second there is no diminishing returns on the honor that you do make. No more grinding out 4k honor at nite and logging into see you got an adjusted 3k honor.
There were a couple of changes made to AV in 2.4 as well. First the moved the starting spot for the horde way back to make the distance to objectives even. Then they set the hit points of Balinda and the Alliance General to the same values that the Horde's were set to, lowering them.
I would have thought that one of the direct alterations to Alterac Valley would have been the most telling of how the future battles would play out. It turns out that giving the incentive to defend through increased honor was all it took to swing the balance of AV.
The Alliance have an effective choke at their base as you cross the bridge. The Horde have an effective choke at Galv. However if your zerging past that point on both sides then the alliance choke becomes the unbalancing factor.
If however the Horde hold the line at Galv you find that they quickly have the upper hand defeating the Alliance by massive margins of 400+ resources. The Alliance attempt to use the choke at their base allowing the horde to cap everything in between. None of the changes that Blizzard made directly to the battleground have effected the outcome. However the indirect incentives to defense have swung the battleground heavily in favor of the Horde. I do not believe we are close to achieving any sort of balance in this battleground but I am interested to see what Blizzard's numbers suggest.
Are all battlegroups that previously favored the Alliance in AV seeing this huge shift in power towards the Horde?
Labels: 2.4, balance, battleground
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posted by Cerias Shadows at 3/31/2008
Cerias Shadows
Zyk
Osiris
Khormid
8 Comments:
I guess it must depend. On my battle group Av was prior to 2.4 a 80 % horde win.
Since 2.4 I have yet to get a single win. (20 matches or so)
I'm on Moonrunner, AV51-60 Bracket, where Horde has managed to win 1 out of 30 this week, usually losing with no towers capped, and 0 bonus honor. THey've rigged AV to allow one side to start with twice as many people. Due to population / intrest or whatever, we generally start out 35 to 17, and then fill up 5 minutes later, after it's too late.
My hunter is in the Shadowburn group and before the change Alliance won alot. Now I have yet to go into AV and even come close to seeing a win. Of course that's just one player's opinion.
Horde had started winning AV more since the 2.3 change. Whenever horde does a strong D at Galv-Tower Point, Alliance almost always looses. They just need to whittle down Alliance to win.
Alliance needs to rethink it's defense strategy and move defense from Stormpike to further south. Only problem is the area is far more spread out and open than Galv-Tower Point.
My personal opinion is that they abandon AV and start from scratch with a new 40 man BG.
haha, i'm on mannoroth and we're still pwning horde nubs in av like we were born doing it. you can't change black to white mate! north can't become south...horde will always win wsg, and alliance will always have AV. kinda makes me happy that you get wayyyy more honor in AV.
I'm on Nightfall EU and until they changed AV, Horde was winning 80% of the time. Now it seems much more balanced...
Maybe 2.4 actually balanced out whoever was winning prior to the patch?
Either way, I liked the good old AV much, much better :(
Prior to the patch, things seemed to be pretty even for in our Battlegroup (Nazgrel server, Emberstorm battlegroup). Since the patch, Alliance has not won a single match that I have been in.
I don't know about other battlegroups. But on Rampage battlegroups, Alliance wins AV most of the time because they're usually all premades. Hordes on this battlegroup tend to be ignorant and dumb because most of them are little kids. However, as said by the author, whenever Hordes decide to defend the IB Chokepoint, premade or no premade, Alliance will lose.
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