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?

Labels: 2.4, balance, battleground