Losing in Ashran Sucks, That's the Main problem.

[Osmeric]

I really pity anyone having to gear a new character to do some PvP.

I have a horde shaman that just hit 100. It took me just a couple of days, not really playing all that intensely, to fully gear it with honor gear.

I found that in the morning, the trick is to exploit the instant horde queues and just repeatedly farm treasures for artifact fragments. The shaman can just waterwalk to the one on the half sunken ship by Mandragoraster, and rotate counterclockwise from there.

[Kagthul]

I have a horde shaman that just hit 100. It took me just a couple of days, not really playing all that intensely, to fully gear it with honor gear.

I found that in the morning, the trick is to exploit the instant horde queues and just repeatedly farm treasures for artifact fragments. The shaman can just waterwalk to the one on the half sunken ship by Mandragoraster, and rotate counterclockwise from there.

treasure hunting can net you several thousand honor per hour, yeah.

[discoepfeand]

The comparisons to AV should be made more often because I generally agree AV is a lot more fun, and I don't even like AV (I've had it disabled on my random queue every since it was possible to do so). However, I have many many hours and many many kills logged in AV, so I do know a lot about it


There are two main things that AV does (or at least did in the Vanilla->Wrath era) that Ashran does not

1) AV significantly rewards players splitting off from the main group to participate in side objectives. Everything on the AV map adds up to the ultimate consequence of the battleground. Towers make the boss harder and if you can control towers then you delay the enemy win. As few as 1 good player can have a major impact on the battleground simply by back-capping towers. My most memorable moments in AV were getting into small battles for towers, knowing that my effort meant something.

This has the end effect of allowing players to choose what way they want to help the team. If you want to bash your head in 25v25 front line battles, it's there for you to do. If you would rather do towers, you can. Even the mines at one point or another were actually useful.

In Ashran it feels like basically nothing a player can do has any impact on the ultimate conclusion of the battle. The only way anything ever gets done in Ashran is if your entire team agrees that it's the right thing to do, and if you have people who aren't cooperating then their non-cooperation is essentially the same as them being logged out. Artifact fragments are too diluted as a currency, and their rewards are too weak.

Ashran would be vastly improved if smaller achievements by smaller groups of players directly aided the main bulk. The lack of this phenomenon leads to Horde players zoning in to Ashran, seeing the dots scattered across the map, and immediately zoning out to get another instance.


2) AV's graveyard mechanic significantly determines the battlefront for both teams and makes for interesting battle conditions. The battle in Ashran never feels dynamic. It's amazing the extent to which both sides know exactly where to find each other at all times, and how there is almost no such thing as a team over-extending themselves. In AV, if you push to base and then get back-capped on a graveyard, it can be devastating for your win chance. This is another one of those "helping the team by individual achievement" things I was talking about. The end result is in Ashran, the battle only turns by sheer brute force. In AV, you can cap the GY's and then slowly wittle down their forces on your way to a reenforcement victory, because it takes the dead guys too long to come back to help. In Ashran, killing 3 people out of the main group of enemies seems to do almost nothing, to the point where most teams actively avoid getting involved in these fights so that they can quickly snipe the event while the aggressing team kills the boss.

This is a great post.

[Deleted]

Yes sitting in a one hour que, only to spend 3-4 hours to get the quest done because the only way to Alliance can win events is when the Horde are busy killing the Alliance boss and then have to kill Vol via the back door because you will get faced stomped by the Horde even when there is no point protecting your bases any longer. All while constantly being kek'ed and run over by them like you were 10 levels lower and Alliance members exclaiming Alliance just have no skilled players etc... does suck.

Must be another horde fraction.. we get roflstomped every single Ashran beyond words

[Gorgodeus]

Must be another horde fraction.. we get roflstomped every single Ashran beyond words

That's why you build a 40 man premade for it.

[Cobaltius]

Must be another horde fraction.. we get roflstomped every single Ashran beyond words

I makes absolutely no sense having that kind of disparity.

Today, on Alliance I got into Ashran about 2pm at about 4:45 I left could not take it anymore, during that duration we killed Vol once and won two events. The straw that broke the camel's back was when we got BR, we had the Artifact, and all the fires turned blue, it finally looked like we were getting the upperhand. Then the Horde showed up ran right over us like we were unarmed and naked, took the artifact, turned ALL the fires red and won the event.

I was still 5 kills short of getting two hundred kills, yes it took that long to get 200 kills, got those and left without finishing the main quest.

All this lopsided BS does is create a perpetual advantage for the other side; on Alliance for example players were leaving as fast as they were coming in, it was almost 3 hours of a non-stop clusterblank, and showed no signs of getting any better when I left just worse.