I just had a TON of fun in Ashran.

[Lorianus]

I have also some fun in ashran now, but thats because it enables me to cap with it my weekly cap without frustration or headaches, since my usual arena mates have quit at this point.

[Livevil]

Still garbage and pure cancer as eu horde.

[Faenskap]

Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. I can be in a really good group, 2 boss kills, 8 events, then we start losing. I'm mainly there for the nemesis kills anyway. Yay, pandas... And draenei. And worgen. And gnome. Good thing we still have a few more months!

From the horde side though, i've noticed we often have very few healers, between 4 and zero (!). And if we find the fucking AA? Nope, can't give it to a healer. Oh well, Ashran is like life, it has its ups and downs

[JustRasz]

Well it will be nice for alts now but as far as doing it for my main PvP toons, no. I would have far more fun running bgs/arenas. It just seems they cant make another world PvP zone that was fun like wintergrasp. I think that was the best idea aside from having a raid linked to it. Where one faction controls a point of interest for a while and the more time that passes it becomes more difficult to defend.

[Exeris]

Going to miss that place, it's something to fall back on when I get bored of the usual stuff.

[Baracuda]

- The final imbalance, which can work both ways, is the number of healers in each raid. In my experience the raid works best with 8-11 healers, but my healer count has often dropped to 5, 4, 3 or even 2 healers in a 40-man raid. The raid always steadily dies out during fights if that is the case, which is unfortunate. (And the other way around, if a raid has 13+ healers, you generally can't get a kill on them - even if they don't kill many of your group either.)

We managed to win yesterday when I got the AA but it wasn't easy before that with 3 healers :/

[Super Kami Dende]

Still garbage and pure cancer as eu horde.

Sounds more like a People problem than a System though.

[Dragoncurry]

It is not even remotely balanced, on Alliance I have to que on average 5-7 times just to get in a group that has a remote chance of winning anything.

As discussed in another thread the Horde can still do premades all ride to Ashran at the same time to que at the same time and usually most get in the same one, does not appear possible for Alliance, at least I have not seen a group forming since before 6.2.

The Horde use the AA Alliance more often than not have to hide in in their base because the Horde can take it away so easy that is more tactically sound to keep them from it as long as possible. Easly 80% of the event and Vol kills I get are when the Horde is busy doing the other else they seem to be able to run over Alliance like they were unarmed and naked.

I have seen on several occasions where the Horde moving in a single group phase in and out it what appears to be well above the 40 player number, no doubt phasing because the server can't handle more than what is supposed to be there suggesting they can/do outnumber Alliance probably more often than not.

What I would like to see is a 3rd party addon that shows constant player count on both sides and would like to see Horde event and Vol wins vs Alliance from what I experience I would bet there is a 70-30 ratio in favor of the Horde. However there is a reason the player base is not privy to that data.

Oh hey look, someone who expects to join a winning Ashran every time without putting in effort while people like the OP try to actually get ppl to win.

[Deleted]

so i decided to give it another go, and it has improved a lot since i last played, which is very good!

still the problem though of melee being useless compared to range, but that's just the nature of zerg fights i guess.

[Faesroll]

I enjoy it, the only thing I'd change personally is removing the Artifact. Without it everything is quite balanced, teams are usually equal and the fights are fun and satisfying. Then there's the AA. As soon as it's up, it doesn't matter how well coordinated your group is, you're going to lose every event for the coming 30 minutes in 80% of the cases. There's those rare moments where you'll be able to pick off the enemy AA but those are really rare.

Other than that, it's enjoyable and probably the fastest way to farm my bloodthirsty title now.

[Deleted]

I agree for the most part. There is big battles between Horde and Alliance now. Contesting for objectives etc. Best part is that it's actually optional now, so you don't have to play with people who are forced into something they don't like doing.

My personal peeves are the Artifact and Ring of Conquest. The artifact is far too strong and it literally dictates the battle. I'll assure you, if you give me the Artifact, for the next 30 minutes we'll be the winning side. Cut the timer in half or decrease the HP gain through Artifact.

Ring of Conquest's purpose is kind of lost on me now'a'days. It's a place filled with genuinely hard elite/rare mobs, so you'll need a decently sized group to do it, but nobody does it. I guess you could do the place for Frostwyrm/Nessingwary/Jade Serpent consumables, but other than that there isn't much of a point. Nobody gives a crap about Artifact Fragments in the current meta. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I was left with the impression that Artifact Fragments was supposed to be super good as it can summon your faction boss, mini-bosses, lock portals etc.

So, it's not perfect by a mile. I'm of the opinion that I like Ashran more than Tol Barad in it's current state, but Wintergrasp has a special place in my heart. Might be nostalgia, but the novelty of having Wintergrasp happen every 2 hour made it kinda unique. The battles mattered a lot, they were fun etc.
But on the other hand, I think Ashran tried to imitate early days AV more so, and it somewhat did it. Too bad classes are homogenized to absolute shit, making zergs ever more viable.

[Deleted]

I enjoy it, the only thing I'd change personally is removing the Artifact. Without it everything is quite balanced, teams are usually equal and the fights are fun and satisfying. Then there's the AA. As soon as it's up, it doesn't matter how well coordinated your group is, you're going to lose every event for the coming 30 minutes in 80% of the cases. There's those rare moments where you'll be able to pick off the enemy AA but those are really rare.

Other than that, it's enjoyable and probably the fastest way to farm my bloodthirsty title now.

i agree, ive been having fun in it last 2 days or so, its been surprisingly balanced most of the time, going back and forth quite regularly, but as soon as one team gets the AA, its over. i think it should be removed, its not fun imo

[Highmitsu]

AA is fun to have but completely unbalanced. Been binging Ashran on 3 different characters since the patch and I can honestly say that a good AA holder (and some raid defense on said holder) is an enormous advantage on that side, up to the point where it can lock events for the full half hour.

[Cobaltius]

Oh hey look, someone who expects to join a winning Ashran every time without putting in effort while people like the OP try to actually get ppl to win.

Apparently you don't play on US Alliance, all the effort in the world is not going to help a team win that is getting facerolled over and over and over to the point where players are leaving as fast as they join. Where it seems only one side is able to make premades with 5-6 heals that dominates everything so bad the AA is useless to Alliance and better off hidden away inside the Alliance base just to keep the Horde from making even worse.

This is the way it is on most all servers, for example today I wanted to get the 4 events and kill Vol quest done on two alts, I started at 6:30am it is now 4:15pm and I still need two event wins on my second alt, I have had to re-que an unbelievable 17 times so far today, out of that I got into one group that was winning anything and managed to complete my first alt's quest which was done just before 11am.

It has been nothing but a non-stop Horde domination fest you would have to be a masochist to want stay in one of these battles so most don't and neither do I.

When they consistently roll over you like you were 10 levels lower than them and have double or triple the number of healers no amount of effort is going to fix it.

[Alienshroom]

Ashran ruined Horde pvp for who knows how long.

[Deleted]

Paladins have the Ashran ability to send an enemy to prison

I always thought it was the purple spheres, now i feel like a noob. Just another reason to hate pallys :P

that the alliance "backdoor" attack

This! It was fun the first time, but one rogue sees it on youtube and then they all spam it for the game. I still prefer caping the flags (farming kills is only reason I'm there half the time)

number of healers in each raid.

This has always been a game of luck, with bgs/raids also. But its not like Blizzard can force people to play healers

Ashran is still fun to me because it is rewarding if you put more (leading) effort into it. I'm not quite as OP as I was before, now that Ancient Artifact has a long respawn cooldown; I used to almost constantly have the Artifact

Exactly the same with me, AA brought in balance people didn't realise we need. Atleast if you were getting crushed (or up against premade Russians) it gave you a chance to grab it and make up for the lower skilled/geared team mates.

[PrairieChicken]

AA is basically nothing in 40v40, it is like 2 extra people which is pretty negligible, and most of the time AA holders are shitters. Can;'t understand why people are so obsessed with it.

[Compstance]

I've done Ashran a lot since it was introduced. Partially because farming Universal Translator parts was good money, partially because it's more relaxing than tryhard arenas, and partially because knowing all the buffs gives you an edge over the rest (which, I admit, is a lot of fun).

Knowing my way around it, I've often been raid leading Ashran as well. Back when Ashran instances weren't hard-balanced and group finder was still a thing, everything was faceroll and there wasn't much of a challenge (or you would queue up without using group finder, and get stomped to bits). Easy, but not challenging and not all that fun - the most fun was from the rewards of fighting (conquest points or nemesis kills).

Now, they've removed premade raids and hardbalanced the factions' player numbers; and even give a stacking buff to the losing team. To top it off, Ancient Artifact now has a respawn cooldown, making it harder to constantly keep it in your raid. Apart from the annoying increase in wait time, it has done wonders for Ashran.

Fights are actually balanced now. I was leading for a long while yesterday, and the whole group was super enthousiastic, even if we didn't win all of them - we won most of it and it was organised, which was better than what they're used to. We encountered situations in which 38 of us, all grouped up, charged into the horde defense and still got wiped out completely - despite all our tight grouping. There were situations where we swarmed an event in progress, killing off all horde, and snatching the win from them. There were MANY occasions where we either won or lost an event, but the score was actually really close.

Those things were just unthinkable before. Fights were always one-sided. One faction would go events, the other would go main-road. Everything was faceroll.

The only remaining problems with Ashran in its current state as I see them, are some small remaining imbalances, queue times, and (sometimes) role imbalances. Most imbalances that I am aware of, are in favor of the alliance.
- The first, just a very small imbalance, is both faction's prison locations. Paladins have the Ashran ability to send an enemy to prison (Jailer's Libram). The Alliance prison is in the basement of their main building, and running upstairs means running into all the faction leaders which one shot anyone coming out. The horde prison, on the other hand, has its exit on the back side of their main area, without any dangerous guards, and right next to the cliff side - you can simply run out and jump/run/glide off the cliff without any effort whatsoever. I'm just glad I'm Alliance in this respect, but it's not fair.
- The second is a side-effect from nerfing the two mainroad bosses' healthpools. They're now so easily zergable, that the alliance "backdoor" attack - running up the side of the mountain from Amphitheater, avoiding the heavily guarded front bridge entrance - can now easily be completed even without control of ANY of the main road flags, with gladiator guards still up. Just pop AOE stealth, run up to the boss, pop a 60% damage reduction scroll, spirit link totem and a healing cooldown, and if stacked properly NOBODY will have died during the boss kill. The imbalance is that the horde don't have such a "backdoor" attack option. Although, in all fairness, this imbalance is partially "fixed" by horde having a "free" ticket to main road. Alliance don't have to care about main road if they just do backdoor attacks, so generally, horde can now take it for free.
- This last bit (alliance doing backdoor attacks, horde going mainroad) does generate a new imbalance however. Alliance only have to do events, and a quick boss zerg every now and then. They only have to fight the horde during the events. They're mostly out of combat and do not have to spend time taking flags. This causes them to have lots of "free time" which, if used properly, can be used to kill rares. Rares give the whole raid class buffs, but more importantly, Arcane Imprisonment wands and Scrolls of Protection. Being able to abudantly use these scrolls and wands in event fights is a large advantage, and means that the Alliance should be able to win around 80% of them easily. In my experience, that has been the case. (Although most alliance raid leaders still send their raid to main road, removing these imbalances.)
- The final imbalance, which can work both ways, is the number of healers in each raid. In my experience the raid works best with 8-11 healers, but my healer count has often dropped to 5, 4, 3 or even 2 healers in a 40-man raid. The raid always steadily dies out during fights if that is the case, which is unfortunate. (And the other way around, if a raid has 13+ healers, you generally can't get a kill on them - even if they don't kill many of your group either.)

Ashran is still fun to me because it is rewarding if you put more (leading) effort into it. I'm not quite as OP as I was before, now that Ancient Artifact has a long respawn cooldown; I used to almost constantly have the Artifact (because I knew when it would spawn, and others wouldn't know that if they didn't see me the last few minutes). But yesterday was exceptionally fun, just from the Ashran fights. Even though we lost a couple, we were well-organised and the fights were fun and challenging.
I wonder what people still dislike about it in its current state, apart from perhaps occasional fps drops and "not liking large-group pvp" to begin with.

Thoughts?

All I saw in this post was "backdoor" and "free time." I approve of this post.

[PrairieChicken]

Apparently you don't play on US Alliance, all the effort in the world is not going to help a team win that is getting facerolled over and over and over to the point where players are leaving as fast as they join. Where it seems only one side is able to make premades with 5-6 heals that dominates everything so bad the AA is useless to Alliance and better off hidden away inside the Alliance base just to keep the Horde from making even worse.

This is the way it is on most all servers, for example today I wanted to get the 4 events and kill Vol quest done on two alts, I started at 6:30am it is now 4:15pm and I still need two event wins on my second alt, I have had to re-que an unbelievable 17 times so far today, out of that I got into one group that was winning anything and managed to complete my first alt's quest which was done just before 11am.

It has been nothing but a non-stop Horde domination fest you would have to be a masochist to want stay in one of these battles so most don't and neither do I.

When they consistently roll over you like you were 10 levels lower than them and have double or triple the number of healers no amount of effort is going to fix it.

Did you actually try to lead the groups? You get up to 50% buff which puts you in equal footing with other side.

[twiddler]

AA is basically nothing in 40v40, it is like 2 extra people which is pretty negligible, and most of the time AA holders are shitters. Can;'t understand why people are so obsessed with it.

^This. With its CD, it is nothing. It is also easily countered. There are actually more OP things in Ashran and since some is complaining of melee being gimped, I'll go as far as saying that melee (especially tanks) are the best roles of Ashran. The real question is, how long do normal people have to wait to understand the tools at their disposal?