Will A/H in battlegrounds be equal or will one side dominate?

[Explicit Teemo Nudes]

How balanced do you guys think A/H will be in battlegrounds? I'm talking about random team vs random team and how common premades will be on each side.
Will most pvp oriented people play Horde making it very imbalanced? How does this look on private servers?

[garicasha]

Some of the alliance racials were pretty good, like escape artist. Although for priests pretty sure undead was the way to go.

Let's see PvP Racials:
Human: Stealth Detection (spirit, swords, +reputation)
NE: Shadowmeld (dodge, wisp form, nature resist)
Dwarf: Stoneform (track treasure chests, guns, frost resist)
Gnome: Escape Artist (int, engineering, arcane resist)

Pallies: One thing that keeps coming up over and over in my "who is best in PvP thread" is "Arms Warrior + Holy Pally"

Tauren: War Stomp (herbalism, nature resist, 5% health)
Undead: Will of the Forsaken (breaks and immune to charm/fear/sleep), Devouring Plague for priests (corpse eating...can they still do that?, shadow resist, underwater breathing)
Orcs: Blood Fury, Hardiness (25% stun resist) (axes, pet damage)
Trolls: Berserking, (Regeneration, Bows, Beast Slaying)

Shamans: Enhances were great for highlight videos, but I've seen some reasonable arguments they were close to the bottom in PvP overall

Priests:
http://vanilla-wow.wikia.com/wiki/Priest_abilities
Human: Desperate Prayer, Feedback
Dwarf: Chastise, Fear Ward
Night Elf: Starshards, Elune's Grace

Troll: Hex of Weakness, Shadowguard
Undead: Touch of Weakness, Devouring Plague

So of those I didn't PvP all that much but it's not ridiculously lop-sided from what I can see. It's pretty situational though, shadowmeld is great for camping (all of a sudden a hunter or warrior pops out of nowhere while you're capturing the flag) but otherwise worthless. War Stomp was always handy though.

[Kralljin]

I would give Horde an edge because Shaman and slightly better racials (Hardiness & Will of the Forsaken).

However, Holy Pallies were extremely strong, altough could be taken out by enemy casters rather easily.

[Kokolums]

Two paladins could cap any flag in Arathi Basin they wanted even if the entire enemy team was beating on them because they could chain their lolimmune and live until the flag was capped. They had no counter until priests got mass dispel in Burning Crusade.

To this day I hate pallies.

[zoddzero]

On private servers Horde BG queues are much longer than Alliance ones. Most PvP'ers roll Horde because of Hardiness and WotF. Horde tends to win most random BG's. However the Alliance are stronger in premades and organized PvP because of Paladins. Many hardcore PvP'ers roll Alliance because of this and their shorter queues.

I assume this will be the case with official Classic too.

[Kralljin]

Two paladins could cap any flag in Arathi Basin they wanted even if the entire enemy team was beating on them because they could chain their lolimmune and live until the flag was capped. They had no counter until priests got mass dispel in Burning Crusade.

To this day I hate pallies.

If that was possible, it got fixed rather quickly.

First off, Paladins can't cap with Bubble, that's nothing new, that's how it was in Vanilla already.
Neither does Hand of Protection or divine protection work, both block you from interacting with PvP objectives.

Lastly, even in Vanilla Divine Protection, Hand of Protection and Divine Shield caused Forbearance, blocking you from receiving any of those 3 mentioned effects.
With the exception of Divine Shield, all of those buffs could be purged.

Like really, if that was possible, Alliance would have had a 90% win rate in AB.

[Kokolums]

If that was possible, it got fixed rather quickly.

First off, Paladins can't cap with Bubble, that's nothing new, that's how it was in Vanilla already.
Neither does Hand of Protection or divine protection work, both block you from interacting with PvP objectives.

Lastly, even in Vanilla Divine Protection, Hand of Protection and Divine Shield caused Forbearance, blocking you from receiving any of those 3 mentioned effects.
With the exception of Divine Shield, all of those buffs could be purged.

Like really, if that was possible, Alliance would have had a 90% win rate in AB.

Trust me it was possible. The conditions you describe did not prevent it.

[Kralljin]

Trust me it was possible. The conditions you describe did not prevent it.

Yeah, then give me some source on that.

I've played Vanilla, watched countless "Vanilla review" videos (or whatever you want to call those videos) on PvP, Raiding, leveling and so forth, none of them mentioned what you described.

[MMKing]

Are you looking for a discussion or tips on what to do should you wish to play classic wow pvp? The Horde tend to have more PVP players, for the same reason Alliance tend to have more PVE players, racials. However, this has the effect of considerably longer queue times on the Horde side.

Horde tend to have an easier time in 10 randoms vs 10 randoms as the hordes are more likely to be dedicated pvp players with an ideal specc and more suited gear for the task. At top tier 10 vs 10 organized play it's pretty equal, more skill determined. However, since there are more random horde players. You can have allot of fun playing on Alliance side in a team of 5.

[Vineri]

Alliance and Horde are fairly balanced. By Balanced I mean 40-60 or 60-40. It fluctuates, although it is 50-50, sometimes . :P

IN AV:
Well there is a cheat for each side. As an Alliance player, it is possible to get up the hillside / waterfall, and walk outside the fence to bypass the towers, then get the final flag, bypassing ALL towers. As a horde player it is possible to scale the mountain and bypass ALL towers, then get the final flag. Blizzard fixed the Horde base exploit early on (adding invisible walls to the Horde base outside fenses), but never fixed the Alliance base exploit. This is important to your question, because people rolling Horde think they have E-Z mode, being able to just go up the hill and win. I believe the Alliance base weakness will evaporate! Tehe

Every other realm is fairly straight-forward. Pick your group if you want a pre-formed group. Sometimes a different pre-formed group will have a better make-up vs yours. Deal with it.

[Projectmars]

Alliance and Horde are fairly balanced. By Balanced I mean 40-60 or 60-40. It fluctuates, although it is 50-50, sometimes . :P

IN AV:
Well there is a cheat for each side. As an Alliance player, it is possible to get up the hillside / waterfall, and walk outside the fence to bypass the towers, then get the final flag, bypassing ALL towers. As a horde player it is possible to scale the mountain and bypass ALL towers, then get the final flag. Blizzard fixed the Horde base exploit early on (adding invisible walls to the Horde base outside fenses), but never fixed the Alliance base exploit. This is important to your question, because people rolling Horde think they have E-Z mode, being able to just go up the hill and win. I believe the Alliance base weakness will evaporate! Tehe

Every other realm is fairly straight-forward. Pick your group if you want a pre-formed group. Sometimes a different pre-formed group will have a better make-up vs yours. Deal with it.

Wasn't there a hill that you could ramp off of to jump into the Horde base and bypass a bunch of enemy NPCs? Either way they did mention fixing several exploits like Wall Climbing, so maybe the alliance one would be fixed.

[Gavll]

How balanced do you guys think A/H will be in battlegrounds? I'm talking about random team vs random team and how common premades will be on each side.
Will most pvp oriented people play Horde making it very imbalanced? How does this look on private servers?

Horde will win
80-90% WSG
60-80% AB
20-30% AV

Horde premades will be running all day also. Also expect Horde to generally have better group composition and more healers.

[The Stormbringer]

If they're using 1.12 as a base, chances are BGs will be cross-server, which should help with balancing issues.

[Vineri]

Wasn't there a hill that you could ramp off of to jump into the Horde base and bypass a bunch of enemy NPCs? Either way they did mention fixing several exploits like Wall Climbing, so maybe the alliance one would be fixed.

Possibly .. I only remember the waterfall one. If you kept jumping into the waterfall you could eventually get a little higher, and a little higher, until you got to the top, outside the fence. Then walk around the fence, to the final graveyard and click the flag. It was nerfed around 1.8-1.10 I believe though, as an invisible barrier was placed near the top of the waterfall. Plus, just to make absolutely sure, they added more invisible barriers all around the outside fence area, lol.

[Hottage]

Horde will win
80-90% WSG
60-80% AB
20-30% AV

Horde premades will be running all day also. Also expect Horde to generally have better group composition and more healers.

Funny enough, that's not how I remember it.

In my premades (as Alliance) I remember it more like:
95% WSG
90% AB.

I only did AV in downtime but our victory rate was pretty high there too (well over 60%).

That said, most of the Horde premades would dodge my team so they could stomp PUGs

[Gavll]

Funny enough, that's not how I remember it.

In my premades (as Alliance) I remember it more like:
95% WSG
90% AB.

I only did AV in downtime but our victory rate was pretty high there too (well over 60%).

That said, most of the Horde premades would dodge my team so they could stomp PUGs

OP did say random vs random If you're running a premade you should always win against randoms

[Storfan]

If blizzard dont fix the horde backdoor in ally base on AV, horde is gonna be CRUSHING ally in AV. On the other hand, Ally has major advantage over horde in AV to begin with.

[Hottage]

OP did say random vs random If you're running a premade you should always win against randoms

Guy I quoted specifically mentioned Horde premades.

[Gavll]

Guy I quoted specifically mentioned Horde premades.

You quoted me, lol. My %'s are for random v random. And I mentioned premades after as per the OP's original question part two.

[Deleted]

Hordes NPCs were better in the original AV.