Vanilla WoWer and AV

[Whammy Shammy]

So here’s my first post on MMOC although I’m definitely no stranger to this great site. Anyways, I’m just wondering if any other vanilla WoWers miss what Alterac Valley use to be like. As opposed to the zerg fest that it has become now. I don’t know how it is in other battle groups but on Whirlwind, if you’re not zerging you’re a scrub who doesn’t know how to play AV. I lol at this.

Now, Blizzard over the years has done a modest job of maintaining a balance between the opposing sides but somewhere along the way they lost the point of AV and thus creating the zerg BG it has become today. Gone are the days of the epic battles lasting for day(s). Gone are the days of strategy, teamwork and gameplay. It’s a shame that newer players haven’t seen the elementals roll out or the druids lending their support. And those are only a couple features that AV can do. Or at least use to do.

Perhaps Blizzard is attempting to satisfy the short attention spans of today’s younger/impatient players (ie time limits in WSG, lowering the point cap in AB, the easy acquisition of epic gear etc.) The “I want it all now” mentality that runs rampant in our society is infecting WoW at an alarming rate and that, for this paying customer, is a little sad but unfortunately from a business stand point it's understandable.

So how can we curb the AV zerg? Well, players that understand defense and teamwork might help but the chances of that happening are slim to none. Maybe Blizzard can revamp AV so a zerg can’t happen (easily at least). Like making the bridge by SPGY a drawbridge that only goes down once towers have been destroyed. Same sort of idea on the Horde side could easily be applied. Who knows, maybe people would actually start playing AV for the BG that it actually can be and learning teamwork along the way. And that itself is not such a bad thing in the end.

Lastly, this is not a QQ thread although it may come across as one to some. I simply want to get a feel for what other players think.

Remember. Play nice!

[mööh]

i know many people here love to see the av back. Sadly i never got a chance to see it but you can make it more a of battle now if you defend like 2 towers. That way they can't attack the leader and that make's it less of a zerg fest

[Satyrn]

Oh I loved the epic hour even day long battles that were AV. When the battle lasted long enough to take advantage of the druids summoning the giant tree, to the orcs summoning the ice lord. It's been so long since they have been activated that I can't even remember their names. They used to be one of the deciders of which team won, who can summon their lord the fastest and follow him till the king.

This made for good team play and actual strategies when both teems are stuck between a kind of tug-of-war battle. This kind of battleground system has been lost to all those that complain, I think blizzard should bring back this BG the way it used to be, instead of a skimpy little battle of who can run to the oppositions final GY and keep it till it captures.

I have lost the will to join for battlegrounds almost completely, not because of my skill but just because I wait in the que for 8 minutes on a busy day to 15 minutes on an off day, some battlegrounds dont even last more than 8 minutes yet im waiting to join one for longer than im in them. Like completing Strand of the Ancients in 3-4 minutes, it's a joke and Arathi Basin is the only Bg that i enjoy competing in because it last often more than not a decent time and is balanced, also Eots. They arent large amounts of people rushing to one point and one goal, they require you to take the point and leave people behind and get the next one. and they are longer because the more zones you have the harder it is to keep them all.

I agree with OP "The “I want it all now” mentality that runs rampant in our society is infecting WoW at an alarming rate and that, for this paying customer, is a little sad but unfortunately from a business stand point it's understandable." Not everyone can be pleased as this game is all about blizzard making money.
I would love to see a battleground similar to that which was AV

[Kleins]

Oh I loved the epic hour even day long battles that were AV. When the battle lasted long enough to take advantage of the druids summoning the giant tree, to the orcs summoning the ice lord. It's been so long since they have been activated that I can't even remember their names. They used to be one of the deciders of which team won, who can summon their lord the fastest and follow him till the king.

This made for good team play and actual strategies when both teems are stuck between a kind of tug-of-war battle. This kind of battleground system has been lost to all those that complain, I think blizzard should bring back this BG the way it used to be, instead of a skimpy little battle of who can run to the oppositions final GY and keep it till it captures.

I have lost the will to join for battlegrounds almost completely, not because of my skill but just because I wait in the que for 8 minutes on a busy day to 15 minutes on an off day, some battlegrounds dont even last more than 8 minutes yet im waiting to join one for longer than im in them. Like completing Strand of the Ancients in 3-4 minutes, it's a joke and Arathi Basin is the only Bg that i enjoy competing in because it last often more than not a decent time and is balanced, also Eots. They arent large amounts of people rushing to one point and one goal, they require you to take the point and leave people behind and get the next one. and they are longer because the more zones you have the harder it is to keep them all.

I agree with OP "The “I want it all now” mentality that runs rampant in our society is infecting WoW at an alarming rate and that, for this paying customer, is a little sad but unfortunately from a business stand point it's understandable." Not everyone can be pleased as this game is all about blizzard making money.
I would love to see a battleground similar to that which was AV

Today I was doing a BG on one of my Alt's and Alliance got Ivus. I had a giant nerdgasm over the fact that SOMEONE finally took advantage of it. Ohhh the memories.

[Rellekk]

So here’s my first post on MMOC although I’m definitely no stranger to this great site.

As someone who says they arent a stranger to the site, you'd know this tread/topic gets brought up once a week.

with that said, every person who played(still plays) Pre-TBC wishes AV could go back to that. I remember being in an AV, logging off for the night, only to wake up the next day in the same AV still going on.

Lok the icelord ftw btw

[psycon]

The problem is 99.9% of the people playing AV now doesnt even know, or have seen the summonings.
It is/was epic, for sure. I remember running AV on my first toon, being a total nab and suddenly seeing ppl @ the lake clicking some portal. I was like huh, lets click. POOF woooow what the &^_* is that!

Awesome times.

edit: btw, is it even still possible?

[Vellin]

It is, but there is no point in doing it.

[Slashley]

On a side note, I remember when AV had the All seeing eye. You had to get the orb from the troll cave and give it to the syndicate guys and then you could get a stealth detect buff.

Edit: since we are talking about vanilla, im hoping that these new changes to the talent trees will return us to a time like old vanilla wow. we'll see.

[Gerbill]

They could do a fairly simple fix in the sense that you need to cap bunkers/towers in a certain order, so you can't rush ahead and cap say Dun Baldar bunkers if the other bunkers haven't been capped yet.
Or perhaps make it so you can cap them (since the rogue/druid ninja groups to cap towers were quite fun) but they're slightly more guarded with guards who actually stop you from capping rather than just dying in 2 hits, they don't even have to deal that much damage just as long as they can survive a while and stop you from capping, so it takes a bit longer to get the tower/bunker when it's not the first in the order. Those guards could despawn when it's the tower/bunker's time in the order of capping (lorewise they'd be falling back or whatever)

This way it'd take more effort for breaking through, you could even add a mechanic that the group who lost more towers gains a slight buff to perhaps get back in the game, and in return that buff would be gone if an equal number of towers/bunkers were to be capped. And because it'll be more effort perhaps those summons can be scaled up and actually be worth something, say a push on a tower at least.

Sure it might take longer but hey.. it'll be fun! Right now whenever AV pops up for me in the random BG I just consider it to be a 50/50 chance of winning due to it being a boring PvE rush..

[Daziel]

Sometimes I still encourage the battleground to gather crystals to summon Ivus. I tell you one time the Alliance summoned Ivus and the Horde summoned their equivalent (don't remember the name). It was one epic battle in the center of AV.

[Lysah]

Lokholar, the Ice Lord.

[Whammy Shammy]

nice to see that there are players out there who know where i'm coming from. and in response to your post rellekk, as a senior member you should show a little more tact. i come to the site often to check out WoW news and not to sift thru the forums per say. And prior to posting my topic i attempted to do a search for related posts but the search function is disabled atm.

Please note the last comment in my post. Play nice! that goes for senior members as well.

[Spartanoble]

they should make it so the other team need a certain number of reinforcements and you need a certain number of towers controlled before you can attack the enemy leader . Long gone are the Join Battle - Go away for a few hours - Join same battle times of Vanilla

[Zoros]

-Guard swarms
-Korrak
-Elite trols
-Ivus/Lokholar constantly bugged
-Unable to rest

Did I play the same AV during vainilla?

[Cernunnos]

Logging out in AV, going to sleep for 7 hours, log back into WOW, still in the same AV.

Those were the days.

Do I want to raid to night or do I want to do AV.

[psycon]

-Guard swarms
-Korrak
-Elite trols
-Ivus/Lokholar constantly bugged
-Unable to rest

Did I play the same AV during vainilla?

Apparently not

[Unionoob]

well.. this game is missing Ground War type game where battle is going atlast 24 hrs or even more..

I really loved old AV and it was awesome.. then they nerfed it but still it was fine.. but then again one more nerf where game ends after 600 reinforcments..

Sad part is that noone want AV for fun or pure pvp everyone want honor.. honor.. HONOR.. srsly its nathing more now then mindless honor grinding..

btw Quest in troll cave for that mechanical robot was the best!

[Siika]

I have never witnessed the old-school AV, but for what I've heard it sounds awesome.
I have never seen anyone summoning the elemental or launching aerial assault or taming frostwolves.
So much potential awesomeness wasted...

[wingcommander]

Had this conv in AV the other day, had AV going for 3 days my self, but someone said they had one for 89 hours!! ^^

I do miss the old AV, steathing up to Iron Deep mine and mining. I've still got my AV trinket and still use it ftw.

How could you prolong the game? Thats got me thinking, The current mechanic of battle masters buffing hp or boss is decent. Its very hard to kill boss (or happens way less) when all 4 battle masters up. But seems to happen quite a lot when there are 2 battle masters left.

I think AV needs more areas on contention. Right now there is only one objective, zerging boss. Once there are other objectives the games will pan out longer allowing some of AV's other subtleties to be played.

Mines
The biggest problem is that there is no focus other than zerg boss ... The mine's bonus is not noticeable, so hardly anyone bothers with them. Even if the other team has a mine, it doesn't make you go, oh crap we need to get you back ASAP. Can't remember the amount of clever fights there were in those mines. So maybe the bonuses of the mines can be improved enough to make a difference in reinforcements. Then once a side has them there would be more incentive to fight for it.

Wolf/Ram Riders
The taming takes a long time and adminittedly the grinding of ram hides probably won't take that long. Not even seen this happen to comment. Reduce the number of turn ins for smaller amounts of elites troops?

Garrick/<insert allinace equiv>
Forgot what they are called, bezerkers for horde ... You have to mine to get supplie, its takes so long to get them and realistically there simply isn't enough time to get the supplies required. This mechanic again needs to be updated for the speedy matches that it now is. Maybe reduce the amount of turn in's which in turn creates more contention for having mines.

Snowfall GY?
Whats the value of this, who wants it in no mans land? Now if we bring back Kazzark, Korrick (the SoF Boss, forgot name) to patrols FoS for the side that owns SF, that will create more contention, its not hard to dodge, but keeps it interesting and another potential spot of contention.

Captains
Gav and Bel are squishy, not impossible to defend, give a decent buff if alive (most ppl forget that) Saw mages with 40k hps when the buff was up. Maybe battle master mechanics can be added to the captains so that they actually give a decent buff to their factions boss. Like 2's hps. More scraps at GY/captains pls!

Simple quick win?
Give everything more hps enough so that you can't solo the all npcs solo and kill everythjing with one CD. Or ignore all of the above and reduce/remove the reinforcment subtraction when you lose a captain/tower. If captain and 4 towers go down, you have like 200 reinforcements left? Make that 400 left and force a kill.

My point is there is no incentive to do anything but zerg, yes there is some tower battles happening, a bit ... but none of the above suggestions will mean squat unless the zerging tatic stops working most of the time. Ask yourself why bother with AV elites npcs when a few players can zerg better without them? Theres just no incentive at the moment!

Longer AV's is not everyone's cuppa tea. I'm not like suggesting we go back to 7 day long AV's. But an epic battle like AV should last at least last bit longer than a 10 minutes zerg fest.

And yes I'm AV lover, after random BG I always queue it.

[Zonas]

Ugh iv been forced to hate AV so much over the years. It had so many problems in vanilla, BC had some of the same problems but it just turnd into the zerg zerg zerg thing, then I lose all faith in Blizz when the caved in to alliance crying about AV being unfair and all that bullshit, now wrath its even worse since now hardly anyone actually knows how to play a BG.