Unusually for me, I've been doing a lot of PvP lately, taking my level 60 troll warrior to Alterac Valley again and again, at least a dozen times. The reason I'm doing it is farming Frostwolf reputation, where I am now just 3,000 reputation points away from revered. The revered Frostwolf reputation rewards are already better than the gear I'm currently wearing, and if I continue to exalted, I might finally get hold of some epics with my warrior too (who due to there being too many warriors is excluded from raiding). How much reputation you gain from a battle in Alterac Valley doesn't depend much on whether your side wins or loses. But I couldn't help noticing that from over a dozen AV trips, Horde only won 2. Why does Horde lose so much in Alterac Valley?
I really have no idea why the win/lose ratio isn't closer to 50:50. I didn't confirm it, but I was told that Horde is winning at least half of the battles in Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin. It is only the Alterac Valley battleground where they fare so badly.
One possible explanation is geography, the battleground not being totally symmetrical, and the natural pathways somehow giving the Alliance an advantage. For example whenever the Alliance takes Iceblood graveyard, it is very hard for Horde players to get from the south to the north, as the defenders of the graveyard can easily prevent the Horde players from passing. The equivalent Stonehearth graveyard is a bit farther away from the choke point of the Alliance, and it is easier to break through. I just don't know if that is advantage enough to explain why Alliance wins so often.
Another often cited explanation is paladins, which are still exclusive to the Alliance. There are a *lot* of paladins in Alterac Valley, much more than one eighth of the Alliance forces. It takes the Horde a lot more effort to kill a paladin than the Alliance excerts in effort to kill a shaman. As a warrior for the Horde it is often my job to rush through the enemy lines, thereby pushing them back. But a paladin is doing a much better job in that, because while I get stun-locked after a few meters and die, the paladin just uses his bubble and gets much farther behind the enemy lines, forcing at least a part of the enemy players to follow him, breaking up the front line. No wonder the pallys are so outraged about the possibility of a priest spells dispelling their bubble. On the other battlefields, where there are less players, and not the big frontlines evolving typically in AV, the paladins have less of an advantage. And in places where fast movement is of essence, the shaman with his ghost wolf form is probably superior to the paladin.
A third possible explanation could be that the Alliance players on average are better equipped than the Horde players, on PvE servers, due to being more numerous. It is certainly true that there are more Alliance players having full epic gear than there are Horde players, just because there are more Alliance players in total, and they have it easier to get raid groups together due to being more numerous. But it isn't clear whether the percentage of players in epic gear on a battlefield is higher on the Alliance side than on the Horde side. Are the players in AV mostly bored raiders showing off their epic toys? Or are these characters like my warrior, who are in AV because the reputation rewards are better than the gear they wear?
Or maybe one of you has another explanation of why Alliance wins more than half of the AV battles. Did you observe the same on your server, or is AV more balanced where you are playing it? I don't believe that there is a fundamental difference between the abilities of the players of each side, so no "Horde players suck" comments please!
No comments:
Post a Comment