This will be the last post about AV for now, I promise. All previous commentary was based on the 51-60 bracket, and having finally hit 61+, I’ve experienced 61-70 AV. As bad as the 60 bracket was, the 70 bracket AV is a complete joke 99% of the time. Not only do both sides avoid each other, they also avoid the entire map as well. From the start, both teams rush towards the other side’s base, skipping all towers and graveyards. You then tag the final graveyard and towers, wait for those to cap, and go kill the final boss. First team to kill the NPC wins.

At least in the 60 bracket, both teams stopped to cap/burn everything along the way, and some form of defense was usually present. In the 70 bracket that’s just not the case. It’s so bad that last night, in my attempt to hit exulted with the main factions, I was having a great deal of trouble just turning in armor/crystals/marks at our base 5 minutes into the game, the reason being it was already overrun with horde and most of the NPCs were dead.

The total lack of strategy is so much worse in the 70 bracket than it was in the 60 bracket, and it would be fairly easy to turn that around. The very obvious reason both sides avoid each other and rush the final NPC is that the shorter the game is, the faster you grind out honor/marks. A slow win gets you less reward than a few quick loses, and since the alliance in my battle group seem to lose 90% of all AV games, they figure they might as well lose quickly. This was most evident in one game where our side put up decent resistance, and the 10-15 people that recalled to defend our base were getting flamed in chat by the offense; that side telling us to stop defending and delaying the game. The fact that we ended up winning that game by buying our offense enough time to actually kill the final NPC seemed to not matter.

The fix for this would be to greatly increase the amount of honor gained for actually winning, and lower the amount for losing. I believe Blizzard did this recently, but clearly not enough. And if we are going to increase the amount of honor gained, we would need to increase the length of games to compensate for this. Patch 2.4 will make killing the final NPC more difficult without burning the towers first, which will hopefully have that effect, but I worry that aside from slowing the two sides down a bit, it won’t solve the ‘avoid and rush’ game. I’m not saying bring back the 6 hour+ games of AV, but if the honor reward was balanced, would an hour long game of AV really be that bad?

The other disappointing change to AV since TBC is that what was once a dynamic and interesting battle due to NPC specials is now just a standard no frills game. The flying NPCs, the cavalry charge, the armor upgrades, and the Ice Lord/Forest Guy are never seen and have zero impact on a game, which in my opinion is sad. Seeing the Ice Lord plowing his way into a base, or seeing a pitched battle broken up due to a cavalry charge was great stuff and made AV unique as a battleground. It was a mistake to remove so much of the NPC factor from AV, and it’s very likely too late to add it back in completely. This can perhaps be fixed somewhat by increasing the resource number in AV from 600 to say 1000 or 1200, and along with the 2.4 change, this will increase the length of games. Blizzard should also reduce the amount of turn-ins needed to initiate the NPC specials, so that even a small dedicated team of collectors could quickly accomplish their goal and deploy the special attacks.

If nothing else it would bring back a little bit of strategy to AV, and I think make it overall more enjoyable and different from the other three BGs currently available.