Alterac Valley – 17 Minutes
It’s fun to get into a battleground, especially AV, in just a few minutes. The wait on Eitrigg for Alterac Valley was often an hour or more before the 1.12 release. But what’s up with the battle only lasting 15 or 20 minutes? OK, sometimes it’s 40 minutes or even and hour, but Alterac Valley used to be a long, almost epic battle.
Truth is, I used to complain about the long battles, too. It was hard, sometimes, to get people off defense. It was a grind. It took hours.
Maybe I’m just seeing different strategies. It does seem everyone rushes to offense now, with the D left to the NPCs. The coordination and teamwork is better for sure.
So is everyone else seeing this? What’s different? Is it just both sides rushing to offense? Is there something else I’m missing?
A patch or two ago they got rid of a lot of the NPCs in AV.
It made blitzkrieg assaults right from the start a lot more common, and has significantly shorted the run times on my server. Our local hordies are usually assaulting Stonehearth Bunker right from the getgo now, and if aren’t extremely careful on defense, they’ll storm right through to Stormpike.
Hell, I remember one game pre-change that I joined at about midnight, played until 4 AM, AFKed out to go to sleep, logged on again the next afternoon and got on at 2 PM to find I was in the EXACT SAME BG.
Full running time when we finished was well over 16 hours as I recall, and I think it was nowhere near a record.
But, since you get a lot of rep and honor at the end of an AV, I love the changes.
actually that has been the strategy for a while now on my server. both teams usually go mostly offense with very little defense. i’ve found on average before 1.12 battles were about 25 mins each. plenty of bonus honor and quick battles was very nice.
I wish Blizzard gave you the option of choosing your style of AV: The old, NPC-heavy, Korrak-raging, hours of fun version, or the new, streamlined, in-and-out before you know it version.
With cross-realm interaction, I’ll bet there would be enough people who would vote for the old version on a regular enough basis for them to actually pop. Heck, I would even do it every once in a while and my main character’s exalted with the buggers!