1. June 4, 2019  

    The state of Battlegrounds and PvP Gearing on Icecrown

    Dear all who read this.

    I don't want this to be taken as me whining or complaining because I'm salty that I'm not winning or something stupid like that, it's merely a surprising speculation that I think should be looked at or addressed by Warmane staff.

    I have been 80 on my Horde Rogue for quite a while now on the Icecrown server.
    I can say, hand on heart, that after queuing many many battlegrounds over the past week, I have not won a single one.

    The faction imbalance in terms of battleground readiness and ability seems incredibly imbalanced.

    Once again, I must stress. I have not won a single battleground whatsoever.

    Now there are a number of reasons I have observed that I believe to be the case. Every time I enter a battleground the alliance have these incredibly geared 35k hp+ players who just dominate and wipe out our entire team, whilst almost the entirety of our horde side has sub 20k hp.

    I was under the impression that there was a gear bracketing system. I think this is being entirely subverted mainly and predominantly by members of the alliance who enter these battlegrounds in almost a twink state. I'm not sure how this is done, perhaps by taking off gear before entering the battleground, I'm not certain how the system works.

    I'm finding it incredibly infuriating that almost no matter what I do, our horde side just gets obliterated and wiped out by these twinked out level 80 DK's and Paladins *from what I've noticed* who just entirely outgear our entire team. I just left an Arathi Basin which genuinely ended in under two minutes because our team were unable to even approach a single base without getting onehit.

    Introspectively, perhaps it could be because Alliance players massively outskill all horde players, but as the law of averages, I highly doubt this is the case.

    I want to use this thread for people to give their experiences and discuss why this might be the case.

    It's becoming almost impossible for me to attain even a single piece of PvP gear because my side is just getting wiped out every single battleground no matter the circumstance and we just instantly lose all hope to continue.

    TLDR ; From what I've noticed, Alliance are just an overly dominant force in 80 battlegrounds to a extreme dangerous degree that makes PvP'ing on the server as a horde member both not fun, and totally a waste of time.

  2. June 4, 2019  
    Hello ionlyplaymage,

    I twink an 80 ret on Alliance side. Based on my small sample size of 300 BG games played, the win ratio is 2 to 1. In other words, 66.7% of the time Alliance wins. If you take away the games before I had gear, the current win rate might be closer to 70%. What I want to point out is, while Alliance does win the majority of BGs, the margin is not necessarily as great as you claim it to be. Before I had gear I estimate we win roughly 60% of the games, which is more or less inline with my experience on other WotLK private servers. After I obtained my P2W weapon and 1k resilience, I was able to carry some of the matches. I believe your losing streak is simply bad luck because Alliance certainly does not win all the matches. I recommend you to reach out to some of the Horde twinks out there (I know a few but I do not want to name names here without their consent). You do not need BiS gear to be a force to be reckoned with in lower bracket BGs. A little know-how will go a long way. Good luck and see you in BGs!

  3. June 4, 2019  
    13 BGs alone on my main healer priest (fully pvp geared), 1 win. 16 BGs alone on my DK reroll (5k9 gs, mostly pve), 1 win too. A friend of mine (rogue, BiS pvp) experienced the exact same. It's been taken from the past week till today. Maybe it's me, maybe not...

    1. When you enter a WSG as horde for example, you'll see 6 to 7 players from Blackrock with around 5k6 gs (relentless). 3 players from Icecrown and/or Lordaeron with about 6k+. Match duration: as long as the alliance team gets bored of waiting for the resurrected horde people to pop out.
    Against you -> full Icecrown (maybe 1 or 2 Lordaeron/Blackrock) with 6k5 gs and shadowmournes everywhere. No no, I'm not exaggerating, I even took screenshots of all that.

    2. Blackrock seems tired of that too. They can't play, they can't compete. Nor can we (Icecrown for my part). Even the alliance side sometimes stops attacking us and feels sorry for what's happening and the lack of gameplay (yeah, res camping is not what can be called "gameplay").

    3. When you have a complaint from a handful of people, you can ignore it. When it comes from the whole community you should listen to it. It doesn't mean that you have to give people what they ask for, but you should at least pay attention to what they are saying.

    4. The only way I've found at the moment to fight and eventually win is to make a premade group and enter WSG or Arathi. Alterac is unplayable, Isle of Conquest too.

    Actually, I find myself (and my friends too) unable to play any BGs whatsoever. We can't get any piece of gear because we get destroyed every single match (or almost) and we don't have fun at all. The gearing process is awful. The gameplay is atrocious. And at the end of the day I feel like: do I switch to alliance or do I simply stop playing until it gets fixed?

    Just my 2 cents.

  4. June 6, 2019  
    Hello ionlyplaymage,

    I twink an 80 ret on Alliance side. Based on my small sample size of 300 BG games played, the win ratio is 2 to 1. In other words, 66.7% of the time Alliance wins. If you take away the games before I had gear, the current win rate might be closer to 70%. What I want to point out is, while Alliance does win the majority of BGs, the margin is not necessarily as great as you claim it to be. Before I had gear I estimate we win roughly 60% of the games, which is more or less inline with my experience on other WotLK private servers. After I obtained my P2W weapon and 1k resilience, I was able to carry some of the matches. I believe your losing streak is simply bad luck because Alliance certainly does not win all the matches. I recommend you to reach out to some of the Horde twinks out there (I know a few but I do not want to name names here without their consent). You do not need BiS gear to be a force to be reckoned with in lower bracket BGs. A little know-how will go a long way. Good luck and see you in BGs!
    Interesting, could just be bad luck but it seems to just continue on.

    Quick question, aren't battlegrounds supposed to be gear bracketed, so why are there enemies in my battlegrounds in full gear with shadowmournes when I have one piece of furious?

  5. June 6, 2019  
    Interesting, could just be bad luck but it seems to just continue on.

    Quick question, aren't battlegrounds supposed to be gear bracketed, so why are there enemies in my battlegrounds in full gear with shadowmournes when I have one piece of furious?
    There are at least two things that could bump you from lower to higher bracket:
    1) Queuing with someone who belongs to higher bracket.
    2) Queuing when there are not enough lower bracket players in queue. Oftentimes when this happens, you will notice Horde side gets filled by players from Blackrock.

    It might be harder to have an impact on BGs as an under-geared rogue (I wouldn't know, as I don't play one), so as an alternative to gearing up, you can earn a large sum of gold from doing quests (don't forget about the Zul'Drak arena quest, picked up in Dalaran sewers). With some luck you can buy some blues off the Auction House to boost your item level to get into random heroics. Also do not forget about the Wintergrasp quests, shoulders, trinkets, and enchants. Hopefully by doing all of the above, you'll soon have 1k achievement points and be able to benefit from the point system as well on the website.

  6. June 7, 2019  
    People have started to twink the lower brackets, 30k health warriors, hunters that 1 shot you etc are all normal now. Whoever has more twink wins.

  7. June 7, 2019  
    well, the gs or ilevel has that type of flaws.

    For evade scaling and stuff of that type and don't deny pve gear in pvp the option is put ilevel cap for piece, so no 284 weapon in low bracket bg.

    pvp gear varies from 232-270 so i guess <=232 / >232 && <=264 / >264 isn't so crazy if brakets by gear is the idea.

    The meaniful part isn't the middle bracket, the main break point for evade bis is >264.

  8. June 7, 2019  

    Introspectively, perhaps it could be because Alliance players massively outskill all horde players, but as the law of averages, I highly doubt this is the case.

    I want to use this thread for people to give their experiences and discuss why this might be the case.

    It's becoming almost impossible for me to attain even a single piece of PvP gear because my side is just getting wiped out every single battleground no matter the circumstance and we just instantly lose all hope to continue.

    TLDR ; From what I've noticed, Alliance are just an overly dominant force in 80 battlegrounds to a extreme dangerous degree that makes PvP'ing on the server as a horde member both not fun, and totally a waste of time.

    Well you pretty much said it all. It took me 10.000 honor kills (around 300 BG'S) to get full furious on my warlock and wrathful Off-set, including belt and boots and I'm still missing the medallion.

    I used to play 10-15 BG's a day, now I play 1-3 on different times to see how the situation is going, if I get IoC or Alterac valley I leave inmediately without hesitation and I try again in 4-5 hours or the next day.

    Once I get the medallion, I'll q one BG a day until I gather enough honor to buy the wrathful weapon, and once I get it I wont ever q a BG again until I transfer to alliance if I see that we struggle to obtain helmet which I don't think we will, but still it's a possibility.


    I hope that with this you understand my position and the position of everyone on horde that has somewhat decent skill in pvp, we just don't want to q on a BG where nobody speaks english, where nobody knows what to do, where nobody listens and where nobody fights, they just run away and spam let them win on the graveyard.

    I don't think there's anything to do, I have lost all faith on horde, and I have been horde since I started on this server in 2012 or 2013, but for the first time I may transfer all my characters to alliance except the warlock, there's no fun in pvp at all, it's impossible to gear up and it seems that horde only appeals to an extremely questionable type of individuals that I won't describe because I don't want a ban.

    If anything was to be done, in my experience the only thing that could fix this would be implementing free transfers from alliance to horde and maybe giving away some perks to the horde like x2 the daily win reward or tenacity in BG's, and even with the latter we would get farmed on the graveyard LOL.

  9. In my opinion there are few reasons that make horde lose most of the battlegrounds:
    1. Human racial and most of the people that want to play seriously pvp will play alliance = veterans choosing alliance side just because its a pvp faction to play = leading to skill difference between horde and alliance,

    2. Blackrock players, i noticed many of people create new characters just to test them out on an instant 80 realm, leading to complete newbies entering the pvp and in my experience = most of them end up on horde side when matched in battlegrounds,

    3. Guilds like "Old Division" and few others - exclusive, mostly best in slot geared, premading guilds which were horde before = became alliance. They were horde to skip the super long queues you had on alliance side but since the crossrealm, the queues are much faster and there is no need to be horde anymore. For reason why these guilds prefer alliance look point 1,

    4. During point 3 i talked about guilds changing factions, but im sure there are also many individual people doing this too. Could get worse as everyone that wants to play seriously pvp and enjoy battlegrounds will just switch to alliance as they cant win on horde.

    5. Because horde is notoriously losing more games than alliance, we see people leaving/afking/not ressurecting in battlegrounds as soon as they see its going to be a hard match because of having no hope so quickly. That leads to even worse odds, where in warsong gulch 2 people not playing is 20% of the team, making even the losing experience awful to play.


    I havent thought much of solutions to these problems yet. The only thing that came up to my mind almost instantly is to include the alliance from Icecrown realm to be crossfaction with the horde like on Blackrock. Mix all the geared people from Icecrown alliance with the opposing horde. This is a solution without looking at gearscore or changing human racial.
    Edited: June 11, 2019

  10. 1. Aliance is full of shadowmourne people at least 10 in AV.
    2. Horde 70% blackrock people and 65% of them people who trying out first time new class.
    3. Server is too old, creating a balance on almost five years server doesn't work well.
    Solution? There's no solution, most of Horde PvP players escaped to aliance, and that what disbalances whole thing.

  11. Yup. All your points are correct. Enjoy Q-ing against no one. The game will be super fun when you're all just sitting on alli side, jerking each other off because there's nothing else to do.

  12. Lets not forget, the original post was mostly about the lower bracket of 80 battlegrounds (BG). I do not have enough experience on the higher bracket, so I will not comment on that. I just want to make a few observations as an Alliance Retribution Paladin twink:

    1) My win rate has gone up to over 70%. I estimate I win about 75% of the time, and of the matches I lose, a not insignificant number of them involve Blackrock players filling the rank of Horde during off-peak hours.
    2) I have yet to come across a Horde twink with significant number of games under his belt that has over 50% win rate. This can easily be checked by looking up someone in the Armory and navigate to the BG statistics page.

    Aside from the anecdotal observation that Alliance usually have more twinks than Horde, perhaps the composition of the teams also matters. The double trinket advantage for Human naturally attracts a lot of plate wearers, who not only can push the lines better, but also provide protection for the casters and healers behind them. This seems to offer Alliance some tactical advantage when it comes to capturing or defending key terrains and objectives, which often leads to victory.

    On a side note, I do not believe the "law of averages" of player skills has much to do with BG win rates. It is not unimaginable that there are more skilled PVP players on the Alliance side. The average player in BG has little impact on its outcome. Average is just average, and it is typically bad. Having one or two extremely geared and skilled players is what usually turns the tide of a battle. Hence the saying, 10% of the soldiers do 90% of the killing.
    Edited: June 15, 2019

  13. May 25, 2020  
    Well you pretty much said it all. It took me 10.000 honor kills (around 300 BG'S) to get full furious on my warlock and wrathful Off-set, including belt and boots and I'm still missing the medallion.

    I used to play 10-15 BG's a day, now I play 1-3 on different times to see how the situation is going, if I get IoC or Alterac valley I leave inmediately without hesitation and I try again in 4-5 hours or the next day.

    Once I get the medallion, I'll q one BG a day until I gather enough honor to buy the wrathful weapon, and once I get it I wont ever q a BG again until I transfer to alliance if I see that we struggle to obtain helmet which I don't think we will, but still it's a possibility.


    I hope that with this you understand my position and the position of everyone on horde that has somewhat decent skill in pvp, we just don't want to q on a BG where nobody speaks english, where nobody knows what to do, where nobody listens and where nobody fights, they just run away and spam let them win on the graveyard.

    I don't think there's anything to do, I have lost all faith on horde, and I have been horde since I started on this server in 2012 or 2013, but for the first time I may transfer all my characters to alliance except the warlock, there's no fun in pvp at all, it's impossible to gear up and it seems that horde only appeals to an extremely questionable type of individuals that I won't describe because I don't want a ban.

    If anything was to be done, in my experience the only thing that could fix this would be implementing free transfers from alliance to horde and maybe giving away some perks to the horde like x2 the daily win reward or tenacity in BG's, and even with the latter we would get farmed on the graveyard LOL.
    I don't understand this generalisations that the alloance has better gear or that they are the only ones that farm players at gy. From what ive seen the horde does the same. Alterac valley, horde win most of the time and they have alot of premades.

  14. June 9, 2020  
    If I purchase a player via trade and the player bio mentions honor or conquest arena points figure, does that mean those points are available to spend or that they were once accumulated and now potentially spent and discarded as the player is naked?

  15. June 9, 2020  
    If I purchase a player via trade and the player bio mentions honor or conquest arena points figure, does that mean those points are available to spend or that they were once accumulated and now potentially spent and discarded as the player is naked?
    Arena and Honor points get transfered when you buy the character and you can spend them once you do so.
    Edited: June 9, 2020

12 Last

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •