FAO WoW players: Alterac Valley

Teki187 · 18 Jan 2008 at 12:28

Anyone remember when AV was first on PTR and released?

Horde base was surrounded with mines, rich thorium viens spawned inside, you could collect an item from the harpy cave and take it across the map on foot to the Gnoll camp and then you could see the enemy players for a certain amount of time.

When they had that big as Raid boss in the middle that could drop epics.

Ahh those where the days.

DampCat · 18 Jan 2008 at 12:33

There were two epic dropping raid bosses. The big ice dude and the big tree dude. PITA to summon and stopped dropping epics after a short while, which was a shame.

DampCat · 18 Jan 2008 at 12:34

Before they removed Join as a Group was good too. Saw a guild on one server would zone in abotu 20 of their guild per game. 5 Warlocks would go straight to the enemy base and summon the rest of the guild, and kill the boss. Game over, 6 minutes. Amusing.

AtreuS · 18 Jan 2008 at 12:42

DampCat said:
Before they removed Join as a Group was good too. Saw a guild on one server would zone in abotu 20 of their guild per game. 5 Warlocks would go straight to the enemy base and summon the rest of the guild, and kill the boss. Game over, 6 minutes. Amusing.

We still get loads of pre made AV's ( horde from al'akir ) so its still doable. I think they use an add=on to all join at exactly the same time or something and then most get into the same AV. Its very annoying as no one from my server does this on alliance side so we are left with usually anywhere upto 5 afkers, 10 idiots and the rest okish players against a hardcore top geared horde killing machine who are all on TS and all work in close knit teams.

DampCat · 18 Jan 2008 at 12:52

Yeah, StinkyQueue it's called

Pixel · 18 Jan 2008 at 17:54

wordy said:
yeah, when you actually got up to rank 10 and above you felt you'd achieved something!

Aye it was such a hard slog to get there, I got up to rank 10 by pugging AB, which took ages before I finally gave up. I still have the "Champion" title to show for all that effort though.

On the subject of AV, I can remember one epic match which lasted over 3 days on our server, people playing for 5+ hours at a time, leaving, then more people coming in to take their place. I've seen world epics drop off the guards, and epics drop from the summoned bosses, it was so different to how it is today.

As for AV being imbalanced towards the Horde... Back before Battlegroups came in, faction imbalances had such a huge impact on PvP, both world and BG. Almost every server was population-imbalanced towards Alliance (yay let's all roll Night Elf Hunters and call them Legolas (and variations of it)). As a result, Alliance always had the numbers to keep a full raid in AV, whereas Horde often struggled to keep 30+ players in there. I think that could be why the map itself was initially Horde-favoured. They have just recently increased the health of Bal and Vann though, in an attempt to make it fairer.