The Battle for Ashenvale (as Horde on PvE)

I've had a few weeks to casually check out the current endgame in Season of Discovery at this point. One of the major endgame activities is the Battle for Ashenvale PvP event. I'm not a fan of PvP in Classic in general, but I figured this was going to be more like Alterac Valley, something with a heavy PvE focus, so I thought I'd check it out.

I also quite wanted the wolf mount that you can earn access to. It's 10% slower than a normal mount, only works in Ashenvale and offers no dismount protection whatsoever (so it disappears instantly the moment you take damage from any source), but it looks cool and Ashenvale is big. As a priest with no class abilities to boost my travelling speed, having a way to speed up my journeys from one end of the zone to the other was definitely attractive.

The general gist of the PvP event is easy enough to figure out, though I did check out the Wowhead guide after my first time to get clarification on a few points. Basically, there's a percentage counter for both factions at the top of the screen that goes up as people kill mobs and other players. Once it hits 100% for both factions, the battle starts and some special mobs spawn. Each faction gets three lieutenants across the map as well as a general. The latter is immune to damage until the former have been killed, similar to the way the turrets/bunkers add protection for the generals in AV, except there is no way to bypass them. Each of these opponents has raid boss levels of health and takes a while to die even with a full raid of forty players.

Because the objectives are spread out across the map and movement is slow (even with the mounts), realistically people have to split into multiple raids to get everything down in a timely manner and as an individual player, you won't get to see/tag each objective personally, though there are apparently people who try to do just that to maximise their rep gains.

Unfortunately, faction imbalance is a major problem on the PvE server, as Alliance traditionally outnumbers Horde 2:1, and... well, you can tell. On the PvP servers, Blizzard decided to enforce a degree of faction balancing in SoD by temporarily limiting character creation if one faction got too far ahead, but PvE has no such restrictions in place. Which is generally fair, but not so much in an open world PvP event like this.

Maybe the devs were hoping that it would sort itself out, since participation in anything PvP is obviously fully voluntary on a PvE server, and Horde has traditionally been more eager to jump into this kind of content than Alliance, however my personal experience at least hasn't really borne this out, as I've lost every single battle except for one. What usually happens is pretty much what you'd expect: Horde only gets one or two lieutenants down in the time the Alliance kills all three, so they get to the general first and win.

The one time I was in a raid that did achieve victory, it was pretty clear why: Most raids are formed at Splintertree Post, which puts them in relative vicinity of two of the three enemy lieutenants as well as the general. However, that leaves the third lieutenant on the other side of the map, beyond the Alliance town of Astranaar, which is a logistical problem.

In the one battle I won, someone formed a strong second raid at Zoram Strand, which took down the lieutenant there and then pivoted to defend the nearby Horde lieutenant. We arrived just in time to prevent him from being killed and absolutely decimated the Alliance raid. This cost them enough time that the people at Splintertree could finish the job there before the Alliance could catch up again, even with their superior numbers. I guess the problem is that this winning strategy requires people to forfeit some personal rewards in favour of the greater good, since the people at Zoram will get less reputation than the ones at Splintertree that get all the other kills, and that's simply not popular.

Even so, I'll admit it's an interesting little twist on open world PvP. We'll see what Blizzard come up with for the second phase.