Classic AV Continues To Entertain

Over the course of the past several weeks I've returned to AV for a few afternoons and evenings to farm some more reputation. I've made it up to revered, which netted me a nice new quiver.

That said, queues have been a pain. And to think I complained about having to wait twenty minutes for a match two months ago! Nowadays the wait times for Horde are easily double that if not more. That does have the advantage that forty minutes are enough time to actually do something other than sit in the queue, such as fish or farm, but if playing AV was all you really wanted to do that play session it still sucks.

Ultimately this wait has largely meant that I haven't actually played that many matches, but just based on the ones I did get into it has been interesting to watch the evolving meta. As Kring already mentioned in the comments on my last post, the instant queues for Alliance meant that they were trying to organise a lot of pre-mades, which was great for the people in those pre-mades and pretty awful for everyone else. For Horde, it resulted in pretty hit-and-miss matches for a while, depending on whether you ended up facing a pre-made or not.

The situation was exacerbated when Alliance players started to drop out as soon as it became clear that not enough members of their pre-made had made it into the match, and apparently there was something wrong with the backfilling mechanism as well, which meant that some matches would start with only ten Alliance players vs. forty Horde. Let me tell you, I felt bad for those guys... but after waiting in the queue for half an hour or more the Hordies were in no mood to make it quick and painless, instead taking their time to bring down every single bunker, kill every NPC that gives honour, and even engaging in silly fun like summoning Lokholar the Ice Lord just because they could.

Blizzard actually felt the need to step in there, fixing the issue of matches starting with one team half empty, and also removing the little number indicator for the battleground, which pre-mades could previously use to co-ordinate which match to enter.

This served to further increase queue times, but I have to admit that the matches I do get into lately have been very fun, with Horde winning most of the time despite of the perceived Alliance bias of the battleground.

It's been very interesting to observe the evolving meta as well: Early on, most of the matches I won had about half the Horde raid splitting off to defend Galv and wipe the Alliance assault there, which would force them to reorganise and buy us the extra time needed to kill Vann before they could get to Drek. It still tended to be a relatively close thing though.

In my more recent matches though, the Horde has been a lot more confident and living up to its name - no more hiding in Galv's shadow and trying to defend. Instead people fan out across the Field of Strife (the joke used to be that it's a misnomer because nobody fights there and people just ride past each other), ping where the Alliance assault is approaching, and then we just form a sort of battering ram and charge right into them. The advantage of taking the initiative aside, I'm still not sure why this works as well as it does.

Not only do we usually wipe out the initial assault, but we then proceed to cap Stonehearth Graveyard - remember when that used to be a meme? When people hated anyone doing that because they wanted the Alliance to have a respawn point that would allow them to keep advancing instead of clogging up the roads on their half of the map? Well, no more of that - in the current meta, the Horde wants to pen the Alliance in and farm them for a while.

The Horde holding Stonehearth Graveyard until both Stonehearth and Icewing Bunker have been destroyed causes the Alliance to trickle back down only slowly, making it easy to defend against them. After collecting a number of the drops from trade-ins, some people will start to recall to Frostwolf Village to do hand-ins, and things like the Icelord summon may well happen for fun.

The final push tends to be hard because the Alliance forces are concentrated in their base by that point, but at the same time they'll be yearning to break out, so eventually the defense disperses a bit, and by that point it doesn't matter anymore if they make a try at assaulting the Horde base, because we're already in their base, killing their dudes. So the long wait tends to pay off with a match that lasts about half an hour and brings with it insane honour and reputation gains for Horde - good times if you can stand the wait.

We'll see how things continue to evolve and whether the Alliance comes up with a proper counter to the currently prevailing Horde strategy any time soon.

There's Something About Alterac Valley

About ten days ago, Blizzard dropped the patch that introduced battlegrounds to WoW Classic, or at least the first two: Warsong Gulch and Alterac Valley. I've never been a huge fan of the former, but I did want to get in on the action in the latter. Conveniently I even dinged 60 just in time to not be completely useless.

Now, queueing for battlegrounds doesn't work the same way in Classic as it does in retail and other modern MMOs. There's no convenient button to just enter the queue from anywhere in the world. There aren't even battlemasters in the capital cities yet, though I do seem to recall those being there in late Vanilla... maybe Classic will get them in a later phase as well.

As it stands though, the only way to join a match of WSG or AV is to leg it to Ashenvale or Alterac and dutifully bump your nose up against the instance entrance for the battleground to make a queue prompt appear. And then you sit there and wait.

While queues are cross-server and I'm sure that's good for queue times overall, it also means that Horde being the smaller faction on Pyrewood Village has exactly zero effect on our queue times, as we get thrown in with all those PvP servers with a Horde majority and therefore need to wait for enough Alliance players to line up to make up the numbers just like everyone else. Initially queue times were only about eight minutes, but since then they've increased to about twenty minutes at times.

This is annoying because that's a really long time to just stand around and wait (you'll have to tap your character at least a couple of times to not get logged out for being AFK), but Classic being what it is, it's also not really enough time to go out and do some quests in the meantime. (Not to mention that you need to be back at the door anyway to queue for the next match once you're done.) Worse, sometimes the matches can be so quick that you spend way more time sitting in the queue than actually playing.

Yeah, if you thought Classic was going to be a return to those "epic" week-long AV matches that people always talk about so fondly...  prepare to be disappointed. Personally I had no expectations of that nature myself, based on my experiences with Vanilla AV on private servers, but I was still kind of stunned by how many matches were over in less than ten minutes. The very first "introduction to AV" quest you pick up near the entrance asks you to retrieve a banner from a cave near your base and I failed it several times simply because I couldn't fight my way to the back of the cave quickly enough before the match was already over again, even if I made a straight beeline for the objective the moment the gates opened.

Sadly it's simply a classic case of WoW players needing to be saved from themselves. It was interesting to watch conversations about this in guild chat, as they basically came down to everyone agreeing that five-minute rushes to the end were not fun, but a lot of people still insisting that everyone should be doing the thing that's not fun anyway to optimise their honour per hour. To me, this is the problem with WoW players in a nutshell.

Fortunately AV is too big for the fun police to enforce anything efficiently. While there may be general moaning that "people" should be doing this or that, nobody really cares about any particular individual going off to do their own thing, unless you go AFK in a blatantly obvious spot, so I've spent a lot of time simply trying to get various quests done.

I previously expressed excitement about acquiring the Ice Barbed Spear for example, but I'd forgotten that this very same quest actually also rewards a pretty sweet crossbow, so I went for that instead as it provided more of an immediate benefit. Mind you, I'd never come across a crossbow before during my entire time levelling, so my weapon skill with them was 1. I entered my next AV match without realising that you can't increase your weapon skill in battlegrounds... let's just say that next match was a bit of an oopsie.

Anyway, once I'd got that sorted out, my main motivation to keep playing was reputation, not honour (though I'm up to rank 2, "Grunt", right now - woo). Interestingly, reputation vendors in Classic don't even let you see their wares if you don't have the right reputation level, so there's no window shopping and sighing over the goodies you'll hopefully acquire soon. You've got to look up the rewards outside the game or be surprised.

One thing I had looked up were arrows, because I hadn't seen an opportunity to upgrade my arrows since I switched to jagged arrows at level 40. Research led me to Thorium Headed Arrows as the ultimate endgame ammo, but they can only be acquired by crafting Thorium Shells from a rare schematic and then trading them in at a vendor... not particularly appealing to a casual player like me.

However, you could also get arrows that are slightly worse than the Thorium ones but better than jagged by reaching honoured with your AV faction, so that's what I went for. Simply being able to buy those from a vendor was going to be much more straightforward than the whole song and dance surrounding Thorium arrows, even if they could only be purchased from the AV reputation vendor near Tarren Mill.

I did get that done eventually and was pleasantly surprised that the vendor also had upgrades for another couple of my gear slots at honoured reputation. Not pre-raid best in slot or anything like that, but better than what I had so I was happy.

We'll see whether/when I continue with my rep grind. Looking up the list of potential rewards for revered and exalted, there are a couple more items that would be nice to have as a hunter; I'm just not much of a grinder. That said, every now and then it can be fun to camp in the AV cave waiting for queue pops while doing something else on the side (such as write a blog post like this one).

I'm not the only one resisting the rush-rush meta and while I'm not sure the long wait times are ultimately worth it, my matches have been interesting more often than boring. Even my win/loss ratio hasn't been too bad considering that AV is notorious for favouring the Alliance. And it does fill a unique niche of hybrid PvE/PvP content that I don't really get anywhere else.

Alas, Alterac

About two years ago I wrote a post about how I enjoyed questing in the Alterac Mountains. Considering that I used to be quite fond of the zone, it is with great shame that I have to admit that it took me nearly nine months of playing Cataclysm to notice that it is gone.

Dun dun DUNNN.

Oh alright, the mountains themselves are still there, but they don't count as a separate zone anymore (they are officially part of the Hillsbrad Foothills) and they seem to have been stripped of any and all content. I mean, it was obvious that the Alliance quests were going to go with the destruction of Southshore, but what about the Forsaken? Evidence suggests that just like with the Arathi Highlands, the developers simply ran out of time, because a Horde flight master and an orc NPC can be found standing in the middle of nowhere on the edge of Strahnbrad, suggesting that the place was supposed to become another quest hub. As it is, the quests in the Eastern half of Hillsbrad peter out somewhat quietly until you get sent on to Arathi to do the same quests there that you used to do before the Cataclysm. Strahnbrad and surroundings appear to have been forgotten.

When I first noticed this, I ran around the area a bit incredulously, trying to find some sort of sign that Blizzard had done something with it, but no such luck. Named quest mobs and the like have been removed, but otherwise the zone is still populated by the same generic mobs that have lived there forever (yetis, ogres and Syndicate). Not every mob in the game needs to have a purpose, and I'm perfectly fine with some of them just being there for flavour. But in this case it stung to remember the times when I had hunted yetis for their fur, killed ogres for a bounty and snuck into the ruins to reclaim lost treasures. When content just disappears, with nothing else to replace it, that makes me sad.

When I discovered to my great surprise that The Perenolde Tiara was still in the quest log of one of my lowbie Alliance alts, I felt a brief surge of hope. Had I missed something? Were there more quests still to do in the zone, for Alliance no less? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be no. Even this one appears to have remained more due to an oversight than anything else, as the difficulty indicator is still tuned to the quest's old level range. By the time I sent my dwarf hunter to retrieve the tiara - while the quest was still orange in my log - it turned out that all the mobs in the area had already gone grey to her. Needless to say that completing the objective felt rather anticlimactic. I can't see many people going for this quest now, what with it being given in Stormwind Keep somewhat randomly and leading you to a zone far away from Alliance lands where all the mobs are grey.

I'd really love for Blizzard to actually finish their revamp of the old world before pushing us towards the next expansion, but I'm not holding my breath. Alas, Alterac, we hardly knew ye.

Questing in Alterac

Last night I took my little shaman alt to quest in Alterac Mountains. That zone will always have a special place in my heart because as far as I can recall it's the only zone that doesn't have a town of either faction or a neutral town in it, so it feels truly remote and dangerous. The map might as well just consist of the words "here be ogres".

This effect was heigthened back in the day (pre-patch 2.3, wasn't it) by the fact that the inhabitants of the ruins of Alterac were all elite. This really wasn't a place where you wanted to go quest on your own.

I really miss random outdoor elites by the way. To this day I'm not sure why Blizzard thought it so important to remove them... yes, making them all non-elite meant that there are yet more mobs everyone can kill alone in this game, but aren't there enough of those already? It's not as if these elite quests were really required for anything, but they were a good opportunity to meet people in your level range, as grouping up for these quests actually provided a real benefit as opposed to just an XP cut. Plus it made the world more interesting to have more areas that were genuinely dangerous to you at level and slightly above. To this day I automatically become wary when an alt of mine goes near the Mosh'ogg Ogre Mound, Jintha'Alor or another area that used to be infested with elites. Then I go "oh right, they've all been nerfed" and feel sad.

Picking up the quests from Tarren Mill meant that I also got to do one of those evil Forsaken quests again that makes me feel bad every time (though clearly not bad enough to skip it): Prison Break In. Some Forsaken guy sends you to the Lordamere Internment Camp to kill a bunch of traitors who stole some "artifacts" from the Undercity and return them. Doesn't sound too bad, does it? I mean... traitors! Evil!

But then you get there and all these "evil" Forsaken are trudging around the internment camp wearing nothing but rags, just like those poor orcs in Caverns of Time: Escape from Durnholde. They are also neutral to you and don't give a damn if you kill their human wardens. When you attack them they'll fight back somewhat feebly and then try to run away when they get low on health. Absolutely pathetic.

As you kill the last guy you're forced to also kill his named guard, who drops a journal in which she talks, among other things, about what a noble and altruistic individual the guy you just killed was. Oh, and those valuable artifacts you were supposed to retrieve? Pieces of bloodstone, that rubbish ore that you only find in Arathi and that serves no other purpose than to be handed in for an Alliance-only quest. (Though one of the uncommon gems found in Northrend is called bloodstone too, not sure if there's a connection.) Way to make me feel good about myself there!

Related to that, I hope that Cataclysm will get rid of those quests to harass inhabitants of Dalaran or at least tweak them in some way. Not that I don't enjoy smacking squishy human and gnome mages to death, but they just feel hugely out of place considering that both the Horde and the Alliance ally with the Violet Eye at seventy and even set their hearthstones in Dalaran at eighty! Really, the Kirin Tor don't mind that I went around killing off their dudes sixty levels ago? Actually, it's worth it to go back to killing them even at eighty, since they drop the rare Cat Carrier (Black Tabby). And all those guys in Dalaran are okay with that? That's just hugely inconsistent.