Wintergrasp Imbalance
So last week Blizzard announced exactly how Wintergrasp works when it comes to giving advantages to a faction that has consistently lost many Wintergrasp battles in a row. Up until recently, my server has been pretty good at trading Wintergrasp back and forth between the two factions. However, just last week it seems, Wintergrasp has become completely overrun by the Horde (I’m Alliance, btw). I think Alliance has only had Wintergrasp 3 or 4 times in the last week on my server. We’ve been up to 5 or more stacks of Tenacity during every single battle. What this means is that there are Horde everywhere. It doesn’t matter whether you go east, west, or try to take a workshop, there will always be more Horde wherever you are than Alliance. There’s no question that this is mainly due to a population imbalance on the server. Especially with the implementation of faction changes, more people than ever have been moving over to the Horde faction on my server.
What this means is that it is very difficult to take Wintergrasp, despite the advantages we have with Tenacity and with starting position. It doesn’t matter if we have 5 stacks of Tenacity, start with all 4 workshops and get 2nd Lieuteant immediately when the Horde can just overrun your siege engines and your flags whenever they want. What Blizzard needs to do instead of buffing the starting position of the losing faction, is to give more buffs to Tenacity. Here are three reasons why the current implementation of Tenacity fails:
- Vehicles don’t scale with Tenacity.
Its fun and all being able to solo 4 or 5 Horde at a time. However, as soon as you jump in a vehicle, you get owned. Since we are so outnumbered, losing one person’s buffed stats because they are in a vehicle means a big loss to our battle potential. There’s almost no point to jumping in a siege engine cannon. However, vehicles are required to win Wintergrasp. Its just impossible with the number of people we have compared to the Horde to field enough people in vehicles and still be able to defend those vehicles against the Horde masses. Vehicles need to scale with Tenacity in order to have any chance to survive.
- Flag Captures don’t scale with Tenacity
I’ve had it happen many times where our swat team of 3 Alliance will hold off 10+ Horde at a workshop indefinitely with Tenacity, killing them as new ones cycle in and the old ones rez. However, we never make any progress on capturing the flag since all the flag cares about is the number of people around it. It doesn’t matter if we can hold the position indefinitely killing everyone each time, as soon as they rez, we’re back to a losing battle. Its impossible to take a flag when you’re vastly outnumbered, even if you’re able to hold your own. Eventually, the Horde get all the workshops just due to sheer numbers. At that point, its impossible to win since we can’t even get any vehicles and we end up getting camped at our graveyard. Tenacity needs to scale with flag captures so that someone with Tenacity is worth more to a flag than someone without.
- CC doesn’t scale with Tenacity.
While Tenacity does help us stay alive, do more damage, and kill more Horde, it doesn’t really help as much as you’d think. The reason is because each person in that vast army of Horde has their own set of stun and incapacitate abilities that can easily remove one of those Tenacity-filled juggernauts from the battle completely. You can’t use your Tenacity empowered abilities if you are constantly stun-locked by six Horde at the same time. If the Horde start using CCs and focus fire, there’s no way that a group with Tenacity can survive. At the same time, there’s no way that the few people with Tenacity can CC even a fraction of the Horde that is attacking. CC becomes even more powerful against foes with Tenacity and any smart opponent will use it abundantly. I’m not sure how Blizzard can fix this. Maybe the first two buffs would be enough. But there’s no question that Tenacity really isn’t all its cracked up to be.
I hope Blizzard goes back and takes a look at Wintergrasp and the imbalance that can happen on some servers. You could make the argument that Blizzard wants the faction with the most people to have Wintergrasp more and that they’re happy with the imbalance and that might make some sense. It probably doesn’t make sense for a lower population faction to have Wintergrasp an equal portion as a higher population faction. However, I think the balance is still too far in favor of the larger populations and that Tenacity needs a buff. Starting with all 4 workshops and 2nd lieutenant only allows you to immediately rush your siege engines into the Horde masses rather than waiting for a time. The Horde are still going to immediately kill your vehicles and eventually take back your workshops. There needs to be some buffs to Tenacity due to the reasons I stated above (and not just bigger numbers). At the very least, vehicle health needs to be raised and flag captures need to be faster for the disadvantaged faction.
I’m not saying that Alliance should have Wintergrasp all the time. I love Wintergrasp, I have the Master of Wintergrasp Achievement, and I’ve had my share of both wins and losses. I’m just hoping I’ll be able to do VoA sometime this week.
Tenacity wouldn’t have to be extended or changed or anything if Blizzard just kept the numbers of people in a battle equal (not just capping the number at 100), similar to how it works in BGs. Then you see little or no Tenacity at all, the scaling issues don’t happen, Didn’t Stand a Chance is possible for the majority faction and WG is more fun for all sides.
One of the problems the Sisters of Elune Alliance has, and yes RPers go to Wintergrasp, is that when we go to Wintergrasp we are outnumbered. I mean that before the battle for the titan fortress begins, I fly over the already horde controlled area and see usually 15-20+ Horde sitting around in the courtyard waiting. Wintergrasp begins, and I check the raid to see how many people… and there are only 5-8+ Alliance. You think 4-5 Tenacity is bad. Wander around with 20 stacks of Tenacity usually everyday… You have the health of a raid boss, can one shot most people, and be really annoying… until you get multi-death gripped, multi-CC’ed, and over thirty DoTs ticking on you once you meet your enemy.
keep crying a river or get a faction change.
So, u saying u have 20 stacks of tenacity and dont get the most of it ? i mean, imagine droppping from in the middle of that horde mob and Bladestorm …. im counting 100 bodies …What about some slow fall, blizzard with 20 tenacity … 100 bodies dead. Adrenaline rush, FoK spam … massive killing spree…
So much potential to mess with the enemy going to waste. Rly, stop QQ and be more creative. Abuse Tenacity and Blizzard will change it.
Then fight for it
I cant win so I complain on the internet. Seems to be that horde out number allies. Well then come to fight. Nothing to do with WG and everything to do with people givin up. You want it then take it
Sorry first time here and I won’t be back all I read was QQqqQQqqQQqqQQqqQQqqQQqqQQtenacitydoenststackintovehiclesQQqqQQqqQQqqQQQqqQQqqQQqqQQqq.
Aren’t I allowed one QQ post after a year on the Internet? =-D
I don’t think it was a QQ post. The fate of PvP is determined by balance, and so pointing out imbalances isn’t whining. Demanding nerfs to ebtter players is. The last couple of commenters are the usual morons. You’ll notice the points in your arguments were completely lost on them - except for the one who couldn’t even read them.
I faction-changed to Alliance to try something new, and it seems the better PvP’ers did the opposite. We basically get slaughtered now, but not from imbalances. The Horde simply has better players. I heard the argument somewhere that as a kid you’re still confused about your personality and so you tend to identify with clean-cut heroes - the good guys. As you get older and wiser you start appreciating the inherent complexity of human nature and enjoy more ambivalent characters. Consequently, Horde has the grown-ups and Alliance the kids. It seems to be true on my server at least. As Horde, WG was calm and peaceful and co-operative: we called out observations, suggested strat and joked around. As Alliance, there’s a lot more nerd-raging and very little co-operation.
It’s still a ton of fun though
My serve its reversed there are tons of alliance a few horde to do wg, but what do you do? We fight for it anyway in the off chance we surprise them with going through the side with 4 vehicles…(sometimes it works…)
Thanks Mikkel. I definitely agree with all of you guys that more Alliance need to go to Wintergrasp on my server. I go everytime its up if I’m on and I do my best to win. But I can’t win Wintergrasp on my own and you can’t really control what anyone else does. Maybe next time I’ll make a post on how to win WG when you have high tenacity, ’cause I’ve done that plenty of times too. Btw, I did manage to get VoA done this week. =-D
Btw, a faction change doesn’t solve the problem. In fact, it makes it worse and is actually the cause of the problem, not the solution.
LOL Yes welcome to my world! On my server the horde is outnumbered (i’ve heard it is 10 to 1) and we loose in WG 98% of the time. Yes ive been there and had raid boss health numbers and been able to 1shot the allies but it doesn’t matter without vehicles you cant win. As soon as you get in a vehicle the other side takes the workshop and then kills your vehicle and you die. There is nothing to do but keep trying and do VoA when you can take a round (usualy like 4am when all the kids have gone to bed).
Just grin and bear it and have fun its a game.
On the Kirin Tor realm, similar outnumbered ratios exist although in reverse… horde rarely has anything less than 4 tenacity, and frequently can get 6-8 tenacity. i appreciate the author’s comments and agree with most of it. the biggest issue is that you need vehicles to capture the fortress, alliance know of the ’siege engine rush’ at the start of a match and will ride out to intercept. even if they die due to tenacity, they are able to destroyed the vehicles. no vehicles, no win… ration of win/loss for horde is about 1:8 based on the Archavon book.
tenacity is a bandaid, its better than nothing but there is no solution to wintergrasp aside from capping # of participants per side, and matching them.
I’m going with the first poster: keep the battle sides equal and *bam* WG becomes fair again. Since tenacity is a hold-over from when WG was a completely open free-for-all it has outlived its usefulness; there are other ways to level the playing field. If the algorithm used in BGs could keep the WG sides to within 10% of each other then tenacity wouldn’t be needed and WG would be competitive again.
But, it might be too late to really fix WG. The real problem with tenacity is that it is an in-game mechanic that can be countered by a non-in-game mechanic: planning, communication and coordination. Horde usually acts like, well, a horde: running around screaming ‘Sparta!’ and killing anything that moves, regardless of strategic value. Tenacity makes this impossible. Tenacity has actually taught Horde on Gorefiend to do what usually is completely alien to them: plan, communicate and coordinate. Unfortunately those skills will persist even if WG is balanced.
Ignore all these people that say qq. Until you’ve played on a server where one side vastly outnumbers the other, you can’t really understand how useless tenacity is.
That’s not to say it’s impossible to win when hopelessly outnumbered, it just requires a level of coordination that’s hard to pull of with a bunch of strangers.
On Alleria, Horde almost never have less than 10 tenacity and 20 is pretty standard. As someone pointed out, you CAN mow through people, but they must have missed your main point - you can kill as many people as you want and it won’t matter, because you have to have vehicles to win WG, and once you hop in one you’re basically screwed.
Maybe a speed buff with tenacity, for vehicles at least?
Tenacity boosts your stats, while vehicles scale with gear … or what? I’m not exactly a WoW genius. Anyhoo, I’m not sure balancing by numbers would be good. There’d be a huge number of mad players if the other side can only pony up a few players. I don’t know if it’s even possible, but if tenacity boosted vehicle health as well as your resistance, you’d have eliminated the vehicle problem and mitigated the chain-CC problem. You’d still have the ‘flood shops’ problem, but there should be some advantages of being more. Also, it’s harder to coordinate more people.
Maybe what they need to be offering is free Faction Transfer’s on your server to try and balance things up. Or blocking Faction Transfers in one direction on the server when the balance ratio gets too out of whack.
Don’t worry about the whiners. You make some VERY good points. In my server, generally WG is Alliance, and I am alliance, though, I have been noticing the Horde holding it a LOT more often of late. I have to admit, tenacity is a pain. I think they should do what others have suggested… balance like BGs. Or, allow a BIT of tenacity, and balance to that. 1 : 1.25 or 1 : 1.5 type balance.
Hello to my world as I’m Horde, and the Alliance outnumbers us nearly 3 to 1 on US-Proudmoore.
BUT, as much as we lose (mostly becaue Horde doesn’t CARE about WG save for Tuesday resets), we WIN it when we want to. That’s what Alliance doesn’t realize. When decide “hey, yeah, we need to do a VOA run” we get together, take our 5 stacks of tenacity, storm the keep and win.
Seems like your server suffers the same apathy in getting people to play it. Just know that you have the capability to WIN WG as any other outnumbered faction on any other server. While you do offer some great suggestions to tenacity, they unfortunately get lost in all the QQ-ing.
And whoever said vehicle health is statis is crazy. The ONLY thing that scales with tenacity where vehicles are concerned is their health. Structure cannons too. A typical run on WG will have 50K cannon, where when we defend on our server, with a few stacks of tenacity, we will have 110K of health.
I think someone said you need to be creative about winning, and I agree with that sentiment…take it from an avid WG pvper on a server just as imbalanced. You’ll lose, and lose a lot. BUT, you’ll also WIN when your faction really wants to.
The fact is that nobody on the lesser end of imbalance wants to get their ass kicked every two hours. Anyway that Blizzard can equal out the battle will only lead to more people playing WG. I love these dillweeds saying “fight for it”, “stop crying”, “you will WIN when your faction really wants to”, BULLSHIT. As far as I’m concerned you all can shove WG up your ass until they do something to balance the numbers. A battle that is based on numbers is unfair, especially when you are looking at odds greater than 5 to 1. WG is a total and absolute failure on Blizzard’s part because #1 they did not balance the battle, #2 Blizzard’s greed supported imbalance by allowing faction tranfers to take place on servers that were already severely imbalanced.
Actually, vehicle health does scale with your gear, but I’m pretty positive they don’t scale with Tenacity.
Also, another point is that even with Tenacity, you can’t be everywhere at once like the Horde can, which is a disadvantage. They can be at every defense position and workshop while you can only cover a few. You may be worth 10 people but you can still only be one place at a time.
So, for example, you may be able to hold the west wall, but you then you lose the west workshop so you can’t get any more vehicles at the west wall.
My first thought on seeing the first two paragraphs was “Bullshit, this is QQ.” And then I read through the 3 reasons, and it DOES make sense and is well-reasoned out and explained.
To the idiots just spamming “QQ moar” in these comments, you obviously didn’t read the entire article, did you? I hear reading before posting makes you look less of an idiot. If you think it’s mindless QQ, then actually post intelligent arguments that rebut each point he made, instead of mouth-breathing here.
Most of you obviously don’t come from unbalanced servers. I happen to come from a server that has WAY more Alliance.
We win WG a handful of times a week, it’s pretty sick. We’ve had many matches were the tenacity is 20, but that just means we are so greatly outnumbers and have NO CHANCE. If Blizz simply posted the win % of each server along with the population % of each fraction it would be obvious what’s going on. Instead I believe they are satisfied that what they are doing works on “most” servers and are happy to countdown the days to the exp with things as is.
Some spoke that they can kill 20 allies with all that tenacity, but, it doesn’t work like that, you have 10 allies attack you, one or two of them stun you and boom, next thing you know you are dead. The tenacity is a worthwhile tool when the fractions are semi-close in size, not when one side greatly outnumbers the other.
The funny part is that I thought this was normal:
Faction starts with the Sunken Ring and Broken Temple Factories under their control and gains access to Catapults, Siege Engines, and Demolishers after earning 1 kill in battle.
I’m only now finding out that it only happens after you’ve lost like 7 WGs in a row.
Good points. I’m on EU-Zenedar and there were free transfers for horde to the realm. Now like yourself, WG is completely overrun. The population imbalance should not have such a major impact on my chances at downing Toravon (twice a week per char). Maybe not an exact match, but if they limited each faction to have a maximum of 10% or 20% more in the battle (40 alliance = max 44 horde) then tenacity would have an greater affect.
I could never change my Alliance characters to Horde just beacuse of Wintergrasp, however we are also outnumbered in The Ventrue Co.
WG is only 1 bg from the many.. there are so mmuch others that we own almost always.
To “Moredekai”
This is exactly why the imbalance exists, and will NOT be fixed by ANY means whatsoever…faction change generates more money.
Blizzard is and has been one of the most crooked and greedy gaming companies out there since induction of their name into the industry.
They’ll sell you the next expansion which is comprised of already created materials that were supposed to be phased in with patches, at $50.
Do you like how in “Print” you can buy a 60 day prepaid card and it’s only good for 25 days because of maintenance days that almost always seem to extend themselves further ? That is just flat out false advertisement.
The most important issue I believe is the inability to prevent pedophiles from interaction with children. They’ll put in all kinds of security measures to ensure you dont get hacked (so you can pay your subscription, giving THEM money)….but not being able to put in security that denies pedophiles access to sign up for one.
On my server the alliance supposedly outnumber horde 3:1 (last time I checked wowsensus). In the early days of WG it was actually fun, it seemed to be that both sides had relatively equal numbers and this translated to a relatively equal win/loss record. Both factions had relatively equal access to the loot piñatas.
Something seemed to happen about 5-6 months ago, and it was like the Alliance on my server lost interest in WG. Now it’s not unusual to jump into WG to find that you have 5+ stacks of tenacity and the horde are already camping the graveyards.
So the problem on my server now is that while the alliance outnumber the horde in terms of population, the alliance just don’t turn up to WG anymore.
On Zenedar its the same problem. Alliance is almost gone and completely outnumbered by the horde. Usually in WG we have 10-15 stacks of Tenacity. We won maybe 2-3 battles in the past 2 weeks.
The numbers are so unbalanced that even during nighttime we still have 4+ stacks.
As this is a batle field now, the numbers should be capped on both sides to ensure a balanced fight. With the new queueing method of entering, this shouldn’t be a problem.
Better players win more. Don’t suck so much and you’ll win. In other words learn some coordination and maybe, just maybe you’ll win Wintergrasp once or twice….