When Horde Showed up to Wintergrasp in Cataclysm Classic

I have a couple of posts up already about the state of Wintergrasp in Cataclysm Classic covering how it is the choice over Tol Barad and how things tend to shake out, with Horde generally being outnumbered somewhere between 3 to 1 and 10 to 1 on the field.

In those conditions Horde players get a boost and can be like titans on the ground, with lots of hit points and a buff to abilities that make them tough to take on.

This past weekend however, we were treated to a new scenario… the Horde pre-made group.

The first sign that something was up was moaning in the instance chat as the match kicked off about the numbers, with somebody announcing that we had drawn the pre-made.

Looking at the match stats, it was clear to me that this was something new.  I don’t think I had ever seen more than 25 Horde in a single match up to this point.  Now suddenly they

There was much despair in chat at the sight of this.

Now, if you don’t play WoW battlegrounds you might fairly ask what the big deal here was.  I mean, it is an almost even match up.  Shouldn’t that be more fun?  Doesn’t that mean we just have to… you know… work a bit for our victory?

First of all, none of us are a bit of good working together at this point after nearly five months of Wintergrasp where the biggest worry has generally been getting in enough kills to hit Lieutenant and making sure people knock down all the towers before we win so we can all collect our 950 or so honor points.

Some of us go out and wrestle with the buffed up Horde players, so they get some fun and some honor based on kills, but mostly it is just a vague operational when on offense to knock down the keep towers then break in and finish the match.  On defense, which is always less fun, it is to knock down the three towers down south, which shaves 10 minutes off the match, then defend the keep while chasing the Horde around.  Potshot referred to this as “Horde and Seek” after one particularly low population match.

Anyway, we were not prepared to be organized or to do anything beyond the usual routine.

Which leads us to the second aspect of this.  The Horde were prepared.

I don’t run many WoW battlegrounds.  I find them mostly too repetitive to be interesting.  Wintergrasp is the most interesting of the lot for me, and even that isn’t all that interesting if I have bought all the honor price welfare epics I can use.

But one thing I do know is that a pre-made group that can coordinate will absolutely own the chaos of a random group that the match maker threw together.

And this group, as somebody announced, was clearly a pre-made.  Apparently they queue up together regularly so some of the people in chat had faced them before.  So they did not do any of the dumb things that randos do, like running of on their own, attacking objectives with one or two people, or just generally being unaware of what is going on or how to play that battleground.

The Horde group, which was on defense, boiled out of the keep in a mass that destroyed everybody who got in their way, grabbed the southern spawns, destroyed the three towers in the south, then came back and kept the battle going at the two northern vehicle spawns, Broken Tower and Sunken Ring, absolutely working us as we tried to retake them in order to gain momentum to attack the keep.

They ran out the clock farming us and when the match ended their final tally showed the result of their efforts.

That is a lot of honorable kills and not very many deaths.

Meanwhile, down in the Alliance end of the scoreboard the high mark was in the 20 honorable kills range.  Being on with my DK and having to get into the melee scrum, I cam out with 12 kills, 11 deaths, and 213 honor.

Still better than running Warsong Gulch and almost as big of a payout as Tol Barad.

Anyway, to sum up, Horde does win some times, and even brings the numbers when they have a mind to.  I’ve been in a couple dozen WG matches in Cataclysm and this is the first time I’ve run into this group.  At least I know why the Alliance is on offense some of the time.