Alterac Valley : A Guide

Dustaz

It always amazes me how people still dont know how to get the most out of AV since the gameplay changed a year ago.

Since its changing again pretty soon, here is the current Dustaz AV 101:

If you are a WORLD PVP HERO/GANK CHAMPION/FEYLUM then the following information is worthless to you. Go knock yourself out pvping for fun. This is purely a guide on how to extract the maximum amount of honor out of Alterac Valley.


Things to note:
A. You get honor in AV for 6 things.
1) Winning the game (80 honor)
2) Killing the enemy General (Drek/vaandar) and Captains (Galv/Balinda) (80 and 60 honor respectivley)
3) Destroying enemy towers (60 each)
4) Defending friendly towers (60 each)
5) Live Captain (40 honor)
6) Killing Enemy players

Of these, Killing players is the least efficient way of earning honor. Since the PVP system was introduced, Diminishing Returns has applied to PVP kills. This means that you earn a set amount of honor for killing a player (i think its 5 or 10 honor points now). If you kill the same player again, you get half of the honor for that kill, a 3rd time and its 1/4 of the honor and each subsequent time that player is worth NO HONOR to you. People standing in the middle of av/wsg repeatadly killing players are WASTING THEIR TIME if the aim is to earn honor points (Of course if they are pvp heros, then thats the place to be. Fun, but a little pointless and they are contributing to players wanting to afk their way thru bg's)

At the end of the day, you will earn FAR MORE honor from completing the objectives of av AND killing enemies while you do this than from zerg.

So heres how you do it.



1. Run straight to Galv/Balinda. You will encounter enemies on the way. They will have red names over their head. You must resist the temptation to try to kill them. DO NOT STOP TO KILL PEOPLE IN THE FIELD OF STRIFE. This is worth repeating for the slow people out there. DO NOT STOP TO KILL PEOPLE IN THE FIELD OF STRIFE. Got it? Once at the rival general kill him/her. They dont really need to be tanked and not a lot of healing is needed so its a pretty easy zerg.

1a. If There is a sizable group already at/near galv, go STRAIGHT to FW keep (Dun baldar) and start to capture the towers there asap. With a bit of luck some other enlightended individuals will be with you to help. The caveat regarding the field of strife applies here too and its worth repeating. DO NOT STOP TO KILL PEOPLE IN THE FIELD OF STRIFE.

2. Once galv is dead move on to the Iceblood tower (icewing bunker). Capture it as soon as possible and THEN kill any enemies around it. Time is of the essence. If there is already a group there and its in conflict skip to 3.

3. Move to Tower Point. Repeat as above.

4. DEFEND TOWERS. Not just the enemies but YOUR towers. If there is enough people at the enemies towers, dont be afraid to go back to reclaim your own teams - you would be suprised how easy it is to do with even 2 people. Remember, They take 2/3 mins to fully capture. For enemy towers - Stand IN the tower. DONT leave to lolrofle about 40 yards away. DONT leave if theres less than 3 people there. WAIT there untill its captured and in flames. If your in FW/DB DONT STAND STARING AT THE GENERAL. You cant kill him untill there is only 1 warmaster left or none ideally, so go and make yourself useful by defending some captured towers.

5. Once All towers are captured (or are 30 secs away from being captured) move into the generals room and attack. DO NOT RUN OUT OF THE ROOM ONCE HE IS PULLED. If you get aggro and you leave the room the general will reset and regen to 100% and everyone on your team WILL want to kill you. If you have the ability to tank or heal and noone is doing these things, DO IT (im talking to you Mr Boomkin and Mrs Shadow Priest and Ms Retlol Pally). There will be at least 25 people dpsing the general, your deeps will be better spent healing or tanking.

6. Win with 600+ honor per game if its done right. In 10 or 15 minutes. Thats almost 3k honor an hour kids. enjoy your epics.




MASSIVE CAVEAT:
In the forthcoming 2.4 patch, Diminishing Returns is being removed from PVP. This means that Joe Schmoe will be worth the same amount of honor to you no matter how many times you kill him. This will radically change the the way AV is played for maximum honor but we will have to wait and see how that pans out.

AL][EN

Cheers Dustaz for the guide that really clears up a few things.

I must hang my head in shame now sit in the corner with a D hat on cos i've never actually ran a battleground yet. I'm afraid i'll make mistakes and get screamed at by fellow team mates (people take this battleground thing really serioulsy) or i'll find myself in the middle of the almost infamous afk'ers that seem to plague the battlegrounds.

Reading your guide makes me realize i should give it a go, whats the worst that'll happen i'll get called a n00b for a while maybe earn some honor. I'll need to repec myself to obviously since i was doing allot of PvE recently.

Anyone got any good advise for a pally spec for battlegrounds im holy at the mo. 34/5/5 i think.

Xyo

You don't need to respec to honor farm dude and if people are shouting at you put em on ignore or shout back.

nix

Well said Dustaz

Id also like to add, if your alliance it is very important that you dont cap the Ice blood grave yard. This is the only thing besides afking that will have people shouting at you, and it will prolong finishing AV by ALOT.

Capping the Iceblood grave yard will cause any horde killed down south to spawn at FW GY or at they're base, this will increase the hordes defense by ALOT and it will become a long and annoying fight to try and cap the other respective towers/GY's needed to advance through AV.

So capping IB GY will inevitably decrease your honor gained and increase the length of the AV, also it would cause me to start typing unnecessary profanities out of frustration as you've delayed my honor quota considerably and its nearly reset time :P

goodlad

'AL wrote:

[EN;55179768']

Reading your guide makes me realize i should give it a go, whats the worst that'll happen i'll get called a n00b for a while maybe earn some honor. I'll need to repec myself to obviously since i was doing allot of PvE recently.

Anyone got any good advise for a pally spec for battlegrounds im holy at the mo. 34/5/5 i think.

Im a holy pally and do a lot of AV etc... You dont need to respec for it, just hand in the back behind the front line and heal away, i dont know about your server but im on dragonblight and there does never be many people healing in battlegrounds so just stay holy.

If you find yourself bored healing in them though just spec ret, personally i have buckets of fun doing pvp as ret spec, and considering the changes to gear for ret pallys coming in soon its gonna be a whole load more fun

smellslikeshoes

Theres no best spec for battlegrounds just spec to what you like to do. If you like healing stay healing spec, healers are always needed in BGs.

super_furry

1) Roll Alliance
2) Play Alterac Valley
3) Win
4) ???
5) Profit.

Ivan

I love AV on my prot paladin. Slap on my healing gear all the way up to bosses and then just tank for vanndar/marshals. Its quite effective, very little kills but it can speed up the AV ALOT

Dustaz

super_furry wrote: »

1) Roll Alliance
2) Play Alterac Valley
3) Win
4) ???
5) Profit.

Clearly someone hadnt rolled horde at the time when horde won it every single time due to map exploits but happily posted "LOL NO ALLY SUX HORDE HAEV TEEMWORK AND R JUS BETTER PVP YES"

super_furry

Dustaz wrote: »

Clearly someone hadnt rolled horde at the time when horde won it every single time due to map exploits but happily posted "LOL NO ALLY SUX HORDE HAEV TEEMWORK AND R JUS BETTER PVP YES"

Been playing AV for about six months properly and in that time I'd say Horde win one in every five, or maybe six games. I'm not complaining, I'm Alliance and we usually get destroyed at every other BG.

copeyhagen

i stopped farming av on my warr cuz i was sick of pvp on him, but the whole 9 months or there abouts i spent farming for honour, on my server horde wins at least as many as alliance, if not more.

"alliance are all w4nker kids anyway"!!!!

murdoc8

thanks for the guide will try it out

Dustaz

super_furry wrote: »

Been playing AV for about six months properly and in that time I'd say Horde win one in every five, or maybe six games. I'm not complaining, I'm Alliance and we usually get destroyed at every other BG.

it seems pretty even to me on my battlegroup (misery), maybe a slight alliance advantage.

Take my word for it though, a year and a half ago or 2 years ago, horde won EVERY av without fail. That was when games of av took 4 hours up to 12 hours too

AL][EN

4 to 12 hours!!! is that for one game of av dustaz??? surely not!! thats mental!

how long would an AV game take nowadays. im all geared up for tonight. and im heading to av (im really looking forward to it tbh) not really sure what to expect.

I've decided tho im not gonna play my current char in the battlegrounds or arena's too much holy pally's arent really cut out for that sort of stuff. I recently rolled a Draenei Shaman and i must say i really do like the shaman class. Once i my current pally hits 70 im gonna stop playing with him. Im gonna run battlegrounds and Arena matches with my shaman once i get him high enough.

BKtje

4 to 12 hours!!! is that for one game of av dustaz??? surely not!! thats mental!

This is waaaay back when AV was actually an epic battle and not a 20min game like it is now adays. Av today is more which side can complete their tasks the fastest instead of a PvP battle, i rarely switch out of my pve gear for AV unless i decide to defend.

Back then there were things you could summon and there was real teamwork involved in many aspects of the fight (along with a 2hr zerg for IB ). Now you can still summon these npc's to help you fight (last i checked?) but it's pretty pointless as the game is over so fast.

I really do miss the old av at times, the quests you had to do to strengthen your side, farming for hides so you could summon your cavalry or even summoning the elementals and then trying to defend it as the opposition did its best to take it down.

I think the old av would work well again with DR being taken out and if they lowered the number of players to 25 or so from 40. It would however require tweaking the NPC's. I just don't find battlegrounds all that fun anymore which is unfortunate.
i really thing there is a niche for a more complicated, intelligent battleground then the curren attack x, defend y and then hope your faster than the opposition.

[/rant]

Pft AV - horde kill belinda, run to giant bridge, get held up for 10 mins, go in and start killing whatshisface if we havent already won by resources... the end
I dont know how much honour I make from it, im just there for AV marks

AB is the way to go! much more fun

Zarbon

I don't like the words "noob/n00b" or "newb" but there are far too many people that fit into those categories, playing AV on my Battlegroup. Btw Vindication is a joke for Allies. Roll Horde for honor!

I can't remember the last time I attended an AV and won, let alone got decent honor. You have people fighting over tactics. Guess what...the wrong, or proven to fail tactic is chosen 80% of the time. The best I can hope for is that a "well-known" player is in the raid and the stupid fanboys/girls listen to him/her.

Its a nightmare. What's worse is people don't seem to learn from there mistakes....poor human race is failing....

Common sense people....:)

AL][EN

I'll remember that!

I actually never made it to AV last weekend got sick, but im going this friday but it got me thinking is AV right for a first time battleground run? would something like warsong or even athari be better for a newbie thats never ran a battleground before.

Im all for learning from my mistakes its the only way you can truly learn to play your character better is to learn from errors and dont make them again.

so for my first ever battlegrounds game anyone have any suggestions as to which battleground i should goto first?

Horsefumbler

Here's a bit of advice for horde in AV.

I've been winning most of the avs i've entered on my horde char recently which goes against the general trend in AV and I'm putting it down to a tactic I've started using recently.

The horde have probably the best defensive bottleneck area in the map at IB tower-IB GY and basically what i do is just slow as many people as possible down as there passing this area and let the archers on the towers take them down. If they dismount to fight I just use stalling tactics on them and their hp will just be wittled down by the archers and they will probably die. If they stay mounted i can just follow them towards TP keeping them slowed and then whatever HP they have left will removed by the archers on that tower. And if they kill me I can res quite nearby and try it again.

It's a great way to stop the alliance from getting early cap on TP and FW towers and delays them capping those towers untill the galv zerg group comes to backup. This allows the horde to get their cap in on SH and hopefully IW and thus get the marshals down sooner and so hopefully get started on van earlier.

Of course its all dependant on the rest of the group not being retarded and slow at balinda/SH area but some things are just out of your control.

My two cents.

Weidii

Thanks for the guide, I've done AV a couple of times, but never really gotten the hang of it.

copeyhagen

2.4 AV changes.......sigh

WOW talk about fixing all the alliance problems and not doing anything about the horde problems....this is going to quickly go back to being alliance controlled
_________________

Alterac Valley will see a few very significant improvements in the next patch and we wanted to share the details of what we have planned.

The first change will be to move the Horde's starting tunnel back to a more equal distance from the first objectives, which will help evenly distance the starting points for each side across the terrain when the battle commences.

In addition, the General and Warmasters for each faction will receive a stacking buff from each other that boosts their health and damage. The more of them that are still in the battleground, the more dangerous they will all be. This will put a greater focus on destroying (and defending!) the towers that remove the Warmasters as players work toward defeating the appropriate General and conquering the land.

Also Balinda Stonehearth has been studying her spellbooks to become a more challenging opponent to the Horde and will do more damage with her spells. The additional health we recently added to Balinda and General Vanndar Stormpike will no longer be needed with these improvements and will be changed back to their previous amounts with the patch.

With these improvements teamwork and strategy will be more important than ever from beginning to end as the Alliance and Horde battle for victory in Alterac Valley. We'll see you on the battlefield.

**i didnt write the above! **

Dustaz

copeyhagen wrote: »

2.4 AV changes.......sigh

WOW talk about fixing all the alliance problems and not doing anything about the horde problems....this is going to quickly go back to being alliance controlled

What exactly are the horde problems? All this does is fix the blatant imbalance in how long it takes horde to get to SH bunker and Balinda and buffs balindas ridiculous casting.

Youve still got a caster as a captain as opposed to a warrior.

What other ones are there?

copeyhagen

if the process was meant to even it out.....well it did fix 3 issues that were imbalanced on the alliance side...and ZERO on the horde side.

your base is littered with 5 extra npc's that horde have to take down while getting the flag and getting to boss

your bowmen can protect your last flag, horde cant.

horde guards when they pop at the alliance last flag automatically attack the npc's in the stable and die.

horde bowmen can be bypassed 100% when capping towers....and when horde come back to try to take them back alliance only has to fight horde...not horde+bowmen.
if you manage to take the alliance tower without being hit by bowmen you will have to deal with them when defending.

Dustaz

copeyhagen wrote: »

your base is littered with 5 extra npc's that horde have to take down while getting the flag and getting to boss

Npcs? cry me a river.

your bowmen can protect your last flag, horde cant.

Dont understand this one. Last flag singular? theres 2. Or do you mean Aid station, sorry im confused.

horde guards when they pop at the alliance last flag automatically attack the npc's in the stable and die.

They can be healed you know. Although i wasnt aware of this, doesnt seem like a MASSIVE problem since at that stage you have control of the Aid Station so its not like the NPCs are vital.

horde bowmen can be bypassed 100% when capping towers....and when horde come back to try to take them back alliance only has to fight horde...not horde+bowmen.
if you manage to take the alliance tower without being hit by bowmen you will have to deal with them when defending.

Um, you can take Alliance towers without killing bowmen. I dont understand what this whine is about really. We can stand inside the towers and not get hit while defending. You can stand on the stairs and los most of them. Or you know, take the 10 seconds to kill them.

copeyhagen

I didnt write it! i jus copied it from another forum. il lsee if theres anything else...

copeyhagen

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19932401-24-AV-changessigh

have a gander urself. its a yanky forum i think but its one of the only ones i can get onto in work so i check it out now and then.

Anti

im in reckoning, and its very rare the alliance loose AV. AB WSG and EOTS we loose 90% of the time because of muppets trying to only go for the flag.

copeyhagen

im on laughing skull, forget the battlegroup name, but its aroun 50/50 most of the time.

if i was in a battlegroup where horde were losing most av i would switch realms probably!

Ivan

Seems to be about 70%-30% in Alliances Favour on Mazrigos. There are definitely alot of imbalances on the Horde side too that were not addressed and possibly will never be addressed.

And I find it pretty funny Dustaz how you talk about us having to kill NPCs that ye can avoid and saying "cry me a river" and then talking about how you have to kill a warrior while we have a mage...

sunzz

CRY ME A RIVER.:pac:

Tonielle

Ivan wrote: »

Seems to be about 70%-30% in Alliances Favour on Mazrigos. There are definitely alot of imbalances on the Horde side too that were not addressed and possibly will never be addressed.

And I find it pretty funny Dustaz how you talk about us having to kill NPCs that ye can avoid and saying "cry me a river" and then talking about how you have to kill a warrior while we have a mage...

Well, I'm on Maz too and have done quite a bit of AV and I have to say it's fairly balanced (win/loss I mean...) in my experience... but then, maybe not. Hordies (meanies :P ) seem to be so much more fecking organised and focussed... if I had to say one seemed to win more I would definitely say hordiebastards *grin*

Tonielle

Anti wrote: »

im in reckoning, and its very rare the alliance loose AV. AB WSG and EOTS we loose 90% of the time because of muppets trying to only go for the flag.

ROFL yeah I spend a lot of time picking my nose in defense by myself until a pack of hordies shows up to give me one hell of a spanking (:D )

copeyhagen

went back on my warr yesterday for the first time in a while to try grind up some honour for the s4 gear comin out. done about 15 av's... lost about 5, so i was happy enough : )

tman

Decided to finally get stuck into AV earlier today (well, a mate talked me into it...)
Ended up getting toally hooked and played 11 games, the alliance only won one of those. Thanks Dustaz!:D

Jumpy

Tonielle wrote: »

ROFL yeah I spend a lot of time picking my nose in defense by myself until a pack of hordies shows up to give me one hell of a spanking (:D )

Yep, I am always a defender. Earthbind totem to slow em down and then just pray that they dont have friends.

matthew26

Same. I spend a lot of time defending...until somebody snags the flag from right under my nose.