f13.net

Recently, one of the largest Horde instance guilds on my server recently declared that they were itching to go to war with the Alliance. While I'm not sure I can take "lots of MC run" with "we're going to be a PVP force" seriously, It will be interesting to see a bit more bite from the Horde side. As it currently stands, the Horde is a pretty solid force on my server, whereas the Alliance is a mix of fairly decent, and really bad. Because of this, I'm trying to prepare for where the battles will be fought, in Alterac and in Warsong.  Anyone got some tactics and tips?  I'm especially interested in Alterac, because it's a multi-tasked area. I'm getting a handle of where to play, and have been reading up on the writeups that Blizzard has for it, but the current mindset on the Alliance side when I played was "kill Horde", whereas it appears that there's so much more that Alterac offers, with respect to things like taking over the mines, and killing faction leaders on the other side.

I'm still a bit fuzzy on what's a good strategy to take down.  Is mine control crucial, and the PvE elements of killing the various NPC Horde leaders? Or instead, focusing on graveyard control, and leave the PvE elements to some chump more appropriate.

I guess the queue + '1 in 1 out' will stop one guild actually filling 20 spaces but I'd imagine if one side gets a large proportion of half decent players who are all on the same ventrillo server, or in the same room, then they can quite easily dominate.

I suspect the best tactic to start with will be to actually get people to work together, if you can get a decent group and go for objectives, or the group on the other side whose capable enough to take on yours. I expect lots of mini battles happening all over the zone as the only time you'll face 20 players lined up, cordinated perfectly and acting as one is if your playing on a Korean server. The BGs will also have solo'ers farming honour, teamplayers as well as the usual rambo's, kamikaze guys and campers mixed up with clueless types, and people who are just plain crap, so the more people teamed up the better.

Wait.. which guild is this?  If it's mine, then hah, I doubt it.  MC/Ony will resume once the shiney wears off.  Patches with new content along with their prerequisite server instability always decimate guild plans for at least a week.  I would doubt BGs make it in as a required raid, just too booked as is.  There's two guilds that would surprise me if they suddenly switched gears and went full blown pvp. 

Alterac right now is more or less TM part 2.  There's some resemblence of stragegy but most of it's fragmented and done in a very large group.    It's capture this graveyard, capture that one, etc etc with non real simulateous offensive actions occuring.   It's all very new.  Not many people know the map, know what's there.. but once people start getting aquianted, it'll be a much more dynamic experience.  As is, very fun, and less pointless than TM. 

Anyhow, sorry for somewhat gunning for you everytime I see you in PVP.  It's just nice to see a familiar face out there.  I'll be playing the shaman pretty much from now on I think, so look for the wrenches.

Yeah, there's been a bit of wild talk on the boards lately from both sides. I do think its funny that the two sides doing the most talking are the two guilds that are also the most likely to spend 80-90% of their time in instances. It's like guilds are cashing checks that the rest of the server's going to cash, heh. I could see a few Alliance guilds saying "screw MC/Oxynia, let's go full time PVP" though, probably none of the top end guilds, they have too much invested.  However, some of the smaller guilds I think will seek to make a name for themselves, and that's potentially a good thing for the server. No clue on the horde end, naturally.

Alterac is.. okay. I think on the alliance side, it's still "find horde, kill horde", whereas the more savvy players are learning to try and hold objectives, and take mines, etc. While this seems to be the less attractive path in the short term for players, the buffs, the rep rewards, and the summoning of that freaking Ice Lord really turns the tide. Did I mention I hate the freaking Ice Lord?  I think on the Alliance side, we'll lag a few weeks at least in terms of "knowing" what to do, just because there's so many 60s to educate and train. For instance, I did my fair share of the TM/SS.  My hours are fairly limited, but at the same time, I played enough to know who were the players that had a lot of time under their belt, and who was just dipping their big toe into PVP for the first time. When I went out to Alterac with a guildmate, we probably could recognize at best 2, 3 people on the alliance side, and probably 1/4 minimum of the horde side. It's been noted that there's also reports of high end mining in the BG, so with our farmer heavy Alliance, expect to see at least 3-5 players who come in and do nothing but troll for Rich Thorium.

The Queues suck, but it's part of the penalty for having the large alliance presence.  Not much more to say besides suck it up and deal. I've been using the downtime to farm for cloth in WPL, which at least nets me a few points a turn in towards getting faction with Darnassus. With luck, the people who don't like PVP will give up trying out the BGs, and the queue lines will get less ridiculous.

As for the gunning part, don't worry. I get a kick everytime I get sapped in the most random places while I'm flagged.  Sides, I told my guild to let me know when you're around, and I have acknowledged to them I will go out of my way to take you down, to the detriment of tactics. To be honest, our guild is a small one, so outside of the multi-guild channels, my odds of hitting the top end instances are rather slim.  As such, I'm getting some feedback to move my spec away from heavyish Protetction (>25 points), and instead go more towards an Arms/Prot build, or a flat out Arms/Fury build. I want to keep my current build a bit longer, if just to mess around with instant cast Concussion blow (conclusion so far: Nice.) and to see how the Protection build gets buffed up in the next patch/later. However, if things don't pan out, I may instead just swap out and you may see the dreaded Mortal Strike debuff on you next time.  :evil:

The Gulch is a lot of fun. Best tactics ive found: Guild only raid on teamspeak...thats a give in though.

We usually run an attack group of 5, warrior, shaman, mage, priest, hunter (could be any class really) - up the right side. Once just inside the base, the priest shields the hunter who then goes as a diversion threw the front door. Meanwhile, priest shields who he can before jumping down death from above style. Mage AoEs, priest fears and dispels the frost trap that is bound to be there at the flag.

Usually then we hope the noobs havent taken the boots yet and go right out the middle where we pwn all.

The defense group usually consists of at least 1 mage, 1 shaman, and  1 hunter... Rogues for stuns/saps are nice, as are priests for fears/heals. Hunter for trap, mage for sheep/AoE, shaman for earthbind/healing/dps.

The key is, as in most CTF situations, is knowing when to bring people to and from offense. If the enemy doesnt seem to want to attack, like after they get scored on twice, you have to pull another mage from D to O quickly. Reform at designated spots on the map. I love the enemies that get one-zy two-zied all day.

Went 4-0 last night, and fought a full group of some of the best Alliance on the server.

If you believe them, top flight guilds can do all the raid content in WoW in around 10 hours a week, so that leaves plenty of time to PvP.

Yep, it's definately possible to do it all in 10 hours. I'd even go so far as to say 8 hours is perfectly doable since full MC clears can be done in 7 hours, and onyxia takes up to an hour.

My guild is a pretty heavy PVP guild, with some PVE thrown in. We have clearned MC, but a server crash last weekend stopped us from summoning Ragnaros for the first time. We also did Onyxia last monday for the first time as a full guild (Man, getting pvpers to finish Warlords Command is a pain). We got Onyxia to 2%, after 3/4th of our group got wipped in a deep breath. Anyway, on to PVP.

The 40v40 BG takes a lot more than zerg force to actually win the whole thing. My guild was the first one on our server to beat one of the Alteract bgs. Followed by the top alliance guild doing it 45 minutes later.

For the Horde, the major stopping point is the bridge that leads into the Alliance city. The northern tower is HORRIBLE! if the alliance can hold that tower, the horde have no chance. Im not sure if it was a bug, but we had an insane guard spawn in that tower last night. Probably around 50 guards, and the tower was untakable, I left after the second time we summoned our major npc ice lord, and we still didnt take the tower.

To win the battleground, you NEED to do most of your quests, inless the oposing force are total idiots. Getting your major NPC and your ground assault at the same time are pretty key. But not only getting your NPC, you have to feed him for a while before he will move out, and once he is moving, look out.

I think the best thing I have seen so far, was when we where escorting our ice lord to the alliance base, and a npc archer pulled him way up the side of the hill. Just after that, the alliance made a huge push at us. Right as they are attack en mass, the ice lord came back. And not just back, he pretty much launched down the side of the mountain in a flanking manuver into the middle of the alliance push, and they never saw him comming. It was great watching them scatter in all directions, and having my guild group totally wipe them out.

If you need some more tips and stuff, you can post on my guild public forums, im sure some of the tacticians could give you some pointers. www.dreadguard.com

And good luck.

I haven't tried CTF yet.  Most likely tonight, I'm on the hook for a DM-East run, so I'll probably not be able to get in any solid PVP time tonight.

I did however, after a 2 hour wait, finally get some solid multi-hour time in Alterac. With a much tighter group of 40, the experience was much more enjoyable.

So far, I think the biggest tactic to do is to get a core group of 4, 5 people, group up, and take care of the quests that the other people are avoiding because it's not sexy "kill person X" quests. On the Alliance side, there a lot of mines that weren't captured, just because people were more inclined to seek out kills in stalemated positions.

Also, you do need to make some allowances to return back to base with all the stuff you've looted. There's a lot of crap you loot, and some of it has some very  useful bonuses.

I think trust is another issue. I think forced 40 man raid groups would go a long way to help.  That way, quests are easier to be called for to do, since you don't have to herd cats to get a group of 5 going.

I am glad to say that so far, the Alliance isn't totally shafted vs the Horde in Alterac; last night, we played them pretty close, although I don't know if the Horde had the full 40. Running the /who command made me cry though, it said there were 11 Hunters, and 1 priest at one point. My hate for hunters has reached an all-time high.

The realm imbalances are painfully apparent now; I really do think that some of the late comers, barely-60 Alliance members who want to PVP 24/7 are going to start to make the rounds to convert their guilds to PVP-style for the other side. I've picked up a lot of the Valor gear, and am pretty happy with my Warrior, so I'm extremely loathe to change sides.

There's been a few really good writeups floating around.  There's a very very good writeup that basically entails what are some of the objectives in Alterac: http://www.daoinesidhe.com/internal/wow/1index.htm

Sadly, it doesn't list what's the point with the looted Medals you get from killing PCs/NPCs. Someone in /general alluded to the fact that it's a secondary quest that you get after completing a larger quest.

There's also a very good blurb on the Penny-Arcade front page, for all you Alliance people, that entails what the horde mindset/reaction is so far.


The more I think about this, I'm inclined to agree with you that it's possible in theory. However, I think a major stumbling block in the thinking of people is to convert them from full time PvE raiders into learning how to play the game PVP style. In addition, a lot of the tricks and skills that are required for PVE are nigh worthless in PVP (see: Protection Specced Warriors). For instance, in extreme situations, what happens when the Priests decide to go deep into Shadow Spec, or the main tank wants to play around with Arms/Fury?

And Rasix, I saw you were tooling around with your Shaman last night.  I made a special case at least once to just rush blindly into the fray and attempt to take you out.  I've given up trying to be a 2H badass, and instead am trying to play to my strengths with what I have in the Protection tree.  The Shield Bash with silence seems to work well to bring down priests and healers faster, and Concussion Blow can really ruin someone's day; I just have to remember to stop trying to Stun Orcs, ugh.

Morphiend, excellent points.  I fully expect the key for either side is for smart groups that can go off and run quests while the main zerg herd are bashing themselves to pieces. On the alliance side, it was apparent we weren't capping Mines.

I was very suprised to find no queues for Alterac this evening. Apparently during the day its 20 v 40 (horde/alliance), and at peak tonight it was 30 v 40. BG is 2 days old and we cant even field 40, in 2 weeks time it could be deserted as you might not even get enough horde to initialise the instance.

So far a few players havent quite got the hang of CTF, with deserted flag area's and a big DM match in the middle. Tactics at the moment seem to be saunter on over to their flag via a quiet route and gently stroll  back. Im looking forward to getting my second up to the lower end CTF instances, I reckon it will be more fun at lower levels, with less lethal talents and spells.

Hasn't hit 2 instances since the first day. Horde isn't often fielding a full team where alliance is maxed with people waiting.  I'm afraid the whole thing is just going to fail. 

It'd be too bad,  because I like it quite a bit better than instance running bullshit.

What I hate the most about the Warsong instances is the initial organization.

It reminds me of first year college - all thrown into a dorm - and left to bicker over leadership.  It would really help if it was possible, somewhow, to spend more time organizing people into groups.  Even more so - the the chance to bring in people into the instance in step with the opposition doing the same.  2 Leaders from the opposing sides enter the instance - and mutually agree how many they want / or can bring into the instance to get it going.

Mechanics aside, I just wish there was more control on who you ended up in the instance with.

There is no question in my experience that people are having a lot of fun with this.

Whisperwind had 2 instances for Alterac on the first day, but as alliance I couldn't get in and there were mobs outside the gate waiting.  Even so, it is painfully obvious that anything less than 50/50 for a server will have problems.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-realm-archimonde&t=77259&p=1&tmp=1#post77259

"I don't get this guy. Since when do guilds need to be good at CTF to be good at World of Warcraft?

Tangible, if I or any other WoWers wanted to be good at CTF we'd go play Counterstrike. Don't gloat useless stuff. This BG will lose its luster just like the rest of the end game content in this mmorpg."

"If you choose to base your success on the pvp server by how many times you've beaten PVE content like MC and Onyxia, you chose the wrong server. To say that you dont have to be good at the pvp content a game offers to be good at pvp, you are just dumb."

"Oh boohoo. Here's an idea for you Bobo, cry us a river so all you alliance crybabies can float yourselves a little pink canoe all the way down to the blizzard customer service department and talk to all the devs (who must all obviously play shaman) and address your grievances. You are a product of the toxic and immature culture of your server and you're mad because you have to pay dividends playing with your fellow losers. Add to that the fact that you are being outclassed by an enemy that relies on teamwork and communication."

"But thats cool, takes clowns like you to keep this $!@% competative. Don't turn your back on me in BG because you can definetely take it to the bank ill be ramming my polearm up your space monkey ass"

I <3 my old server...

This is one reason I chose Horde.  The que for Alliance is going to be much longer than the Horde.

I'm wondering if the Alterac instance is even winnable without either luck or supreme stupidity on the other side. The home bases are both set up in a way that killed players and spawning guards never ever lose any ground to a full side enemy rush. In one game, we (the alliance) took all the graveyards up to the base, destroyed the towers, destroyed the garrison, took both mines, summoned the rams, summoned the forest lord, and maxxed out our guards. Then, we threw wave after wave of a full 40 person force plus Lord at the fortress. We still couldn't take it. Here's why:

- Guard spawn rates are ridiculous. If either team has rampaged to the home base they shouldn't have to deal with another hour of slowly killing their way in, only to be wiped out by a spawning guard zerg. I'm of the opinion that home base guards shouldn't respawn, and if they do, it should be on a very slow timer.

-Two, there are no secondary entrances to bases. There is only one gate, one door, and all of the high ground. While this is strategically sound, this makes for a very agonizing situation for either attacker. You gain ground and then lose it again based on running into a whole new set of enemies that send you rolling back down the hill.

- Enemies spawn behind your lines. In what form of war does this ever happen where the enemy can just spring up behind your attack constantly? If I take a graveyard, and destroy a tower, and kill a garrison, the reward should be that no guards spawn ANYWHERE near those positions.

- Guards for the attackers are useless. Why do I have a massive defensive force of ram-riders, souped up guards, and massive reinforcements if they just chill at the back? There should be a certain point where NPC guards should start sending attack waves to the main base. I mean it's not like we're worried about the home front once we breach everything to the main city walls.

From my experience the best way to win Alterac Valley is with splitting up your forces. You need 20-30 people just to hold the line, I like to call this the zerg force as that is basically what they do. This force smashes into the opposing side over and over again to make sure that the opposing zerg doesn't achieve anything significant. It's so easy to keep a zerg pinned down with NPC support that this group doesn't even need to be particuarly skilled or organized. The next group needs 10-15 people and its job is to make surgical strikes against objectives. That is taking towers, graveyards, killing luitenants and other named enemy NPCs. This force is the most important and must be able to mobilise quickly and be able to switch objectives quickly to throw off the opposition. You really need 10 or more because 5 people cant really take a tower unless alliance leave them alone for 10 minutes, and graveyards are hard to hold long enough with just 5. The beauty of this group is that once they start a takeover of an objective the opposing zerg will turn around to stop them and YOUR zerg will cut them down as they run. The last few people need to be collecting ram hides, taming wolves, and delivering supplies, all the little PVE quests that help out your faction.

Our faction is currently 5-0 on our server and this is the way our faction rolls every time we win (as opposed the the hours of useless back-and-forth zerging where not enough skilled people are on at the same time to put together the surgical strike group) so it works pretty well.

Those last few yards of ground are HELL. Basically you need the zerg and surgical team to zerg it up for a while, then when the enemy has gotten used to zerging it up the surgical team mounts up behind lines and charges in when the zerg has pushed the other side far enough. The surgical team's objective is to rush a tower and use the flag. Don't attack anything, don't stop for anything until you have the flag. Once that is done you just zerg the tower until it goes down, which is likely because it's hard to take back the flag with all hell breaking loose in the tower. Repeat that for the other tower, and when you get those down you basically zerg until someone can rush/sneak in and pull the commander back behind your lines where you all jump him and beat him into the ground.

Fin.

Then you can't get another instance going because alliance are sick of losing. :(

See my point is that the last few yards shouldn't be constantly overrun with NPCs. I mean, you have them on the brink of destruction. You've forced them all into a hole. It should simply be a constant push again and again until they are worn down. However, with the inexhaustable guard spawns, normal tactics of will-breaking don't work. That's a problem that needs to be addressed. These games shouldn't go beyond 3 hours at a time. That's just overkill.

Oh for sure the last little bit of the BG is completely stupid. You shouldn't have to grind at it for hours, or ninja towers and bosses in order to win.

You know, the boss drop ninja'ing is really getting annoying.  Everytime that stupid tree falls, some jackasses take all of the loot and then say, "it was on FFA!" "What's ninjalooting?"  "Someone else would have taken it!" 

I can shrug it off, but it's sending some people into fits.

Ok ive won 6 alterac valley bgs in a row the last 2 days so i've picked up a few tricks:


-First - you can literally beat down a team to their front door, then spend hours trying to force your way inside.  Its not going to happen, not even the summoned uber mobs can help as they rush in and get beat down by the toughest mobs in there.  There is no way you can get past the two towers without some serious luck, or doing what ive done every instance so far.  Rogue strike teams.  Ideally 4 rogues and a druid, although it can be done by as few as 2 rogues, work their way to the top of the tower (you have to sneak in and suicide somewhere your body wont be found, then rez past the see invis dogs) and take out the tower.

This works like a charm, normally the other team comes up in ones and twos and the stealth crew can hold them off, if combined with a decent push by the other forces (good time to strike is when you get that 30% dmg buff) can give you enough time to drop the tower.  After you take the two towers the rogue strike team has to take the last graveyard inside the base, this is alot harder as you have to time the guard respawn and the rez waves but it can be done with patience and practice.

When the last graveyard falls its pretty much game over.  Every instance ive been on has been a stalemate at the oponents last towers until i put together a rogue team to take them out, i've won every single time doing this and honestly i don't see any other way to get past those chokepoints.

Second - in order to even get to that point you are going to need people doing the shitty quests, theres no two ways about it.  You need someone taming animals for the cavalry, you need someone collecting hides, you need someone getting supplies from the mines.  You also need to corral the loot whoring cocksuckers who only joined the instance to get that fucking polearm from the korrak quest.  If i never have to hear "can we kill korrak now plz" ill die a happy man, its mind boggling how this idiots want everyone to drop everything just to fight an uber mob in the middle of a fucking battle.  Everytime ive seen a team try korrak while they didnt control most of the battlefield its always resulted in them getting routed and pushed back at least one gy.

See, my hope is that Blizz looks at this and thinks, why the hell are these things in a stalemate for over 10 hours? That cannot be the intended design, and in reality, it's all the fault of NPC guards.

The point was that if you just keep throwing wave after wave of men at the choke point Zap Branigan style it will take ten hours, but if you use some strategy they can be gotten past in short order.  I don't think there is a problem.

Suiciding troops for respawning and ninjaing towers isn't a freaking strategy, that's just an exploit of the crappy system. Also, having endless defenders pop up in a siege ain't normal either. There's only one way in, you have no other options. Even if you jump the fence you still are only on the ground floor and have to fight your way up one hill while getting shot at by towers and zerged by guards. My point is that there should be more of a strategy other than, die, spawn, die, spawn, hope you don't get noticed, rush up, die more, and maybe luck out that the defenders are idiots.

my leet tactic for warsong gulch is to enter the queue hunt for about 2 to 3 hours and then finally get into the zone. The map only lasts 5 minutes though as there are not enough horde players to start the map so you go back into the queue for another 2 to 3 hours and repeat.

After trying friday saturday and sunday I got into a battle ground a grand total of once that did not immediatly shut down due to lack of players. The one map I played was somewhat fun but what fun that was there was pretty much destroyed by the insane queue times and fizzled matchs. I can't see really going out of my way to go all the way over to get into the queue then travel all over to go back to my normal hunting areas in blind hope it won't tank.


kaid

I tried Gulch for the first time last night and loved it. Now mind you, I've only been playing a few weeks, so I was in a level 21-30 bracket. I'm playing a level 25 Dwarf Hunter.

Took about ten minutes to get in, and had a couple minute wait between matches. Had a hell of a good time. Tactics on our side were abysmal and we lost pretty consistantly, but it was still fun. I'm really not a pvp guy, I haven't had a single duel in the game up till now, but this I can enjoy as a diversion from grinding.

The level imbalance is fairly noticeable if you get stuck one on one against someone 5+ levels higher than you, but it all works out. For every time a level 30 Warlock landed 4 Dots on me, I managed to concussive shot a level 22 and feed him to my bear Bobo.

Good times, good times.

The trick for getting in the queue in any decent time appears to be don't try to go in with friends. I had a couple matchs I went in solo and got in within about 30 minutes which is not to horrible.

Hunters are VERY good goalies in warsong gulch. Multishot into big packs of people brings that nice warm smile to my dwarven face. I respeced a bit of talent points into survival for the trap root side effect. This was causing potential flag thieves HUGE problems between the snare traps and the root side effect few who tried for the flag survived the attempt. The only way they got the flag out is when they sent like 6 people at me hehe I can only keel so many.

For all those who complain about a hunters powers I can only say that I have been taking down just about everybody at a decent kill vs being killed ratio. One on One a hunter may not be uber but in a battleground situation I was wacking warriors, shamans, wizards, priests, rogues and just about anybody else foolish enough to get into my range with little problem.


kaid

FYI in Alterac there is a trick that puts you into the back base of the Horde when you are in a siege. I'm not sure if this is intended and there is a similar trick on the alliance side, but it's there. I also have an epic mount, so I'm not sure if a regular mount can perform said trick, but oh well.

The trick is as follows. Around the back (South side) of the main horde base, there is a frozen waterfall. This leads down near the back wall for the lower horde encampment. You can jump a low section of fence from the higher ground near this fences by jumping due West towards the rocks. At this point an outcropping once you are inside the fence gives you high ground to jump south towards the waterfall. You can clear the waterfall and make it up the hill to the next gate guarding the horde GY in the back. If you correctly situate yourself as far up as you can go on the rocks, you can jump straight out to the top hill on the left side of a tree there. If you land this, you can walk into the Horde's back yard away from guard spawns. This leads to a group attack strategy that can bust a horde turtling defense stalemate. It's probably the best one I know. If the Horde acknowledges an attack to the rear they have to keep forces available which decrease the front. If not and they let it go, they must deal with long distance attacks.