This weekend in WoW it's Alterac Valley that's getting the weekly bonus if you participate. So I've decided to post something a little bit more geared towards WoW players, but for those of you with less or no experience of the game, it should be an interesting read, because it offers some insight into what makes WoW so much fun even after years of playing.
The Set-up Alterac Valley is a battleground that takes place in its own entire zone that rivals by its size any other zone of the game, its goal is for a team to kill the opposite team's boss leader by forming a raid, while at the same time protecting its own leader, and protecting and capturing bases along the way. This particular battleground features resources/reinforcements where each team starts with a set number, and as their enemy destroys towers/bases, captures mines or graveyards, their resources go down. Another opportunity to lose is by losing all of your resources to the enemy, so defence is equally as important as offence.
Horde vs Ally That being said there's a somewhat different play-style for this dungeon between horde and alliance. From my experience horde generally just rushes to fight in the middle of the BG, with a complete disregard for the BG objectives, while somewhat sporadically performing hit and runs on allies, who are trying to capture bases. If you're a defender on the alliance side, what you'll experience is at least a dozen friendly players trying to hold off the horde at the alliance leader site, while at the horde leader site, it's generally a bunch of alliance players quietly waiting for reinforcements to arrive to form a raid for the boss.
Organization On top of that from my experience within the Horde, those people DO NOT TALK to each other. Like the many seemingly incompatible races they're comprised of, if you try to organize some structure to the battleground you'll be faced with a wall of chat silence. Seems like everyone on that side is happy to score some easy kills on allies that'd wander off away from the groups, and cares for little else. In that respect playing Alliance is a lot more satisfying for me, when it comes to PvP, since everyone at the beginning of the raid neatly announces what they think we should do, people tag themselves as tanks/healers, including my holy-priestly self, people warn each other about incoming horde forces at this point or another. And generally on my server which is Neptulon EU, Alliance wins eight times out of ten.
The trickz So basically what each and every player is expected to do is first of all rush a smaller boss near the middle of the field, then capture two enemy towers, then go for the last boss. What makes capturing towers essential is that it makes the enemy's boss weaker. Lastly you need to capture two more towers right next to the boss, which is not a problem, since the areas is seen by hordies, as a site reserved for ally tea-parties, careless chatting and waiting for the towers and nearby graveyard to be turned over to the ally side.
Defence as much as Offence All in all what matters is that you divide your forces accordingly towards defending your own bases and capturing, and later on forming a proper raid for the last boss.
Lastly as soon as I could today I got to play a couple of sets of Alterac Valley the first one was an easy win, with me and another healer at the boss, we basically waited out nearly the whole battle in front of the boss's area, and rushed as soon as the graveyard was ours, the second one was a bit more frantic with only me to heal, at level 82, which is nowhere near as effective when your tank is lvl 84. But after dieing myself half a dozen times and rushing back to join the battle (in fact the whole BG group died in portions several times over) we downed him in the last moment, before we would have completely wiped, which would have reset his health and started everything all over.
The Set-up Alterac Valley is a battleground that takes place in its own entire zone that rivals by its size any other zone of the game, its goal is for a team to kill the opposite team's boss leader by forming a raid, while at the same time protecting its own leader, and protecting and capturing bases along the way. This particular battleground features resources/reinforcements where each team starts with a set number, and as their enemy destroys towers/bases, captures mines or graveyards, their resources go down. Another opportunity to lose is by losing all of your resources to the enemy, so defence is equally as important as offence.
Horde vs Ally That being said there's a somewhat different play-style for this dungeon between horde and alliance. From my experience horde generally just rushes to fight in the middle of the BG, with a complete disregard for the BG objectives, while somewhat sporadically performing hit and runs on allies, who are trying to capture bases. If you're a defender on the alliance side, what you'll experience is at least a dozen friendly players trying to hold off the horde at the alliance leader site, while at the horde leader site, it's generally a bunch of alliance players quietly waiting for reinforcements to arrive to form a raid for the boss.
Organization On top of that from my experience within the Horde, those people DO NOT TALK to each other. Like the many seemingly incompatible races they're comprised of, if you try to organize some structure to the battleground you'll be faced with a wall of chat silence. Seems like everyone on that side is happy to score some easy kills on allies that'd wander off away from the groups, and cares for little else. In that respect playing Alliance is a lot more satisfying for me, when it comes to PvP, since everyone at the beginning of the raid neatly announces what they think we should do, people tag themselves as tanks/healers, including my holy-priestly self, people warn each other about incoming horde forces at this point or another. And generally on my server which is Neptulon EU, Alliance wins eight times out of ten.
The trickz So basically what each and every player is expected to do is first of all rush a smaller boss near the middle of the field, then capture two enemy towers, then go for the last boss. What makes capturing towers essential is that it makes the enemy's boss weaker. Lastly you need to capture two more towers right next to the boss, which is not a problem, since the areas is seen by hordies, as a site reserved for ally tea-parties, careless chatting and waiting for the towers and nearby graveyard to be turned over to the ally side.
Defence as much as Offence All in all what matters is that you divide your forces accordingly towards defending your own bases and capturing, and later on forming a proper raid for the last boss.
Lastly as soon as I could today I got to play a couple of sets of Alterac Valley the first one was an easy win, with me and another healer at the boss, we basically waited out nearly the whole battle in front of the boss's area, and rushed as soon as the graveyard was ours, the second one was a bit more frantic with only me to heal, at level 82, which is nowhere near as effective when your tank is lvl 84. But after dieing myself half a dozen times and rushing back to join the battle (in fact the whole BG group died in portions several times over) we downed him in the last moment, before we would have completely wiped, which would have reset his health and started everything all over.
Sounds fun.
ReplyDeleteAlterac valley was always my worst BG. I wonder how much it's changed since I last played WoW.
ReplyDeleteGood time in AV. Wish it was like Vanilla times though...
ReplyDelete