And Power Corrupts,
So Study Hard, Be Evil.

After the last five levels of uninteresting leveling grinds, I’ve committed to throwing Illysu and Illysa into PvP play as my endgame. I know that’s going to be a hard grind, but I figure if I focus on learning one battleground at a time and putting some solid effort into honing my skills– it should pay of well in the end.

After all, how many PvP’ing dual-boxing Shadow Priests can there possibly be? 😉

Step 1: Knowing What I Don’t Know

I haven’t ever tried to learn actual PvP strategy before– on my main I was pretty much ‘Cats is 4 Fite!’ and mauled people’s backs. So this time I’m going to hit the books, learn what the -bleep- I’m doing. I refuse to be the honor-leeching dual-boxer everyone will assume I am.

Breaking down a Shadow Priest’s ‘job’ in PvP is pending in another post, for now I’m just trying to learn the lay of the land. *breaks out the research material*

Step 2: What is the point of this BG?

It’s hard to win a game if you don’t know the rules, so here’s the breakdown of what Horde is supposed to accomplish in Alterac Valley:

The Alliance has 600 reinforcements and to win we have to get them down to 0.

To speed things up you can:

• 1 : Kill an enemy player (40 enemy players would have to die fifteen times each!)
• ~0 : Capturing the Mines gets you 1 reinforcement ever 45 seconds, but isn’t worth it
• 75 : Destroying and enemy tower (x4 towers = 300 points)
• 100 : Killing the enemy captain
• 600: Killing the Alliance General (wins the game)

Killing the Captain (Balinda Stonehearth)

The Captain periodically grants a 20% health buff and a size increase to all members of their faction.

Killing the Captain is not required to win the AV and some Horde guides (the few I’ve found so far) recommend skipping her altogether. Of course other guides recommend just turtling and winning by defense, but I don’t know how popular that is in real life.

Sadly a running theme for ‘How to Win AV’ is: “Roll Alliance” *sighs*

Killing the General (Vanndar Stormpike)

The Alliance General has four Marshalls that defend him, linked to each of the towers.

Each Marshall provides a stackable buff that increases damage and health by 25%

Killing at least two of the towers appears to be the most popular strategy. I don’t see many that recommend killing all four, and since it takes four minutes to cap a tower, it will be interesting to see what method folks favor.

Step 3: General Stragety

When I played as Alliance we always zerg’d. But the Horde guides note the 30 second longer run-time for a zerg and recommend leaving defensive folks behind to slow the Alliance down. Since I’ve got two fears and two mind controls, this makes me think I might be a better defender than zergling. *ponders*

Taking the alliance graveyard to force a respawn in the tunnel, and then taking two of the towers before the General seems to be the only consistent strategy. There’s a lot of ‘just slow them down’ and ‘make sure to recap!’, but we’ll have to see how it plays out.

Actual Horde strategy guides seem few and far between, but that may simply be because folks have given up on this BG. Most of the comments on the Battle.net threads are about the old glory days and more than one mention that no actual PvP goes on in AV anymore.

Maybe not the best place to be learning how to PvP then… but still, a 40 vs 40 gives me a lot more room for error.

I hope. 😛

Back to the Books

So for now all I have is a vauge idea of what I need to do– I’ve still got more research to go and more blogs/websites/etc to read, so I’ll update this as I find more info!

References

Wowpedia Entry : Alterac Valley
Battle.net : War College – Alterac Valley
Battle.net : A “Brief” History of Alterac Valley
Ten Ton Hammer : Alterac Valley Battleground Guide