On Monday, the Horde of Retaliation managed to capture every node in Alterac Valley except the Stormpike Aid Station (and the bugged Irondeep Mine), whittling the Alliance down to 0 reinforcements and almost no honor. Surprising to many, this coup was achieved because of a strong, co-ordinated defensive team. This was not achieved through a premade, and voice chats were not used.As we have mentioned before, playing defensively is not everyone's cup of tea. Recently, as players are adapting to the new Alterac Valley, we are starting to see new defensive maneuvers take shape. In fact, the strategy has actually become a great way to farm some HKs, gain more overall honor from each win, and see some unpredictable action.
At the beginning of the match, defense met up at the Iceblood Graveyard, Garrison and Tower. After being initially pushed down to Frostwolf Graveyard due to Alliance players breaking south, several players managed to monopolize the Field of Strife while offense pushed steadily forward. Soon after, defense reclaimed Iceblood and suddenly the Alliance had nowhere to resurrect except the Stormpike Aid Station.
Defense quickly rode through midfield toward Icewing Bunker. About a third stayed there, hindering the progress of any opposition that tried to slip through by walking past the lake rather than on the road. Another third road forward to help push north with offense, as the Alliance had retaken Stormpike Graveyard by this point. Even though the Horde was forced to resurrect at Stonehearth Graveyard, we managed to push back to Stormpike in no time.
The rest of defense cleverly ensured that any Alliance riding past our bottleneck were quickly overrun, which was not difficult, as they often managed the maneuver alone. Meanwhile, northern snipers capped and held the Dun Baldar bunkers. In the end, the Alliance lost with 0 reinforcements, holding only the Stormpike Aid Station and the Irondeep Mine, the latter of which we could not take, as once taken by the Alliance, it is bugged and cannot be captured.
The defensive team left that battleground having seen at least as much action as the offensive. In fact, the experience was full of spontaneity, suspense, unpredictability, and a real sense of achievement.
I'm certainly not writing this to gloat (for the Horde!); I'm primarily trying to illustrate the importance of the defensive aspect in battlegrounds, especially in the new Alterac Valley. Not only does defense have much to contribute, it can in fact be the star of the match; and not only as a last resort, or turtle.
If you have never played defensively, or have not done so recently, I challenge you to give it the old college try. Especially in the new AV, you never know how valuable your efforts may end up being. In addition, with new and improved benefits for casual players, now is a great time to try something new. Do you have an interesting story of battleground defense? Have you been inspired and would like to go D; or are you still maintaining it is useless?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
12-04-2007 @ 11:14AM
doogan said...
in before AV isnt balanced posts
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12-04-2007 @ 11:17AM
Mark Chisholm said...
Whoopdie Freakin Do.
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12-04-2007 @ 11:24AM
crazyterran said...
Cool. one game in a million. I'll go in with my 6 guildies and kill galvanger / drek'thar ourselves and let the marks fill our mailboxes.
12-04-2007 @ 11:21AM
Mort said...
Happens quite often in my battlegroup, which I can't remember off the top of my head, for horde. Even gone so far as to take aid as well.
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12-04-2007 @ 11:23AM
Ahoni said...
I have been a part of several AVs like this since 2.3. I have had more than one AV where i ended up with over 1000 honor for the match. A determined defense of 10-15 people can prevent the opposition from moving past the choke points. If you do it intelligently, once you wipe them, you move up the field to the next choke point and stop them there. Solid Defense like this can net you 585 bonus honor, plus all the HKs. Several of these games in one day, most no longer than 20 minutes, each with 100+ HKs is lots of honor.
Mostly though, its much more fun than the zerg to the end that AV used to be.
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12-04-2007 @ 11:25AM
Nick S said...
about one in ten games look like this for us - good defense combined with disciplined offense (by disciplined, i mean they move with coordination as a group) can really steamroll AV these days.
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12-04-2007 @ 11:25AM
Mitch said...
The thing that bugs me about AV the most is the Alliance choke point. I understand it's easier to defend the Alliance side, but I would rather be able to mount a quick counter offensive with a chance to gain honor rather than be stuck in a losing match which seems like FOREVER.
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12-04-2007 @ 11:26AM
Zach said...
Yeah, these are fun. I've had quite a bit of these. These are what I like to call perfect games. The First Aid Graveyard in this scenario is actually irrelevant. There's no Honor gained in capping it, so leaving it untagged is just fine. The end result is:
83 Honor for winning (killing the enemy General or 0 Reinforcements), 62x5 (4 Towers + Captain destroyed/slain), and 41x5 (4 Towers + Captain retained), 20 for a secondary objective... for a total of a whopping 618 Honor in one AV game. HKs are just icing on the cake.
Oh, and of course, the beautiful bug:
http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.wowinsider.com/media/2007/11/super_honor.jpg
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12-04-2007 @ 11:28AM
Charles said...
Yeah, we did the same thing yesterday in the Shadowburn battle group. A good portion of the team went to galvangar and beat the alliance back, after which they just gave up and waited at the bridge until they were pushed off of that in five minutes and butchered. Alliance's lack of discipline and skill means that when their turtles are broken, they give up.
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12-04-2007 @ 11:28AM
Arnold said...
And this is news because? ? ?
In my battlegroup (Rampage), this happens all the 'freakin' time (excuse my french, s'il vous plait).
Last night, Horde 606 honor, Alliance 0 honor.
I play alliance, I say it sucks. Big time. Yes, due to the bridge, we can defend our aid station almost ad infinitum, but that is about it. Due to the layout with the Iceblood choke point and the way the Graveyard there is laid out, a dedicated group of horde defenders can achieve what you so gleefully gloated about. It hurts especially because in our battlegroup it happens soooo often.
Essentially there is only one way in to Galv, whereas Balinda can be approached from multiple sides. Stonehearth bunker (the one in the middle) is on your way to SHGY, sitting out there on its own, I can go on and on and on. If you could please cite one example where the alliance can achieve the same thing of 606 honor to 0 honor.
Urgh, I'm just bitter...
(I personally don't have any animosity towards the horde--in fact I have a bunch of horde toons scattered over various servers--it is just that my wife took one look at the undead/tauren/orc/troll females, and said "no way." One look at the NE females, and she fell in love. Accordingly, we play alliance. )
I don't think that Blizz caters more to horde than alliance, etc... I just wish that there were more PvP maps, or that you could swap starting locations or whatever. Do we need a goblin battleground with random starting locations?
-bitterly yours-
-Arnold.
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12-04-2007 @ 11:32AM
Valandil said...
Maybe this might even show that capturing SH GY isn't such a bad idea after all? It stops the Alliance controlling the middle-ground, it seems.
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12-04-2007 @ 11:45AM
Fireflash38 said...
Capping Snow fall is great, if you have the timing down correctly. You cap it either after you have capped SH or SP, not before.
Also, even if your defense is getting pushed back, recapping towers should be a priority. For instance, one AV I was in, we had 25 people on defense, the rest on offense. Our defense got pushed away from IB, however we were able to utilize the slight bottleneck by the tower after IB and keep their offense from ever getting close to FW.
About 5-10 of our defenders had to act as cleanup duty, killing whatever allies just ran past our line into our keep.
12-04-2007 @ 11:34AM
dpoyesac said...
I'd just like to brag that I was there and I saw it happen. Go Azuremyst!
I think it illustrates another interesting point: the need for flexibility when it comes to strategy. I played several games after this one, and in all of them the Alliance went super-heavy on offense, meaning we couldn't repeat the feat.
But -- in those games where we started off with a heavy defense we were able to slow the Alliance enough to kill Vann first. In those games where we tried an all-out offensive rush, we lost the race.
I think this shows the most interesting aspect of the new AV: every game is different, and in every game the team needs to be flexible enough to respond to the other teams strategy. When we horde assume that what has always worked in the past -- even if that past is what worked yesterday, or just an hour ago -- we lose.
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12-04-2007 @ 11:36AM
Ryzen said...
From my experiences in Defense in this new AV...one full group can greatly hinder progress of the entire reverse side faction...sometimes all you need in AV is the extra 2 mins of time one strong defensive group can give you. A strong defense wont win you AV ( having half your team on defense). But a strong O followed by a dedicated defense should be feared:)
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12-04-2007 @ 11:41AM
Jason said...
On my battlegroup everyone pretty much uses the old strategy. Run to the end and kill the general skipping everything in between. And games end faster than ever and you get honor.
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12-04-2007 @ 11:51AM
Slayblaze said...
Yep same here. In fact it is even more of a offensive rush than ever before. It seems like each time Blizz tries to change AV to make things less of a rush to the opposing general, they achieve the exact opposite.
It does seem to me that the difference now is that when both sides launch a massive rush to Drek/Van (skipping everything in between) that Horde now have the edge to win where before the change Alliance had the edge [shrug]
12-04-2007 @ 12:52PM
Jason said...
That's true. The Horde does have a shorter distance to travel now.
12-04-2007 @ 11:50AM
Adam said...
I had a game like this a little while ago. We ended with 585 reinforcements to alliance's 0.
Unfortunately that was only one game in the many AVs that I've played since 2.3
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12-04-2007 @ 1:31PM
Malachi154 said...
We won an alliance turtle the other day with 1 reinforcement left - the score was 1-0. It was kinda long, but the end was very exciting. Since the score at one point was 10 alliance, 7 horde, it was a real nail-biter!
12-04-2007 @ 11:53AM
hordienub said...
This is why I rolled Horde after playing 2 alliance toons to 70. I actually witnessed one horde player apologize to another in battle the other day! The loses I've seen horde side are always much closer - i.e. in AB 1990-2000. Not the usual blowout I see Alliance side. People defend nodes, run in groups and healers heal.
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