Reflections On “New Alterac Valley”
Patch 2.3 has been about for a few days now and with it came yet another evolution of the Alterac Valley battleground. Such an evolution deserves another commentary.
I was spending my playing time today in Alterac Valley trying to complete the PvP BG Daily. In the process, I took the effort to log in several games trying to get that darn victory. It’s the first time I did Alterac Valley since the patch came out so I was curious to see how the changes affected the game. While inside one of the games, my fellow hordies were arguing about strategy and I picked up someone saying “Do you even know how to win in new AV?”. That’s why I called post 2.3 Alterac Valley “New AV” and hence the title of this post.
Prior to 2.3, the general strategy to winning an Alterac Valley game involved a very offensive approach that basically involved a race to the opposing team’s general. This led games to be very quick, making it ideal for players who want to grind honor and AV marks. But this also led AV matches to be quite mechanical and even predictable in the sense that you knew you wouldn’t encounter much resistance since the game was really very offensive minded. My observation about this way of playing AV is that most of the time it seemed like it was a huge outdoor PvE dungeon where you needed to kill mini bosses and then the last boss since there really wasn’t much PvP-ing to be had in the sense of players really fighting other players. In fact, there were times I would end the game with a number of honorable kills I could count with one hand.
New AV is way different. It forces you to play a lot of defense or risk losing too many reinforcements. Never before have I encountered members of the Alliance actually guarding Captain Balinda! New AV seemed to bring back the PvP to the battleground. It felt like the Alterac Valley of waaay back in the old honor system when players dropped items like Night Elf ears, which you could turn in to gain more reputation. Those times were fun because there was a lot of player killing involved. New AV forces the players to be more active in both the offense and the defense and be mindful of what’s happening in both aspects of the game. Because of this, the game takes longer and sometimes too long for what we’ve been used to. At least they still don’t take as long as the AV matches of old that used to take hours and hours!
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POSTED IN: PvP - Battlegrounds
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