An Early Look at the Alterac Valley Battleground

[MongoJerry]

An Early Look at the Alterac Valley Battleground

This is a collection of a few early impressions of the Alterac Valley Battleground based on about two hours of playing last night illustrated with a few miscellaneous screenshots I took along the way.

Right behind Tarren Mill lies the Horde fort that forms the Horde entrance to the Alterac Valley battleground. (I sure felt silly running all over Alterac trying to find the place). The camp has a quest giver and a Frostwolf Supply Officer vendor who doesn't sell anything, although he repairs armor. I suspect that one has to gain reputation with the Frostwolf faction to be able to see the items he has to sell -- in the same way that one has to build reputation with the Argent Dawn to buy things from the Argent Dawn Quartermasters.

Inside the tunnel, one sees a lot of guards both stationary and patrolling around. This is not going to be a very good place for Alliance gankers to hang out.



There's also a quest giver here named Teeka Bloodsnarl who gives out some basic Alterac Valley related PvP quests. These are all tutorial quests designed to let players know what they can do once they get in the valley. Capture a mine, capture a graveyard, capture a tower. These quests are likely to be fulfilled by players on their first trip into Alterac Valley.



When you walk into the Alterac Valley instance portal, a dialog pops up to ask you to select which Alterac Valley battleground instance you want to join. I selected "First Available" and got placed in the first battleground.



Through the instance portal, the tunnel continues and here you see a *ton* of Horde guards, most or all of whom are high level elite mobs, and I assume the wolves can detect stealth. I think Blizzard wanted to make sure that one tactic people never used was camping the opponent's entrance tunnel.



When I entered the battleground, I brought up the map to get oriented. There are no gray areas on this map that one has to explore to reveal. Everything is known immediately. Red means something occupied by the good guys (Horde), blue means something occupied by the bad guys (Alliance). You can see on the front that there's a tower that's half red and half white. That means that the Horde has just killed the commander of that tower and are in the process of taking it over, but the transition to Horde hasn't completed yet. I don't know how one stops the transformation from taking place if you are on the opposing side. Once a tower or graveyard is conquered, NPC's of the conquering side will appear to defend it.



As soon as I crossed the instance portal, I posted a "LFG" message and got invited into what was initially just a 5-man group but an hour later ended up being a raid group that contained most of the Horde inside the instance. Players were scatterbrained, being lost in the newness of it all, so the 5 of us didn't coordinate effectively at first. However, a couple of us decided to go take an uncontested mine held by kobolds. At first, it was just two of us, me and a warrior named Typho. This seemed OK, because we found out that the kobolds are low 50's elites. I figured it'd be slow going, but doable. Then, a patrol of five kobolds added while we were fighting two other kobolds and we got slaughtered.



But then a couple other players came down to help us, and it was smooth sailing from there. Once we killed the kobold boss at the heart of the mine, Horde NPC miners popped up everywhere around us and started battling the remainder of the kobolds. This was basically a chance to get free loot, since all the kobolds were busy fighting the NPC's, so all one had to do was do a little damage to each of them and collect the loot when they died.



After this final battle, the mine got suddenly silent as the whole place filled with Horde NPC's. The mine stayed in Horde hands for about an hour before the kobolds came back. As I understand it, by holding onto the mine, you make your NPC's all around the battleground a little stronger.



But of course, none of us came here to PvE. After we took the mine, we went back up north to the front line which was at the time near a flat open area in the center of the map. As I understand it, there are landmines all around this area and in order to get rid of them, Horde players have to kill a boss who hangs out in or near one of the bastions just to the north of this field.



Our group decided that the best way to stop the Alliance was to take over the nearby graveyard, so we headed up there. I took a wrong turn on the way to the graveyard (this particular graveyard was up on a hill), so my raidmates beat me there and tore down the alliance banner. The banners turn white when the graveyard turns contested.