Update:
Screens are up and can be found here.
Let’s talk about WoW, since I don’t seem to be able to keep my mouth shut about it anyway.
For the people that don’t know what World of Warcraft is: Get educated.
I only played the Alterac Valley battlegrounds seriously about 3 times up until now. My first time in there was like the time when u learn the flavor of Skittles, a whole new world is opening up for you. I mean, sure you’ve tasted candy before, but this was different. This time, you could actually _feel_ the charge, and _taste_ the rainbow. It’s the exact same thing with Alterac Valley. You’ve got the World, “Azeroth”, in World of Warcraft. And then there’s Alterac Valley. It plays so much different than your normal WoW gameplay, PvP included. Although it’s kind of hard to understand how everything works at first, you learn it pretty quickly when you know what the purpose of each team is.
Each team starts at their own base camp, Horde is positioned in the South, and Alliance in the North. The objective is to get to the other teams camp, and slay their Warchief. Along the way are certain points you can control to get a tactical advantage over the enemy. There are graveyards and towers to capture and destroy. Graveyards allow you to respawn when you’re dead. The closer to the enemy you can capture a graveyard, the easier it gets to keep on pressuring the enemy and driving them back to their camp until you can slay their warchief. There’s 1 graveyard in the middle: The SnowFall GraveYard. In my opinion the most important one to hold, because it’s situated on a mountain and only has 2 paths that lead there. It gives much leverage when you’re attacking the following enemy graveyard. Next to the SnowFall graveyard there are still 3 other enemy graveyards you can conquer. Each graveyard, when controlled by a faction, has guards (NPC’s) to protect them. These guards’ stats get stronger the longer the game lasts (like the OOE mod for Warcraft3). Taking over a graveyard works as follows: you right-click the banner and wait for the action to complete. Of course, this action can be interrupted by getting attacked, or moving, etc… After you have completed this action you have to hold the graveyard for a while until it becomes one of your own faction. The enemy forces get a message that one of their graveyards is under attack and they can reconquer the graveyard by right-clicking the banner and waiting until the action is complete.
Besides graveyards, there are also 4 bunkers and towers you can destroy. The concept of destroying one is much like the graveyard capturing, but a bunker has stronger and more npc’s to guard it. Along with 1 or more elite “Lieutenant” npc’s (lvl 60 elites) you need to pull or kill. Patrolling guard NPC’s won’t spawn when you destroy a Bunker/Tower, PLUS you get Bonus Honor for each bunker you destroy, so it’s a good thing to torch these things.
There are also quests you can do inside AV, some of them will help your faction to turn things around sometimes. For example for The Horde there’s two quests you can do to send out WolfRiders. One of them is to tame Frostwolves in the area and bring them to the quest NPC. Another quest that relates to this one is to kill Rams and harvest their skins to make armor for the WolfRiders. When enough wolves and armor have been brought back, the WolfRiders ride out and slay everything on their path. Now, these WolfRiders are like 20 or something (haven’t really counted them) lvl 60 elite guards, that ride the path starting from the Horde’s base to the Alliance’s base. Alliance has a similar quest to send out RamRiders. There’s also a quest to collect blood from the other faction’s npc’s and players so you can summon a Boss NPC that will fight for your faction. And yet another to send out Air attacks that will strike where the largest battle is going on at the moment.
Besides these faction-aiding quests, there are also a couple of other quests you can get outside AlteracValley. Such as “Capture a graveyard”, or “Capture a Mine”. Yes, there are also 2 mines you can capture and hold to gain minerals to support your troops. If you’ve got lower-levelled players in your group (with lower level being players that aren’t 60), you can get them to harvest wolves/skins or mine minerals or whatever, and have your lvl 60’s crush the opposing forces.
There is also one particularly interesting quest, to kill the raid boss “Korrak”. A troll that spawns at around 3h of battlegrounds playtime. I was stuck with Verdant Keeper’s Aim (quest reward from Maraudon) until I killed Korrak and got myself the crossbow BloodSeeker reward. The other rewards are pretty nice as well.
I haven’t been able to destroy the Alliance’s Warchief with my Horde buddies, but I’ve been damn close. I had been playing for over 2 hours (from the start), and we got them driven back to their base and needed to capture one graveyard (the one inside the Alliance’s camp). But after playing another hour without any result I quit, because things weren’t progressing anymore. Too bad because that was a pretty cool game. I saw all the faction-aid quest rewards in that one game: The WolfRiders, The WyvernRiders and Lokholar The IceLord.
As for how rewarding playing battlegrounds might be, let me tell you this: Last Week I still was a Grunt (about 25% til next rank) I got 1293 kills, 24442 Honor and my Standing was 436. That’s by only playing 2 battlegrounds, I totalled about 8hours battlegrounds playtime. And this week I gained one rank. But no entire bar. I’m a Sergeant with approximately 55% of the honor bar left until I reach next rank.
I’ll update soon with pictures of the Battle we almost won.
My overall first impression of Alterac Valley was that it was pretty amazing. And fun ! Man, I didn’t have so much fun since last time I played a _good_ game of Quake3 CTF about 5 years ago. It was incredible, and I hope this experience lasts and look forward to crushing the fucking Alliance.
FOR THE HORDE!
. GoogleTalk supports open standards and you will be able to use other clients if they’re also supporting the XMPP protocol.
