wow battleground tactics

wow battleground tactics

World of Warcraft features three different types of battlegrounds:


(*) When you enter these battlegrounds, you are guaranteed to be playing with players in the same bracket: 10-19, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59 and 60.

Note that you don't have to go to the geographic locations listed above to enter a queue: all the major cities (Orgrimmar, Undercity, Thunder Bluff, Stormwind and Iron Forge) have three battle masters in the War Quarters for each of them. Just sign up with all three of them, then go on your way: you will be teleported to the battlegrounds as soon as your turn comes (you will be prompted first).

All three battleground have different structures and strategies and picking one is a personal choice. In a nutshell:

WSG is probably the BG that's easiest to grasp and to have fun at initially. It has ten players maximum and the goal is to capture the enemy flag and bring it back inside your base (your own flag must be there as well).

AB games have fifteen players maximum and the goal is to reach 2000 resources first. The production rate depends on the number of nodes that your team controls.

AV has a maximum of forty players on each sides and features epic battles where the two sides are trying to kill the opponent's general. Depending on what you're looking for and who is playing, games can have sophisticated strategies or no strategies at all. Any player above level 51 can participate.
Levels
As indicated above, you can start playing the BG as soon are you're level 10, but considering how brackets are structured, you will probably die a lot if you happen to have a level that ends in 0-6. Obviously, having a level ending in 9 guarantees that you will never face anyone higher than you (except in Alterac Valley).

Also, keep in mind that all battlegrounds are marginally different at level 60 than any other level, since most of the players you will face will not only have epic mounts, they will most likely be geared in tier 2 epics or more. For people not familiar with this term, it simply means that the opponents will have better gear than you, so be prepared for a certain amount of frustration in the battlegrounds at level 60.
For this reason, I strongly recommend staying at a level ending in 9 for as long as possible if you enjoy PvP gaming. Once you reach 60, there is no turning back...

Rewards
Blizzard has created two different systems of rewards that will please both hardcore and casual gamers.
Reputation
This is the recommended approach for casual gamers. Whenever you participate in one of the battlegrounds, you gain reputation with one of the three associated factions. The amount of reputation you win will depend on the outcome of the game and on various other events that happened while you played (capturing buildings, killing enemy players, etc...), but you are basically guaranteed to leave a battleground with more reputation than when you entered, so reaching the maximum level is just a matter of time, no matter how little you play every week.
There are several levels of reputation, each one unlocking more items that you can buy from a special supplier either inside the battleground (for Alterac Valley) or just outside the instance in the geographic locations mentioned above.

Here are the reputation levels along with the number of points you need to accumulate before reaching it:



If you reach the Exalted status, you will be able to buy epic (purple) items, something you cannot do anywhere else in the game.

Honor system
The honor system rewards players that can play on a regular basis. Once a week (usually on Tuesdays, after the maintenance is over), your standing is reassessed and based on your achievements of the week past, your rank will be re-evaluated. There are fourteen ranks, and the higher you go, the harder it is to get to the next level (but not impossible: each realm typically has a small number of levels 14). On the other hand, the higher you are, the slower your rank will decay if you don't play, thus allowing you to slow down or let one or two weeks go by without playing without seeing your rank drop down too much.
The exact formula used to calculate the honor points is not public, but a few facts are known about it. In a nutshell, the final number is calculated from the number of HK (Honorable Kills, see below) and honor points that are granted to you based on achievements performed by you or your team throughout a game. Whenever you gain one level, you can go to your main city's Hall of Braves to buy the new items that are now available to you. Note that you need to be at least level 6 before you can enter the hall, and to whet your appetite, you will probably be happy to learn that at level 11, you can buy an epic mount for 90g...

Marks
Finally, each appearance in either of the battlegrounds will grant you either one (if you lose) or three (if you win) "marks". These marks can be turned in at each battleground location for money, reputation and honor for every three marks you turn in. While it is possible to turn in marks for each battleground separately, I recommend you wait until you have three marks for each battleground and then turn in the "For greater honor" quest. You will get more honor and reputation with all three factions this way.
Be aware that each mark only stacks up to 20, so make sure you never have more than 17 marks when you enter a battleground, or you might end up losing some (the extra marks are actually mailed to you in that case, but they have a twenty four hour expiration, so check your mailbox as soon as possible to retrieve them or they will be lost for good).

Terminology
Like everything in World of Warcraft, the battlegrounds have very specific terminology that it's important to understand if you want to follow what's going on. Here is a quick rundown for each of these terms.
General








Warsong Gulch
If you've never played any PVP, I recommend you start with Warsong Gulch, which is fairly easy to master strategically. The goal is to capture the enemy flag and to bring it back next to your own flag (which needs to be there in order to score the point). The first team to capture the enemy flag three times wins. The top of your screen indicates how many flags each side has captured so far and if a flag icon is next to it, it means that the flag shown is currently in the hands of the enemy.

WSG games typically start with a rush on both sides toward their opponent's FR, capture their flag (since most of the time, 8-9 players rush in offense, only 1-2 can stay in defense, and they get quickly overwhelmed). Then each side will bring the enemy flag back to its base and try to hide in a "safe" place (see below). After that, the game is mostly about protecting your flag carrier while trying to spot and kill the enemy carrier.

Depending on how confident the team is, it is common to leave the flag carrier with two or three defenders and send the rest of the team in offense to locate and kill the enemy carrier. If you see an enemy pick up your flag and run, immediately announce which way the runner is going, which is typically either "gy" (the graveyard), "ramp" (the ramp that leads to your base) or "tun" (the tunnel). Similarly, if you happen to pick the enemy flag, announce which way you intend to run so that your team can meet you there. Since "tun" alone is ambiguous (you might be talking about the enemy carrier), I tend to add a "me" for each of my announcements whenever I pick up the enemy flag: "me tun".

Here are the various places a flag carrier can hide with his bodyguards:
• The roof. Convenient because the access is a bottleneck, so enemies are easy to spot from far away. They also need to come through a long ramp, so you can prepare ahead of time and use Frost Traps to slow down their progress. It's also a good spot because you can drop down to the flag room if things start getting too hot for you (note: you should only do this as a last resort move. In general, always stick with your team. See below for details why).

• The side room (or the flag room). This is the room next to the flag room. It's convenient because the transparent wall lets you see who is coming via the tunnel.

• The graveyard. The obvious benefit is that freshly resurrected players will be there to defend you right away and the the only access is through the path (the bluff below the graveyard cannot be climbed). This is probably a tactic to save for when your team is badly outnumbered or out skilled.

• There are also a number of other places where a lonely carrier can hide, such as on the sides in the middle of the field. I've seen this happen when the game is hopeless (i.e. 2 vs. 10). It's fun to see the opponent team get frustrated trying to find you, but they always eventually do...
Here are a few random thoughts about tactics:
• You're the flag carrier, you have an escort of a few players and you suddenly get attacked: should you run or stay with your escort and fight? I tend to recommend the latter. First of all, running is almost guaranteed to fail all the time since you can bet that at least one of the attackers will have the means to stop you (entangling roots, frost nova, hamstring, gouge, etc...). Second, it becomes hard for the enemies to target you when you keep moving around a group of your peers. Very often, they will commit the mistake to all attack you at the same time, which makes them sitting ducks for your escort (and even easier if you have an unthreatened healer making sure you stay in good health). Also, keep in mind that if you die, the flag can now be picked up by anyone, and if your bodyguards know what they are doing, they will have been monitoring your health and they'll be ready to pick up the flag before an enemy does.

• If an enemy flag carrier has a healer, always make sure that at least one person on your team is assigned to that healer (ideally a Rogue, who can not only stunlock this player but also interrupt their casting). Even a team of three has small odds of killing a carrier if he has a healer to back him up.

• Don't fight midfield for no reason. While it's common to see newbies or people who are only interested in raking HK's do that and ignore everything else (even this perspective is erroneous in my opinion: you will earn more honor by winning the game in the long run), you should basically only be doing one of the following four things:
o Play offense
o Play defense
o Escort your carrier
o Try to kill the enemy carrier
Arathi Basin
In Arathi Basin, you are trying to control nodes which, when captured, start producing resources. The more nodes you control, the faster you produce resources, and the faster you will reach 2000, which is when the game ends. Since there are only five nodes, controlling three and keeping them is enough to guarantee a win, so this is usually the strategy you should aim for: capture three nodes and make sure they are all evenly defended at all times.

Of course, it's never that simple and the opposing team will typically try to reconquer some of these nodes either by attacking one massively, or fake an attack on one and assault another one (this is rare, but very good teams do that). On your end, it's also good to keep the enemy team on its toes and regularly send one or two of your players to try and ninja a fourth or fifth node. The attempt will probably fail but it will force the enemy to distract some of its forces to the threatened node in case they were just scouts for a more massive attack.
Alterac Valley
Alterac Valley is by far the most intriguing battleground, and it's the kind that you either love or hate. The reason is that there seems to be a general imbalance on every single realm that I've read about. On the one I play on (Draenor), the Alliance basically wins 95% of the games. It's the opposite on other realms, which probably tends to prove that Blizzard designed AV just right, and the imbalance is simply created by players for various reasons that I won't go into (gear is usually the main factor). If it's any comfort to you, I reached Exalted status with the Frost Wolf faction after having only won one game. That's right, one game. We lost all the others I participated in (which I evaluate to around fifty).

If I can make it to Exalted, anybody can...

In the beginning, an AV battle is a massive rush: both sides head strong toward the enemy fortress and try to go as fast as possible. In a perfect (but boring) game, both factions will soon reach each other's fortresses and it will be to whoever is the fastest to kill the enemy general.
In practice, it never happens this way.
Very often, a midpoint encounter will happen and one side will prevail, slowly eroding the other's offense. After a while, one side will typically have 80% offense and 20% defense and the other team will have the opposite, guaranteeing a non-stop kill fest on both sides of the map.

The first thing you should do when you enter AV is to check out your map and identify the main fight points (there are usually two). One will typically be behind you and the other ahead. Pick a destination and head there, while paying attention to the messages flying by. Typically, each landmark on the map has two buildings of importance: a bunker and a graveyard. The bunker is defended by bowmen and an elite captain and the graveyard will also have an elite and five guards. Bunkers typically need to be taken by force, but graveyards can easily be ninja'ed by two players: one will ride on his mount and "kite" the elite and his guards, while the teammate runs to the flag and captures it. Ninjaing graveyards can sometimes be of value, but unless you have a stronger presence, it is very likely that the two ninjas will soon be overwhelmed by the other team that will try and reconquer it right away.

When you approach the enemy fortress (Storm Pike or Frost Wolf), the first thing you should do is destroy the two towers defending it. This is not mandatory, but doing so will make future walkthroughs easier and it also impacts the number of war masters (assistants) the enemy general will have at his side once you reach him. The next step is to capture the Relief Hut (Horde) or Aid Station (Alliance). This will guarantee that the enemies can no longer respawn inside their fortress. Once you capture the RH/AS, it's usually very hard for the enemies to retake it, and at this point, it's only a matter of time before you kill the general.

The next step is to pull the war masters one by one. These are elite characters, so you need to make sure you don't pull out everyone or your offense will quickly get wiped (if you own the RH/AS, you will respawn nearby, so it's typically only a temporary setback).

Finally, you will enter the fortress and fight the general (he cannot be pulled). He's a 62 elite that will require at least ten people to take down.

Alterac Valley has a few additional complexities that make the game more interesting than the other two battlegrounds.
Each time you loot an enemy corpse, you will get a certain amount of armor scraps, blood and flesh (different items for the Alliance). Each of these can then be turned in to NPC's back at the Keep:
• Once enough armor scraps have been collected, your side will deploy veteran units (and for the next level, champion units). These units are the ones that guard your bunkers, towers and graveyards, so they can make a significant difference.

• Flesh can only be turned in once one of your commanders has safely returned home.

• Blood is turned in inside the cave at the entrance of the Frost Wolf Keep. Once enough blood has been collected, the NPC will move toward a summoning point in the middle of the map (Horde: 45,51, west of the Field of Strife. Alliance: just east of that point, in the middle of the Field of Strife). Once he gets there, he will materialize a pentagram on the ground and if at least ten people can click it and hold the position for long enough, a monstrous elite creature will appear (Horde: the Ice Lord, Alliance: the Forest Lord). Of course, if the enemy spots you summoning, they will do everything they can to break it, so make sure you get a lot of people and that some of them are assigned to the task of making sure the summoning doesn't get interrupted.

The two Lords work about the same way: for the first five minutes, they will just wander about in the Field of Strife, killing the occasional enemies, and after that, they will slowly make their way toward the enemy fortress. Note that they cannot be directed: only enemies can aggro them and cause them to follow. For this reason, you should keep a minimum number of your players around your Lord to make sure that he doesn't get kited and also to keep him buffed and healed.

On the receiving end, the best way to get rid of a Lord is to bring him near the instance entrance and kill him there. It will take a lot of people to kill him, though, and while you're busy doing this, the enemy is most certainly making progress toward your fortress. Still, this approach is better than having the Lord enter your fortress, which is pretty much a guaranteed loss unless you bring everyone back in defense. Note that your general will not interact with the Lord: only human players can kill him.
Should you kill the captains?
The captains give their respective faction a regular buff and will give some reputation if you kill them (e.g. 125 points for Balinda Stonehearth), so the question regularly arises to figure out whether you should kill them on your way to the enemy fortress or just skip them. Even though these characters can usually be taken down by five good players, I tend to think that they are a costly distraction when the game is just beginning and each side is rushing toward each other's fortress. Of course, people will be quick to point out that "it only takes a few minutes and five men", but the reality is very different.

First of all, you never have only five men heading there, so your raid comes to a big slowdown as half, if not more, of the crowd gets diverted. Second, it is likely that a few of them will die during the fight and will have to resurrect to a far graveyard (chances are you don't own a nearby graveyard yet, and even if you do, there's still the time penalty and the time it will take them to catch up). For all these reasons, I usually recommend to skip mid-field captains and head for the enemy graveyard as soon as possible. There is always time later to revisit this choice and if your team is losing, you will usually have enough of an advanced notice (i.e. your Relief Hut / Aid Station will fall) to send a small group to reap the reputation benefit before the game ends.
So you want to be a leader?
Once you've accumulated some experience, you might want to become a raid leader (especially since people are usually very lazy and prefer to endlessly type "invite please" instead of starting one themselves). Players are usually grateful when someone creates a raid and also fairly tolerant with the raid leader, so don't be shy.
As an AV raid leader, your responsibility is to spend more time looking at the map, read the messages and direct people appropriately. Pay close attention to the messages describing which nodes are under attack, and if you're using AVBar (see below), make sure you keep your team appraised on capture times (I usually announce the three and one minute marks).

Whenever you give directions, expect that only a small portion of your team will obey, so feel free to repeat at length. It also helps to use group numbers to give orders ("group 2 retake SF GY") but again, I found that most players don't know enough about the game to even know what group they're in.

On the other hand, something that works very well is to call out names. It takes a bit longer (you need to identify them on the map) and extra typing (you need to be a fast typist), but "people in tunnel, defend FW GY" doesn't work as well as "xyzzy haru dozel, defend FW GY". Try it and you will feel some great satisfaction when you see these players moving in the direction you asked them.

Pay close attention to how both teams measure up in terms of captures. You can get a good sense of what team is ahead by seeing which buildings each one takes. For example, if your Horde team is still fighting around the Ice Wing Bunker while the Alliance has already taken the Frost Wolf Graveyard, you know you're rapidly falling behind and you should probably start allocating more people to the defense of your keep.
Class considerations
PvP is a very different game than PvE, and you'll need to radically alter the way you play if the battlegrounds are your very first contact with PvP. This section is not about teaching you how to play PvP but just a list of a few battleground-specific thoughts that you might find useful.
I'll start this section with a few general comments and then more specific ones depending on which class you are. I'm hoping to receive some help from the community to fill this section since even though I have three 60 characters, my Rogue is the only one I've ever PvP'ed with.

The first thing you need to realize is that you will rarely be dealing deadly blows. That's right: very rarely. You'll land a few hits on someone, but you won't be the first one to hit them and you won't be the one finishing them off. Therefore, all the crit and combo abilities you have in store need to be revised in light of what battlegrounds really represent: teamwork.

For this reason, I tend to focus a lot more on crippling and immobilizing enemies than killing them (I rely on my heavily equipped teammates to do that). DOT's are also a good weapon to use since a lot of human players will know when to run away to heal (especially paladins, which have the ability to "bubble up" when they reach 1% health and then heal themselves), but they will typically not know exactly the amount of DOT they have just received until it's too late.
Rogues
Mind-Numbing and Crippling poisons are a must. Forget all the other damage-dealing poisons that you probably use in PvE. In the battlegrounds, you want your enemies to walk very slowly, receive massive DOTs, have their casting time reduced and, last, receive less healing (healing is difficult in the battlegrounds). I also use a lot of Kidney Shot to immobilize someone, and Rupture, which is a great DOT to inflict especially with five combo points.

As a general tactic, Rogues should never engage plate and mail and should stick to cloth only. Based on what I said above, you will never be able to kill any of these players, but you can incapacitate them quite a bit by sneaking behind enemy lines and either sap them if they are not in combat yet (ideally when they just resurrected or are drinking or eating). If they are in combat, a Cheap Shot, followed by a Back Stab and maybe one Sinister Strike are a good way to make their life a bit harder. Depending on your build, you will have accumulated three or four combo points by then and it's then time to run away back to your team and spend your capital on Slice and Dice to make sure you don't lose these points (again: you will not be killing your target, so the combo points will disappear soon). Sapping priests or druids is particularly effective since you are basically putting out of commission a major healer for thirty to forty seconds. Sapping lonely flag takers is also a good option if you know that help is on the way and you don't feel like soloing that particular player.
Add-Ons
There are quite a few add-ons specifically targeted for PvP, but I recommend two in particular:
• CT-Raid Assist. A must-have for anyone who takes part in raid, even if you're not an active participant.

• AVBars. A very useful add-on that gives you timers for when various nodes or buildings will become captured. This is very important information that you need to share with your team if you are using this add-on.

lol nice alot players need to read it!!