Flux

Arathi Basin (AB) for level 70’s has become a red headed stepchild. It started when titles were removed from battlegrounds and made honor the most important reward, removing the competitive aspect and turning it into an honor grind. And then it became a ghostland when Alterac Valley become the fastest place to get honor. You will still run into very organized pre-made groups but most avoid it now unless it’s a bonus weekend, daily quest, or they need some marks. For those times winning is essential for getting anything out of it. So let’s go over what works for a vaguely coordinated pick up group, the beloved pug.

Back in the day and occasionally now there were a wide variety of strategies with names like six/six and the floating three, or seven/seven and the fat kid, which by the way is still a great opening strategy. But most of these strategies require too much coordination for pugs. The best pug strategy is the one you can say with one or two chat lines, and the simpler the better.

With that in mind, let’s go over some chat line phrases which you can spam. These are golden rules of pugs. A well organized group would not necessarily want to do these. But a semi-organized group will get a lot of mileage out of it.

“take and hold three flags” - the only way you are going to win is to take and hold at least three flags. You might try for a fourth or a fifth if things are going well to speed it up. But without three you lose.

“defend with three” - Leaving a flag undefended is a sure way to lose. You need at least three defenders. No less.

“fight on the flag” - people get distracted, run off, or forget to fight around the flag. You should always be on top of a flag either defending it or attacking it. If you are not on a flag or running to one, you are in the wrong place.

“inc” - If your team’s flag is about to get swarmed call it out. Phrases like “inc 5 lm”, Incoming 5 to lumber mill, or “inc 2 farm” let people who are floating between flags know where to go to reinforce. Call out incoming enemies or get swarmed and die.

Besides communicating as much as possible there are two strategies that seem to work best. One is the 5/5/5 which means three raid groups of 5 people each take and defend a flag, group one goes to one flag, group two to another, etc. When the battle ground starts, someone could say, “Group One go to blacksmith, Group Two go to Lumber Mill… “, etc. This has the advantage of being very easy, probably more coordinated than the other side, you know who’s supposed to be where by looking at the raid tab, and it has a strong defense. The second strategy which is better but harder to pull off is the 3/3/3/6. You still take and defend three flags, but you keep only 3 people at each flag. The other six roam around, hopefully together, to provide defense or harass the other teams flags. In reality you are likely going to wind up with a mix of the two strategies as people decide they want to do their own thing or aren’t paying attention to any strategy at all.

Which flags are the best to take? Some people swear by the iron triangle (farm/stables, blacksmith, lumber mill) since it is easy to support each other and some swear by the (farm/stables, mine, lumber mill) since you contain the other team at the blacksmith. In a pug, the differences don’t really matter. Take three, if you only have two, get one more. If the fighting is too intense at one, then shift to another, don’t get obsessed over one flag and get log jammed. You will notice that because of the natural flow of the map and flag placement that the Alliance tends to try to take stables, mine, and lumber mill at the start while the Horde tends to go for farm, blacksmith, and lumber mill at the start. So the most likely first battle is going to be at the lumber mill.

That’s about the best you can hope for in a pug. I have seen some amazing coordination develop before where there were groups coordinated attacks on weak horde defenses, groups held strategic points at crossroads, and defense groups rotated people to different spots depending on incoming attacks, but they are few and far between. If you stick to the tips above you should be at least if not more coordinated than a typical pug on the other side of the battleground.

A few tips for fun

• if you are a mage or priest, slow fall and levitate are great ways to go from the lumber mill to the blacksmith, or the blacksmith to the mine. Cast it, mount up, and jump. You can float down to the next flag.
• if you are a hunter (Eagle Eye), shaman (Far Sight), or have the Ornate Spyglass you can look out at the other flags from the one you are defending and help call out incoming enemies

Have fun with the red headed stepchild!

Tags: pvp
Author: aos

This entry was posted by aos on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Games, WoW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.