The new Alterac Valley

When Blizzard introduced the Alterac Valley battleground to World of Warcraft, I went there a couple of times, and then abandoned it. AV was only open a few times per week, you had to wait in queue very long, and once you got in, the battle lasted many, many hours. I never saw AV finished then, because after a couple of hours I just got exhausted and left. Fast forward to patch 1.12, and boy has Alterac Valley changed!

I don't do much PvP, but some guild mates advised me to visit AV with my Alliance priest, because winning the battle there gives you a very nice wand of biting cold. Okay, the bonus to frost spells is useless to me, but the 64 damage per second were a lot nicer than what I had before. First positive surprise on trying to enter AV is that there are half a dozen and more AV battlegrounds open at any given time. And even for Alliance the queue was only 10 to 15 minutes.

Once I entered the battleground, it turned out that the strategy had changed fundamentally. While in the old AV people were basically meeting in the middle and killing each other, now Horde and Alliance just rush past each other. Very few to no people are defending. Within minutes Horde captures the graveyard closest to the Alliance base, and vice versa. The side that kills the enemy general faster wins. The battle that lead to me gaining my wand lasted less than half an hour. Other battles lasted a bit longer, because some people tried to defend their base, slowing both sides down. I managed to do some AV quests, like capturing a tower or capturing a graveyard. That is surprisingly simple, because nobody defends them, there are just NPC guarding the flag. As priest you just pull them all, do a Psychic Scream to send them running, and if nobody resists you just have enough time to capture the flag.

All in all there was surprisingly little PvP in Alterac Valley. Most players on both sides stuck together in one big group, assaulting the NPCs of the enemy fortress. When I tried to defend, I was quickly cut down. Once I was in a battle where about a dozen people defended the Alliance fortress, and that battle went nearly 2 hours, because without those dozen players the Alliance didn't have enough firepower to take down the enemy general, and their defence prevented the Horde from killing the Alliance general, until the Horde finally broke through and won. After one evening in AV I was friendly with the Stormpike, and had gained 20k honor points, but only had 200 honor kills. In the fastest battle I won without having a single honor kill, as Alliance was fighting NPCs exclusively. What a strange way to do PvP!