Controlling AV

After clearing 3 bosses in Hyjal last night a big group was up for some PvP in order to get their trinkets for the Archimonde fight on Thursday. We had 8 people at one point and let me tell you that was more than enough to completely control the battlefield. It's amazing that only 20% of the total raid can make such a huge impact but having such a well coordinated force (with plenty of healers) makes all the difference between an otherwise ragtag bunch.

We were rolling with:
Enhance Shaman (yours truly)
2x Hunters
Rogue
Holy Pally
Resto Shaman
Resto Druid
and after a he leveled his axe skill... a newly minted Enhance Shaman (guildie mentioned here who decided to roll with the true spec of hardcore gamers)

Yes that's 3 healers and 4.5 DPS (sorry Last, but with only 10% crit rating unbuffed you're only getting credit for 1/2 of a dps'er!!) What a difference having multiple healers makes. Here's what we did.

First few matches it was the textbook Alliance AV win strat. We rushed RH because you can count on everyone else going to Galv first. If there was no defense then we split up and capped the flag and the towers. If help was needed at IBT, TP, or FWGY after we capped the southern points then a few of us broke off to help, with the rest staying behind at the flag and the towers to prevent ninja capping. Then after the last or 2nd to last tower capped we'd call for ALL IN and take down Drek with ease.

This went on for maybe 5 matches. All lightning fast victories. It's great... for a while. Then it gets boring so we tried to mix it up. Next match we hopped between Stonehearth and Icewing. We actually went down to IBT first, capped it and chilled out down there until we saw SH get capped by the Horde. Then we rolled en-mass to SH and laid waste to the two defenders there. Of course at that point IW was capped so we went there and took that. We spent the rest of the fight bouncing between SH & IW, holding on to those for the duration of the fight. When Alliance was All In we ran back to Dun Baldar to mess with the Horde in Van's room. It was an outstanding victory with plenty of bonus honor for saving 2 towers.

For the next match we decided to have a bit more fun and defended Belinda. I think though we played our cards wrong and gave away not only that there were Alliance waiting in her room, but A LOT of Alliance. We only met sporadic resistance for a good five minutes in there. So we broadened our defensive strategy, moving between SH, IW, and Belinda. We let the Horde keep the SHGY because it not only gave us a bit of a challenge but also provided us with plenty of fresh HK's. In fact at one point we had both towers safe and decided to just farm people coming out of the GY.

But soon we realized that the Alliance had no forward graveyards... NONE. And the entire Alliance force was on defense. We had forced a turtle. The only ray of sunshine was that IBT & East FW tower were destroyed. Other than that, no other towers were taken by either side. This is where things got fun for us.

We popped back into Belinda's room to thrash the five or so Hordies that were trying to tackle her, recapped SH, then all eight of us rolled straight south. We picked up the Iceblood GY and asked two alliance there to guard it. More alliance were joining the offensive push and some took TP. As for us, we ran down and just completely mauled the resistance at FW. We got split up into two groups in inadvertently with two Hunters, rogue and Pally getting caught between FWGY and the bottleneck. Me, the resto shaman, and the resto druid rolled up into West, capped it and held it against two rogues and a pally. The other half caught up with us and the fighting was intense at this point. Horde had a Warrior, 2 Rogues (you know how I feel about rogues), Mage, Warlock, and Pally. We pushed them back deeper to the RH GY and then capped RH. They still had FW and were making a push on to us, but at this point a few more Alliance joined the fight and kept the horde busy down there.

With towers capped we would have called for the All-In but there was only the eight of us and one more resto Druid. We were feeling bold so the healers told me to strap on a shield and get to tanking! There was some horde resistance inside who we dispatched with ease. Our rogue and hunters pulled the dogs off and killed them. I saw misdirects from the hunters, and constant heals coming in from four different sources. It was brilliant! I had down Stoneskin, Grace of Air, Healing Stream, and Searing totems to help with the defense. I popped Heroism and Sham Rage right from the start to help with the initial chaos and until we got settled into position. I never dropped below 50% health with all the heals, and down went Drek.

Here are two screenshots of me tanking the Frostwolf Clan leader:

and



It was a 26 minute AV with 520 bonus honor and I must say it was the most fun I've had in that BG. I can honestly say in that instance the eight of us controlled the flow of that battle entirely.