Alterac Valley...

I'm a sucker for a quest. 
Want me to do anything outside of my normal comfort zone of World Quests, Dungeons and Raiding?
Just put up one of those shiny, gold exclamation marks and I'm there... just have to turn it into a shiny, gold question mark :-)


Put a reward on the quest, anything except just gold no matter how useless the reward may be, and I can't wait to get started!


And this is how I ended up in Alterac Valley.


The weekly 'event' has been random battlegrounds.
After my last PvP adventures, I had actually been looking forward to going back in for more... not enough to just do it, of course, got to have that quest ;-)


The Shaman PvP set looks pretty cool too so I wanted that for transmog -
Quick aside... How annoying is gearing up in PvP??  I've had about 12 necks and 16 rings but still not got the legs.


Anyway... Alterac Valley.
I didn't play back when AV was a thing, I've only heard the stories of those epic 5-day battles.
My experience of AV is Alliance and Horde waving to each other as they pass in the middle of the map, burning down a tower or two, then killing the boss.


Alliance almost always won, no idea why but there must be some hidden advantage in the map for Alliance... like Silvershard Mines for Horde I assume.


This suited me just fine as I was on Alliance so could complete my PvP without any actual PvP-ing.


So when I zoned in to AV over the weekend, charged downfield and came up against massed defence of the first mini-boss... it was a bit of a surprise.


The entire horde team, all Russian which is apparently important, massed at the top of the ramp up to the first tower and slaughtered us mercilessly as we innocently funnelled into the choke point.


I imagine this is how lemmings feel, particularly the ones at the back.
Ooh ooh, we're going for a run.
Where are we going?  Where are we going?
Let's all run together, this is fun
Oh dear.


Amid much swearing about Russians (is this really a thing?), orders were issued about taking towers and graveyards.
We had to win this one properly!


So of course those orders were routinely ignored as everyone charged back into the fray to die again.


Not me by the way, I'm all for listening to someone who knows what they are talking about... so I was busy looking at the map trying to work out what ICB could possibly be, and how to take it.


As even the most hard-headed of our team tired of banging their heads against the Russian wall, and we were spread around the map taking various towers, bunkers and graveyards (and a mine!)... the Horde attacked!


It was like that scene from Return of the King when Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli jump off the boat, all the ghosts spawn and they sweep everything before them!


We eventually managed to recover and gather together again but the battle was essentially lost... cue more swearing about Russians.


That wasn't my only trip into Alterac Valley this week though, it seemed to come up more often than all the others.
I would say roughly half of them followed the format I was used to seeing, the run and zerg tactic with an Alliance win.


The rest followed a similar pattern to the first attempt, a defensive Horde holding position then pushing out.
There were some immense battles over towers and bunkers but it also quite often degenerated into a strange stalemate and a war of attrition would ultimately, and inevitably, see the Alliance lose.


I didn't realise it at the time but this battle was being lost long before that point.


Outside the Alliance base is a narrow valley, this falls away on one side but then comes back to another narrow passageway.  All this creates one incredibly long chokepoint.


The Horde would push to this position and hold one end but were unable to break the Alliance at the other end. 
Likewise, the Alliance could comfortably hold the Horde at bay but couldn't break out at the other end to launch an offensive of their own.


To reach this position required a few specific events...


The Horde had to survive the first wave of attacks comfortably so they were still in quite a cohesive group when they pushed out against the isolated Alliance.


The push out had to happen before the Alliance had finished taking one of the Southern graveyards, forcing reinforcements to run the length of the battlefield and spreading them out even further.


The Horde then needed to take or re-take all of the graveyards in the South whilst moving en masse to the long chokepoint outside the Alliance base.


If the horde reach that chokepoint with sufficient numbers AND control of the graveyards, the battle is essentially over.


Any pockets of Alliance resistance in the south can be taken out at leisure as long as those graveyards are held because the respawn is always at the wrong side of the chokepoint.


The inevitability of defeat dawns on you when you realise that you can't get enough people through the chokepoint alive to re-take another graveyard, while the enemy has taken towers, mines etc. to bolster their reinforcement count.


I can't see any way out of it to be honest...
Can you stealth or "corpse walk" enough people past the chokepoint to start taking objectives? 
Or at least enough to force the horde to abandon their entrenched position to deal with the threat?


Maybe, but you don't really get that level of coordination in the random queue.


Some old hands will probably tell me an obvious solution that I haven't even considered but I'm new to all this stuff and still learning how to play, never mind battleground strategy.


Regardless, I won enough BGs to complete my quest and await the next PvP-based event.  I am tempted to just do a few... without a quest (!)... I still need those legs after all :-)