As you can probably tell, I have a hard-on for Alteric Valley these days. As I mentioned in my other post Alterac Valley Honor Farming, the changes in patch 2.3 make this an honor pinata, and competitive as well.

My win ratio in AV is way over .500, I would guess more towards .600 or even .700. I will point out 5 Alterac Valley situations you can exploit to bring your own win ratio up. (DISCLAIMER: I play ally, so these tips will mostly apply to ally.)

1. If you are passing Snowfall Graveyard (see image too the left) and it is not capped, go cap it. This might be the most important thing you can do in the game. The sooner this is capped, the sooner dead people stop rezing all the way across the map.

2. Defend you offensive caps until they flip. If you see a graveyard capped but not flipped, or a tower capped but not burned, defend it until it does. These static objectives are very important. They give you honor and shorten the field.

3. If, however, Iceblood Graveyard (IB GY), Iceblood tower (IB Tower), and Tower Point (TP) are capped and defended, fallback to try and reclaim the alliance towers. Sometimes you will find Stoneharth Bunker (SB) undefended, or with just one on D that you can solo and get the tower back. That is more honor when you win, and makes it harder for the horde to take down Vann. (The flip is easy to see for the horde)

4. If you are trying to take the Relief Hut (RH), kill the archers in East and West Frostwolf towers. I can't believe how many times wave after wave of ally smash into RH without taking out the archers. They hit for 700 each, and there are 5 on each tower. Removing these archers are key to getting RH.

5. Recognize the horde's Sorched Earth strat. This is where they basically play D and send sniper squads to cap all they ally towers and win by depleting the ally resources. The horde can win with a lot of honor, but it takes a lot of time and ally gets very little honor. If you see this strat, fall back and defend the towers at all costs. This will result in a long turtle game, but the only counter to this strat is to teach the horde it does not work.

You will not win AV all the time, but with heads up play and a good strat, you can win a majority of the time, and get great honor doing it. That said, I understand some battle groups just suck at AV. If that is your BG, drop a line in the comments and let me know what happens. Maybe we can work something out.