Alterac Valley Tips: Before the Match

Before entering the battleground, it's best to be prepared with all the supplies you might need in battle. Bringing your own food, water, and consumables can make a difference to your performance and help your team that much more. Potions, bandages, and food with positive effects all increase your survivability in combat.
Enter the queue
You can go to the battlemaster at the major cities to enter the Battleground queue. Once you sign onto the queue, remember that you can do whatever you want while you wait. While waiting, you could use your hearthstone to port back to town to manage your bank account, check out the auction house, or send mail. Or you could also head off into the world and work on some quests, or kill monsters for loot and reputation gain. Once the battleground is ready, you can enter it from wherever you happen to be. Keep in mind that outside of its holiday weekend, Alterac Valley will tend to have the longest average queue of the four battlegrounds.

Queuing with friends
For Alterac Valley, there is no option to join as a preformed group. However, by clicking on the "join battle" button at the same time, you and your friends have a chance of entering the same battleground. When the pop-up appears notifying you of your ability to enter the battleground, you can confirm which Alterac Valley you received and compare with your friends. If not enough of your group got into the same battleground, you can always leave the queue and try again. Alternately, your group can manually queue for a particular Alterac Valley instance by selecting it from the available battleground list when queuing. However, queuing for specific battleground instances can result in significantly longer waiting times, since it won't necessarily be the first available instance.

Joining a fresh Alterac Valley game
Before the gates open and the match starts, there is a brief waiting time for the team to completely fill up and for any last-minute preparations such as casting buffs. Move up to the closed gate so you can get out and into the action as soon as possible. As soon as the match starts and the gate opens, rush through and mount up. Go go go! Follow the pack of players into enemy territory. If you're playing a defensive role, stop when you see the enemy rush and slow down their advance. If you're on offense, you will be heading for the enemy fortress, capturing and taking down some strategic objectives on the way.

Joining a game in progress
If you have joined a game that has already started, open up the map with the "m" key. Each person on your side (Alliance or Horde) is represented on the map by a dot. You can mouse over the dots to see player names too. Where the players on your team are and what objectives your side controls can give you an idea of how the battle is going. You can review the Alterac Interactive Map for more details about the various important locations on the map. Also, you can open up the score screen on your minimap to see how long the game has been going. If the match has been going on for a significant length of time, it's possible there is some sort of stalemate in progress.

Alterac Valley Tips: Gameplay

Objectives
Your main task is to kill the enemy general and win the battleground as fast as possible. The faster your team burns through the match, the faster you can collect your bonus honor, tokens, and advance to the next game. You should always be working toward slaying the enemy general. This is achieved by fighting your way across the map, taking over graveyards, and destroying enemy buildings.

You also want to earn as much honor as possible per game that can be redeemed for better equipment. You gain honor by destroying towers, killing enemy players, killing enemy NPCs (captain), and by defeating the enemy general. You will have more honor if you have destroyed all the towers and prevent the enemy from destroying your towers.

Game Flow
As soon as the game begins, players rush out of the starting gates toward the enemy graveyards. If you're not quick enough leaving the gate, you might be trapped behind a sea of enemy players rushing toward your general. It depends on your battlegroup, but often Horde players attack Stonehearth to kill Captain Balinda while Alliance players take Snowfall and kill the lieutenants near Captain Galvangar but skip the captain himself. Players rush ahead and capture graveyards working their way quickly through the towers and graveyards until they reach the enemy general.

Depending on the game, and players, sometimes the enemy team will have many players on defense - and other times there will be little to none. If you have too much defense and not enough offense your advance along the map will be slow. Games will typically go longer and there will be less honor over time for players because the game isn't ending as quickly. On the other hand, having no defense whatsoever is not advisable. Even a handful of defenders can slow the enemy, especially at chokepoints. The delay, however slight, that they give to the enemy attackers can mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Chat
Good communication is essential to teamwork. Upon joining the battle, you will automatically be in the battleground channel (/bg), where allied players can communicate. Players are also automatically joined together in a raid group. Keep each other appraised of what is going on in the battle. The offensive and defensive teams should communicate often on their status and progress throughout the match. For example, if the defensive team finds the other side pushing hard in one location, they can rally to that point. They can also let the offense know that they need to hurry to defeat the enemy general. The offense may then bypass some objectives in favor of rushing to the general's fortress. Similarly, the offense can discuss which objectives to conquer and which to bypass amongst themselves. Each side can also call for reinforcements from the other.

Stay Together
Try to stay together with a pack of allies, as there is strength in numbers. In Alterac Valley, some enemy NPCs (such as the two generals) are extremely tough and can only be defeated by a large group of players. The number of guards, enemy players, and sheer amount of terrain to cross lends itself to having a large group of players sticking together to accomplish the objectives of the battleground as fast as possible. If you are off on your own, you might be very susceptible to attacks by a mass of enemy players. However, it is also a viable tactic to station small teams of players or even individual players to hold and defend objectives such as graveyards and towers. On defense, having the bulk of your defense banding together to hold strategic objectives is very effective. This is particularly true at key chokepoints, where even a small defense can hold off a larger attacking force.

Rejoining the Front
If you find yourself unable to proceed in the map because you've been cut off from the main force and are surrounded by the enemy team, you need to rejoin the main pack. You can try waiting until your teammates have captured a forward graveyard, at which point you can attack the enemy, die, and be revived at that forward graveyard. You can also try sneaking around the enemy.

Graveyards
Controlling graveyards is very important to your team's success. Control over the graveyards assists your team's advance across the map. Once you've captured a graveyard, your allied players can now spawn there when they die. Eventually, if you capture the graveyards near the enemy town, you can use them as a base of operations to launch your final assault.