Arathi Basin

From WoW: IncGamers World of Warcraft Wiki

Overview

Arathi Basin is the classic game of “domination.” There are 15 players on each team. There are 5 “resource nodes” and the goal of both sides is to capture and control as many of them as possible. If your team controls a node, the node gives you resources. Accumulate 2000 resources and your side wins.

The five nodes are the farm, the blacksmith, the mine, the lumber mill, and the stable. The farm is closest to the Horde entrance, and is usually controlled by them. The stable is the node closest to the Alliance starting point, and is usually controlled by them. The other three nodes are in a perpetual state of dispute. The blacksmith is right in the middle of the map, and usually is the most hotly contested node.

Controlling three nodes will guarantee your team a victory, but it will take a while. If you control three nodes, the resources dribble in, albeit somewhat slowly. If you control four, you’ll win more quickly. If you achieve the near-impossible feat of controlling all five resources, your team can score 2000 points inside of 5 minutes. (Best of luck with that.)

Length

A hotly contested match lasts about 30 minutes. Depending on how dominant one team is, a match can be much shorter.

Battlemasters

As with every other battleground, there is an AB battlemaster in each faction’s major cities. There are also entrances in the field (see the map). NPCs near the field entrances give quests that yield honor and reputation.

Insight

This game is arguably the most popular of the three battlegrounds. It combines a seemingly simple concept – control the nodes – but is full of subtleties. Many players feel the reputation rewards given by the Defilers (the Horde faction) and the League of Arathor (the Alliance faction) are among the best in the game.

Strategies

Four strategies are commonly used when fighting in Arathi Basin.

The “Zerg” strategy

A Blizzard game (Starcraft) gave rise to the concept of zerging. That concept is alive and well in Arathi Basin. For those unfamiliar with the term, “zerging” is nothing more than the mindless throwing of troops at your enemy.

In AB, it simply involves everyone on your team running from node, to node, to node, capturing each one as you go. No effort whatsoever is made to defend these captured nodes. If your enemy is confused or disorganized or easily intimidated, this strategy can win. An enemy can easily come up with a strategy to overcome these tactics (see below).

The “Capture and Hold” strategy

Again, this one is obvious. The idea is to break your team up into three groups of five players each. Each group goes out and captures one node. After capturing the node, the players stay and defend it.

Although this isn’t rocket science – heck, it couldn’t be more simple – this strategy generally works pretty well. It’s not a pretty victory, nor is it a fast one, but it wins AB matches.

There can be some pretty interesting matches take place between zergers and capture-and-holders. The holders cannot defend against the zerg, so they’ll lose their node. But the zerg can only be in one place at a time, giving the holders ample opportunity to grab another node. It’s a game of cat and mouse, and can be fun to watch and play.

The “Floater” strategy

This strategy is almost exactly like the Capture and Hold strategy above, but with a twist. The deal is that you divide your team into four groups. The first three groups go out, grab a node, and hold it. The fourth group is the floater, whose job is to assist whatever group needs it at the moment.

In order for this to work, communication is really important. After capturing a node, the capture and hold teams – generally a team of three or four people – must start screaming the moment they are threatened. This gives the floaters time to get there. If the floaters are slow, or if the defenders didn’t say anything as the enemy approached, this won’t work. The defenders must also shout out when a threat evaporates. It generally looks like this:

Panickyshaman: “Help at the mine!” Invisirogue: “8 inc at mine!” Bgleader: “On our way” Several seconds pass. Panickyshaman: “Mine ok. They took off.” Bgleader: “ok.” Skinnymage: “Smith needs help. Incoming!” Bgleader: “On our way”

It’s not complicated, but communication is the key. The floater group is also critical, and must be flexible and responsive to emerging threats.

The “Run Around Like Headless Chickens” strategy

Ok, so this isn’t really a strategy, but it sometimes wins AB matches. It basically works by luck, or because a handful of players actually know what they are doing while the rest just do pretty much whatever.

If your AB group doesn’t have a cohesive strategy, you just might be able to pull the match out anyway. Do one of the following effective things, according to your class and ability:

1. Defend a node. With a good combination of panicky screaming and delaying tactics, you might be able to get your mindless comrades to help you defend a single resource node whenever it’s threatened. This alone can win matches. Well, sometimes. 2. Ninja a node. A lot of teams leave nodes unattended. Run (or stealth) in there, capture it, and take off. Even if you can’t hold the node, you can keep them from having it. If they can’t hold it, they cannot score points. Repeat this as often as possible. 3. Group up. Even if the leadership sucks and no one has a plan, you might find a few like-minded individuals to hang with. While everyone else is running around, fighting in random places, capturing and losing various nodes, your ad hoc group can effectively zerg and capture a node or two. 4. Follow your zerg. Sometimes the “chickens” strategy will automatically evolve into a nice zerg. Contribute your fair share.

Gaining Honor

Honor is gained by killing enemy players, as usual. Bonus honor is gained according to the amount of resources your side has gathered. In a nutshell, even if you are losing a match, it’s important to score as many resource points as possible. The more points you have at the end, even if you’ve lost, gives you a greater honor bonus.

As with Warsong Gulch, each player gets an honor token for a loss in Arathi Basin, and three tokens for a win. Turning these in gives both honor and reputation gains.

Gaining Reputation

Gaining reputation in AB is something of a mystery. The official WoW site gives out the following, uh, useful information:

As players compete, they will improve their reputation with the Defilers or League of Arathor, thereby earning many new and powerful rewards.

Gee, thanks for the specifics, Blizzard! Anyway, it is known that you gain rep when you win (or lose) a match. To be sure, you also gain reputation at various times when the resources reach certain points. As with every battleground, you gain reputation when you complete quests for the quest giver, who can be found at the exterior entrance to AB. There is also some speculation that you gain reputation with each honor kill, or for each killing blow, but this information is nothing short of rumor.

Although many of the specifics of gaining reputation in AB are not well understood, it is known that playing more ABs results in greater reputation gains. In fact, each match results in noticeable (if not exactly quantifiable) reputation gains. AB reputation gain is not considered extremely difficult (as is the case with Alterac Valley).

Reputation Rewards

Just like in WG, the reputation rewards for both Alliance and Horde are virtually identical. Although all players start out with neutral reputation with the Defilers (for Horde players) or the League of Arathor (for the Alliance), building up to friendly or honored isn’t too difficult. As you’d expect, getting to revered or exalted status is far more challenging. As with WG, exalted status enables players to purchase epic quality rewards from the Arathi Basin vendor.

Depending on their reputation with the Defilers or the LoA, players have 60 rewards that they can purchase. The vast majority of these are armor, though a few weapons can be found. The complete list of rewards for each tier of reputation can be found here. Noteworthy is the trinket that can be purchased upon achieving “friendly” reputation. Considering how easy friendly status is to achieve, it is extremely popular. It absorbs 550 physical damage on average, and as such is useful in both PvE and PvP. As mentioned earlier, many consider the AB rewards the most desirable of the three battlegrounds, so the trinket is only one of many sought after rewards.