Warsong Gulch

From WoW: IncGamers World of Warcraft Wiki

Overview

Warsong Gulch is, both literally and figuratively, a game of capture the flag. There are 10 players on each team. The Horde team must work their way into the Alliance base and grab the Alliance flag. The Alliance team must do likewise to the Horde. Each team must then return the enemy flag to their own base to score a point. The first team to score three points wins the match.

Length

Usually under 30 minutes. 15 to 20 minutes is common.

Battlemasters

As always, there is a Warsong Gulch battlemaster in each faction’s major cities. There are also entrances in the field (see the map below). NPCs near the field entrances give quests that yield bonus honor and reputation.

Insight

There are several complications.

The moment you grab the enemy flag, you become a shining beacon – almost literally – running across the battlefield. The flag itself is a bright red or blue banner on a long pole, and carrying it makes you stand out. You also have a colored tail behind you, and it follows you as you run. In short, you are the most obvious thing on the entire field.

Of course, if you are killed by an enemy, you drop the flag. If they pick it up, it’s summarily returned to their base, and you’ve accomplished nothing. Since you are the most prominent moving object in the entire game while carrying the flag, everyone on the opposing team will be doing their utmost to kill you. Generally speaking, they succeed.

Further, you cannot score if the opposing team has possession of your flag. The significance of this rule is not to be overlooked. Unless your team’s flag is sitting securely in its sconce, you gain nothing by stealing your opponents’ flag. Thus the very design of Warsong Gulch requires you to practice offence and defense simultaneously.

Strategies

In every battleground, there are numerous strategies that have proven successful. Below are listed a few that have been know to work.

The “Stick Together” Strategy

This is the strategy that made Kaizen famous. In WG, Kaizen stuck to each other like glue. They traveled in a big, scary, unkillable mob. This mob marched right down the middle of the gulch, and they chewed up anyone they met along the way. Then they marched right into your base, and stomped on any defenders. Then the mob marched out of your base, with your flag, and back to the middle of the field. There they usually met some hastily gathered defenders. Kaizen summarily ground these stragglers to powder. If any Hordies had the audacity to take Kaizen’s flag while they were out, this is where the deadly Kaizen mob of death met them, too. Kaizen then stomped them and took their flag back. The mob then continued onward to their base, where they scored a point. They then repeated the above stomping, mashing, grinding, marching, chewing, killing rampage two more times. Game over.

The “Five Rogue” Strategy

This is a good strategy as well. The idea is that all your team’s rogues and druids go out on offense. Everyone else stays back on defense and protects the flag.

Ideally, five Rogues or Druids head off to the enemy base, leaving 5 defenders at home. Rogues and druids have the only method of instantly turning their opponents into useless, immobile statues, incapable of doing anything. It’s called Sap, and it’s the freaking bomb. Generally speaking, the rogues stealth into the enemy flag room, sap everyone, and take the flag. Then they run as a group back home. If anyone attacks the flag carrier, that attacker is immediately sapped, gouged, stun locked, garroted, spit on, and had his pimply face ground into the dirt. If the carrier gets into any real trouble, he sprints. Rogues get 15 seconds of sprint, and that’s enough to take them most of the way home. This team of stun-locking sprinters is usually quite successful at getting the flag where it needs to be.

In the meantime, the defenders should not be simply standing around. Casters should be keeping busy casting level 1 AE spells in the flag room while the rogues are out. Why? Because it will unstealth the group of rogues the enemy is sending to your flag room, that’s why. Generally speaking, having the Mage, Hunter, etc firing off some low-level AE attacks is enough to give the approaching team of rogues a bit of a challenge. The key to success is to keep up the AE constantly; any break in the low level AE barrage will give the enemy rogues a chance to sap-and-steal, so keep it up.

Note: Stealth prevents players from picking up a flag. It also causes players to drop a flag if they already have one. (The same is true of invulnerability spells and mounts).

The “Meet in the Middle” Strategy

The whole idea is to keep your team in the middle of the field, killing any enemy it sees. If anyone on your side dies, they need to rush back to the group in the middle of the field ASAP. This tends to give the enemy fits, since getting to your flag, or getting that flag back home to their base, is like trying to outrun a swarm of angry killer bees. Of course, someone on your team has to occasionally run up to the enemy base and try to steal their flag from time to time, but that always seems an afterthought to the folks that live by this strategy. There is no subtlety to this one; this strategy is exactly as simple as it sounds.

Gaining Honor

You gain honor in WG by killing your enemies, as usual. You also gain bonus honor by capturing the enemy flag, returning your flag to its base, and by winning the match. The amount of bonus honor you gain by winning the match is equivalent to soloing a maximum level enemy player. (If you are in a match with level 60 players, the bonus is the same amount of honor you’d get by solo killing a level 60. If you are in a lower level WG match – the WG match for level 10-19 players, for example – you’d get a bonus equivalent to soloing a level 19 player.) The amount of bonus honor you receive for capturing a flag is three times this amount. These bonuses are given to everyone on your side. The screen below shows an end game score screen with bonus honor.

Gaining Reputation

You gain reputation with the Warsong Outriders (the Horde faction) or the Silverwing Sentinels (the Alliance faction) each time your team captures a flag, and also at the end of every match. You also gain reputation by turning in honor tokens, which you receive at the end of each match. You gain one token when you lose a match, and three when you win. (Turning these in also gives you an honor bonus). You turn in these tokens to a quest giver near the battlemaster, or a duplicate quest giver near to the exterior entrance to the battleground.

Reputation Rewards

Good reputation with the Outriders or the Sentinels yields identical rewards for both Alliance and Horde. You start out as neutral with the Outriders (if you are Horde) or Sentinels (if you are Alliance), but you can rather quickly achieve friendly or honored status. Gaining revered takes more work, and getting to exalted status is extremely difficult to do. The rewards, however, are commensurate with the level of difficulty.

Depending on their reputation with the Outriders or Sentinels, players have more than 50 rewards available to them. The complete list of rewards for each tier of reputation can be found here or you can again refer to Elvyra’s Guide for the Reputationally Challenged. Suffice to say, there are epics to be had. If WG is your battleground of choice, the purchasable reputation rewards are really pretty great.