Had a great first time in Halaa tonight but afterward I had some thoughts about how to best hold the town. Clearly the attackers just need to run an AB style strat, keeping a few people at the Wyvern posts to hold them while having a large force maneuvering on the bomb runs.

But what are the options as a defender? It isn't practical/possible to heal the guards(far too much health to make this a worthwhile tactic), so it seems like having possession of the town is just an inevitable war of attrition. Is the most efficient thing to do, in order to earn Halaa tokens, take control of Halaa and then allow the other faction to retake it again? It seemed like I got far more tokens on bomb runs then I did on defense.

On my server the alliance:horde ratio is something like 5:1, so far Halaa has been permanently alliance occupied, and the most I saw was one horde guy holding one gryphon base to do some bombing. :( I certainly hope defending the place is impossible, so that maybe when enough people level up horde will actually manage to capture the place, so we can then have some fun bombing it! Hey, maybe I'll even get some battle tokens one day...

Just out of curiosity, is there any point on using more than one wyvern? Or for that matter, is there any reason to be trying to keep the perches themselves? You can recap them in like 10 seconds if alliance burned it and there's simply no reason to post guards on them unless you want to protect yourself from waiting alliance at the perches.

Unless there's something I'm missing about the bombing runs, it doesn't seem more complicated than "bomb the hell out of their guards until they're dead."

Edit: While on the subject of defending themselves, I like to watch for wherever alliance caps nodes, go there and don't take it and instead burn down any alliance that likes to land there after they're done with their bombing runs. Usually if they have their head up, they'll bomb you once but you can usually shrug it off because you have the advantage of positioning, they don't. But other than that, no reason to really try healing the guards. They just have so much HP which the bombs burn through and against an organized crew, they will focus on guards one by one and kill them very quickly.

If there are defenders you quickly learn the tactic of flying from node to node capping them all and then randomly choosing one which makes it much harder for the defenders to know where to ambush you at. Also you need to take out the post or they can instantly fly again.

Halaa should not be defended =( It should be lost over and over and over so you can bomb the opposing factions guards and trigger their local defense message so they come out and provide you with fresh meat for bombing.

I cry a little inside every time someone in my guild decides to mount a defense of Halaa.... the Horde just get discouraged and quit playing when you defend it. If you let them take it, then take it back, then let them take it, then take it back... it's HOURS of fun for everyone.... versus defending it for half an hour, discouraging folks from playing and everyone going back to grinding their levels out.

I'm a bit discouraged by what seems to be the optimal way of getting max tokens: win trading. Is it really that bad?

I've just been doing HFP towers so far, and it seems that just trading towers back and forth is the way everyone wants to do it, and there's very little PvP as a result.

If you're going to defend Halaa, it's all about defending the flight paths i think - this gives you the best amount of marks and once the guards are gone it's basically over anyway. I did have a better time earning marks defending rather than bombing, especially as holding the GY makes corpse retrieval much quicker. Defending the town is just a bad idea as you're constantly being bombed. I do think it's supposed to change hands over and over, although faction imbalance makes it really tough to judge on my PVE server.

On a related note, does anyone else think the crystal powders for the Halaa turn in need to have a buffed drop rate? I spent a few days bombing and defending Halaa for 100 of the battle tokens but didn't expect that 20 research tokens would be ridiculously difficult to obtain. By my estimation ~4k mobs need to be killed assuming an avg 10% drop rate, which is 2 levels worth of xp . . . and at my speed i think it'd take 30 or 40 hours to do it.

The gear really isn't at all worth that kind of grind and the mounts, while pretty good bling bling, don't fly, unless you fall off the bridges by Halaa :P

Get the Killing Blow on an opposing force near Halaa

Does wyvern post counts as "near Halaa" ?

Yeah

It does but it seems even 10 yards past or when people jump into the lake below, that's too far for a token. Additionally if a pet kills a player no tokens are recieved. All players in a party / raid get tokens if they're in proximity to a kb from a group member, but others who may have qualified for an hk do not qualify for a token.

A good offensive bomber can absolutely shell anyone camping him. Save a bomb or two to lay down on the flight points and you can hose any number of people with a support mage lurking in the bushes.

Halaa intrigues me because of all the PVP objectives in the game it's the only one where the offense has a genuine advantage. Unlike the other PVP objectives that are fairly easy to disrupt taking Halaa involves some serious effort and a good attacking team can almost certainly kill an even amount of defenders thanks to the power of the bombs. I really, really like the design of it.

I haven't been to Halaa yet (soon hopefully) so I'm kinda curious about it.
Is there any benefit from holding the town? Something similar to the Terokkar Forest towers allowing the capture of spirit shards and the xp/dps bonuses? If there was it'd make sense for offense to have an advantage and an incentive to keep attacking while defense has an incentive to hold it.

Along the lines of what Greybone said, it seems kinda wierd that most of the PvP objectives so far have involved win trading to maximize gain.

There's a 5% damage buff for the zone, if you control halaa.

There are a few items you can buy with the tokens there, and it's kind of nice for questing in nagrand if you can use it as a shortcut.

I am largely curious as to what Blizzard's stance on this is going to be. Obviously, within arena and battleground play, their stance is clear; I've seen plenty of pre-mades win trade and subsequently get a hefty boot to the jaw. With Halaa, however, it seems as if the entire "encounter" is designed around allowing it to both consistently cycle control between both factions [with no obvious limit on how long one faction's control can last].

So, what's going to happen when players inevitably start to organize within the various chat channels a faction-wide recession, so that the opposition can take their place and gain control of the town? I suppose this question could stand to be answered with regards to a lot of the world PvP objectives (e.g. Hellfire Basin).

I've only done 3 quests in Nagrand (2 of the 'exterminate this species and the annoying one for the jump-a-tron key) and I've gotten about 16 of those token things so far. Unless I'm thinking of the wrong tokens but they have a bunch of text on them and stack to 100.

ps Are the rewards any good? I can't check till I get home today. Sucks for my server so far though, I don't think horde have ever controlled Halaa.

Edit: spelling is my friend.

I bought [Halaani Claymore] off a vendor for 9g when 3 of us took the town before it got crowded.

http://www.thottbot.com/?i=56310

Wow, that's not a bad sword for 9g. I remember someone in my guild linking me a Socket (unique) gem that was +8 Strength. Was red I think.

Has any other realm got a bugged Halaa? It seems that there's 1 guard hidden somewhere which we are unable to find, target (wandered around the place for a few minutes spamming '/target Alliance') and kill , so the Alliance have had the pleasure of whatever buff it is they get since it was first opened...thxblizlol!!

Hopefully when they fix it it'll become as lively as it was destined to become...I would hate to see Halaa become a permanent 'black spot' because of this stupid bug.

My worry is that it's an impossible situation not as a result of the design, but rather the community. Many players are only interested in doing what is needed to mostly quickly obtain rewards. If trading Halaa occupancy maximizes their gains, then PvP will be damned much like it was in Alterac Valley. It would be an unfortunate blow to what is an otherwise well-designed series of world PvP objectives that have already shown the potential of revitalizing world encounters.

Whatever Blizzard's stance is, I hope they make it clear in an aggresive manner so that I can either write off world PvP as idiots farming [and thusly not worth my time], or an interseting system wherein players will need to bring their damnedest to get their rewards.

I think there should be more and better rewards at halaa to encourage more pvp there. With an hour's worth of farming and 60 kills, you can basically get everything you'd want.

A legitimate siege of the place would net you an upwards of 60-70 tokens per hour. Really the only thing is the +10 resilience gem that you'd have to work for.

I also think that defense still has a very strong position. The graveyard is right there in the town. The key would be to beat down the defenders so much they have rez timer.