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.

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.

Excuse my somewhat stupid question, but i'm on PvE server :) How do you get Halaa battle tokens ?

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

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.

You don't need to get the killing blow, just need to be in the area of the kill and alive. Dead people running back get no tokens.

This is sort of what I was thinking. I just wasn't sure if there was really any advantage to trying to actually defend the town. So it seems that to maximize both fun and battle tokens that you should cap, and then just pretty much not impede the re-cap too much so that you get to swap sides.

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.