Alliance Battle

Overview
Alliance Battles are 12 vs 12 PvP battles that control the alliance border between the Kurzicks and the Luxons.

There are five alliance battle maps. The battlefield map determined by the current alliance border between the two warring nations. The more territory one nation has, the "harder" the map will be for that nation.

Finding an Alliance Battle

 * Your guild needs to be allied with the Luxons or the Kurzicks.
 * Travel to your Guild Hall and talk to the Luxon Navigator or the Kurzick Kommandant (which one appears depends on your guild's allegiance) and accept the request to fight for their side. You are then teleported to the outpost of the battlefield that represents the current status of the alliance border.

Battlefield Maps
There are five battlefield maps:
 * Kanaaki Cliffs (Deep Luxon)
 * Etnaran Keys (Shallow Luxon)
 * Saltspray Beach (Neutral)
 * Grenz Frontier (Shallow Kurzick)
 * Ancestral Lands (Deep Kurzick)

Players cannot choose which map they will be in, instead when they choose to fight in an alliance battle they are taken to the one that the alliance border is currently at. It is possible to come out of a battle and find the place empty. This means that the border has shifted (as a result of the most recent battle) and that players waiting for a game are in another place. To find them, simply return to the guild hall and re-enter the battle again.

Forming a Party
You assemble your group of 4. The party leader will press the "Enter Battle" button and your party will be sent into the alliance battle, provided there are twelve individuals (three teams of 4 people) on the other side waiting to enter as well. The game will keep resetting the counter until there is a full team ready on each side. It's important that players build experience with these battle maps as a certain level of untold coordination is needed. Team Chat in the chat window allows players to chat with all those in the battle from their alliance. Chatting players from another 4-player group will have their names in darker blue, and an (Ally) suffix. You cannot chat with only your team in alliance battles.

Battle Objectives
Winning the Battle: To win a battle the winning side has to accumulate 500 points before the other side. Accumulating points can be done in two ways:
 * 1) Holding a control point: For every control point held, the party gets 1 point every 5 seconds.
 * 2) Killing members of the opposing party.

Also, a white towel winning situation is if the entire opposing party leaves. A knockout winning condition is if one side can hold all 7 control points for 60 consecutive seconds. The match will end with a win for the prevailing side in each of these scenarios.

Control Points: There are usually seven control points on the map which are captured by having more players and allies in its vicinity than the other team. Depending on the specific battle map, control points will be at equal distance from either side or closer to the side that is losing on the alliance border. By default, a control point will be in neutral status.

A team attempting to capture a control point will bring in a number of players to it:
 * If the control point has the same number of players from both sides, then it will not start to shift in either direction.
 * If the control point is neutral and one team has more players at it than the other, then it will start to shift in the direction of that team. The speed by which it shifts is dependent on the number of players that team has more than the other team in the vicinity of the control point. For example, if one team has 4 players and the other has 1, the control point will shift to the team with 4 players with a speed of 3 pips (the difference between 4 and 1).
 * If the control point is already owned by one side and the other side brings more players to it than those of the team that owns it, the control point will first shift away from the side that owns it (speed again relative to the difference in presence). Once the control point has drained away all its allegiance bar to one side, it will be announced as "nuetralized" and then it will start to shift towards the other side.
 * The NPCs guarding a control point (see below) will count towards the team they belong to when the shift is taking place.
 * Pets, minions and spirits do not count as allies when affecting the shift.

Once captured, a control point will spawn a few NPC guards (which count towards holding the control point) and offer some other special ability (resurrecting allies closer to the battle, a melee bonus to people in the arena, elemental protection, spawning resurrection orbs, creating NPCs that follow players around, etc). The NPC guards do not respawn unless the point is lost and then recaptured so it can often be advantageous to kill one even if it means your character's death.

Reward
Each kill awards the team's members with 1 Luxon or Kurzick faction point and 3 Balthazar faction points.

Both the winning and losing team earn 2 Luxon or Kurzick faction points for each point they scored in battle. The winning team receives an additional 250 Luxon or Kurzick faction points. This means a minimum of 1,250 points for the winning party.

General Strategy

 * There is no Death Penalty during alliance battles and characters are respawned quickly (20 seconds or instantly). This makes Minion Masters and IWAY Warriors quite powerful, as there are almost always corpses lying around to use.
 * It is important to spread out and focus on gaining shrines rather than directly fighting the enemy. A clumped up team can't easily capture or defend multiple control points.  Sometimes it is worth giving up a control point and then recapturing it in order to respawn your NPC guards.
 * A tutorial to the current map is offered by a NPC in the outpost. Be sure to have read the instructions before forming a group.