I won about half my AVs. (granted only did about a dozen) If horde goes defense they'll probably win because they have the more dedicated PvP players and a lot of alliance are just PvErs wanting faction rewards.
Defenders have to be smart or they'll be road kill. What I do is this: I trap the entrance then eagle eye to watch when alliance are near, then run back to the choke point near the smith and lay another trap as soon as they trigger the first one. Then I move to the smith NPC for cover and shoot at them and try to goad them into attacking me. If they take the bait, I run to the two NPCs near the smith (a troll and cow) that will aggro on them. This forces them to kill three (or more) NPCs they otherwise would not have. If they keep chasing me I run to the primalist. If they're really dumb they'll aggro the primalist and if they're mega stupid dumb they'll aggro her and run to their raid. I almost never die doing this even solo but I usually have to eat/bandage inside the cave to heal. (fucking warlocks)
Important to keep in mind that any kills you get at this early stage are a big win because you force them to spawn across the ENTIRE map, effectively taking them out of the fight for a very long time. They will often be injured from having rode past Tower Point and differing mount speeds will split them up so just having some ranged standing at the smith firing at them as they ride past can be quite successful at getting kills.
After that what you wanna do is attack them when they're dealing with warmasters. I like to run up the east tower and shoot from there when they do this because I can trap behind me and it forces them to run up there to get me, then I can drop down and flee if needed, wasting their time. Sometimes they don't even seem to know where they're being shot from or think it's NPC fire or whatever. (again, PvErs)
The Iceblood graveyard choke also has two elite NPCs to use as shields and nearby Tower Point is the one horde tower that actually causes significant arrow damage to them, (base tower archers are amazingly useless) so it's not a bad place to attack them from as well. Current meta is to not even bother getting this garaveyard so it's unlikely that they'll all dismount to overwhelm you.
Saving towers are of course also very important for warmasters
