A taste of BG at 80

Through out my WoW'ing, I've had an on/off experience with BG's.

Did some for fun at level 39 when I didn't know a whole lot about the game.

Then at 70, did a bunch. Primary motivation was to get gear. The point in the lifecycle of TBC that I joined the game, there was tons of outstanding gear available from BG that represented very solid options for raiding.

Along the way, had a pretty positive experience in BG. A fair bit of fun, and naturally, a healthy dose of agro from BG pug members or just plain old frustration at being ineffective. Learned a lot about my class, got better at dealing with other classes, got a bunch of gear for raiding and also for more PvP to make the grind less painful.

Up until Merrymaker, I didn't do any BG at 80

So the time came to step into the queue once again.

First off, AV in my new Battlegroup is just awful for Alliance. I never realized how reasonably balanced things were in the Retaliation battlegroup. It was simply disgusting how badly we got spanked. Most of the matches were actually 40 horde vs between 15 and 30 alliance. I don't know why they even kick those games off. /spit [target=Blizzard, in-de-face]


Secondly, F death knights. Death's Grip "Get Over Here" is annoying. But oh well, I suppose I'll get use to it.....

Thirdly.....or not. Because I doubt I'll be doing very much BG.

Why?

All the loot requires Arena Ratings of 1650 or better.

Back in my old battle group, I think 1549 was my highest rating. And that was only achieved via my most hated and anguished couple of hours per week. So I stopped Arena once there was no PvE-enhancing rewards available to me. A rating of 1650 on my new server is absolutely not gonna happen for me, so I highly doubt I'll ever set foot in Arena again, unless they make some substantial changes to the whole shebang.

There's Savage blue gear available for no Arena rating. But aside from Resilience, my current PvE epics are better in every category than the Savage stuff, for both PvE -and- for PvP.

So as it stands right now, I doubt I'll do any BG grinding for gear. I might step in to do the daily quest every now and again, because in limited doses, it'll add some fun.

I'll probably try out Wintergrasp, despite the lag seeming to crush gameplay server-wide during prime time evening Wintergrasp battles.

Fourthly: I can get Savage gear (if I magically decide that I want resil more than any other stats, which I might if I do want to hit any BG in the future) via Heroic badges. And I can get Hateful via 25-man badges.

I'm nearly at the point that I don't want anything PvE from either class of emblems. So I might dump spare emblems on some PvP gear.

But for what?

Maybe to quest in, so I'll be more survivable on a PvP server. That might be a decent idea.

But I doubt I'll try to gear up for mass BG action, since BG action won't provide me any reward without an Arena rating.

Bye Bye BG

The way things are set up right now, my days of grinding a weekend away to get a shiny piece of BG gear are over.

I'll probably do the random BG here and there, because I do have fun in small quantities. Once it becomes a chore, or if the annoying kiddies are being too abusive, I can just stop since there's no carrot dangling at the end of the marks of honor. And we all know that MMO is about the carrot. The shiny is what keeps us going through the grindy parts and the enduring-awful-strangers part.

However, the gf and I had a hoot in some AV's, so when she dings 80, maybe we'll go in together. But that'll be for fun playing together, and not so much for gear.

Besides that, Blizzard has nearly killed Battlegrounds for me by tying Arena rating into the mix.