Blowing the Dust Off

Well, I'm back after a lengthy hiatus. I've been up to quite a bit, futzing around in the 5-man Icecrown Dungeons, as well as taking a stab at some of the 10-man content. I'm still not a big fan of raiding (too time consuming), so I haven't even gotten past Deathwhipser yet. What I have been having quite a lot of fun with of late is battlegrounds.

I've always liked the competitive, yet relaxed nature of these PvP battles. I can wander around doing my dailies, or knocking out classic quests while waiting in the key, then eventually it's off to the battleground for a bit of fun. In theory I could do this with the dungeon finder as well, but I'm a healer, which means almost instant invites to these groups, so I wouldn't get much done with my questing before going off to a dungeon. Moreover, there isn't much left for me to get in terms of gear drops from the new 5-man dungeons, nor the triumph badge gear. I suppose there are the achievements, but I'm in no rush to go do those.

This past week, Strand of the Ancients has been the holiday battleground, so I've been spending most of my time there. Some people complain about how reliant the zone is for using vehicles to get things done, but I like that element of it. It adds an additional element to the battle, and makes your team work to protect them, not just having 75% of the players randomly fighting the opposing faction somewhere, which can often happen in a battleground. The big thing is just getting people to communicate in order to win, and it's surprising how rarely this happens. A lot of times no one in my groups would make a decision on which gates to storm (resulting in everyone randomly going their own way, and losing), or which graveyards to cap when on offense, and while defending the Strand, plenty of people would neglect to call out when the enemy was. I've pretty much taken it on myself to give out some basic assignments when on the ship heading into the battle, setting a gate order so everyone has a basic idea of what to do, and will hopefully work together toward that.

About the only real gripe I have with battlegrounds at the moment, though, is that the queue times are kind of long, with waits of 10-15 minutes being common, and that quite a few times I'd be dropped in a battleground when it's almost over, so I'm stuck in the queue for a lengthy period of time and only get a few hundred honor points from the battle when I eventually join. Apparently some of the changes coming in the next patch may address this, and more importantly it will be doing away with marks of honor. Word on the street is that after the next patch we'll be able to trade these in for honor points, and rumor has it we could be looking at 2000 points per mark. I have so many of those that I've collected over the years, and never spent. If this rumor proves to be true, I could have many hundreds of thousands of honor points to play with come next patch, and can get a respectable PvP gear set. I could certainly use it, as I'm playing in mostly PvP gear at the moment with the exception of a pair of i245 boots that I recently acquired.

So yeah, I'm pretty much in full-on dailies, and classic content mode right now, with liberal splashes of battlegrounds thrown in. Maybe once I get a little more PvP gear I'll even look into doing some arenas. As it stands, I like this mix of PvE and PvP that I've been doing as of late.