I spent all of last evening in Alterac Valley with my troll warrior, doing PvP. This turned out to be a good idea, as this morning during the maintenance Blizzard nerfed the honor gain, so I hope I still get yesterday's honor on the previous scheme. I did AV because I already had far too many AB victory marks, and because I wanted to test whether I would also get about 1,000 honor per hour in AV. And because I like AV, it is fun, even if I rarely win.
My new arms warrior build, with the new BC talents, turns out to be pretty good in PvP. Especially useful is the talent Second Wind (Whenever you are struck by a Stun or Immobilize effect you will generate 20 rage and 10% of your total health over 10 sec.). As in AV I get hit by a stun or immobilize effect far more often than once every 10 seconds, this basically gives me a continuous health regeneration and rage gain. Nifty.
In 4 hours I did 4 Alterac Valleys and gained 4 AV victory marks, because we didn't win a single one. This bring me up to 10 AV victory marks, from 1 win and 7 losses. In Arathi Basin I got over 40 AB victory marks. I only lost a single complete AB battle since the patch, although technically I "lost" two more AB battles, because I joined battles which had already started and where the Alliance was several hundred points ahead. I don't mind, because a quick loss still gives one mark, a few honor points, and doesn't take up much of my time. But the fact that the Horde wins more than half of the AB battles disproves the theory that Alliance is better in PvP or better organized. If the Horde loses most AV battles, it must be related to geography.
The battles I participated in were of two types: fast or slow. The fast battles was when both sides rushed past each other, Alliance directly taking FW graveyard and Horde directly taking SP graveyard, without bothering with anything in the middle. Alliance wins those kind of battles even if Horde takes SP a bit earlier than Alliance takes FW, because for Horde it is much more difficult to storm the Alliance castle than the other way round. The fast battles gave one quick losers "victory" mark, but weren't that much fun.
The slow battles happened when one side decided to try to stop the other side. That works in all cases, but results in neither side being able to win quickly. I have a growing suspicion that in the end Alliance wins because they always control the SF graveyard in the middle. Both sides follow natural "paths" from their side to the other, and the SF graveyard lies on the Alliance path, but away from the Horde path. With the middle graveyard under permanent control, the Alliance is never thrown back further than the middle. But as Horde I often got killed at SH or SP and ended up far back in the starting cave, and then got bottled up there by Alliance players not letting anyone pass IB. So in a war of attrition the Alliance also wins in the end, due to shorter supply paths. I found the slow battles more fun, except for the one that lasted over 2 hours, because then you don't gain much honor from kills any more in the end. And of course you get very few victory marks like that.
I hope I got the 4,000 honor points I was shooting for last night, because that would bring up my total to nearly 11,000 points, half way to the High Warlord's Blade I would like to get for 22,500 points. As the blade besides the points only costs 20 AB marks, which are trivial to get, I don't mind how slow I get the AV marks. Maybe one day I end up with 25 of them, and can buy the Immovable Object shield, which only costs 7,000 honor points besides the 25 AV marks. It seems the battleground-specific items have a lower point cost and higher mark cost than the general PvP reward items. Unfortunately a first check didn't reveal any interesting items for a warrior that could be bought cheaply with AB marks, the level 60 weapons there are a casters staff and dagger.
The good news yesterday was that the battleground were relatively lag-free and stable, but that was because Blizzard had disabled the cross-realm battlegroups, and we only fought against people from our own server.
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