Death knights ruined my PvP!

Attention-grabbing headlines aside, I mentioned before that I find death knights, their death grip and their chains of ice spam quite annoying in PvP, but this post is not about that.

I've also mentioned before that low-level PvP seems to be pretty fun these days, what with the twinks having been banished into the nether their separate battlegrounds. From my experience people joined in at whatever level they fancied, wearing nothing but their levelling gear (maybe a few heirlooms here and there), acted pretty laid back about everything and had fun.

I should have known that it was too good to last. In other words: My shaman levelled and entered the 50-59 bracket.

Now there may not be any "proper" twinks roaming among us lesser mortals anymore, but in this level bracket you get a load of death knights in their free tier two equivalent from the starter zone instead, two- or three-shotting people of any other class regardless of level, simply because everyone else is just wearing a bunch of levelling greens and blues. In short: You have twinks, only worse.

Why worse? Creating a twink requires some work at least, to find all the best gear for your level, get the right enchants and so on. All it requires to get a death knight ganking machine for the 50-59 bracket is to play through the death knight starter zone. In that hour or so you'll get ridiculously good gear for your level handed to you for minimal effort, so anyone can do it very easily.

Basically unleashing a bunch of newly-rolled death knights into the wild of the battlegrounds is like handing heavy sledge hammers to a bunch of toddlers and sending them to play in a china shop. There'll be pain, lots of it, and it doesn't even matter whose side you're on.

Case in point, a Warsong Gulch match that was looking like we would stand a decent chance at winning since we had about four death knights on our team. (I feel sick even thinking about it in those terms, but it's the unfortunate truth.) The Alliance was one-nil ahead however, from an early cap while we were terribly outnumbered. Both flags were being held, and our team fought teeth and nails to get the enemy flag carrier down. Finally the flag is returned to our base, the enemy flag is being held by a death knight who's in mid-field with nothing in his way. Everybody cheered him on in chat, this would be our moment!

Except... said death knight decided to just meander around mid-field for a bit and then ran straight back into the enemy base where he got killed eventually. Incredulous shouting in chat ensued, what was he thinking? His response was, mildly paraphrased: "lol I dun wanna cap, I dun wanna gain XP and level". My comment that he should just turn XP off then was completely ignored and chat just quickly devolved into an exchange of insults between the death knight and everyone else, while the Alliance happily capped the flag some more.

You can say a lot about twinks, but I don't think I've ever heard of them making their own team lose on purpose. To overpowered deathtards on the other hand, nothing is sacred.

Last I heard, the new LFG interface that's coming in the next patch is also going to incorporate a feature to "vote people off the island" a.k.a kick them from the group via majority vote. I wonder if that could be implemented for battlegrounds as well? Oh, I know that it won't happen because it would be abused too much, but man, what I wouldn't have given to be able to boot that guy.

I can't wait to hit sixty, when Outland will hopefully level the playing field again and make things somewhat less painful.

P.S.: In the next match I entered, the Alliance had no less than six death knights on their team. When I got into their flag room, they played death grip pong with me, yanking me up and down between the levels before killing me. I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry.