Fun with Retail PvP

I've never been what I'd call a "PvP person" when it comes to MMOs. By that I mean the type of player who constantly has their PvP flag on, can frequently be found inside instanced battlegrounds or arenas, or loves to seek out fights in the open world. However, neither have I been truly averse to PvP.

I think in WoW I dipped my toes into Alterac Valley fairly early on, but my first real attempt at doing more PvP didn't come until Burning Crusade, when a guildie of mine was looking for a 2v2 arena partner. We played together for a bit until we stopped gaining ranking, by which point it was time to admit that I was holding him back and he found someone else to play with. I don't recall doing a lot of PvP during Wrath outside of joining for Wintergrasp sometimes, but during Cata my ranked battleground team actually became one of my main raisons d'être for a while, until I quit WoW altogether for SWTOR (but also, I had once again reached the point where my performance was holding others back). In SWTOR I enjoyed the casual PvP right from the start and it has been a staple of my in-game activities ever since.

In Classic I tried PvP again but found it to be horribly unbalanced and not very fun, a perception that didn't really change when I gave it another try in Classic BC. However, a few weeks ago I started dipping my toes into casual retail PvP, and to my surprise it's actually been kind of fun.

A rare Alliance win in Deepwind Gorge, aided by the warrior who kept guarding the market with me all match.

The catalyst for this change was that my Lightforged Draenei priest, whom I'd been levelling through healing dungeons, hit Shadowlands and I didn't really want to deal with nothing but Shadowlands dungeons for another ten levels. They're alright, but I've honestly seen enough of them in the past two years. I didn't really want to solo quest or do Torghast as holy either, so I decided to give battlegrounds a try, since those are suggested as an alternative levelling path for Threads of Fate, and there's a daily quest to win one battleground that awards a piece of gear and a decent chunk of XP.

I've also become a bit more interested in collecting transmog sets in the last few months, and apparently a lot of old sets can now be bought from various PvP vendors if you've got the correct currency, so that served as an additional incentive.

I complimented this hunter on their pet naming.

Anyway, as someone who hadn't really done retail PvP since Cata, there were quite a few changes that I had to take in. You queue for PvP with a role now, and you do get scaled up in the levelling brackets so that everyone's the same level. Those features have probably been there for a while, but it was my first time really seeing them.

Battlegrounds are now split into normal and "epic", with the latter including things like Alterac Valley and Isle of Conquest, but in the levelling brackets not many people seem to queue for the latter so that I only got into a few "epic" matches. Mostly they were Ashran, the addition made during Warlords of Draenor that I was completely unfamiliar with. To be honest I'm still none the wiser in terms of how it's supposed to work as most of my time in there was spent in giant slug fests on the main road, during which the Horde would push us further and further back until we lost. But hey, Jennifer Hale does the voice-over for the intro!

There were also a lot of changes to the rotation of the regular/smaller maps. I only found out in the context of people talking about Wrath Classic that Strand of the Ancients was removed from retail some time ago because apparently everybody hated it, but in turn a whole bunch of new battlegrounds have been added since I last played: Mists added Temple of Kotmogu, Silvershard Mines and Deepwind Gorge, and Legion added Seething Shore. I quite like Temple of Kotmogu as it's fast-paced, objective-focused and easy to understand ("u have more ball u win" as someone put it in chat the other day). Silvershard Mines I'm a bit ambivalent about, and Deepwind Gorge is basically Arathi Basin 2.0, which means that Alliance loses a lot and I'm not a fan, even if the map layout at least seems a bit more balanced. Seething Shore seemed to be another very fast-paced and objective-focused map, which I thought was quite enjoyable the couple of times I've been there.

The different ways in which people explain Temple of Kotmogu in chat are always fun.

It was interesting to me that I found myself making comparisons to SWTOR a lot, and I do think that Bioware had the right idea with the changes they made to the WoW formula such as giving tanks an actual role in PvP, adding a built-in stun breaker instead of requiring you to earn a piece of gear for it, and having interrupts be less powerful, as it can be quite frustrating at times to get crowd-controlled, locked out of casting spells and silenced in quick succession.

Still, casually doing the daily PvP quest once a day has been pretty fun and my win-loss ratio hasn't felt too bad. People running around like headless chickens and fighting on the road are still a thing, which still frustrates me in the base-capturing battlegrounds (especially in those Arathi Basins where we only cap two bases at the start and then people instantly start quitting and yelling about how everyone but them is stupid, and then it just snowballs from there) but in a way the addition of more maps with mobile or changing objectives has kind of helped to alleviate the issue a bit because it makes it so that running around a lot and fighting in different locations can actually be a good thing.

Anyway, I got my priest all the way to sixty that way (which means that I now have two priests at max-level... at least the way I play retail is still living up to the blog's name to some degree) and I've also done a few battlegrounds at max level, during which I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly I could get a full set of at least basic PvP gear and that I didn't feel horribly underpowered as a fresh sixty. I might keep coming back to this at least every now and then.