Pee vee pee.

So it turns out that the +15 follower enhancements do not stack on top of each other which is a pretty big disappointment. That means they're basically only useful when your followers first hit 100 to get them over the 615 hump. The +3 enhancements seem to stack as much as you want though, which is nice because you get an awful lot of them.

Over the weekend I finally dipped my toe back in the PvP water. My gear isn't great, but oh man, so much fun! It seems like there are a dozen battlegrounds now, half of which I had never tried before. You can queue for a specific battleground or for a random one; doing a random battleground gives you a reward of a strongbox for completing the battleground (or at least, it's supposed to. sometimes I did not get a strongbox, but I'm unclear as to why that was). You're even able to remove up to two battlegrounds from the list so you don't get stuck in Alterac Valley every single time.

The strongboxes vary in quality and can have extra honor points or even gear in them! I think the lowest level gear I got from one of these boxes was iLvl 600, but that gets bumped up to 660 in PvP so that's better than the iLvl 645 PvE epics I have.

I think I ended up in ~4 new battlegrounds that I had never tried before. One was essentially Warsong Gulch with a 15 minute time limit. One was like a combination of Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin but also with mining carts added in (?!?). One required you to 'control' mine carts as they moved from the center of the map to their end stop (this one had a lot of fun fighting). And the last was kind of weird - there are four orbs in each corner. Once you pick one up, you earn points but become easier to kill (I think; there's a buff that details the changes that you get, but I died almost immediately upon picking it up so I didn't have a chance to read it too closely).

I'm pretty sure we lost every battleground I was in. We may have one once. Still, I had a lot of fun! I also tried out Ashran which is the new "open world" battleground. It's not quite a battleground, as you can be queued for Ashran and still queue/run the normal battlegrounds. I know this because Ashran takes forever to get into. The queues are awful and to top it all off, it doesn't even give you an estimate until you'll get in. This is probably because Ashran doesn't really finish. Think back to when Alterac Valley first came out and matches were weeks long, and all the fun was in killing the Alliance and their NPCs, handing in upgrades and summoning new NPCs ... it reminded me a lot of that. We were "winning" at the time I was in there in that sense that we had the Alliance pushed back and they were unable to reach the side events. Every so often, there's an announcement that there will be an Event in one of the side areas. The winner of the Event gets a Strongbox. There are also rare NPCs that spawn, giving you a large amount of Artifacts. Artifacts can also be stolen from any Alliance you kill and can be turned in for Honor points (can't remember if you get Conquest points as well).

You also get a ton of Broken Bones from Ashran. Broken Bones are gotten from killing the opposing faction in World PvP and are used to process work orders at the Gladiator's Sanctum. These work orders then provide you with honor and conquest points! So, doing random battlegrounds and hitting up Ashran seems like the way to go if you want to gear up quickly. Coming into the weekend I had just the PvP cloak and Belt ... I now have an Amulet, Shoulders, Chest, Bracers, and two trinkets. The two trinkets give a set bonus of 10% less damage taken and the Shoulders/Chest give a 2 piece bonus of resetting the spell interrupt on a successful attempt (usually a 6 second cooldown).

The next step, outside of continuing the gearing process, is taking a close look at the talents I selected while leveling up. I was looking at them last night and there are definitely some that need to be changed.