A PvP Update

I've been doing a lot of PvP lately and have started to make my way into Rated Battlegrounds. If you don't have a bunch of friends or a guild to do RBGs with, you can find groups for it using the LFG tool, similar to any PvE raid. When you bring the tool up, you'll be able to see the description of the group (generally they say how serious they are, if they're looking for a particular class/spec, and if they require a certain rating to join) and see how many of each role (tank, heal, dps) they already have. It has been a struggle to find good groups as Feral, since Boomkin is the preferred Druid DPS spec. I'm actually considering starting to accumulate Boomkin/Resto gear with honor to help deal with this.

Rated Battlegrounds are great for several reasons; well outside of being really fun. First, you get 400 Conquest Points for a win (Arena wins are worth 180). This means that at lower ratings, you can reach the weekly cap with just 4 wins! Second, your first three wins of the week have a chance to provide 50 extra Conquest Points or get an actual piece of Conquest Gear. The piece of gear that you get is random, and it is possible to get something you already have. I was lucky enough to get gloves, though they were not the Set variety. I think my brother got Bracers. Depending on which piece you get, that's a huge benefit - it could be a whole week's worth of Conquest Points!

The last reason why RBGs are great is because you have a chance to get some really cool mounts. If you get to either 40 rated battleground wins or 100 3v3 arena wins in the current season, you are rewarded with a token that you can exchange for either:

Vicious War Raptor

Vicious Skeletal Warhorse

Vicious War Wolf

Of course, once you hit 75 rated battleground wins (overall, does not need to be in a single season), you automatically get the Wolf ... so it only makes sense to get either the horse or the raptor. It looks like those have been available in previous seasons as well, so eventually you should be able to acquire all three. I am unclear whether you can get a token from both RBGs and 3v3 in the same season.

I got up to 14 RBG wins over the weekend, highest rating of 1606. I've friended a couple of the leaders of good groups I was in, hoping to be able to find good groups more easily in the future. We'll see whether that's good enough or whether I will need to make the switch to Resto/Boomkin.

In addition to RBGs and Arena, I spent several hours in Ashran this weekend in an attempt to reach Revered. Being Revered with Vol'jin Spear allows you to purchase Conquest gear that has Versatility. Versatility, at least for feral druids, is the most important secondary stat for PvP. It increases damage and healing done (or healing received? one of the two), and reduces the amount of damage you take.

There are two ways to earn reputation in Ashran - turning in Artifacts (you get them from killing NPCs and other PCs) which you get ~3-4 rep per and doing events which gets you 500 reputation per win. Friday night while I was in Ashran, there was an entire raid group of horde going around doing the events. It went pretty quickly, I was able to go from Honored to Revered in just 3-4 hours (ish). A lot of time was spent waiting for the next event; had we spent that time killing the elite mobs for more Artifacts, it likely would have gone much quicker.