Blood Sport: Welcome to Twin Peaks

Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women? That's why Blood Sport is here!

The Twin Peaks battleground was introduced with Cataclysm. While it's a new battleground with a brand new map, Twin Peaks borrows a lot of elements from an old, favorite PVP location, Warsong Gulch.

In Twin Peaks, the two teams face off to play a rousing game of capture-the-flag. The rules are essentially the same as Warsong Gulch. To win, you run up to the enemy flag, right-click it, grab it, and run it back to your own base. If your flag is in your base, then you score a point. If your flag is not in your base, you have to hang out while you wait for it to get returned. Like I said, it's essentially the same thing as Warsong Gulch.

The map of Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks gets its name from an obvious factor on the map. Each team begins in their fortress at the top of two opposing hills. The terrain of Twin Peaks slopes gently away from each fortress. Again, like Warsong Gulch, you can think of Twin Peaks as two bases with a middle ground.

Each base has three entrances -- one in the middle, two on each side. The bases are not identical, however. The Horde base has one entrance that is the end of a stream. While there's lots of discussion about whether that water represents an unfair advantage for one team or another, don't be surprised when you find out the Horde and Alliance bases are not equal.

General gameplay

For better or for worse, this is how most of the random battleground matches in Twin Peaks tend to go. When the gates open, a huge clump from each team rushes for the other base. A few random fighters hang out in middle, hoping to get lucky and gank the enemy flag carrier on the way back.

The longer the flag carriers are walking around with enemy flags, the higher a debuff will stack on them. This debuff increases damage to the flag carrier, making it more and more difficult for healers to keep up with incoming damage.

As a result, you often end up with a team defending your flag carrier while the rest of your group tries to kill the enemy flag carrier.

Keys to winning

Your flag carrier should be a relatively mobile player with a strong amount of resilience. Healers often make great flag carriers because they're well-nigh possible to kill one-on-one. That being said, the flag carrier should not be left to its own devices; crowd control is a factor.

Twin Peaks draws on a lot of the same dynamics as Warsong Gulch:

• The primary goal is to plant the enemy flag in your base and keep the enemy away from your flag.

• Don't fight in the middle, unless that just happens to be where the enemy flag carrier is. It can be tempting to rack up honor kills while people are running back and forth, but that doesn't serve the primary goal.

• If you're carrying the flag, it does you little good to outrun your support team. While you might be able to live forever against one or two enemies, a group of enemy players will still make short work of you without significant backup.

• Kill their healers. Resilience gear makes it very easy to mitigate incoming damage, and a healer can keep a flag carrier up through immense damage. If you don't kill or shut down that healer, you're not going to kill your flag carrier.

• Protect your own healers. You'll note how we just discussed a healer can keep a flag character up and going for ages. Therefore, your own healers are important (and they heal you!). You should protect them.

How much resilience?

Twin Peaks, like Warsong Gulch, is one of those battlegrounds that involve a lot of smash-face PVP. In Strand, you roll around in demolition engines and spend time killing those tanks. You don't really care about other players, per se.

This place, however, is all about nothing as much as killing other players. For that reason, it becomes important that you're rocking as much resilience as you can get your hands on. A solid 2,000 is a good amount of resilience rating to consider yourself a fully-enabled team member.

Flag carriers are nothing but a running target. These guys should definitely be looking at 3,000 resilience rating and at least 140k health. Anything less, and you're essentially a running pork chop.

Want to ascend the arena ladders faster than a fireman playing Donkey Kong? We'll steer you to victory with the best arena addons and let you in on some rank 1 gladiator PvP secrets. Be sure to check out our guide to PvP keybindings.