Silverwing-Sentinels
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The Art of War(craft): Absolute beginners' guide to Warsong Gulch
Zach loves the Battlegrounds. He loves them so much that he spends nearly all his playing time mucking around in them. He loves them so much he writes a column devoted to them. He loves it so much he makes a comic based on Battlegrounds play. You could say he eats, lives, and breathes Battlegrounds and world PvP. And maybe some Krispy Kreme doughnuts. It's kind of hard to get by without doughnuts. Alright, so you have some kind of vague idea about what a Battleground is. Basically, Battlegrounds are where players go to consensually bash each others brains out. Or fry them. Or freeze them. These instances are designed for players to enjoy PvP, get a bit of honor and, if you're not already at max level, some experience. In the future, Blizzard has revealed plans to make the Battlegrounds even more like instances or dungeons by hinting at possible actual loot rewards. It's an interesting concept we'll have to revisit sometime in the future. For now, we'll get back down to the basics. Last week we discussed how to get inside a Battleground. That's easy enough, especially with the new changes to the Battlegrounds queue system. This week we'll take a closer look at the different Battlegrounds available. Think of it as a nice buffet of PvP that you can choose from. What kind of Battleground you choose will depend on what kind of game you want to play (or more realistically, what Marks of Honor you still need. We'll get to that later). Hit the jump to check out this week's featured Battleground, Warsong Gulch.
Warsong Gulch revisited
Blizzard poster Slorkuz gave a lot of effort in a post made the other day discussing Warsong Gulch, one of the game's first Battlegrounds. In a long post, he details his experiences with common tactics such as flag room defense, 10-man offense, half and half (5 on offense and 5 on defense), and the most common tactic that all players are familiar with -- the "kill anything on sight" strategy. It's a rather hefty post and should help a lot of players decide on what tactic to employ when running WSG premades (as you can't obviously expect PUG groups to follow any real strategy with coordination). Slorkuz explains that Warsong Gulch is a Battleground where team composition is critical, something that holds true here more than other Battlegrounds (or as in the case of Alterac Valley, not true at all). With such a small team, having no form of crowd control or healing can and usually ends in a loss.
Singing a new Forest Song
And so, in my quest for a cross-racial mount, I took my level 36 Draenei priest to Ashenvale. Now, this is a zone I really don't enjoy playing in. The map discovery is very difficult, the terrain is tough to traverse, and everything is so spread out it takes forever to complete quests. I have not quested in this zone for about a year or more. All of my Night Elf alts I have leveled in human lands because I know the quests so well. But, like I said, I am on a personal quest to get my priest a palomino at 40, and so I trudged on into Ashenvale with a heavy heart. In Astranaar I met up with Vindicator Palanaar (whose name seems an odd coincidence, don't you think?) who sent me on to Forest Song. Here is where I roll my eyes and groan, but travel out to Forest Song I did. What I was expecting to find was one random guy with two quests and a whole vacant ruin to himself. What I did find was something completely different. The Silverwing Sentinels are there, as is an ancient protector, not to mention a whole heap of Draenei. They even added a flight point. The area has been fixed.
