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My rank 2 PvP trinket came in handy several times as I tried to evade mage Frost Novas, hunter snares, and rogue stuns. It really reminded me of the old DAOC Purge realm ability, on a 5 minute timer, and usable by a larger set of classes. Now if only there was some way to purge fear effects (and piss off warlocks all over the place.)

All in all, I was feeling pretty satisfied after a good two-and-a-half hours of PvPing between both battlegrounds. Mind you, there are a few problems I noticed or heard about while playing on the test server:

• In the Warsong Gulch CTF battleground, I heard a rumour that Paladins could grab the opposing flag, hit Divine Shield, and make it all the way back to their base while unattackable. This assumes they’re on an epic mount (i.e. 200% movement rate) the entire time, but again, it’s another example of the cheese Paladins can pull off with their shields. Hopefully Blizzard will prevent shields from being used while you’re holding a flag, or it could cause some serious imbalance problems once it hits the live servers.
• My full-screen map would not display the battlegrounds maps, for some reason. I heard someone else say that theirs was working fine, so maybe it was just me. Since I’ve seen screenshots of the Alterac Valley map from that same screen, it seems to me that it should be working fine.
• Ranged attackers had a significant advantage over non-ranged fighters (especially Warriors and Paladins) in the Alterac Valley battleground. There were many stand-off fights where without range, there wasn’t much you could do. This isn’t really an issue for casters, archers and stealth classes, who have either long range or ways to get into melee range undetected.
• Potions, potions, and more potions. Blizzard needs to make healing and mana potions more readily available (I didn’t try to purchase any in either battleground as I had a supply already on me), because you burn through them VERY quickly in the battlegrounds.
• Lag — while I didn’t experience a huge amount of it, some people were complaining about having horrible lag. I could attribute this to their connection speed/latency, or to their PCs, but the little lag I did experience seemed to just involve loading large numbers of character models when in the middle of a big fight.

I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen of the battlegrounds. Hopefully Blizzard will listen to (reasonable) user feedback and make a few adjustments. I also really hope they keep the patch up on the test servers for at least a couple of weeks to give people a chance to work the kinks out of the system before it becomes “official” and hits the live servers.

On a totally different subject, the Arcanite Reaper nerf feared by those who read the leaked patch notes did not come to pass. There was a minor change to the effect/duration of the Enrage ability in the Warrior Fury talent tree, documented here:

Enrage — Increased the number of charges to 12. Decreased the duration to 12 seconds. The new duration is the limiting factor for slower weapons (e.g. Arcanite Reaper will typically get one less swing), while dual wielding and faster weapons will make better use of all of the charges over the duration of the ability.

Definitely not the nerf everyone feared. Not that re-balancing 2H weapons for instant attacks would be a bad thing, but that’s a different story altogether.

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