10 November 2009 - 10:34Musings on lowbie battlegrounds

I’ve been getting back into lowbie battlegrounds.

I’ve made the decision to level Lainie, my 19 twink rogue, a while back. However, this doesn’t keep me from lingering in every bracket and battleground I can. Outfitted with the heirloom shoulders, chest, weapons, plus her leftover twink gear in the rest of the slots, she can still hold her own.

One of the most important things lowbie battlegrounds does is to give you perspective. As you’re playing without many class defining abilities, you definitely get an appreciation for them. Have a DOT on? Can’t Cloak, sorry, have to deal. Sprint, Evasion, Vanish on cooldown? Either gotta spec combat or wait for the cooldown to run out. Have no stuns, no Blind? Learn to Gouge and bandage.

You have such a small toolbox that you have to keep racking your brains to make yourself useful. I often find myself scanning my bars frantically, trying to find a spell that would come in handy for the current situation. It’s a fun exercise, and makes you feel like such a pro when you remember you’re an engineer and own bombs that will get the pesky melee off your flag carrier.

Overall, in my very humble opinion, it has the potential to make you a much better player.

In other observations – snares are brutal at this level. Absolutely brutal. There is no way to get out of them, save for a trinket – healers, dispels, BoFs, all of those are dreams. Being human, I’m still luckier than others with a two minute trinket, but they’re fairly easy to reapply anyway. I can also Vanish as a last resort, but again, two spells on two and three minute cooldowns don’t really help when it takes a warrior one GCD to reapply Hamstring. In fact, a warrior who tab Hamstrings or a shaman with Earthbind Totem can easily keep everyone off their flag carrier. I’ve been kited to the other end of the map by a shaman who used Earthbind and Frost Shock freely, and it was not pretty.

I’m used to always having a snare out at level 80. Dispel it, shapeshift out, pop your trinket, slow your foes too. Snares don’t matter that much when everyone has one or more, and multiple outs. They make the world’s difference when the opposing team is assisting their FC with a field of totems and Frost Nova, and you can’t do anything but watch the druid travelform away.

Probably the best thing about battlegrounds at this level, though, is the existence of hybrids.

I love hybrids. I’ve leveled five of them to above 70. However, once hybrids are past a certain level, for all intents and purposes, they’re no longer hybrids. They’re DPSers, tanks or healers, depending on what they’ve specced in. They have a massive toolbox  – but a big part of it is either not viable to use, or in the case of feral druids, downright inaccessible while they’re performing their class role.

In the lower brackets, this distinction doesn’t exist. No matter what spec that paladin is, he can toss a couple of Holy Lights around without using a gigantic amount of mana to heal for piddly amounts. The flag carrying feral can toss around roots and HoTs without thinking “it’s not worth the mana I use to shapeshift”.

When I was leveling Kielle, my night elf priest, I spent a good chunk of time playing 20-29 battlegrounds having the time of my life. I wore WSG/AB reward gear, some good quested/instanced blues I had managed to obtain, and whatever greens I could afford from the AH. She was my main on Grim Batol at that point, so I couldn’t afford to twink her any more than that. The best piece of gear she had was probably her level 28 AB boots, on which I’d sprung for 12 stamina. I had a pretty standard shadow spec for the level, only with 2/2 Healing Focus.

I was pretty much a star.

I stood a good chance against twinks and non-twinks – because I was a decently geared hybrid. With an AOE fear and a ranged snare at my disposal. I could heal almost as well as an at-level holy or disc priest, but I could also do more damage than they did, and need I mention again that my signature damage spell had a ranged snare component? Which was channeled, so going around corners did not break it?

I’ve never loved my class as much as I did at that point. With Shadowmeld, Mind Flay, a multitude of DOTs and Psychic Scream, I was a champion flag defender. Tossing around bubbles, heals and dispels, I could play FC support like nobody’s business. I could do everything that my class had promised I could do. And I could do all of them well enough to make a difference.

I would recommend everyone, battleground fans and haters alike, to take a lowbie character and put them through battlegrounds. No matter how much you feel you know the class, you will learn many new things and develop a new appreciation for your underused class abilities.