LFM AV Premade

I recently hit level 60 on my worgen mage and decided it was time to take her into some battlegrounds for the first time. After all, I had heard that mages have a very high damage output and frost spec provided some very good survivability in PVP. So I took to her to Alterac Valley for my first person versus person on my mage. I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that I was in the top five of DPS for the battleground despite the fact that I was level sixty in a bracket filled with all levels from sixty to sixty nine. So being the lowest level allowed in the battleground and being in the top five of damage for a forty man team pleasantly surprised me. It also got me thinking.

I remember semi-fondly the leveling experience of my first character. I was playing on a PVP server. If you've ever played on a PVP server then you know that leveling in neutral zones can be quite annoying. You're running around killing bears and trying to find their ears, which for some reason not every bear drops ears for your quest, and BAM! You're laying on the ground dead getting ready to run back to your body. Why? Oh that's right, a level seventy Priest (Hutch*) with nothing better to do just ran up to you and just smited you into the ground. So you run back to your body, pop back up and BAM! He jumps out from behind a bush and drops you again. Inevitably, this is the way it goes in all “neutral” territories from level ten to seventy.

I am in remembrance of those days full of trial for the simple reason that it drove my desire to PVP to a new level. When I hit level seventy, all I wanted to do was build up a good set of PVP gear and head out into Azeroth to hunt down the bane of my leveling existence (Hutch*). Back in BC, for me and my friends there was only one thing we all gathered up the guild to do and that was hit Alterac Valley. So now to the part I've been thinking a lot about lately. I really miss doing premades.

If you aren't familiar with the term, an AV premade is a group of forty people (or less) forming a raid group and with the help of an add-on (av premade) all getting into the same Alterac Valley fight at the same time. The advantages of this are pretty obvious. You get a group of that size or magnitude into the same battleground with the same goals it's not hard to win a battleground. It's a lot easier to work together with a group working together than it is with a group thrown together. You cut down on the people that are just there to kill a horde player (or alliance player), loot their body, then turn in armor scraps for reputation over and over. Everyone knows where to run and what to do making it very hard to lose when you almost always end up going against a group filled with the people I just described.

I don't do a lot of Heroic dungeons since I started playing Cataclysm, so I usually find myself playing filling empty time doing battlegrounds. I love running into a wild gunfight finding the person in need of the most medicine and healing them back up to 100% while the person they are beating on watches in astonishment as the last of his hit points are taken from him. It's fun to me to find an unsuspecting target and blast him with a moonfire, root him, then start blasting him down. All that mixed with the strategy involved with Alterac Valley makes it one of my favorite places to constantly go to for my honor points.

Cataclysm coming offered the idea of rated battlegrounds, and to me that sounds like the closest thing I'm probably going to get to a premade at this point. I am also an avid raider. My guild also is filled with people that are avid raiders, problem is most of them aren't avid PVPers also. So I haven not yet stepped foot into a rated battleground. I hope to do it eventually, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get at least ten people together to do it right now.

I only write this to reminisce about the long hours I spent in premades back in BC. I started out playing PVP before I raided, and I probably always will PVP. I just hope that I can find a way to have as much fun doing it as I did back then. Did any of you participate in AV Premades? Maybe I'm only part of a small group that did this, even though I thought that it was pretty common.

*Hutch: Elocine and Kierphas can tell you all about him. He hung out in Hillsbrad Foothills terrorizing anyone that went through. He was well known to Horde on the Gurubashi server cause all he would do besides arenas and battlegrounds is hang out in Tarren Mill ganking lowbies.