At some point during your WoW career, you might be hanging out on Stormwind or something, just checking the auction house. You might be looking for a couple heavy leather for a new Quiver, or maybe looking for a new sword. And then you notice its Arathi Basin holiday weekend…. and you think… let’s give it a go… We’ve all been there. Even when leveling up an alt, its hard to resist the pull to give PvP a try.
So the question is… how do you, some random dude leveling up, compete with all the twinks that swarm the battlegrounds at the lower levels?
Well, the quick answer is… you don’t. You can’t. You’ll never be “on par” with them. They will have the BEST gear, the BEST enchants, and you won’t.
But you can become competitive with them. It will take some effort, as you will most likely need to swap out some gear sets, maybe even respec. But it can be done.
GEAR
The most important thing to remember about battleground, and PvP in general, is stamina. You need your healthbar to be as high as you can get it. There really is no stat in PvP that is more important than Stamina. Everything else is secondary after the hit point pool. For example, let’s say you want to try out some battlegrounds at level 39. Before you even bother signing up, check out your gear. Look at how much stamina there is. From head to toe, ALL, or as close to all as you can get, should have + Stamina present. Your gear doesn’t have to be pure + stamina, but you definitely should be getting something that has a significant amount of it.
Let’s make up a hunter. Everyone say hi to Giggles the Orc Hunter! (Hi Giggles)
For our hunter here, if he heads into a battleground with 5 greens that are + X Agility, and + Y Stamina, he’s doing great.
An excellent indicator is to do a battleground, and check out some of the twinks around you. You should be easily able to get half of their hitpoints, and about 75% of them will be a comfortable spot to be. For example, our hunter sees a rogue with 3.5k hp. He should then consider 1750 hp to be a minimum, and about 2600 hp to be a comfortable amount for this bracket.
Another important thing is to have all of your gear at least in the bracket you’re Pvp’ing in, and preferably in the latter half of the bracket. For our 39 hunter here, he should not be wearing a single piece of gear that is under level 35. If he has some really nice blues that are about levels 28-34, thats ok, but there shouldn’t be a lot of them.
LEVEL
I know a lot of people gt indignant over this. Like, you’ll see a level 42 in Warsong Gulch, and everyone will be somewhere along the lines of “GTFO” and “Get off the team, you’re making us lose”. Y’see, in these competitive battlegrounds, having a “lowbie” trying to PvP just really is ruinous to your side. It doesn’t matter how good of a player you are, if you’re a level 40, you will NOT be able to compete against the geared out level 49’s. It just will not happen. You will do nothing except waste space, and drag your team down.
No. Stop. Listen. You are a low level. You do not have the abilities, the talents, the gear to compete with people who are on the flip side of the bracket. If you are level 41, you WILL NOT be able to compete against a 48, or a 49. You just won’t. End of story.
You should only go and do battlegrounds when you are in the last half of the bracket. Essentially, levels x6-x9 is when you won’t be a hindrance to your side.
For our random hunter here, he should be a minimum of level 36 before even considering going into a battleground. Level 37 is better, 38 even better, 39 the best. Its similar to battlegrounds at 70, where if you have a member of your team with practically no resilience, andunder 7k hp. They are without mincing words, worse than useless. They will be unable to contribute to your team efforts in any meaningful way, and even worse, they are taking up a slot that somebody with good gear could be. Again, shut it. It doesn’t matter how much skill you have, if your gear is terrible, you will be sorely limited by that. Doesn’t matter if you’ve been playing a mage for 17 years, have five hundred thousand honorable kills, if your gear is so poor that a 3 year old playing a rogue can kill you almost instantly.
Take this to heart. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT waste everyones time by trying to enter in a battleground if you are not at least level 36, in our little hunters case. And if you are level 36, make sure at least two thirds of your gear is in the 30 bracket. Level 38 and 39 are the best spots to participate in PvP, as you will have all of your best talents/abilities trained up for the bracket, and have the best… err, good gear for the bracket. You can’t wear a level 38 chest of ridiculously high stamina at level 34, now, can you?
Do your duty. If you want to win, level up. Giggles should seriously consider not even setting foot into a battleground until he is level 38. You don’t really need to be 39, you don’t get any new abilities. You do, however, get an extra talent point, and the possibility of some slightly better gear.
SPEC
Early on, spec matters a lot. For example, as an enhancement shaman, you really won’t be much of anything until you have Dual Weild, which you need to be level 40 to get. Trying to PvP any earlier than level 40 as an enhancement shaman would see you… well, basically gimped.
This isn’t really something I can help you out too much with. Whatever spec it is you want to use for PvP, you have to learn for yourself when it wil become viable in PvP. For example, there are no good mage specs for 19 PvP, 29, 39, and 49 are all dominated by fire centered specs, and from level 50 onward, anything goes.
Its quite similar for many classes. Hunters, for example, 19, 29, and 39 are all dominated by marksman specs. Sure, you can spec elsewhere, but for these levels the best talents are in marksman. Past 40, both survivalist and beast master hunters come into their own.
Some classes, like Warriors, don’t even come into their own, regardless of spec, until they are of somewhat higher level. For warriors, if you’re trying to PvP AT ALL before you have Intercept, you are at a disadvantage.
Now, you don’t need to optimize your spec for PvP if you want to do some battlegrounds. Your random leveling spec will do just fine, the only problem is it won’t be good. It will be fine. You won’t be optimized. But you’ll do fine.
You can mess around with your spec if you like, but you don’t really have to, as long as your in a bracket where your spec can work. Like, if your trying to play an elemental shaman at level 29, you are going to fail. Repeatedly. And miserably. At 29, really the only spec thats even halfway viable would be if you went as a Restoration Shaman. Neither of the other two specs have come into their own yet.
As a general rule, anything that resist spell pushback, stuns, things of that nature, are excellent. Anything that causes stuns or otherwise hampers your opponents mobility, is excellent. Consider this example:
Here we have your average fire leveling spec at level 39. This spec is for leveling, opening with Pyroblast, then chain fireballing until dead. Frost Nova as necessary. Rince and repeat, next.
Here we have your average fire PvP spec at level 39. It has some similarities, and some major differences. For one, a fire mage at 39 will very rarely use fireball. The fast paced environment of PvP means that the mage will be using spells like Scorch and Fireball a lot, by simple fact that he needs to be fast. Fireball is not fast. Not at all.
You see the difference there? The first spec can work in PvP, for sure, it just won’t be as good as the second one is. The second one can function just fine in PvE, but it won’t be as good as the first one. At these lower levels, spec is not quite as important as it is at 70. At 70, you can easily number crunch for days at a time about 3 or 4 talent points, but at lower level battleground levels, even if you designed your spec by throwing darts at your brother, it’ll still work fine.
Now the true question… is it worth it to bother PvP’ing while leveling up?
I say yes, most definitely yes. The whole point of leveling up, and the gradual introduction of abilities, is so you learn how to use them in the game. You should definitely give PvP a try, for the sole sake of seeing how the abilities work in a competitive, player versus player environment. If you plan on giving PvP a try at maximum level, you should definitely have the experience from these early levels ready to go. As well, if you randomly do battlegrounds at these earlier levels, you can start collecting honor long before you need to spend the pointson various pieces of gear.
You see all these people at 70, with literally no good PvP gear. And you know, if they had PvP’d at all before, they should have had enough honor for at least three or four pieces. I mean, I was able to buy all the PvP gear that was avaliable at every single bracket all the way up from level 29. (I didn’t do 19, 19 sucked). There really is no reason you can’t spend a week or so at the X9 level, do some battlegrounds, collect a few thousand honor, then move on.
You don’t want to be one of those scrubs at 70, doing EotS for the first time, and wondering how the hell that warrior just ran at you really fast, and then killed you instantly with this “Mortal Strike” thing, do you? I thought so. So do it right. Learn your class, get some honor, and then when you actually hit 70, you will have some very nice gear ready to go, and some excellent experience with your class to boot.
And most importantly, you won’t suck.
Actually, speding time in the battlegrounds prior to level 70 is a very good way to end up with enough marks and honor points to buy some basic PvP gear when hitting 70.
As a level 68, I perform fairly well in 60-69 battlegrounds, but I am regularly doomed while playing in Alterac Valley, due to a significant gear gap between 70 players and me.
Moreover, the 60-69 bracket is extremly enjoyable, due to :
– people having almost all their class abilities and talent points, being in the end of the levelling process
– no one has armageddon-bringing stuff, because hitting 70 outdates most of the stuff you had so far
If you intend to play your character mostly for PvP, doing it regularly from lvl 66 is a must. Consider doing the daily quest every day, for fun and profit.
This post couldn’t have come at a better time, as I just hit 29 on my noob mage and started messing around in the bgs with her. I passed this around to some friends as well who are playing with me. Good stuff!
I see your point about it frankly being futile playing a bg at lvl x1 etc, and not being a usefull member of your team but sod it! WoW is all about fun and call me a sadist but i quite enjoy being ganked my a twink rogue.
Ive lvled my alt huntard up to 62 and now im enjoying the delights of being raped by a full s3 warrior in AV, yeah i know im gonna be fooked, yeah i know hes going to 1 shot me and my kitty, yeah i know that im going to get brutaly violated by any one that even looks at me.
But you know what, its a good way of gettin honour and badges for s1 gear when i hit 70, and i /dance when i get a killing blow when i multi shot from behind a bush:)
As soon as i hit 20 on any of my alts i bang it in to a battleground and see what kind of fun i can have or see if im going to enjoy higher lvl pvp.
Play WoW, have fun, get raped
Great post!
I’m a Hunter twink and enjoying it immensely but whereas I can beat you down 1 on 1 if you’re a casual player, the shoe must surely be on the other foot when 3 or more catch me unsupported. I try to get a /laugh out before going down because the whole point of the game is to have fun 🙂
I document the twinking process for a hunter at my blog which also gives me time to learn and understand about my class. But even keeping it casual like you say and getting off the XP grind every now and then will pay off similarly by the time you reach level 70. Just get in there and enjoy!
Best advice ever. Period. My main is a raiding combat rogue that is ok at pvp, but doesn’t really have the pvp gear or spec to do a great job in arena or battlegrounds. So, as you said in your post, I just do fine. I’ve also got a 66 paladin that I’m instancing to 70, and needed to kill some time to build up rest experience. So I leveled my 26 Hunter to 29 in a few hours, spent about 20g on the auction house and headed into AB and WSG.
I can’t remember having so much fun in battlegrounds! In two days I went from 0 to around 300 kills, I’m pushing 1000 Honor and I have 20 bg marks. I can’t compete with the warlock twinks (50k damage on a 29 in 20 minutes!), but my damage is usually in the top 5.
So again, thanks for the post. I plan on getting about 33 marks out of each battleground before moving on, and I’ll do the same at 39 etc. Should be nice to have a full set of season 1 (or 2) the day I hit 70 on this toon.
– SamuelTempus
This topic may be a week old, but it set me off enough to comment.
“You should only go and do battlegrounds when you are in the last half of the bracket. Essentially, levels x6-x9 is when you won’t be a hindrance to your side”
No one, no matter who they are, has the right to tell people that they shouldn’t PLAY A GAME the way they want to. No one.
I don’t have the right to tell a lvl 61 to get out of the BG.
I do have the right, as a lvl 60 mage, to queue up and join an AB game.
People CAN add to the team at lower levels.
Just this weekend my lvl 60 mage killed a lvl 70 warrior that tried to gank me. Yes, I’m a mage and he’s a warrior so I had an advantage from the beginning. However, he died and I lived.
That same mage went into AB at 60. And in the end I was #3 in damage done.
Did I “hinder” our team by doing more damage than 12 out of 15 players? Did I “hinder” our team when I Silenced the opposing healer? Or when I sheeped the warrior that just charged my healer?
Oh, right… I hindered my team when my Water Elemental dropped a Freeze right into the middle of an advancing team. I put them all in combat (no charge or stealth for you thank you) AND allowing my team to engage the enemy when they were out of position.
Instead of telling people to not JOIN a Battleground, maybe you should instead give pointers about where a lower level player can help the team.
I’m sorry to be a late-comer to the discussion, but I have to add just a bit about being a lower-level in a PuG BG. First, the folks in it are clearly PuGing the BG, so whoever they is whoever they get. In some ways, they should be happy it’s not an afk bot, and that the player is actually willing to put some effort into it and play as hard as they can.
Second, there’s one type of character who can still make a huge impact in the BG game without being in the latter half of their bracket: healers. They don’t need to worry about not being able to hit the higher-level players, and it’s quite possible to stack +int, +stam, and +heal (and, for pallies, +crit) almost exclusively on gear. And at least on my (admittedly non-competitive) battelgroup, getting a healer in a PuG is like winning the lottery, no matter what their level, if they’re geared even close to properly and have any inkling whatsoever of how the BG works. Like, a lvl 61 pally, running behind the flag-carrier in WSG and BoF’ing and flash heal/holy lightin’ their little hearts out? Gold. Not a max, optimum, fantastic twink’d-out lvl 69 zomg I’m getting all the pvp set at 70 pally, but… doable. Playable. Winnable.
Dorgol, he said he suggested not to join. You’re right, nobody has the right to tell anybody how to play. He’s offering his advice. Don’t go into battlegrounds x0-x5. A lower level player can help his team … but if he was higher level he would help his team more.
Also, in lower level BGs it is very beneficial to stack ‘of shadow wrath’ gear if you’re a shadow priest or a warlock, ‘of fiery wrath’ etc. instead of stam. Stam is more of a level 70 focus.
I agree with the last poster.
I played at 39 with 4 pieces of ‘of fiery wrath’ gear and I was hitting for insane damage at that level. Each piece of that gear added +20 to fire damage. That’s +80 fire damage. On top of that I had other pieces that brought my fire damage to over 110.
Every other piece of gear I went for int and stamina.
I ran out of mana quickly but usually killed my opponent before they got me. I was surprised to even end up with a couple matches where I had over 10 kills with no deaths of my own.
I agree with most of the article. While its not fun to be at the lower level of a bracket, I’m not sure your unwelcome? In many battlegrounds the numbers are lopsided either horde or alliance. So if your side is outnumbered they would rather have a lower level on their team than nobody. If your side has way more than the other then having a few lowbies don’t hurt, they win anyway. Only matters for even number matches where both sides are maxed out. Almost never happens on my server where both sides have the max number of players.
I wish they would eliminate twinks with experience for each bg played. Twinks really turn off newbie players who’s first bg experience is to die over and over again in a few seconds, really fun! Many never play bg’s again. There already is a predefined twink level, level 80!