On the pleasures and rewards of PvP

It should be apparent to you all by now that we are too small a guild to form a raid or even reliably have enough people on at once to do a 5-player instance. This leaves limited options for obtaining better gear. I cannot more highly recommend checking out the gear that one can get from playing the various battlegrounds. I'm currently working towards obtaining 3 pieces of the Warlord's Threads Set. Just the shoulders, gloves and maybe the pants. I have the tokens for the shoulders already and am only a few Alterac Valley wins away from having the tokens for the gloves.

Getting the honour needed for the pieces will be the tricky bit- 29835 honour points! I may end up just getting the gloves and shoulders!

Ok, so I've covered the rewards parts of things...

In regards to the pleasures of PvP there are a few key points I'd like to make:
For all the battlegrounds there are different strategies in play- it isn't just about killing the opponents (although that is one of the sweetest things).

For Warsong Gulch it is about capturing the enemy's flag and returning it to your base while preventing them from capturing your flag. There are a number of roles that one can play in this situation: Flag Carrier (helps if you have speed buffs like Shaman Ghost Wolf, Druid Travel Form or Cat Form with Feral Swiftness, Rogue Sprint), Flag Carrier Escort (Heals, Crowd Control, DPS), Flag Defender (Crowd Control, DPS). Any of these roles can be great fun!

Arathi Basin is all about capturing and holding resource nodes. There are 5 nodes to capture, each with it's good and bad points in terms of strategy (that is, ease of defense and as a vantage point). For Arathi Basin, keeping in groups is important, shifting between offense and defense as necessary. When people help each other and make sure to defend the nodes victory is assured and very very satisfying.

Alterac Valley is a tough one to describe simply. It is a full scale battle with various resource nodes and respawn points to capture and hold. But there are also alot of little side-quests that you can complete that will not only aid your honour/rep but also turn the tide of battle. There are various NPCs that can be brought into combat by acquiring enough drops from enemy players and NPCs. Come to think of it, I'm relatively new to AV so I'll leave WoWWiki to explain. As you can see it is very PvE as well as PvP.

I'm yet to try Eye of the Storm so I wont comment on it.

Don't be afraid to try the battlegrounds! If you're worried about "not being good enough" stick to defense at first or hide in a group when attacking. If you can heal, drop some heals on anyone who looks like they are contributing to the fight. The action is usually fast-paced, akin to when someone accidentally pulls too many mobs in an instance

Nice guide!

Just a couple of things to note. Personally, i hate BG's. Too many 15 year olds bickering and yelling at everyone to defend this or cap that. If you love your pvp (and i know a few of you do) your better off saving your tokens for lvl 70. Almost every lvl 60 epics you purchase will be replaced by quest greens & blues in Outlands pretty quickly. The only pvp i wouldn't mind doing is Arena style pvp. 2v2, 3v3 & 5v5 Arena rewards are very good, and quite easy to obtain, and, like Aphlixxo said, as a small guild, this may be the only way to get nice gear.

Here here! Very good points. I must admit I'm only after those pieces because they look f*ckin' awesome. I intend to go through the whole process again for 70 epics ;o)

The other thing i don't like about the pre 60 BG's, is they're full of twinks, and no, i don't mean young gay boys. It's completely unfair to go into a battle against a toon that has had 100's of gold spent on gear and enchants.

I don't mind doing it all over again either really, its good gear as a stopgap, could be stuck with really low level shoulders or something for a few levels otherwise if we don't gear up now, and I really want my frostwolf epic mount.