Before the Battlegrounds

With the revised PvP/Honor system in the latest WoW patch, I (along with just about everyone else) am battling away to get myself enough honor for a shiny reward or two, so I thought I’d look back a bit…

When the original Honor system was introduced, giving “points” for kills and assigning ranks based on those points, with progressively shinier rewards as you went up in rank, there were no battlegrounds. Not being on a PvP server, this meant there wasn’t much opportunity to get honor, but the shiny rewards were tempting, so anyone “cruising for a bruising” would head to a common spot: Tarren Mill.

For a typical Tarren Mill fight, the Alliance (almost always outnumbering the Horde) would line up on the road near the mill, and, en masse, slowly shift forward. The Horde would line up in the town, and also slowly shift forwards, both sides cagily staying out of range of each other, an occasional skirmisher darting in a ranged attack then heading back to his own lines, sometimes a particularly brave (and insane) melee class launching themselves into a mass of the enemy and being promptly slaughtered. Gradually the Horde would be pressed back towards the town until a member of the Alliance got too close, at which point the NPC guards would go bonkers and fling themselves upon the Alliance, who’d fall apart in disarray, hotly pursued by the Horde for a variable distance, then everyone would form back up for another go.

This was, frankly, rubbish. Especially for a melee class, firing the odd missile now and again between insane rushes. It was probably the closest PvP got to a “real” battle, from my limited reading on pre-gunpowder warfare, hardly a bundle of laughs. So after a few visits to Tarren Mill, and enough kills to make Sergeant (which gave a handy discount from vendors), PvP was again forgotten until… battlegrounds.