So this is Christmas
And what have you done?

Alterac Valley, mostly. What with it being bonus honour weekend, in between assorted family festivities I’ve managed about 724 rounds[1] of AV.

[1] not to scale.

I have to say, post 2.3 Alterac Valley doesn’t seem so different to the previous version. On our battlegroup, at least, there’s seldom any defence, and when there is it tends to be from the Alliance. Standard issue zergs are still the order of the day, the typical ending being a narrow Alliance win. Every now and again some decent defence will net a win with all Alliance towers intact (though seldom with Balinda alive as well), though those battles tend to last somewhat longer, sometimes ending with Horde reinforcements gradually being whittled down in a pitched battle rather than Drek’Thar being defeated. Ironically the greatest honour per minute actually comes from a couple of occasions of meeting Horde premades, 30+ players from the same server, who ride directly up to Vanndar (stopping briefly to take out Balinda) and take him out. As all Alliance towers are still standing, that’s a hefty amount of honour (better still if Galvanger goes down) in a few minutes.

So the honour points have racked up, enough for a couple of bits of Vindicator’s leather armour, with a final piece to come tomorrow (so long as the estimated honour total isn’t wildly off) as an extra Christmas present, and that’ll probably more or less wrap up my brief return to Azeroth. It’s been a bit of fun, but not that much has changed in the last six months. It’s on to 2008 to see what that brings…