Ahhh… 40’s. An “age” when you’ve got a good solid footing under you, you’re strong, you can take the beats for quite a while longer and maybe even survive attacks to fight another opponent before being sent back to the Spirit Healer.
I hit 40 some time in the last week and immediately went to Razor Hill in Durotar to buy my Troll her turquoise-colored raptor mount. Because of my Sargeant rank in the Battlefields, I got a 10 or 20% reduction on the price of both the mount training and the mount itself. Cool! That leaves me a few gold left over for training the new skills that came along with level 40 for hunters.
It’s been a long trek to 40, it feels like. I started just after Christmas and have played this character steadily, daily, since then. I know there are other players who would play a lot longer than 2 months to get their character to level 40, and even play a lot more player hours to get there than I have, but still, it’s a long trek to get to this point where I feel happy, comfortable and powerful.
My adventures in Warsong Gulch are MUCH better now that I’m out of that ghostly 30-39 range which, on my Realm of Zul’jin, seems to be very devoid of battlefield activity, except on the weekend, and even then, only in the evenings.
In fact, one of the first couple WSG’s in the 40-49 range I went into, I came out with 2300 honor points BEFORE counting the honor I’d get for the Honorable Kills I attained during that round. Considering a full week of Battling in the 30-39 range got me a total of 4006 honor points, that recent round was insane.
I’m hoping that I’ll at least have my rank rating move up to be in the upper 50% of Horde Sargeants in Zul’jin this time, because I’ve been hovering in the lowest 25% for the last few weeks, especially as I ventured through my 30’s. I don’t expect a promotion but that would be a nice surprise ;)
Life is getting more fun in the Battlefields in the 40’s I noticed as well. Even though I’m only 40-41, I’m really not getting killed as much as I expected I would. There are more people playing defense, and the offensive groups tend to work together better in our team. I’ve even been noticed and acknowledged by regular Battlefielders of the senior ranks in my range, and I’ve been given party invite privs among an elite list of those given those privs.
Occasionally I’m the raid leader, especially because I have the BGInvite WoW UI Addon that makes the process super-easy. I’ve got it hot-keyed, so when I press F2, invites are all sent out, a ’say’ is said to let folks know to leave their parties if they’re already in one, and the party automatically switches to a raid to allow more than 5 total members. Then when I press F3 after folks have joined the party, everyone is given invite priv’s for new folks joining the battle.
Because I’m a Hunter, I’m generally away from the active fray and am able to invite people as soon as they join the battle without a problem. I can honestly say that when I’m the Raid Leader in the battlegrounds, nobody’s left out of the raid group unless they choose to be.
I STILL haven’t tried AB, but maybe this weekend I’ll get into that. I hear that in the 50-59 range in Zul’jin there’s very little WSG but a lot of AV and AB, so I guess I’d better get used to how the one I can enter, works!