Spoiler alert: PvP is fucked at the moment. I could post reviews about Hunters and their ability to essentially kill a target with a single cooldown regardless of the target's defenses, but I think that the following complaint and response from a player and a blue speaks for itself:

393 k chaos bolt crit in Arathi basin and I have 55 % dmg reduction

Chaos Bolt always crits and requires considerable build up time.

Now, I do not want to hype this response up too much, but this feels like the blue acknowledging that that is more health than most players currently have on live, it is a single spell, and they are pretty much okay with a single spell doing that damage because it requires a lot of build-up. Maybe I am the crazy one here, but it seems to me that the consideration for Chaos Bolt's "considerable build up time" is pretty silly. For those who are not up with their Warlock play, you need only cast Incinerate (their primary nuke) three times to use a Chaos Bolt that can do more than a player's full health. This is absolutely insane to me; I have to use my direct damage attacks a minimum of three times (and sometimes as much as five) to land my hardest-hitting direct damage attack, and it will never do more than 100k on a player (in fact, right now it is hitting more like 50k on players who have 350k hp).

I do not want to get too deep into it here, but Blizz has done poorly so far this expansion in terms of PvP balance. Warriors, Hunters, and Warlocks are all hitting too hard, all healers except Priests have infinite mana in 2s (although this may be due to the fact that Feral's damage is so poor right now), and there is generally too much CC that does not share diminishing returns. Warrior+RDruid is basically the best 2s team right now (aside from Hunter+Hunter, which is unbeatable) because the Druid will never run out of mana, the Warrior does the second best burst and the best sustained damage in the game, and the Druid has a 5sec stun, 9s of Cyclone, and an 8s instant-cast AoE Fear.

The thing that makes the least amount of sense aside from all this is that just about everyone is at their damage-reduction cap. That is, you start off at level 90 with 40% damage reduction and you can get that as high as about 55%; Guntir and I are both at around 50% damage reduction now, and Warlocks are still hitting me for 300k Chaos Bolts and Hunters are killing Guntir in a Silencing Shot with their Stampede (call all pets from the stables). Additionally, everyone is going to be picking up another 15% damage done to players as they get more and more PvP gear, so damage will actually be going UP.

Shit's busted.

On a side note, there are two new BGs: one has mine carts involved and is stupid; the other has a really fun deathmatch style game-play where players have to pick up orbs and survive. The longer the player has the orb (and the closer to the center of the map that player is), the faster that team gains resources in a race to 1600. I did not think that this sounded like much fun but when I actually got into one of these bgs, I found it to be VERY entertaining.

So, Guntir and I dinged 90 last night. This grind seemed different than grinds in the past. Perhaps I am just not as in love with WoW as I once was, but I feel like there was this huge anticipation in the past for hitting the highest level and working through zones and getting gear and run-on sentences; now all these things just annoy me. Then I start picking holes in things and start looking for annoyances.

Well, I have found one. Guntir and I ding 90, and we port back to Orgrimmar with the naive notion that that will be where the honor vendors are. Nope, sorry. We get back there and the honor vendors have been removed. So, we start Googling about to try and find out to where these fellows have moved and there is basically no information out there. I tried wowhead to no avail, then tried wowdb to no avail, and eventually googled the phrase "where are the honor vendors in mop?" There was a link to a forum post where a guy shows some place, so I go there only to realize that that is the Alliance honor vendor area. Finally, we find the Horde version and it is on the big wall no where near the major city (of which I have not yet bothered to learn the name). That was annoying.

Since I basically dinged, bought the honor helm/gloves, and logged for the night, I do not even have a grasp of how Dream of Cenarius plays yet. We will probably start doing arenas in the next day or two, but I wanted to get a post out this week with something. I will post again when I have a few games under my belt.