As many have probably guessed, I am having a bit of trouble stepping back into the arena after my hiatus given that my gear is "old-n-busted" as compared to the current season's gear. That being said, I have been grinding honor. Maybe it is just my broken memory, maybe it is just me being a cynic, but I remember BGs being a lot more annoyingly bad in the past. I have had a great number of BGs where I will be sitting at LM in AB and calling out in bg-chat "inc farm" or "4 inc bs" etc, and the team will, without any protest or conflicting words, rotate properly and defend the node. The only exception to this rule is in EotS where my team will insist on fighting over mid in a 2-2 bout with me holding the flag at FR saying "I am not capping; push MT and stop fighting at mid".

By the way, I missed when this happened, but apparently the scoreboard informs player specializations now. Fantastic! I have seen a number of addons that print summaries as the BG is about to begin showing how many healers the opposing team has and how many my team has. Guntir tells me that this was a ninja addition in one of the posts between 4.0.6 and 4.3 (the builds I have played). Technically, it should not really matter how many healers your opposition has, but seeing that your team of 15 has 4 healers is a pretty welcomed sight which, in my view, fills the team with a bit of confidence - especially when you see the opposing team has one or fewer.

Another aspect to BGs that was added in my absence is the "role" indicator. While it is largely useless in EotS and AB, knowing who the tank is and who the healers are in AV, WSG, TP, and to a lesser extent IoC is extremely helpful. In the last few days, I switched my spec over to my "tanking" feral build (which long-time readers will recall was an attempt at adding survivability to my double-healer+Feral team back in June) to run flags. Basically, I take Natural Reaction and one point in Thick Hide over Primal Madness and an additional point in Fury Swipes. In essence, I get 18% damage reduction in Bear Form, rage when I dodge, a bit more dodge, and some minor armor, and chance to be crit reduction in exchange for 20 energy from TF and Berserk. With a pocket healer, this spec makes me nigh-invincible now that I am around 4200 resilience (as compared to ~3500 last week).

Another thing that shocked me was my discovery that the season 11 honor weapon was only a 6 ilvl improvement from my season 9 tier 2. I was grinding to try and replace my weapon thinking it would be a decent little upgrade, but I have basically given up that idea. It will be another few weeks before I have "earned" enough conquest points before I am allowed to buy my weapon, but I am looking forward to seeing that upgrade. Additionally, I think all the kinks are worked out now and we should be running a kittycleave variant this week on Wednesday. Seeing the damage potential from Warrior+Feral in bgs (random warriors), I am excited at the prospect.