I Still Miss Wintergrasp

Wintergrasp even with all the QQ'ers QQ'n about imbalance in numbers or buff was always a grand time throughout the duration or Wrath. Take over a workshop, man a canon in the fort or a tower, bulldoze that workshop in that demolisher you just built (until they took that out). Defend/attack, go as ground support for the vehicles... There was a lot of options in how you played WG. We won some and we lost some, but it was always great. Even when the battle wasn't going on it was an actual world pvp zone filled with activity. It was there! On the Map! You could fly to it, you could fly around it, YOU DIDN'T ZONE INTO IT! Many players would stick around scrapping it out for so long after a battle that the next one would start. The rich ore, herb and later fishing resources available made sure even the timid players would be hanging around. I'd often stick around so long farming it up after the fight that the next one would begin. The music in WG between battles was somber, peaceful almost mournful like something you'd expect to hear after a truly grand battle. It really set the tone for this beautiful zone between the bloodshed. The battle itself was fun enough that people always got into it regardless of wanting to run a VoA or farm the elites after their victory. I loved WG from the first time to the last time and all throughout Wrath, regardless of what toon I was on, whether he had any pvp gear at all or not, if I was online and it was going on I was there.

Tol Barad really failed to capture anything that I loved about WG. TB was just a mindless zergfest until the clock ran out. Win or lose you most likely hit your hearth and got the hell out of there unless you stuck around to do the dailys. The actual zone was all but a ghost town 99% of the time outside of the battle. With WG when you won you saved that hour long hearth cd and headed to the fortress for the portal back to Dalaran and flew by or saw your fellow combatants and in most cases hung out for awhile! Players celebrated their victory in WG by shooting the shit. They kicked it on their epic mounts, dueled around with each other, pug'd VoAs, etc... The WG courtyard after a victory was just as populated as Dal or the Org AH. Even if you lost and that last wall was down you'd fly by a crowd of the opposing faction and their elite npc's just to use that portal! It was a little, but significant something. TB was instanced like so many other parts of Cata so it didn't really feel like it was an actual place. The lore sucked and was all but completely unexplained. You don't need grand lore to sustain something. That little journal of Archavon's was all you needed! That was hilarious, and with each patch we met another of his brothers. You weren't flagged upon entering TB so basically it was just another questing zone on pve servers. If you weren't grinding for some vendor item or maximizing your daily quests for guild rep there was really no purpose in going there at all.

TLDR: WG ruled, TB sucks. I will continue to wax nostalgic about WG for years. As for TB I can't really say I'm going to miss something that I never cared about or rarely spent any time doing.

First Aid - Should you even bother?

First Aid could use some updating, not to mention just about all professions, primary and secondary, but I'll focus just on First Aid for this post. WoW Insider's The Queue touched on this today and several of it's readers comments suggested improvements and advancements that could help make this secondary profession a little more interesting and capable. Instead of following suite and wildly speculating about how changes could improve things I'm just going to look at what First Aid is, here and now and break down whether or not it's even worth leveling up. Yes, there's a bunch of achievements you can rank up through the profession, one of which (Ultimate Triage) can actually be kind of fun to try to get and better yet is awesome when you didn't even realize it. But for actual function in game it really only reigns supreme in one area, PvP.

In Combat
The great benefit First Aid has is that bandages can be used in combat so that mostly throws it into the PvP category which also touches on it's unique feature that they can be used on other players regardless if they have the profession or not. Though in reality unless you have some amazing on the fly communication going on that other player will likely move the second you start using this 8-second cast-time based bandage hence interrupting it's effect. But for self heals during PvP this is where First Aid really shines, Those bandages can be a literal life saver when used after a perfectly timed CC. In addition, unlike a health potion which can only be used once after combat has started, you'll be able to bandage again after it's 1 minute cooldown is up regardless of dropping combat or not.  But it's not the only in combat self heal ability, there's actually a whole race our there with a bandage effect talent build right in.

Forsaken Racial
If you're Forsaken/Undead your Cannibalize can also be used while fighting and gives the benefit of regenerating mana as well, provided there's a fresh corpse around, which is pretty common in battlegrounds, but only rarely reliable or available in arenas. But out and about in the world questing or running dungeons you won't have to go too far to find, kill then eat a humanoid or undead npc. Beasts, demons, dragonkin can not be Cannibalized. So here's this a whole race on Azeroth who already have and even more power effect built into their character from level 1. No material gathering, no leveling, nada. Just eat away. No, I didn't forget Gift of the Naaru. But a 20% heal with a minute longer cooldown doesn't even come close to working as a replacement for a bandage. But you play Alliance or you play Horde but you'd never even consider rolling an Undead? Well luckily you have a 4 in 10 shot of playing something way more ubiquitous than a Forsaken.

Healing Classes
If you play any healing class in any spec then like me you probably didn't bother leveling First Aid on them at all and never thought about it again. Many years ago I started leveling First Aid on my first alt, an Enhance Shaman. By level 20-something I realized that I still had a stack of Linen Bandages that I've never used so I stopped wasting my cloth to continue leveling it.  He's still sitting at 55/150 First Aid.

Outside of Combat and Class Abilities
Outside of combat there's just so many more readily available options beside bandages. There's food! Cheap, plentiful, utterly common food. You don't even have to make an effort to get it seeing as most humanoid mobs will drop some after you kill them.  Warlocks have Soul Harvest which when used after a Soul Burned Health Stone can take you from 10% health to full in half the time of eating. Precede that with a couple Life Taps and your down time is pretty much nil. Soul Burn is kind of a personal gripe with me since I'm a Forsaken warlock. They basically rolled one of my racial's into my class so eh no big whoop. Though on my priest Cannibalize is still awesome for 5 mans when I just eat on the go and never have to bother a mage for water, speaking of which... Mages have glyphed health regeneration through Evocation, +40%! Actually, every class has some sort of health regeneration talent or ability. Most aren't as available, reliable or convenient as just eating, but Recuperation, Spirit Mend, Enrage Regeneration, Blood Tap/Lichborne+Death Coil, etc... You get the idea.

So outside of PvP is there really a reason to waste all that cloth and time on First Aid? Not for this player. Embersilk, even as this point of the expansion is still too valuable for me to squander on bandages that'll go unused. Even my main who is nearing 13,000 achievement points isn't even getting any for his Preparing for Disaster. He'll get it eventually, but I'll wait for MoP when those bandages will once again grant skill up points.

The only problem with the new Darkmoon Faire - PvPer's

Every time I've gone to Darkmoon Island since it launched last night I zone into an epeen match between at least 2 dudes and several others that need to chime in. This results in me adding about a half a dozen new names to my ignore list. Thank you Blizz for upping the cap on the ignore list awhile back! While in a capital city I couldn't care less about the idiocy of Trade Chat and my home realm is a lot worse than others I've played on. Medium population, not a lot of capable pvp/raiding guilds, so a lot of people just sitting around bored and lonely and needing attention. We have several Trade Chat stars who've been trolling the /2 for years on a pretty consistent basis. But that's in Org or SW, this is Darkmoon Faire Island.

In a game with War in the title that revolves mostly around a lot and a lot of killing, the new Darkmoon Faire is a warm fresh breath of dare I say, family orientated gameplay. And it's fun! All the classic midway/carnival games are represented, there's daily quests for the Faire that grant rewards like prize tickets for pets/mounts/novelty items and even profession skill up points! There's rare and exotic beasts on exhibit from all around Azeroth and Outlands, tasty treats and drinks to enjoy, a dancing bear, pony and ram rides, a fortune teller who gives a sweet +5% dmg buff, and the fishing around the island is very lucrative. All in all the new Darkmoon Faire is a grand addition to WoW and another wonderful surprise from patch 4.3 (possibly my favorite patch in years). DMF will keep new and old players alike entertained for a very long time to come, either as a small diversion to the usual questing and dungeons or for the lengthy pursuit of one of the new pets and mounts available. It's just too bad this 'other element' is also here thanks to the Deathmatch Pavilion.

Don't get me wrong, I love that Blizzard is putting an effort into 'world pvp' again. As soon as I got to the Deathmatch Pavilion I swapped in my pvp spec/gear and hopped into the fray, finally bowing out after my rez timer hit that 2 minute limit haha. My issue is that I just don't think it should be here. Put it back in Gurubashi and the other world arena's and give them their own separate chat channel once they enter the area so questers, passersby, revelers and the rest of us don't have to listen to them. Then again, its' very possible that these guys will eventually get bored with this arena just like all the others and this will all be a non-issue in the next couple months. We'll see.