Recently I’ve been focusing on setting up two sets of gear: a decent PvE set and a decent PvP set.  As such, my usual WoW days involve doing my garrison stuff, doing my apexis daily, doing a quick LFR, and then doing some battlegrounds.

So.  Alterac Valley.

I don’t know how it is on other battlegroups – or if battlegroups are even a thing anymore (probably not) – but here on Shadowburn the Horde is truly abysmal at Alterac Valley.  Just utterly awful.  My usual Alterac Valley experience, as Horde, involves starting out okay, thinking “hey, we’re not doing too badly this time around,” pulling up the map, and seeing a line of blue towers and graveyards all the way down the length of the entire battleground.

Then we lose soon after.

I refuse to remove AV from my list like everyone else does because I still love AV; something about it is deliciously old-school and I usually enjoy it anyway.  But let’s just say I don’t ever go into it expecting a win, because we never get one.

So myself and Mister Pike were in AV yesterday, and it was going about as well as can be expected for us – Alliance had, oh, about 400 reinforcements left and us Horde had like 120.  Just another average day on Horde, to be honest.

So there we were, all of us Hordies spawning back at Drek’thar (not spawning in the cave was a plus, at least), and the Alliance was getting ready to rush in and finish the job.  Then Mr. Pike said something in chat that struck a nerve.  He said “I don’t care if we lose, I’m going to make the Alliance fight for every last inch.”

And for whatever weird reason, everyone in the battleground chat started to agree.  Person after person piped up about how “oldschool” that mentality was, how “Horde” it was… and how we should definitely do that.

And so the Alliance never got to Drek’thar.  Not once.  It was all forty of us at our choke point vs. all forty of them, and it was glorious.  An absolute bloodbath.  We were under no delusions that we would win this battle of attrition, of course.  We were realists.  It was already a loss.

But you better believe that we were gonna make it take like twenty minutes.

For those twenty minutes we gave the Alliance hell.  We refused to give them the satisfaction of a quick, easy victory, because screw that.  It was oldschool AV at its finest, and battleground chat was full of people talking how awesome this was and how it was taking all of us back.  There were even GGs going around when it was all over and our reinforcements finally, inevitably, dwindled down to zero.

And that, my friends, is why I still love AV.  It’s why I’m gonna keep queuing for it even if we’re terrible at it.  I’m looking forward to a few matches later today.

Because win or lose, it’s Alterac Feckin’ Valley, and if there was ever a truly legendary battleground, then this one is it.