My rogue hit level 60, putting her at the bottom of the battleground bracket food chain once again. I suspected she would be relatively useless in a one-on-one situation against, say, a level 68 rogue, so I decided to stick with Alterac Valley until I gained a few levels.
So, this past Sunday (after deciding to put off working on my novel), I cleared my bags, queued for Alterac Valley, and went mining. (In between BG’s, I am mining and leveling engineering. I want rocket boots!). I noticed that I was about 7000 xp points into level 60, for which I need 290K xp total. Within a few minutes, the battleground popped and off I went.
After a victory for the Horde, it was back to mining and chatting with my guildmates. One of them asked how the battleground leveling experiment was going and I said, “great!” and glanced up at my xp bar. It was at 96,866 xp. 😮
Really? 90K for one battleground? Wait… had I run a partial BG in there, too? Or did I see that starting number wrong? (I listen to podcasts while I run BG’s, too, so sometimes I’m only half paying attention.) I jotted down the number and queued again. Here’s how the afternoon broke down once I started keeping track:
Starting: 96,866 xp
After AV#2: 123,384 (26,518 gained)
After AV#3: 190,360 (66,976 gained)
After AV#4: 256,862 (66,502 gained)
After AV#5: 289, 757 (32,895 gained)
Of these, AV#2 and #5 were partial battlegrounds where I was probably replacing folks that had been afk or dropped part of the way through. The Horde won all of them (woo!). That’s pretty good xp for 15-25 minutes worth of play.
I wondered if there might be diminishing returns as I level more, but according to wowwiki, it should continue to be rewarding, because boss kills and tower cap rewards are based on a percentage of the xp required to level. My numbers don’t quite mesh with theirs, given that I clearly got more than 20% of a level for a single AV win (twice!). In any case, it looks like running battlegrounds (particularly AV) is a viable way to level.
And, it’s fun. One of my guildmates teased me a bit about how I was spending my time (like, how could running BG”s over and over possibly be interesting), but I am loving it right now. Each battle presents a new challenge against new opponents that may or may not do what we expect. Sure, my teammates are sometimes obnoxious, whiny, and insufferable, but I either tune them out, zing right back, or take my frustrations out on the opponent. If it gets too annoying, I just take a break and work on crafting for a while. I much prefer all this to doing the Hellfire Peninsula quests again.
Outland Bound 