Battleground rep by the numbers

So you're eyeing that shiny Conqueror or Justicar title for the battlegrounds, and you need rep. Chances are if you PVP at all, you're already Exalted or close with Frostwolf or Stormpike, and heck, that was easy, so gaining exalted with your respective Warsong Gulch or Arathi Basin faction should be cake, right?

Yeah, not so much.

Because you get a little reputation for every enemy NPC killed in Alterac Valley, or a lot if you take out Balinda and Vann or Galv and Drek, and there are so many quests in AV, it's pretty easy to get Exalted before you can even complete some of the other achievements (in fact, while I'm not sure due to my head start on both my mains, I believe that if you do all the quests and kill at least Balinda or Galv every match, you could probably hit Exalted before you even get the Alterac Valley Veteran achievement).

Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch, however, have no NPCs, so you have to be at least partly successful to gain any reputation.

So here's an expanded version of the little guide I wrote for myself, since I am shooting for Conqueror on Ideale and maybe Ahami as well. At least it'll get me out of Alterac Valley for a bit!

Arathi Basin
Arathi Basin has one bonus that Warsong Gulch does not: quests. Completing and turning in the quests grants 500 reputation each. In addition, you gain 10 rep for every 200 resources gathered (or 10 for every 150 on battleground weekends). That's 100-130 rep per win, and the battles go much more quickly so even if you lose, you're not spending too much time futilely. If you do the available quests, you'll need to win 312-405 battles to hit Exalted. If you lose but still put in a good show in most of the battles, that's about 500-600 games played.

Ideale needs 367 wins at 100 rep per win, plus one quest.
Ahami needs 397 wins at 100 rep per win, plus all quests.

Game Plan: Run two matches per day, every day, on at least one toon.

Warsong Gulch
Warsong Gulch is definitely the harder of the two. WSG matches can go on for a fair amount of time, and even if you win, you only gain 105 rep per game (or 135 on WSG weekends). This means that if you only play on WSG weekends, you need 934 flag captures to reach Exalted; if you miss the weekends, you need 1200. Ouch. That's 312-405 games if you win every game.

Ideale needs 1144 flag captures.
Ahami needs 1181 flag captures.

Game Plan: Cry. Just kidding. Try and shoehorn in a win a day so I don't get stuck at Friendly or something horrible when I finish up AB.

Can you tell I sort of hate Warsong Gulch?

That's a lot of time in both battlegrounds, but I think I can do it. I really want the title for Ideale, which means my best bet may be doing as many of the two battlegrounds before she hits 80 as possible. Horde in the pre-level cap brackets in Nightfall tend to be those who actually enjoy PVP, thus we work together better and have a higher success rate. End-game drops down to a 50-50 proposition. I don't intend to stop questing or anything, but I could spend half an hour in the battlegrounds before heading off to quest easily.

Ahami is already 80 and since PVE healing kind of bores me, I've pretty much just been doing dailies. So I will ditch a couple dailies and hit the battlegrounds with her more often (she's just barely Revered in AV, too, so I can keep running that; Ideale is already Exalted with Frostwolf).

Ideas to Keep It From Sucking
- Take advantage of the battleground weekends. If it's AB or WSG weekend, ignore the other battlegrounds (even the daily, if your time is limited!) and cram as many games as you can in.

- Find friends to run with. Chances are there are others on your server going for the title (and other achievements) as well, and if nothing else you can commiserate between matches. Team up with them as much as possible if you work well together, and this has the added bonus of improving your success rate. I watched a five-man premade in Alterac Valley defend and recap all four towers against the 15 or so Alliance who slipped past our front lines today. A few folks got their Frostwolf Perfection achievement that match. Ran into a priest and mage in AB who defended the Lumber Mill alone the entire game without losing it once, despite groups of 5 or so Alliance heading up there every few minutes.

- Get guildmates involved. One of VeCo's Alliance PVPers got the Battlemaster title (world fifth, world first paladin) with the help of his two guilds and in-game friends. Many of them got a bunch of the PVP achievements in the course of helping him out, and they all said it was a lot more fun that way.

- Even if you don't find friends from your own realm, work as a team with whoever you end up with. If nothing else, the exercise in strategy will give you something to do. And if you get a cooperative group (you know, the kind who doesn't type insults and cursing in all-caps while trying to singlehandedly cap the stables), you might be able to work on some of the more difficult defense achievements. In fact, if you're on around the same time every day, you might start running into familiar faces; when Ahami was 59, I spent a couple of weeks in Alterac Valley with her before leveling for some reason (I forget why). Because I usually queue up between 1:30-4 a.m., I was running into the same group every day, from several different realms in the battlegroup, and we won about 95 percent of our matches because we had a strategy and just trusted each other to listen and respond when someone said, "We could use some more defense at Galv" or "We're short healers on offense."

- Work on the other achievements. Ignore the rep at first, and work on stuff like Disgracin' the Basin and Supreme Defender and, of course, the Veteran achievements you get for 100 wins. By the time you've exhausted those, you'll be much closer to your goal (hopefully, anyway!).

- Spend your Marks of Honor. I have no idea if they stack past 100 now, because every time I get close, I go shopping. Ideale has several tabards. Ahami just got herself the Frostwolf Howler (and another achievement!). You can get six mounts via Marks of Honor, the five faction mounts and your respective AV mount; work toward the Albino Drake. I'm going to turn in Marks for honor on both of them as well until they both have the blue PVP set and the off-set pieces, which could take a while since each piece is 50k-60k honor. These are goals that can be worked on a bit here and there, so (like with the achievements) you feel like you're accomplishing something.

- Don't push it. If you keep working toward it, it'll happen, but don't burn yourself out. Take time out for exploring, professions, RP, world PVP/Wintergrasp, heroics/raiding, arenas, or whatever else floats your boat. What's the point of having a fancy title if you burn yourself out on PVP or even the game getting it?