I saw this mentioned on a couple of PvP blogs, but couldn't find much other information on it (on this site).

1) Anyone have info or a link on it? When are we getting it, how will the rating system work (by team or by guild), etc?
2) Any thoughts on general strategy or team composition? In the past, I know we've had success with using PvE-geared prot warriors as flag carriers. Feral druids might be more popular in PvP as well due to this change. Hunters are often dominant in open-field battlegrounds like WSG. Will paladins be useful for anything besides blessing of freedom?

Intervene has a 30 second cooldown, druids are still the #1 runners.

Druids can run flags with a lot less support than a prot warrior, Druids can run flags faster, and are more versatile. It's no contest unless you like to play the 10-man flag-train of death, or unless you really like to turtle.

If the other team's Paladins are asleep - sure. But a few mages and JoJ can make quick work of a Druid.

In pvp in general, healing wins. So, resto spec shamans dropping wf behind a team of arms warriors is very useful =)

2 years of horde WSG domination, at least on my server/battlegroup, thanks to windfury advantage and a second class with its own speed boost (ghostwolf).

Rated WSG is probably a long ways off, but it sure is fun to think about. I think the allure of WSG is that it offers a lot of classes/specs which are currently considered low men on the PvP totem pole an opportunity to shine.

That being said, I'm not sure warsong can work in wow 2.0, given its current rules. Prot warrior flag carriers with 400 resilience, 19k health, passive 16% spell damage reduction, 10 second CD spell reflect, intervene, 15 second CD intercept, etc., are a beast we just haven't ever experienced in competitive WSG to this point. The potential exists that games could be extremely long, boring, and frustrating.

But with some tweaks (thinking out loud: 5 caps wins, players can cap even if their team's flag has been taken, any player who has capped the flag twice can no longer carry the flag), a revitalized competitive WSG scene has the potential to be a great boon to the game.

Pre-tbc with the grouping of the battlegroups, there was a BG9 warsong league that was extremely competitive and alot of fun until general TBC fever and attrition hit and the league ended up flopping.

But I've long felt that warsong was the best battleground for competition and a rated WSG would be a blast. But for just motility uses a druid is irreplaceable as a flag carrier in my opinion, although they are far more hurt by itemization than warriors.

The best thing about rated BG's would be that good teams could get good games consistently, rather then smashing pugs all night.

The second best thing would be that specs that just don't perform well in arena's could have a place to shine - specifically feral druids and prot warriors, as well as hunters.

If done right, this would open up a whole new end game, and keep a lot of subscribers around.

Yeah I do have to admit the game was a very different beast for horde vs. alliance back then. Basically our counter to paladins was 2x elemental shaman with pretty heavy pve gear who were our scary burst factor, and our druid tended to use reflectors and other tricks(faps became more and more common at the end) to be extremely slippery.

Judgement of justice would be a pretty difficult thing depending on defense set-up, but the majority of the time there wasn't a paladin around the flag room so it would depend on how able our mid group we be with motion to cover him.

That's because WSG has and always will be about team support. The strong teams utilizing the 10 man "pain train" and a well geared protection warrior will beat out a team with a silly druid out running his own team just because he has a skill that allows him to move fast.

They've talked briefly about guild vs guild battlegrounds for the expansion but I don't think real concrete information exists yet.

I think if they do create rated warsong, there will be emergent strategies that come out of the woodwork that wouldn't be apparent beforehand. We'd see a lot of interesting matrices, many of which counter each other, similar to arena trends.