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?

Before TBC feral druids used to offer feral charge which gave much needed mobility to a flag carrier as well as actually being able to kill the people attacking them. With the growth of the anti spell abilities of warriors and the insane uses of intervene in WSG I think prot warriors will be the best carriers.

Edit: I claim bad tooltips and temporary insanity as my defense.

I believe the rumors about WSG league started when a developer mentioned off hand they had been thinking about it. This is not unusual they have been thinking about player housing for 2 years and its not in yet.

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.

Are shamans any good in WSG? Burst dps on any one target doesn't seem to be a huge factor, but I imagine some totems (earthbind, grounding) are probably still generally useful.

I don't have a lot of experience in WSG, but I've always felt that I've contributed much more as restoration than elemental.

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.

At the end of vanilla several top end alliance raiding guilds such as Loot FTW were the source of many headaches with their full t3 prot warrior + several paladins keeping BoF up. We weren't far behind in gear but once the game turned into a stallmate their warrior felt alot stronger than our feral druid.

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.

Where was the idea of a rated WSG mentioned? Is it purely speculation, or based on something said by a developer? This got me excited, so I hope it's valid.

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.

8 on defense, paladin and druid on offense. God I hated those games, with gear as it is, this tactic would only make it even more viable. Sure, the offense doesn't work every time, but you can get 1 cap per hour with a little FAPFAP help...

I would have loved this implemented... 1 year ago. But on my server, so many have quit post-TBC, all the old timer WSG pros have mostly blown away like tumbleweed. Rated WSG isn't exactly going to bring back people to the game in my opinion.

Late night premade WSG was probably some of the most fun I've ever had in this game. I remember getting the 2nd Perdition's Blade on the server and playing WSG for like 4 hours after the raid in a premade.

I see you are from the same battlegroup as I am, then you most likely know about our team which we called Bad Karma back then. We faced Loot FTW multiple times in WSG and even though our gear consisted mainly of t2+general/hwl rewards we have never lost a game versus Loot FTW or even struggled against them (we never lost a single WSG at all during 2-3 months of farming). As simplistic as this is going to sound, against teams that use a strategy like that preventing that warrior from regularly getting past the midfield was enough to easily win.

Now at level 70 I really don't see WSG being completely different besides the horde having paladins now. A flag carrier is still gonna be very vulnerable to the nuking power of an organised team. I am really looking forward to this rated WSG as the balance between classes is less of an issue with 10 man groups and the map is almost equal. If Blizzard manages to fix all the exploitable places to hide the flag I can see it becoming a very fun battleground to play. As Lord Beef said I am interested in what kind of strategies will emerge and what kind of matrixes are going to emerge but I think that group setup will be less of an issue as in Arena.

About group setup: our team used to run with a caster heavy group setup with 3 healers. Our flag carrier was usually a shaman. We had a hunter on defence and I would help out on midfield and fall back to defence if needed. Our midfield team consisted from 5-8 people depending on how our opponent played, by controlling the midfield we could easily prevent enemy flag carriers from even reaching our flag. I still believe that a setup using mainly magic dps is going to be very effective. Most teams rely on a high armour flag carrier which casters can tear through without any problems.

I've always thought prot warriors trumped druids as flag carriers. A druid is stronger alone but no good team is going to let a druid wander around free like that. A warrior is much stronger when they have support. Contrary to popular belief, if you get a group together on WSG weekend and queue at primetime the system should match you vs. organized teams most games, but when we do it we just constantly 3 - 0 everyone because we have a huge gear advantage. That's probably the biggest problem with rated WSG. How many teams on a given BG can match a full T6 (or equivalent) flag carrier who can swap into any kind of resistance gear and nine others with gladiator and t6 gear? I guess WSG would change a good deal with ratings attached to it, but it would have to be some major changes to make PvE gear anything other than a huge advantage.

A metagame would likely evolve.

At level 60, a few casters (specifically fire mages) could gib any flag carrier by using a few timers and force a flag drop.

At level 70 with resilience in place and massively higher health pools you can't instantly burn someone down, you have to make the damage unhealable by adding in mortal strike or wound poison, similar to the 4dps arena teams you see today.

A magic dps heavy team would undoubtedly do well, but could be bested by a team designed to take out cloth casters. In theory this would involve rogues, hunters, and warriors though how viable that would be remains to be seen

That is true and those are teams we used to struggle against back then but having a hunter/warrior and myself as a rogue or sometimes even 2 rogues did give us an overall balanced setup capable of dealing with most team setups, even those that where build to destroy cloth, we just had our midfield team consist mainly of caster dps because they where most effective in stopping a flag carrier if you combined it with a warrior to put on mortal strike. I wonder how this kind of setup works now though, I believe that with resilience in place caster teams are still favoured because they are less limited by resilience then heavy physical teams. In any case this rated WSG definatly looks interesting and depending how they do the rewards it might just revive my favourite battleground.

Yeah I'd agree. I'd certainly love to see it happen, for all battlegrounds really.

Okay I'm going to devolve into a rant for a minute, so forgive me.

With raiding and arenas there's a general philosophy of "Play well, surround yourself with others who play well, have good teamwork and you can get good rewards. Either better rewards than your less talented peers, or the same rewards but earned much faster". Being a player in a top guild I enjoy this as this lets me get lots of great purps. I can stroll into tier 6 content, spend 8 hours a week clearing it and typically walk away with a new item. I can play arena for an hour or two a week and get a new item about every other week.

In battlegrounds I lose this completely. It takes me the same amount of time and effort to earn items from honor as just about anybody else. I have to slog through battlegrounds and earn honor no faster than the mage with 5k health that runs into the enemy pack like a retard. (Well okay slightly faster since I'll get more HKs while alive)

I would love for it to be such that if I kill strong competition in battlegrounds that I'm rewarded with more honor points per time spent, and I would love to be faced against strong competition more frequently.

Some sort of option where I could do "ranked wsg" where the opponents would be matched to my skill/gear ratio (much more tightly than currently, even if it meant longer matchmaking) but the honor earned would be much higher would be awesome.

In summary, QQ I want to try moonkin in arenas without having to put 3 days /played into AV first.

I may be alone with this feeling, but are you 100% sure that direct items are the only driving force for people to play games? I would bet from past experience that even if rated WSG offered ladder ranking, it would be enough for many people to attend. I just personally cant believe in this power of purples. Even if it was only title based competition, there would be plenty of teams fighting. Edit: Why are people playing Stracraft? It doesnt give you epic items.

As I said, maybe that is just me.

You're right. Currently items are the only driving force for me to play battlegrounds BECAUSE I feel it's no longer fresh and fun, due to the lack of high end play. Arenas are more entertaining because of the ladder and thus I'm involved in more than one bracket, instead of only playing in whatever bracket yielded me the most points. A rated ladder would make it fun even without making the rewards easier to get.

That said, it's not an either/or situation. Increased honor would just be another incentive to get people involved in the ladder, and the fun created by competition could actually get people to play them past the point where they stop earning rewards.

With items I don't mean a full set like arena gives for example, but some reward or a special title for being high in the ladder just like arenas currently give is a good incentive for people to push for being high in the ladder.