My Mage finally dinged 80 – and would have to admit that the closest thing to a Dungeon boss she has ever seen has been Drek in Alterac Valley. I then get to actually try for a real spell rotation. I also admit making my spellsteal button hotkeyed has made my Bg experience a little more fun on a squishy fire mage with only 100 resilience.
My mage had been stuck on 79.5 for quite some time, and not really interested in questing, I had been gradually leveling her in her 70’s by doing dailys and easy quests as I went about herbing, but then after leveling my Hunter quite sucessfully in Alterac Valley, and getting 12 levels in a week. 56-68 ( see pic below) of which a large amount of that leveling was done in Alterac Valley. I thought I would try my hand at seeing if I could level my Mage to 80 in BG’s.
My Favourite BG would have to be Arathi Basin, then Eye of the storm. I didn’t want to play what could end up being a long drawn out AV and WSG is only good in small doses. So I queued for AB and Eye, I found that my waiting times were sometimes long for those two, and when I did get into one, the BG would be uneven, and I would lose miserably and therefore get no, or little xp. Leveling in a Bg on that toon was looking like it would impossible. At first I thought that maybe we were really terrible in that bracket, then I saw how many Alteracs were running. Not one BG like AB or Eye, or the couple that Strand had ( because it was the holiday weekend this weekend) but twelve seperate Alterac Valleys were running at the same time on one count.
Why?
You kill Galve , you get xp, cap a tower you get xp, win the Bg xp ect. There are a lot more opportunities for xp when you are winning in AV to get xp. Even if you don’t win your chances of getting some xp are higher. So the secret to leveling in BG’s from at least my Hunter and a Mages experience has been to do it in Alterac Valley. It took 5 Av’s to get me from 79.5 to 80. We lost one, and only got a small amount of Xp but we won the rest with varying degree’s of successful tower capping in each.
More than one person seems to have caught on to this revelation because of how many people are in AV, and how many aren’t in the other Bgs.
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Pugnacious Priest's Warcraft Blog 
I leveled my mage in AV from 76 to 80. a few casual AVs here and there, spell stealing, slowing, sheeping and freezing to my heart’s content. in worst cases, I’ve never had less then 200k xp per hour, with an average being about 400 to 500k. Best part is – you can just go in and instead of actually fighting, do all your AV quests (especially good if BG is not going well). you’ll still get xp for every tower and kill. blizzard was making noises about nerfing experience gain in AV soon. so far they haven’t, but its ridiculous as to how easy it is compared to solo questing or other battlegrounds :/.
on a plus side, Av taught me a great deal of how to be more mobile and quick thinking on my mage 😛
It also helps that in the 70’s bracket, you’re teamed with sometimes heavily geared level 80 toons that maybe even be in a small premade group, whereas in the 60’s bracket, nobody really has very good gear and the matches can become those stalemate aoe-fests. My method was to queue for a BG just after grabbing a bunch of quests. I’d enter, and right away you can tell if your side is going to win or at least cap some towers, or whether the match is going to drag on for 30+mins. If the match looked like a no xp gain, I’d just afk out and continue questing until my deserter wore off, then repeat. Leveled my druid from 70 – 80 in about two weeks of only playing a few hours every night this way…(about 3 to 4 hours per level). Of course I found that once I could hit icecrown my xp gain shot up a lot higher by doing quests instead such as the ebon blade dailies, valhalas etc.
All in all it was absolutely wonderful being able to level up via BG’s because I was actually able to play with other people. The lower levels are pretty damn lonely and boring.
My rogue was stuck on 79.5 for a very long time too. At least 6 months. She had absolutely no resilience but I took her into AV and did my best to cap the mines and stealth my way to deserted towers to cap them.
I can’t get over how different AV is now. People don’t play to win, they play to earn XP. That’s not necessarily bad, and people are more willing to defend the towers that are capped, but there’s no unspoken agreement over who gets to cap which graveyards (I guess the enemy earns XP from capping those too?).
The games can last for a really long time too. In one AV I played we spent more time trying to summon the giant forest lord dude than win the map. We did summon him (with 200 armor scraps or whatever) but unfortunately wore down the enemy down to 0 reinforcements not long after we summoned him.
Most fun I’ve had in AV in a long time.
Old post but I gotta say this. My Priest was lvl 51 2 days ago…now lvl 62. AV Call to Arms weekend. Each AV lost was about 30% XP and a win was a good 70%XP. Sometimes you would hope for 2-3 quick loses over a 20min win. All and all when your in the lower levels its best (to me) to just run around healing and fearing…as your miss alot of spells u cast on enemys. good luck!
what about getting gear when you are pvp leveling?
I wouldn’t want to do 100% leveling through Bg’s for that reason. Cherry pick quests, do some bargin AH shopping, some pvp gear from honor will certainly be useable if you are going to pvp more.