In a Battleground, you see the enemy, the red tag indicating a target, and the hunter in you unfurls, your animalistic instinct to fight rises, nostrils flare, adrenalin pumps through your body, pupils dilate, and your hand grips your mouse in fevour, your focus becomes narrow.
You want to chase them down – You want to feel the last dregs of their health taken away by your spell, your weapon swipe – and hear their final cry as their pixels collapse at your feet in a heap.
*snap
That was the sound of the elastic from your BG Blinkers smacking into the back of your head
Sometimes not killing someone is strategically better.
So here are some reasons not to kill someone in a BG – Ignore them, or CC them instead.
1. They will rez full health and mana – quite possibly in several seconds and only a few feet away.
2. Your’re paying attention to them rather than doing what you should be doing. Look! your flag just ran past, or the tower just capped under your nose.
3. They have no mana anyways. ( doesn’t mean that they aren’t dangerous, just that another target could be more deserving of your attention)
4. They are actually AFK standing in the flag room. Killing them might wake them up that something important has been going on, and that they need to pay attention. An afk enemy is one less person you have to deal with, and one more than for the enemy to get frustrated over.
5. CC pee’s people off more – encourages them to play irrationally. Sheeped, Turtled, Catted, Slowed, Frozen.
6. You stop getting decent honor on kills if they keep dying so much and you try to farm them.
Edited as per below comment about DR. I would swear.. that I read something about Hk’s getting DR
I tried to come up with 8 – didn’t quite work.
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Pugnacious Priest's Warcraft Blog 
2. Your <==== paying attention to them
You're
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Feel free to delete this post.
Great blog by the way.
Cheers for the correction – and thanks 🙂
7. Because they are a Gnome blogger with new keybindings…
8. Because they are a Gnome blogger that is trying to take a screenshot of you…
Farming them for honor does work, DR on honor from 1 player went away long ago.
Mmmmm in 2.4 they removed it but I am trying to find a reference to where I would swear did something similar to dimishing returns. If I can’t find it – will edit.
Their is dr, but unless you are farming them its not a concern.
But it works for me. Nothing like walking up to the flag in AB and capping it while the mindlessly stare into space. You really want to kill me as the flag carriers healer in wsg? Fine but by the time you do he will have capped the flag. 3-4 of you want to kill me in SOTA on the beach and none of you hop in your vehicle? Again its just fine with me
And 7: because they draw more idiots to their current location if they are alive. So if they are somewhere they should NOT be (like the bridge of AB), they are better left alive to let more of his kind go to the bridge, leaving all the flags to you.
Too late I read your warning!
AB… Rogue at BS… Worth a go, he’ll have backup, I’ll need backup…
Dead…
Mmm look at scoreboard…
Report.
Then there was the bunch in SotA last night… Bludgers!
I sometimes take a prot paladin into battlegrounds. I’m particularly fond of Arathi Basin. The sheer *damage* you can do to another team by tying up 5+ members of their team for the minute it takes them to kill you through all your cooldowns, and the 30 seconds it takes them to get back into position, is incredible. It’s 5v1, guys, you’re *going* to win the battle, but the war? Not so much.
We took three PvP healers from our into an EotS, once. – about three minutes of frantic healing into the battle later, we realised that 10-11 of the opposing team were fighting the three of us for one (currently contested) base – leaving the rest of our team 12 vs 4-5, dominating the rest of the map.
Some targets are bad targets. Be a bad target…
I like your strategic thinking!
I had a couple of people on the Alliance side (I was Horde) who would always emote me with hugs and kisses in the cities. Now call me a carebear but if I happened to see them in BG I would let them go about their business unless it was going to result in a terrible Horde loss! Often they would dance and bow! Shame I’m not so nice in arena! : )