There are so few things that I actually have to do in WoW these days. Chasing achievements, for the most part, has grown stale for me and even daily quests are something I do only once or twice a week now. While I continue to raid, my guild has never gotten very far with hard modes--either in Ulduar, or in ToC. To be honest I'm not all that interested in pursueing hard mode achievements, though I will participate on attempts. And that's pretty much how the guild raiding has been going lately. We clear 25-man ToC Tuesday night, then go do Onyxia and VoA and wrap it up for the night. Thursday is normally reserved for Heroic ToC-25 but we haven't gotten very far.
So what do I do with the rest of my time? PVP for the most part, and it is the PVP achievements that I'm slowly but surely working my way through at this point. One of which -- Justicar -- is my current goal. What is Justicar you ask? Quite simply, it's achieving exalted rep status in Alterac Valley, Arathi Basin, and Warsong Gulch. Anyone that Battlegrounds knows that this achievement is a royal pain to get because getting to exalted in Warsong Gulch is a test of any person's patience.
By comparison, getting to exalted in Alterac Valley takes all of a week or two and is so easy that its achievement is almost universally ignored. You get rep for taking objectives in the game, and by killing NPCs around the map. Rep comes very quickly. On the opposite side of that scale is Warsong Gulch, where you get rep by capping flags only. 35 rep per flag cap on no-holiday weekends, and 45 rep per flag cap on holiday weekends to be exact. Meaning on non-holiday matches you can earn a maximum of 105 rep, and 135 rep in holiday matches.
I almost never participated in Warsong Gulch before patch 3.1 because there was no time limit on the match. And hour long grind fests were the norm, where the opposing side more often than not, simply farmed you for honor rather than capping flags and ending the match. It made for no rep, and very little honor for the side that was getting rolled. In patch 3.1 that changed with the imposition of a 25-minute time limit. It also meant that a side could win with capping a single flag. Or two, for that matter.
You begin to see why getting to Justicar is such a rarity. Just look at the math. You have to win a minimum of 400 matches by 3-capping to get to exalted. If you look through BG-Heroes you'll see that most people win 45-55% of their matches, which means that to achieve that perfect 400 required 3-cap wins you'll most likely have to participate in approximately 800 matches. That figure starts to go up dramatically as you factor in 1 and 2 cap wins. And of course if relies on you winning close to 50% of the matches you play in.
My winning percentage is 47% as of last night, and yes I keep track. And not every win has been a 3-cap, so over the course of the last 20 matches I earned 1190 rep, which means I will to participate in around 640 more matches if the average holds true. I try to run a minimum of 5 WSG matches a night, so I'm staring at about 4 months (or longer) until I get the requsite rep I need before I can begin to concentrate on Arathi Basin rep.
Unfortunately Arathi Basin is about as bad, as it grants rep with each "tick", with the ticks coming faster as you accumulate more bases. As WoWWiki indicates, you earn 10 rep every 160 resources your team gains. Which means you can earn a maximum of 100 rep per match, compared to the 105 you can earn in Warsong Gulch for three flag caps.
Now tell me that isn't worth more than 20 achievement points. Incidentally, only 4.5% of alliance players have this.
