I know, I know, most of you hate Arenas. I've been writing for WoW Insider -- ahem, I mean WoW.com -- long enough to know that you guys probably aren't the most avid of PvP players. But the fun thing about it is that at least I'm not preaching to the choir, right? Anyway, I have to admit that I've gotten pretty tired of Arenas myself. Aside from two to three weeks worth of games in Season 5, I skipped the season altogether, unhappy with the balance then and the constantly changing rating and matchmaking system.

That wasn't even the heart of it, really. In the past seasons where I'd had the most success, I played with particular classes and specs that were viable in that season's environment. More importantly, I teamed up with players who were focused on PvP and were expectedly competent at it. The downside was that our success as a team was proportional to my loathing of the players on my team, particularly our team leader who was prone to excessive nerd rage and finger pointing. It sometimes happens that the best PvP players aren't necessarily your friends, and working together towards high ratings is sometimes a marriage of convenience. At a certain point when the stakes were extremely high, where wins would net us measly gains and losses would tank us badly enough for us to lose titles, Arenas became more stressful than fun.

In the end, I felt that it simply wasn't worth it and stopped playing Arenas. At the end of the day, the people I truly enjoyed playing with were my friends, none of whom were truly into PvP or played a class and spec that complemented my own. In fact, the player whose company I enjoyed the most was my wife, who abhors PvP and whose only contribution to my passion is to call for retribution (literally) whenever she got ganked. Instead, I shifted gears and spent most of my time on getting Battlemaster, which turned out to be an extremely fun albeit overly lengthy endeavor.

The beauty of it was that I pretty much did it solo, with the very occasional premade contributing to a few Achievements. For the most part, I could PvP in my own time, on my own terms. Several times throughout the effort it felt reminiscent of the grind through old PvP ranks. It felt good. It felt fun. And it felt extremely refreshing, punctuated with the occasional game of Wintergrasp. I'm a couple of Achievements shy of Master of Wintergrasp, too, with my biggest hurdle being the 1,000 Stone Keeper's Shards considering I almost never do Heroic 5-mans. I still have to figure out a way to expedite that.

The casual season
Anyway, after obtaining Battlemaster it was time to move on to something else. I necessarily played Arenas in Season 5 because I needed the ratings to buy some decent Honor gear, but otherwise I forewent the items that were available exclusively for Arena Points. The great news is that Season 6 is probably the best season to start playing Arenas. I know I dissed the current Arena system a few weeks back, but that was because I'd grown accustomed to a high risk environment where match losses resulted in severe penalties.

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