And by honor I don't mean the honor-as-currency system that's currently in the game -- I mean a sense of personal honor as in, there are things you make a conscious decision to avoid doing just as a moral gesture.

I thought of this recently after a truly miserable losing streak in Arathi Basin. I wound up in three consecutive matches with a full complement of 15 Alliance players to 7 or 8 Horde (with both sides being PuG's, mind you). Being out-numbered and out-gunned sucks no matter what, but it's made immeasurably worse in places like Arathi Basin and EOTS due to the dwindling number of sites you'll have to rez when your side is being utterly destroyed. There was one particularly awful game where the Alliance decided to see how much honor they could get from us before the inevitable 4 or 5-cap ensuring their victory, and simply zerged us in the graveyard as we rezzed (or tried to). The feeling was made worse by knowing, having also played Alliance in BG's, that Horde would almost certainly have done the same thing had the situation been reversed. PvP is the subject of a lot of emotional dicussion in the WoW community as a result of situations like these, and I think we can all agree that it's not the losses that drive you nuts so much as knowing that the game is full of places and times where no amount of strategy or skill will keep you alive.

There are a lot of things in PvP that I just don't like being a part of.
I don't attack fellow Druids unless I'm attacked first (yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but a surprising number of Druids subscribe to this). I don't join in when an enemy player is obviously being dog-piled. I don't /spit on opposing players or do other rude emotes, and I don't participate in griefing. There's not much about WoW's PvP system that's really all that fair to begin with, especially when compared to games more explicity designed around PvP combat, but in the back of my mind there's still that notion that your opponent should at least have a sporting chance. I risk being called a hopeless carebear for this statement, but I think "honorable kills" are a lot more enjoyable when there's a measure of actual honor involved.

It also prevents me from having to re-invent the wheel, so kudos to Starryknight! Instead, I thought I would share some highlights of the guide, and my own tips and tricks to using Healbot Continued.

Many of you who read part one of the Healbot Continued saga have asked if this addon is suitable for PvP healing. As it turns out, Healbot Continued has a skin pre-loaded with battlegrounds in mind. Called the Alterac Valley skin, it will build a frame that is well suited to healing your battleground group, but wait, there's more! Healbot Continued has a built-in range finder, which will fade out individual players' bars if they are out of your healing range. This is a great way to avoid wasting heals, although it can't save you from losing a heal because someone leaves your maximum range while you're midway through a healing spell.

In the wake of the most recent PTR change to Flametongue Weapon applying a -50% healing debuff over 5 seconds and -- it now appears -- the Flametongue totem itself doing the same for others' melee attacks, a number of forum threads have popped up questioning the increasing number of these debuffs in the game. The funniest asks, "Is there some sort of Mortal Strike non-proliferation treaty that stops me from having Mortal Strike on my priest?" (short of Hex of Weakness, I guess). Suggestions include an MS effect on Crusader Strike, "MORTAL SHEEEEEEEEP!", and "Mortal Portal" for mages.

The best argument I've seen is not that Mortal Strike or MS-like effects like Aimed Shot are themselves imbalanced, but they're bound to seem that way if healing is overpowered in PvP. Healing per second is nearly always more efficient than damage per second if you're specced for it, although that's cold comfort to yours truly while resto-specced and under heavy fire in battlegrounds or arena. Nobody knows if the newest version of MS is really going to help Shamans in arena, but between this and the nerf to drinking, it does look more and more as if PvP is increasingly being balanced around the notion of healers staying exposed (and vulnerable) for longer.