But wait... there's going to be MORE to do in Ashran?

I'm in the painfully long pathway trying to get all my achievements for the Gladiator's Sanctum which I thought I would be unlikely to achieve with changes coming in 6.2.  I spend so much time in there lately that I don't even do arenas anymore because Conquest is capped from running around doing all those events, and I don't even want the conquest, all I want is race kills!

Luxy finished hers ages ago and had encouraged us to spend more time in there but it's only now when it's almost too late that I heeded her advice.  Crooked has also been doing his and is almost done, but I am far from done. I am doing Gnomes at the moment and still have Worgen, Pandas and Humans to go.

Ashran has at least come back to some semblance of fun as I join the prelisted groups in the Group finder. You see a few people regularly and learn quickly who is a good leader and who is not.  Crooked has been playing on his hunter and has had a lot of recognition as a good leader and a good ancient artifact carrier which I always feel chuffed about (coz I KNOW that guy! Woo!).

When I was doing Dwarves I noticed that some days there would be NONE at all, and other days there were heaps.  Mctacky wondered if there was a pattern so I decided to look at gnomes.

And do you know what - GNOMES DON'T COME OUT AT NIGHT.

Crooked told me that he got a lot of gnomes during the daytime.  I tend to play late at night and there are very few gnomes around.  The one time I did see plenty of gnomes was in the afternoon between 5 and 8pm.  Since then I have been doing an hour or two at night and found that gnomes are few and far between.

6.2 is bringing a lot of changes to Ashran.  One of the supposed changes to Ashran was that there will no longer be the ability to create a premade raid in Ashran - you will automatically be placed into a raid when you enter.  I like this idea, because it bugged me when nobody would invite you to a raid group. However, I was hoping that some of these people I've been playing with cross server would be in these raids.

Thanks Godmother for the image

There is going to be some new underground stuff in Ashran in 6.2.  And there are GHOSTS and things down there.  There are events down there like there are above ground and you have to kill bird ghosts to get some tokens. Apparently you turn your tokens in to this ghostly Arakkoa and first to 50 wins.

Conquest awards are also changing.  The events won't give you conquest anymore, but they will give you boxes and honour.  To get conquest now, you have to do weekly quests as well as repeatable ones based on honour kills and events and faction leader kills.  Someone on the forums suggested giving a reward for defending your base - I think that's a cool idea, but not sure if Blizz would like it.

What do I think of the changes?

Well, I think that the conquest changes encourage people to hang around longer and also try to kill Tremblade.  That can only be a good thing.  Of course, if they make the "kill faction leader and win 5 events" repeatable that is good for continuing to receive conquest points.

It has a little bit of the Tol Barad feel to it, with the weeklies and repeatable quests. I do miss daily quests so at least I can get them here I suppose.  You know what else it needs - there needs to be more mounts or pets so people will be encouraged to do more Ashran.  Though they might want to steer clear of the flying mounts for a while...

I wish I could buy things with broken bones.  Surely that would be cool.  They're like Garrison resources at the moment, overflowing in my bags and capped at an amount (5k for bones, unlike the 10k for resources) and I dearly wish I could buy some PvP items, maybe like Sinister Spores or some of the drops from Ashran like the books from rares. I sit at the bone cap and I'm still killing more people and I wonder, if only I had something to spend all these bones on! How I wish I could get more Flight Form books!

However, there's still a lot of hate for Ashran - Trashran, Assran, I see so many bad things said about it but still I see TONS of people in there in the evenings, farming honour kills and conquest.  Mostly on PvP servers, but I guess they're enjoying the world PvP.  One of the problems is that it seems to be so skewed!  I like it when the battles are close, but most of the time it's US getting a thrashing, or alliance getting a thrashing.

I guess the good thing is with the changes in 6.2 is that the killing will continue. It means I might still have a chance to get all those Gladiator Sanctum achievement kills after all!