Category Archives: pvp

pvp

The Ultimate Cross-Faction Dick Move

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…is when they kill your follower before killing you.

There’s some druid who hunts me down at least once a day (what did I ever do to you, bro?) and does just this.  Yes yes, I know, PvP on a PvP server, whatever.  But what did Vivienne do to you?  What did Aeda Brightdawn do to you?  WHAT DID TALONPRIEST ISHAAL DO TO YOU??

btw I just saw this movie yesterday and it's brilliant.
btw I just saw this movie yesterday and it’s brilliant.

The second biggest dick move is in PvP is in battlegrounds when they take your insignia for no reason.  Like really does anyone rez anywhere BUT the graveyard?  No reason to take the insignia but some people do it anyway and I feel like it’s the WoW equivalent of teabagging or something.  I dunno why I feel that way.  Always have.  Is it just me?

Okay, enough of my ranting.  Originally I had a completely different post lined up but that fecking druid, guys.  That fecking druid.

1cZsS6D

battlegrounds, pvp, thoughts

Mercenary Mode is a Band-Aid (But It’s a Good Band-Aid)

So, the big news!  Remember not so long ago when I was lamenting the faction imbalance in PvP lately?  Well have no fear, Mercenary Mode is here, which lets you queue up for the opposite faction in order to alleviate pesky things like queue times.

Although this doesn’t address whatever the core, underlying problems are– and I suspect racials have to do with a lot of it– I think this will probably do a decent enough job at helping to treat the symptoms, at least.  I don’t really suspect us Hordies will be able to try the faction hop anytime soon, since it’s the Alliance who has most of the queue problems, but hey, maybe with some Alliance on our side we can actually win AV now?  Maybe?  Like, just once a week?

Honestly my biggest question right now has to do with battleground chat.  It’s always been a toxic place; one that I put up with, rather than leave, just because it’s nice to be able to call out “incs” and be able to actually talk tactics on the rare occasions that I’m not making liberal use of the ignore feature.  Presumably now you will be able to communicate with the opposing faction and I foresee a lot of dumb playground fights and namecalling from both sides.

You know who else forsees? ARCHMAGE TIMEAR!
You know who else forsees? ARCHMAGE TIMEAR!

Ah well.  More people to sacrifice to Ignore for the Ignore God, I suppose.

The REAL question now becomes “Is Ashran fixable?”  (Probably not)

battlegrounds, pvp, thoughts

This Is Why I Don’t PvP Anymore

1 Comment

So before I start on this, general disclaimer that I might not be getting the full picture, that this relies on third party graphs and datamining, and so forth.  But I feel like this is fairly accurate, based on my own experiences and what I’ve heard from others.

Basically I’ve discovered a nifty website that tracks battleground statistics and to no one’s great surprise (and especially not mine), us Hordies are getting demolished in basically every way.  Especially in my dear Alterac Valley.

Ouch
Ouch

Now I used to do quite a few battlegrounds, but I haven’t done any in a while.  Why?  Well, it’s simple: constantly losing isn’t fun.  Constantly losing isn’t fun for anybody, which is probably why the Alliance is now running into battleground queue problems.  Because I’d guess a lot of players are like me and stopped trying once it became clear that things weren’t improving.

So what can be done to fix this?  Well, I’m no serious PvPer so I’m not going to sit here and theorize on this when I’m sure others can do it better.  But it certainly does need fixing!  Until then I’m just gonna do other stuff and dream of Alterac Valleys in days gone by.

 

alterac valley, battlegrounds, pvp, screenshots, stories

Let me tell you a story, a story of a madcap Alterac Valley…

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…which happened just yesterday.

Mr. Pike and I had finished up our Apexis daily and queued up for some random battlegrounds to work on our PvP gear, as we are wont to do.  We did a couple of IoCs, we did some Gilneas thing which was basically a mini-Arathi-Basin, nothing special.

Then, finally, we got into that king of all battlegrounds, Alterac Valley.

Alterac_Valley_loading_screenAlterac Valley is not really ever the Horde’s shining moment, as I have previously discussed.  We always go in expecting a loss, but it’s fine because I’m a huge nostalgia nerd and love AV and always will.

We went into this one and were promptly greeted by an adorable little blood elf mage in quest greens who had decided to take charge of this battleground and told us all to defend Galv.

And for some reason – maybe because we were battle-weary and never win this thing anyway – a ton of us decided to go with his plan.

So the battle started and probably a good 12 or 15 of us, instead of continuing northward with everyone else, ran into Galv’s hut by Tower Point to defend him.

The first Alliance to show up trickled in and promptly got destroyed.

More of them showed up soon after – there were some forty of them, after all – and eventually we all went down but not without a fight and not without thoroughly confusing the Alliance, who were now busy “making strange gestures” at us in response to our unusual tactics.

WoWScrnShot_042115_171222We all respawned at the nearby graveyard but instead of heading up north, we followed the Alliance south.  We bothered them, hounded them like a thorn in their side.  They had no idea what was going on – and frankly, neither did I, upon realizing that the Horde was taking bunkers and we were preventing the Alliance from doing likewise.  Not right away, at least.

Our intrepid quest-green-clad leader kept offering support and direction in battleground chat.  Much of it was unconventional, but as many of us replied in rather bewildered fashion – it was working.

Due to the nature of the entire plan and how odd it was, we did eventually run into some snags.  For example, we eventually were all cornered back down at our home base.  But once again, another miracle happened – the people who had headed north snagged Stormpike Aid Station, and suddenly we were all respawning up north.

At this point it was just a race to down the boss.  I honest to god thought we had it but the Alliance beat us to it.  Another loss – and yet it didn’t matter because it was the best AV I’d played in years.  It was tense, it was close, it was weird.

All thanks to you, Mr. Mage in Quest Greens.  May we meet again in the near future!

battlegrounds, pvp

It’s 2015 and I finally figured out how Isle of Conquest works

Isle of Conquest was one of those weird battlegrounds that they added in Wrath of the Lich King that I never got.  It was kind of like Alterac Valley, but kind of like Wintergrasp?  What?  Like at least when Eye of the Storm was added I understood that one.

40181318Endlessly confused, I removed IoC from my battleground queue for many, many years, until finally adding it back in recently because I realized that during my WoW hiatus Blizzard decided to add several new battlegrounds that I hate more.

So anyways today I wound up in IoC and lo and behold I ACTUALLY GET IT.   I don’t think you guys understand the gravity of that statement.  Like I still don’t understand most of it, but at least I get the part where you parachute into the other guy’s base and kill their big bad NPC.

And you know what?

That’s freaking awesome.

Well, time to go queue for more battlegrounds.  And lose 90% of them.  Such is life in the Horde.

alterac valley, battlegrounds, pvp, stories

For We Shall Make Them Fight For Every Last Inch

Recently I’ve been focusing on setting up two sets of gear: a decent PvE set and a decent PvP set.  As such, my usual WoW days involve doing my garrison stuff, doing my apexis daily, doing a quick LFR, and then doing some battlegrounds.

So.  Alterac Valley.

800px-Alterac_Valley_loading_screen

I don’t know how it is on other battlegroups – or if battlegroups are even a thing anymore (probably not) – but here on Shadowburn the Horde is truly abysmal at Alterac Valley.  Just utterly awful.  My usual Alterac Valley experience, as Horde, involves starting out okay, thinking “hey, we’re not doing too badly this time around,” pulling up the map, and seeing a line of blue towers and graveyards all the way down the length of the entire battleground.

Then we lose soon after.

Sad-Cat-1

I refuse to remove AV from my list like everyone else does because I still love AV; something about it is deliciously old-school and I usually enjoy it anyway.  But let’s just say I don’t ever go into it expecting a win, because we never get one.

So myself and Mister Pike were in AV yesterday, and it was going about as well as can be expected for us – Alliance had, oh, about 400 reinforcements left and us Horde had like 120.  Just another average day on Horde, to be honest.

So there we were, all of us Hordies spawning back at Drek’thar (not spawning in the cave was a plus, at least), and the Alliance was getting ready to rush in and finish the job.  Then Mr. Pike said something in chat that struck a nerve.  He said “I don’t care if we lose, I’m going to make the Alliance fight for every last inch.”

And for whatever weird reason, everyone in the battleground chat started to agree.  Person after person piped up about how “oldschool” that mentality was, how “Horde” it was… and how we should definitely do that.

And so the Alliance never got to Drek’thar.  Not once.  It was all forty of us at our choke point vs. all forty of them, and it was glorious.  An absolute bloodbath.  We were under no delusions that we would win this battle of attrition, of course.  We were realists.  It was already a loss.

But you better believe that we were gonna make it take like twenty minutes.

B_RctT9U4AAYck5

For those twenty minutes we gave the Alliance hell.  We refused to give them the satisfaction of a quick, easy victory, because screw that.  It was oldschool AV at its finest, and battleground chat was full of people talking how awesome this was and how it was taking all of us back.  There were even GGs going around when it was all over and our reinforcements finally, inevitably, dwindled down to zero.

And that, my friends, is why I still love AV.  It’s why I’m gonna keep queuing for it even if we’re terrible at it.  I’m looking forward to a few matches later today.

Because win or lose, it’s Alterac Feckin’ Valley, and if there was ever a truly legendary battleground, then this one is it.

battlegrounds, pets, pvp, screenshots

I Shouldn’t Press My Luck

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So I was feeling pretty happy about hitting 20k words (exactly!) in my NaNoWriMo today so I decided to dink around in WoW for an hour or two.

The first cool thing that happened was getting WSG for my random battleground, seeing that our ragtag group of team members was up against a pre-made, deciding to stick around anyway… aaaand then notching up a win. Against the pre-made. I giggled.

The second cool thing that happened was that I decided to clear out my quest log before Cataclysm so I was doing this random quest down in Howling Fjord and I happened to stumble upon this huge gigantic elite polar bear as part of the quest. So obviously I tamed him.

So there I was, doing pretty good for a random WoW break, so I hopped onto my Netherdrake and sort of aimlessly started to fly around in a general Northerly direction. I had the music on (which is rare) and it was nice and calm and atmospheric and I was kind of thinking about the good times I’d enjoyed with this expansion and how it was almost over.

And this is when the third cool thing happened. See, I somehow wound up in Zul’drak during this little jaunt, and a little voice popped into my brain. The little voice said, “Hey, isn’t there a spirit beast around here or something?”

And I said, “Hey, I think there is! Let’s turn on Track Beasts for the heck of it.”

So I turned on Track Beasts.

And the second I did, this little yellow dot appeared on my minimap.

I moused over it and it said “Gondria”.

>.>

…

This is, believe it or not, my very first Spirit Beast. I know Gondria is sort of seen as the Poor Man’s Loque, but I’m already in love with my Shiny Ghost Kitty who, because of his heal, has already proven himself to live through things that would have killed any of my other pets. (Read: the last boss in Gundrak who does that thing, I’m not sure what it is, that KILLS PETS DEAD.)

I had to release my newly-tamed polar bear to get Gondria. But don’t worry. I went back and got the same bear again afterwards. :3

pvp, specs, survival

Survival?

13 Comments

Hi dead blog! *pokes with stick*

I figured I should write something. So here I am. Hooray! And as a bit of a double bonus, I figured I’d return to my roots and actually write something huntery. Double Hooray! So intense!

So, here’s the deal. As of now, I sort of consider myself to be a… triple-spec’d hunter. As we probably all know by now, I have two level 80 hunters. Well, Tawyn‘s been rocking her Beast Mastery main spec and her Marskmanship Fun spec. And for a while, poor neglected Lunapike was rocking the Beast Mastery spec as well. But of course, right?

Well, recently I blew the dust off of the latter and decided to start playing her again. At that point, I hadn’t seriously played her in months, so she was decked out in a bunch of super-old-school stuff like dungeon blues, heroic purples, and Nesingwary. Spec’d Beast Mastery she was getting maybe 3k in heroics, which is like… half of what Tawyn does on a lazy day. Beast Mastery is a fickle, gear-dependent creature.

Anyways I sort of missed big numbers and I was feeling ambitious and I knew I didn’t have the gear for Marksmanship so I went Survival. Yup. Now for those of you just tuning in, my grumblings about Survival are pretty well-known. I’ve ranted about it many-a-time in this blog: how much I dislike the rotation and basically find it un-fun in every way. It’s why Tawyn’s dual spec is Marskmanship.

…so I’m not sure what I was smoking when I decided to go Survival, but go Survival I did, and you know what? This time around I really enjoy it. I’m not even sure why. I think it finally “clicked”. I mean, in essence it’s a very similar rotation to Beast Mastery, except that stuff is on lower cooldowns, so you have to be a bit quicker on your feet… and you get Lock and Load. By the way, Lock and Load is super fun. It’s tied to Black Arrow, so once you figure out how best to use that one, you’re good to go.

I can also see why SV is the recommended “Freshly Minted 80 Hunter” spec. Upon spec’ing it and heading into dungeons, it was basically like… Go Directly to 50% more DPS, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. It was very plug-and-play.

Anyways, I have also rediscovered my love of level 80 PvP. I love pre-50 BGs to death, but the endgame stuff with all the resilience and everything was never really my bag. But I did so many BGs on Lunapike this last weekend, and had a blast. It feels like I have a ton of toys to play with as Survival.

But yeah. Sorry for the massive TLDR. I’d break this up with pictures but WoW is down and I’m too lazy to go hunting through my screenshot folder.

If you want me to write about something in specific, lemme know, because I’m having a terrible time coming up with stuff to put in this blog lately. Just keep in mind that I’m still pretty much retired-from-raiding so super intense strategy guides are probably out, but most everything else is open game.

alts, pvp, screenshots

The Art of War(song)

7 Comments

My rogue was about halfway through level 18 this morning, so I decided to do some Warsong Gulch. The first game was kind of a failure; we lost pretty badly. I was sort of preparing for this to be one of “those mornings” where it was just a string of losses and crying.

But then something interesting happened.

We started communicating.

See, there was a pretty solid group of about six or seven of us who kept re-queue’ing over and over. We didn’t always get into the same games, of course, but we’d always be there with at least a few buddies from the previous game or two games ago or whatever. A couple of us were pretty twinked out but there were a lot of your average lowbies in our little re-queue’ing group as well.

Anyways, pretty soon we’d figured out what everyone’s strengths and weaknesses were, and we were making and executing plans. We knew who our best flag-runners were, who was best on defense, and who made the best distractions. There was no QQ, no whining, no crying if somebody messed up. Just a lot of “gj”‘s when we made yet another flag capture.

Game after game we just dominated. 3-0, 3-0, 3-0. Anytime we queued up and saw a friend we could rely on from a previous game we would say hi and /cheer at each other. Even the people from the Super Hardcore PvP Servers were /cheering and /waving. And every game our motley little group just smashed the Horde. It was, quite honestly, the best PvP I have participated in in a very, very long time.

But all good things come to an end, and pretty soon came that fateful game where I announced at the beginning that it would be my last: I was gonna level out of the bracket. The response was a few “Noooo”s in BG chat which made me feel kinda warm and fuzzy.

Perhaps fittingly, this was our hardest game of the morning: the Horde had some pretty geared folks on their end this time, including a rogue who was basically equal to me in gear and who I locked one-on-one horns with several times. But we managed to eke out a victory in the end– with a flag I captured.

Thanks, BG9, for making WSG surprisingly awesome again for one morning. I hope to see you all in Arathi Basin! <3

alts, pvp

So cheap you should just call me Wal-Mart

11 Comments

Let me tell you about my rogue.

She’s level 18, and she’s wearing Exceptional Stormshroud Shoulders, Stained Shadowcraft Tunic and a Swift Hand of Justice. She’s got an Upgraded Dwarven Hand Cannon, and she is dual-wielding a Venerable Dal’Rend’s Sacred Charge with Crusader and a Sharpened Scarlet Kris with Fiery.

Warsong Gulch is my sandbox. My kiddie pool. If I am on defense, the other team doesn’t get the flag. Period. (Or if they do, they drop it within five seconds.) If I am guarding our flag carrier, the other team doesn’t get their flag back. Usually at this point I am asked to go retrieve our flag from the other side, so I oblige, stealth across the field, and calmly get our flag back.

In my latest game I was on defense the whole time. Despite being out of the action most of the time, I was third on killing blows/damage done, and I didn’t die a single time. I exited the game with the same buffs I got at the beginning. And we won 3 – 0.

I used to hate people like me. The goggles-wearing rogues that could jam random buttons on the keyboard and two-shot me. In fact, I kind of hate myself for turning into one.

Low level hordies on Bloodlust, I do apologize. You are free to hate me, because you have a good reason to. Don’t worry, I won’t be here long– I plan on leveling right up and out of this bracket and moving on to Arathi Basin.

But until then, WSG is my playground.

*naughty, evil grin*