Tag Archives: battlegrounds

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

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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

battlegrounds, pvp, screenshots

All Your Basin Are Belong To Us

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So feeling nostalgic after my last post, I decided to give Arathi Basin a whirl on my level 46 hunter. AB is arguably my favorite battleground; WSG is a sentimental favorite but it’s in a masochistic sort of way and I’m sort of afraid to go in there now that it’s changed, AV used to have that epic feel but has turned into a zergfest, and EotS… well, we won’t go there.

Turns out the Intimidation + Bestial Wrath combo on a clothie is just as fun as it was years ago, and turns out pouncing on an unsuspecting hunter and Wing Clip + melee’ing him to death while he stands there stunned is still absolutely hilarious.

Gosh I love PvPing as a hunter. Nothing else compares, really. Healing is funnish and a nice change of pace but it’s nothing compared to huntering. I always wonder what people are on about when they say hunters need a buff in PvP– to be fair, I know they’re talking about arenas, and I’m talking about lowbie bracket battlegrounds, and there is a huge difference– but gosh I feel OP, and I luuuurve it. I basically never die, even when taking on groups of people alone. Really the only downfall is that you run out of mana far too quickly, and then regenning mana takes pretty much twice as long. >.>

So yeah, this AB. I went in and we were getting the whole “Not enough players… this BG will end in five minutes” dealy. I looked at the scorechart; Alliance had a full 15 players and us Hordies had five or six or something. I contemplated leaving, anticipating a five-cap stomp, but then said “ya know what, screw it,” and ran off to Lumber Mill.

We took Farm and took Lumber Mill, and for several minutes I was the lone person defending Lumber Mill as everyone else ran off to Blacksmith. This is where I single-handedly took on groups of two or three Alliance who kept trying to come attack me and who all failed miserably. Did I mention I love being a hunter in battlegrounds?

Anyways, we were getting more and more Hordies by the minute and finally fulled out to a full 15 vs. 15 AB. We were on a roll at this point, Alliance had no chance. Like there were a good six of them defending Mines, so we did a two-pronged attack on them, two or three of us attacking from each side, and just nabbed it out from under their nose. By the time we won we had about double the resources that they had. It was hilarious.

WoWScrnShot_081109_230426

Almost as fun as an instance, a nice break from questing, and you get XP. Yay! I love you Arathi Basin.

battlegrounds, beast mastery, patches, pvp, talents

Good news everyone!

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goodnews At some point between the last time I seriously PvP’d (’bout a year ago) and now, Bloodlust Alliance figured out how to win Alterac Valley!

=D

…okay, so, while that is good news, it’s probably not the good news you came here to read. Fortunately, I have other good news. The latest rumblings on the PTR are the impending change to Animal Handler. This talent has changed much through the years. Initially it gave your pet some extra Hit, which was rendered obsolete with hit scaling. Then it gave your pet expertise, and that, too, is about to be made obsolete. So now what’s it gonna do? Increase your pet’s Attack Power by 5%/10%.

For the record, that is awesome. And though I have no hard numbers, if Blizz delivers that plus expands on pet scaling like they said they wanted to in time for 3.2, combined with the impending weird Kill Command reduction on Catlike Reflexes and the Wild Hunt buff… I’m guessing that Beast Mastery is pretty much “fixed”.

Gotta say I am a bit worried, though. Remember why Blizz nerfed us last time? A lot of it was because pets were doing over 50% of our damage and they said that was too much. To which I actually agree– I love having a pet doing, oh… 35, 40% of my damage, but anything over 50% makes me too uncomfortable. Anyways, Blizz nerfed the pets, while forgetting to, well, really buff the hunter to counterbalance it.

Anyways, with all these new changes I don’t see any way that a Beast Master pet won’t be back up to 50% or more of a Beast Master hunter’s total DPS, and I worry that Blizz will have their nerfbat at the ready again. But who can say, really? It’s one of those things where we’ll just have to wait and see. At least the Blues know we could use some love, and that’s always a good sign.