As the Dust settles

So its day 2:

1. Ret Paladins have already been nerfed
2. We are still sharing battlegroup space with a Spanish Battlegroup
3. Around 95 percent of the post patch threads on the PvP forums are complaining about either shared battlegrounds with no common language or ret paladins. The other 5 percent are keyloggers
4. I managed to rescue my priest, no thanks to Blizzard. My ticket was answered with an email telling me to delete my WTF folder
5. The gnomeling is now lv 38, almost 39 (but he bailed on me to watch the Grand Prix practise)
6. I specced my paladin prot and had fun tanking the Sunken Temple (have to start somewhere)
7. Did some battlegrounds on my resto shaman. They went much better than I expected. Wasnt two shot by anyone and managed to keep the gnome alive against an arms warrior. Got some of the pvp achievements, including the one for 300,000 damage or healing in a single game.
8. Did MH on the shaman, again it went much better than I was expecting. Loved the flowerpower feel of raiding with shamans and druids. Wild Growth has a wonderful animation, which when combined with the flowers from my weapon enchant gave the raid a real garden feel. Didnt feel particularly stressed in the mana department, saw lots of big numbers flying around the screen.

Heading into the expansion feeling fairly happy and confident at the moment. 

Edit: On the subject of Dust, we were questing in Dustwallow earlier and I couldnt help wondering, what kind of Mage would "choose" to live here.

Although the sunrises seem to be beautiful, I think I would rather be living in Dalaran.

Everything including the kitchen sink

Ive always had an inventory problem. My bagspace seems to vanish overnight as soon as I get beyond lv 15 or so. I just cant bring myself to throw stuff away, after all it might come in useful for something, leveling an alt perhaps (murloc eyes), farming rep (bone fragments), skilling up a profession (solid stone). But how much of this stuff do I actually need, when it comes down to it, very little.

Crucial and necessary items that should never be thrown away.

Number 1
The pvp trinket, otherwise known as the Medallion of Horde/Alliance. Whilst this comes in a variety of flavours, 5 minute, 2 minute with 20 resilience and 2 minute with 45 resilience they all at the end of the day, do the same thing.

Use: Removes all movement impairing effects and all effects which cause loss of control of your character.

Whenever I level a new toon, its the first thing I spend my honor on. Easily optained, this remains in one of my trinket slots all the time whilst Im outdoors as you never know when someone of the opposing faction will decide to be a jerk. Obviously if you are on a pve server its slightly less of a "must have" but in recent times its also been useful in numerous pve encounters, most namely Rage Winterchill and Archimonde. In fact its been so useful on those and other encounters than some high end PvE guilds have been making their members/applicants farm one.

My verdict: Dont leave Shattrah without one.

Alterac Valley Blues

Ive always loved AV, right from the start when it was a 24 hour zergfest, when casting even the tinyest heal at Snowfall graveyard was guarenteed to get you splatted. Ive played it happily through its many manifestations, when breaking into the Horde base was a slow painful process, one death at time, but what never ceases to amaze me is the fact that despite it being ingame for so long, most people dont seem to understand how to play it.

Going for Gold

Once upon a time in my miss spent youth I had a computer game called "Going for Gold" in which you could compete in various running events with the ultimate aim of reaching the Olympics. It was a very frustating game, so when I discovered that Blizzard had added an Olympic tribute ingame, I was a little nervous. Luckily all Blizzard wanted us to do is pvp, I mean thats easy right. I do that all the time. So fueled with all the stories of people who got their pet after their first game, I queued up all excited. Several hours later I was both frustated (alliance in Nightfall are dubious at the best of times and even when we did win, no medal in the mail) and grumpy. I even dragged the gnome out of bed so I had someone capable of killing stuff to heal.

Then just when I was going to give up for the night, it was late and I had run out of nets (thats another story), there it was, glistening in my mail box.

Here I am in my Competitor's tabard with my brand new shiny pet. He even claps his hands together to show his approval.

PvP brings out the worst in all of us

If you must make macros like this to be used at the start of Battlegrounds, make sure its all spelt correctly. Blizzard are highly unlikely to use "u" instead of "you". Seen quite a few of these recently, all with really bad grammar/spelling, the worrying thing is each time its spammed into chat, at least one person leaves the battleground. Coincidence perhaps. Hopefully.

On a slightly related note, got ganked by 3 separate 70s in the Searing Gorge today. Guess what they all had in common?

Yep, all rated below 1550. So do high rated players not gank lowbies? Am I just meeting scrubs taking out their frustation on greys? Maybe I should make a "LF high rated lowbie gankers" forum thread to see if anyone holds their hand up and says "Yes, im a Gladitator and I gank low levels with pride".

Progress

Ive been working on my little list over the last few days and I think Im actually making headway.

The Orcling is lv 51 and counting, we managed to break through the Badlands into lusher and more interesting zones which really speeded up the leveling. The screenshot is the only good screenshot of the Badlands, me leaving it.

Got the Rune of the Guard Captain. A task made slightly harder than it should of been by the fact I was 5 levels lower than the mobs and Tamung was using a brand new weapon and so couldnt hit them. I wish the Alliance had a version of this trinket.

Hit Alterac Valley for the first time earlier today. It turns out that in the 51-60 bracket in Cyclone is really biased in favor of the Horde. Got 500 honor in 10 minutes along with 25k experience for completing a few of the quests. I also got to upgrade my main hand by getting the mace from the kill Vanndar quest. Its just a shame the queue times are horrible, but since the alliance get slaughtered 15 to 40, I suppose we can hardly blame them.

Its a Jungle out there

On a medium population server you might think that hitting STV at 4am would be relatively safe. You would be wrong, within 10 minutes we had been ganked by 2 completely different lv 70s.





The rain started just as we arrived. I suppose that should have been an omen. It went from light and airy in Booty Bay to wet, grey and dangerous in the jungle.

Which brings me to my current dilemma, we arent gankers at heart. I think its partly because there are 2 of us, which makes attacking solo questers who make up most of the opposing faction we encounter just seem wrong. Also, I think its a personality issue, maybe a touch of arrogance, why attack someone when you know you would beat them.. its no challenge. Which is why, I dont understand what 70s get out of killing people in their 30s.. ah well, only 32 levels to go before we can hunt them down and eat supper on their corpses. Anyway back to the dilemma, do we gank everything red on the principle that when the next scrub 70 comes riding past and one shots us, we will smirk to ourselves as we corpse run remembering all the misery we had already caused... or do we stay as we are, playing nice and then regretting it?

The arena rating theory is still holding true btw, both our little friends had rubbish ratings. This crocodile could probably have beaten them in a duel.

Perhaps even my parrot could have, well that might be pushing it.



On a more positive or at least more aggressive note, we got around 40 honor today from a lv 42 gnome warlock. He had this fascination with Grom'gol, lurking just outside the perimeter dotting up all the low levels venturing out. Which just plain nasty but for some reason he just didnt want to get the hint. We killed him around 7 times, the final time way out at sea. For some reason he thought escaping from a Shaman would be easier at sea.... water walking proved otherwise.

Ganking Lowbies

Now dont get me wrong, I love pvp as much as the next person, but I really dont understand the mentality of people who just hang out at zones 50 levels lower than those they should be questing, killing greys. Today we visited Tarren Mill to discover a lv 70 hunter running around killing npcs and baby horde. Then we moved to STV to start doing Tamung's weapon quest and low and behold there is another 70, a warrior this time again killing lowbies.

Which leads me to the reason for this post. Someone posted whilst ranting on the official forums that people who gank lowbies all have sucky arena ratings and fail at fighting their own levels so take out their lack of epeen on lv 20s. Now I tend to take everything i read on said forums with a pinch of salt, after all people are usually too busy complaining, fighting or trying to protect their own bruised egos but that one comment got me thinking. Luckily I keep a stack of postit notes by the computer and I made a note of all their names and checked their amoury profiles... would you believe it... their average rating was 1300 in 2 v 2.

So Zamppa and Snappyah, this post is for you two pvp gods :D

On a slightly more bragging note, we had our first proper pvp today. Running around in 1000 needles finishing a couple of quests a lv 41 squid mage decided to be a hero and try and aoe two little orcs. He died and gave 3 honor points, my first 3 to be exact. Your first always needs to be immortalised in print so hello Sötsomsocker.

I have to admit the reason I dont lowbie gank is simply because you look so stupid when it all goes wrong. When your target/s fight back, kite you to guards, produce 70s out of the bushes or anything else sneaky. On the other hand, managing to be a lowbie who successfully kills a skull by clever use of terrain/tactics/pots is one great feeling.

Titles

Much to my surprize, my priestie got an arena title this week.

So 10 games played on her in season 3 got me Challenger. The team played a grand total of 29 games last season, i played the other 19 on my shaman who naturally also got the title. Which according to Arena Junkies put us in the top 30 percent of our battlegroup. Now, i find that a little scary, if we were in the top 30 percent, that means the other 70 percent, 7000 active 2 v 2 teams give or take sit below 1650.

Which leads me on to titles in general. Having given the matter some thought whilst I really feel that Blizzard needs to tighten its title rules otherwise they are pointless. The only Arena ones should be Gladiator, handing a title out for 10 games in a whole season is just ridiculous.

Hand of A'dal should only be available to people who were able to complete the attunements before they were removed and the same is true of the Champion of Naaru.

Most people want something that distinguishes them from the crowd and when everyone has the same titles it makes them useless. You dont stand out, which surely was the whole point behind them being introduced in the first place.

All in all, across my characters which have a wide variety of titles available to them, the only one i like to wear is my little undead priest's General tag because that is the only one i really had to put effort into getting in the first place. I completed the attunements which lead to the PvE titles before they were introduced, killing those bosses for progress so i kind of got the titles as default. As ive already covered, the arena one took me 2 weeks of less than one hour in total so hardly counts. Rank 12 on the other hand took weeks and hours and hours of "farming" at the farm.

Then we have the "Of the Shattered Sun". Now in all the discussions of this ive seen recently, the most common argument defending it was "but its only fake money, it doesnt matter". But unless you buy gold, in which case WoW money equals RL money, ingame gold equals your time. Time you could be spending earning real life money so in the end it works out the same. Nothing in life is free and that includes titles in WoW it seems.

What titles do you wear with pride and why? Also more importantly, what kind of titles do you want Blizzard to introduce ingame?

Healing and PvP

"Damage wins the fame,
Healing wins the game".

Whilst browsing the official forums, i saw this signature and it made me wonder. Pre-TBC I farmed rank, or rather my boyfriend farmed rank on his warrior and i just trailed along in his wake spamming heals on him, but regardless back then healers in pvp were rare. Even healers in pve guilds often either respecced or smite spammed in pvp, my guildmates being the perfect example of this. We were the best guild on the server and yet my fellow priests either pvped on their rogue/mage alts or respecced shadow if they were battlegrounding for any length of time. The only time they were happy to go in as healers was when we were either premading ab/wsg or doing large groups of guildies in AV.

So then Blizzard introduced Arenas and now.... everyone is healing. Its rare to meet a feral druid these days, they are either boomkins, resto or a combination of the 2. Priests are for the most part Disc (myself included) and shamans seem to be resto with a warrior in tow.

This has good and bad effects. When 80 percent of your AB pug are healers, its going to be a slow loss. When every node you attack has one s3/4 warrior lovingly protected by a windfury dropping shaman its likely to be a fast one.

But more importantly, what changed. Are the majority of todays PvP healers doing it simply because of arenas? And if so, the class changes coming with WotLK will be interesting. If feral becomes as viable and good as resto currently is, does that mean all these resto druids bouncing around like jumping beans will suddenly return to being the mangle spammers they were in the early days of the current expansion. Personally i hope yes, they return to kittyness, mainly because i hate meeting them in arenas, warrior + druid means long games, the outcome of which is usually based on who manages to drink the most.

But if a majority are only doing it for the gear, why dont people enjoy healing? Personally having pvped and raid healed on all 4 healing classes in all dungeons and all battlegrounds currently ingame, i dont see what there is not to like about it.

Plus points of healing in PvE
No one can really check up on you. As long as the maintank/whoever you are assigned to heal isnt falling over dead every two seconds you have plenty of leeway. You can watch tv/listen to music, talk on vent whilst healing.
All the dps, especially hunters if you heal their pets and rogues love you for it.
Getting raid spots is easy as long as you are capable of writing a half decent application and showing up on time with consumbables.
Finally and most importantly, you can heal yourself, which means your life and ultimately your death is pretty much in your hands unless you manage to outaggro the tank.

Plus points of healing in PvP
You can heal yourself
You can choose who to heal. See that warrior over there who was bullying the nice warlock, let him die. That rogue who has been spamming "lose fast" since before the gates even opened, it will be snowing in Stranglethorn Vale before he gets a heal from me.

I guess that explains why i like to heal, im a control freak at heart.

The other great thing about being a healer in pvp is you escape all the abuse. My boyfriend across all his dps toons, hunter, warrior and rogue has had many a disgruntled opponent log to tell him how much he sucks, knows nothing about his class and should delete his characters before he embaresses himself any more. Not to mention all the whispers from people on IRC, "X says lol lol lol you suck" after he ganked the guy at Elemental Plateau.

Rabbits, rogues and more rabbitity rogues

Maybe its just me, but rogues seem to be multiplying like the proverbial rabbits these days. Every battleground seems to have at least 5 of the little devils sneaking around stabbing people in the back or hemoing their faces skillfully. Luckily the majority dont seem to have taken
Kick out of their spell book, let alone keybound it, but i still dont like them, especially the undead variety. I guess that harks back to the days of being a little pve priest (whilst my Robes of the Guardian Saint and Benediction looked great, they acted as a rogue magnet), also having less than 4k health probably didnt help either.

Although now my health has more than doubled, i still harbour a faint mistrust of all things roguesque, so some kind of cull would be nice. Maybe Blizzard could offer a reward for rogue hunting, something like bring 10 rogue heads to a NPC in Shattrah and receive a welfare epic in return. We could have a new set called "Rougestalker", red of course for killing large quantities of the sneaky little creatures and maybe a shiney new title. Mariposa the Rogue Slaughter has a much better ring to it than "of the Shattered Sun" or "Champion of Naaru".

Failing that, renaming the class to Rouge might help lower the numbers, or would at least make all the "Rougemaster", "Rougedk" etc sound smarter.

Arathi Basin

Now its time for some of the "whining" of the title. Since i stopped hardcore raiding in april, ive been focusing mainly on pvp. Now that unfortunately means PuGs which are painful. From my experience pvping on both factions, ive noticed the following things which seem to hold true across the board.

1.a) No one wants to defend. So the game starts, everyone streams out to nodes, the alliance tags the Stables, the LM and the GM. Now the guy who tags the Stables heads straight off to the Farm. So we end up with the alliance tagging the farm and the horde tagging the stables, thus games which should be fairly fast end up taking at least 30 minutes as we play musical chairs with the nodes.
b) On the odd chance someone does want to defend, its usually a healer. Which then leads to the rest of the map complaining about the lack of healing. Although i have to admit, im usually found shadowmelded at the Lumber Mill, lurking waiting for some little hordling to wander into my lair.

2. Why oh why oh why would anyone with less than 6k health at lv 70 choose to enter pvp combat. Now im not being particularly elitest, its just common sense from where im sitting. Why do something which must be so painful and frustating when pretty much everyone can 2 shot you. The side with the largest number of undergeared people, and its usually mages and druids will lose, its as simple as that so if you enter wearing completely scrub (sorry, but i love that word) gear you are letting the rest of your team down. Doesnt matter how good a player you are, although given the blue pvp sets easily available from reputation vendors, stam/res gems and enchants etc, i find it hard to believe good players choose to enter as free kills.

3. Communication. Now there are 2 types of battlegrounders. Those that keep giving updates, announce if nodes are under attack, inform people about the enemy strength at target nodes and so on and then we have those that dont say anything. You only discover if their location is underattack either when its capped by the other side or if you happen to be using something like Grid and you can see their health going down.

You can tell a lot about a PuG before the gates even open, does the mage make a table?, do the priests/druids/mages/paladins buff everyone? Is anyone talking in Battleground chat? If the answers to all those are yes, you have a good chance of winning.

In summary, communicate, defend (Nightelfs make great defenders, nothing beats shadowmeld) and communicate some more. Whether games are won or lost has nothing to do with racials, factions or Blizzard imbalance, but everything to do with the players taking part so if YOU lose all the time, maybe you need to fix something in your playstyle.