Road to 2200

After about a month and a half of rated battlegrounds my crew has produced three 2200 ratings, with me being the most recent. A quick tale of Murphy’s Law taking over when I got close…

So ya, 2191 rating and completely dusting everyone as I rose from 2140 to the above mark. With a 3-0 record on the night and 9 more points needed, we queue into Gilneas and the above screenshot tells it all…Reckful again. Now for those all claiming that grinding long enough gets you to 2200, it is partially true but it’s very, very frustrating. Once you reach a certain point you begin losing rating, starting a vicious cycle of higher level players not wanting to play with newer ones because of the ratings loss they endure while those same newer players gain 91 points for a win and you lose 12 points for a loss.

Anyway (off my soapbox), running into a team like this is the epitome of what rateds should be from formidable players. Reckful is sitting around 250-50 W/L record in rateds and there is a good reason – they play with the same players and are a very, very good. Our healers would get burst at the initial waterworks fight until they hit a defensive cooldown, at which the entire offense would instantly be on another target. As soon as the defensive CD was over, the offense jumped right back on them – let’s just say there’s a reason they’re sitting on ratings like that. Having your ass handed to you like that from time to time is nice if you’re paying attention to things they do and try to emulate them.

Draxo and I did double team Reckful somewhere in the midst of mindless waves attacking various targets. I mean ya, whoopee shit amirite? Oh well, least we did something in the match.

Anyway, quick warning for those who may have kids around – the next image contains content unsuitable for people who hate FAIL:

Yes, we played to a 0-0 stalemate in Twin Peaks. I mean, 9 points to go and after drawing the previous game and surviving without a ratings loss we run into a decent rated squad and never manage to drop either flag carrier after 20 minutes. Full debuffs and everything – just no deaths. The Alliance sent Bajheera (Warrior), Skeetzlol (Rogue) and Macabra (Spriest) on offense – rest were on defense. Ya, 7 man defensive team with a protection warrior (Platefobrain), a warlock for fear bombs, a mage for CC and 4 freaking healers. Talk about insufferable…

I mean, it’s our own fault in a way – we didn’t send our defensive mage into the fight until the very end, and we actually killed the warrior as time expired but obviously couldn’t return the flag. I didn’t know the end result would be raid-wide ratings loss, but if you’re reading don’t make the same mistake we did.

But in the end the good guys prevailed (I actually think it was a few nights later as well) and I was able to get my rating after 3-0′ing this crappy Eredar team. I look sweet in the my new digs, and in case you were wondering – Yes, you have to trade in all of your gear and re-enchant, re-gem and re-reforge everything the way you had it before. Same goes for the weapon.

Just wanted to throw a few screens up and relay the information that I’m running around with a 372-weapon and I know how to use it. I’ll post some screens up of the carnage expressed thru random bg’s here fairly soon.

/Gasp

Ya, I”m one of those geek points guys.

Tons of R1′s

Just because I enjoy watching them means that anyone who frequents the blog should as well, right? I mean, no real way to add aesthetics to an RBG, but if you watch and listen carefully you’ll end up grabbing a little bit of strategy out of it in the end.

Shattered Hand (H) vs Magtheridon (A), uploaded on Dec 22, 2010.

Season #10 Death Knight Gladiator Set

Yesterday MMO Champion posted all the Season #10 Gladiator gear sets which will be live in Patch 4.2, and above is the male and female version of everyone’s favorite class. All in all I am pretty happy with the look, and while many are criticizing the horns as making DK’s look like the spawn of Satan I think it makes for a nice evolution from the Season #9 helm. Of course, I can’t ever remember displaying my helm graphic so take from that what you will.

Be sure to visit the MMO Champion link above to view your own class set as well.

Since the Last Update…

I only wrote 3 posts in February for an all-time low since I started this blog in 2009 (good god time flies), but don’t mistake my lack of posting for a feigning interest in the game. I am still active every night at or around 10pm EST and generally many more Alliance will click “Release Spirit” than I will.

Getting right into things, you may recall my brush with greatness (I guess if you could call it that) when Drunk PvP defeated a very high rated Mannoroth team that contained a few personalities – hell I may have even boasted about killing one, who knows. Anyway, bump that experience in favor of the game I played the other night against Reckful, who if you need an introduction can do so by simply Googling him.

Any time you log into a rated battleground and are facing Alliance-side on Tichondrius, I’ve found that you are probably going to lose. Now in this match we did get 3-capped in the end, but with mine belonging to Horde and the lighthouse belonging to the Alliance, the Alliance managed to cap waterworks and the ensuing 3-cap was essentially from us throwing all at another node. Yes it was an ass-kicking, but I certainly do not feel like we played bad.

The biggest thing I noticed with the team was their ability to switch targets. Sometimes in running BG’s I can call a target and not immediately notice a change in damage against them besides my own, and that’s not necessarily because people weren’t assisting – they were getting CC’d, weren’t right there with me or a variety of other reasons. Against this team, when they picked a target it was at half health in a second. Our healers are unbelievable and the strength of our BG team, but they always found themselves playing catch up against the Tichondrius team.

An example of coordination from that team, our druid Ipsi was cycloning a healer in trying to score a kill, and in the time of the first cyclone the realization to the healer was that he was going to eat the 2nd cyclone as well, and when the 2nd was cast it was stolen by a mage. So if you’re a hopeful 3k rated battleground player in the future, this is what I have to offer you in what you should be shooting for down the line.

As for Reckful, you would think a 3k+ rated player would be roaming the map mopping our shit up all over the place but he defended the lighthouse. Near the end of the match we rushed that node where he promptly put more than half of the damage you see he did into us in a span of about 2 minutes before the game over. Oh well, good times.

Besides that one epic game, my concentration since my last update post has almost been entirely in grinding rated battlegrounds. On nights where our consistent 6 players are not online I may resort to wrecking random BG’s (and good god have I apparently improved), grinding out a little guild reputation or finishing up steps on acquiring more geek points. I believe in my last post I stated I should be well over 300 wins in arena by now with a higher rating, but I think in the past 3 weeks I played 1 game for a conquest rating cap in 3′s per week and then the last was based on my BG rating. I finally understand the Arena guidelines and posts/articles that seem like good players are always switching servers and whatnot, and it’s because there are millions of reasons as to why teams don’t last which I’ve managed to witness often in my first real season of it.

After losing my warrior/paladin to a server transfer following a disagreement with the GM, the GM (leader of my 2′s and 5′s) essentially quit playing due to the lack of a connection. Well, 2′s sucks (and sucks hard), my 5′s has a decent ranking though said GM is in control of it and is never online, and before essentially spending most nights grinding BG’s I have picked up partners for a PHD 3′s team that just hasn’t taken off full-flight yet. I do enjoy arenas and plan on playing them more, but I’ve learned that when you find a good group of guys you enjoy playing with you may as well enjoy the fruits of those relationships while they last.

Anyway, the GM has been gone for over 3 weeks and there is no timetable for a return, so yesterday I left that guild in the capable hands of three others who were in charge of it alongside myself. I joined the group of guys that I have been grinding with lately, and the above screenshot represents the first BG I ran with their tag actually over my head (you can tell we’ve been a bit of a grab-bag type of group).

Finally, last night I hit 1900 to finally achieve the same PvP rank that my warrior in vanilla still carries to this day. Points are scarce as of now with games against very low teams awarding single digits and the higher ones awarding in the 20′s, but I do maintain hope of taking that rating over 2200 before Season #10 launches assuming with Patch 4.1.0.

My PvP Status

I wanted to start off this post with a really wise war quote, something like from “The Art of War” that I’ve seen elsewhere and could pretend that I’ve read it but I apparently lack that ability or desire to do so today. It’s really a shame too; this entry is going to cover about everything involving my DK existence to this point, largely in part because Snowpocalypse 2011 dumped 2” of ice and my power wavering in and out isn’t all that conducive to grinding arena ratings.

(Though I obviously did later find a Chinese translator and translate “Of The Horde”)

I think it’s nearly universal from the PvP community that this season has been amongst the most balanced that arena play has seen, and while not perfect many factors that have tilted odds one way or the other are the being addressed in the upcoming Patch 4.0.6. In terms of death knights I believe that Necrotic Strike did need an adjustment as its implementation likely led many players to be rated significantly higher than they should have been, though my thoughts on how it is being done (lower absorb, can drop Desecration) will have to wait until the change occurs. A successful silence chain previously could lead to a healer being dealt 40k worth of NS stacks to recoup, and at the rate DK’s could continually deal damage and stack more the ability was simply a royal pain in the ass.

The 2H Frost damage buff coming in the patch is a welcome addition, and while I do harbor that ounce of sympathy for those who spent more for DW I have to call bullshit on your forecasting ability that told you DW would do more damage. When looking at the frost talent tree you have mirror images to choose between MotFW and ToT, and under no pretense did you predict that DW damage would stack on your oblits. Sorry, you went DW because you 1) liked the look/idea or 2) copied off your favorite Arena DK. My idea certainly carried no more research to go 2H, my only thoughts were that if Frost didn’t compare with Unholy in arena that I at least purchased the right weapon to switch. Either way, I’m comfortable with the weapon decision being a choice in the Frost presence and I am even open to the idea that each spec excels in different areas, but in no way should DW outperform 2H consistently in everything.

Anyway, since Cataclysm I have ran a Blood spec for tanking and 2H Frost for PvP and initially could not be more happy with my decision. The Blood spec was a response to the constant need of tanks in end game PvE content, and thinking about every time I thought to myself that I would like to do an encounter (mostly VoA for me) I was cockblocked by several much more shitty DK’s. While not a raider, I rarely was beat out on DPS and even held more than my own earning my Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquisher – but even getting raids attempting to get my Brynntroll was next to impossible because of the abundance of DK dps. In Cataclysm, I vowed to devote the same amount of time to PvE as I did in Wrath – but the problem is I’m coming up on 2 months past release and I still could care less.

The Blood spec is fun, and while I haven’t tanked on it since mid-December I use it every day running dailies. I wear my full PvP setup (medallion and badge included) in Tol Barad, Deepholm and Uldum, and when Allies attack even 3-on-1 I have come up victorious. If the Blood spec had any Arena function at all I would keep it, but that said I am starting to lean heavily on the side that I want to try out Unholy instead of 2H Frost.

Ahh yes, this debate. Most “pros” will tell you that you need to run Unholy at higher levels and that Frost is the “nub” spec. Nah. Unholy provides constant pressure at all times, and when coordinated well can overwhelm teams with a transformed ghoul and a gargoyle. Frost can give insane damage almost instantly, but the higher I get in Arena I find my burst being peeled much more efficiently than it was at lower levels. My mind isn’t made up on what I am doing and will likely see how Frost performs following the content patch, but in the near future if you are an armory watcher you will likely see a change of some sort.

Speaking of “pros”, other than quickly claiming 1550 achievements across the board in Arenas and an 1800+ rating in 3’s, the highlight of my Cataclysm experience so far was beating this team from Mannoroth. In this scoreboard shot reveals some of the most revered players in the battlegroup, including Lopez, widely considered to be the best DK on the US-Ruin battlegroup (he runs Unholy if you’re wondering). Now in the past I have said that Strand of the Ancients victories should not hold a lot of weight because it is simply an awful battleground, but since our big victory occurred there I take all that back.

Kidding, but it was exciting to pair our guild up (we have a 1750+ achievement requirement for entry) against élite players and come out on top, even if they did let us steamroll to the orb after shutting them out in the first round.

Speaking of the 1750+ achievement, I never had it when I joined my current guild as I was let in without it because of some run-ins in battlegrounds and Wintergrasp with some of the members. I have always considered myself good at PvP, but if you’re reading this far into my post you know that people judge you almost solely upon your highest ratings as often as people mistake your gearscore for skill in a dungeon. It was refreshing to know that I have no difficulty grinding out this rating, though I am starting to understand why people get stuck at certain ratings. There is a noticeable difference in competition at 1800, and I have heard the same at every century interval after that. Now being that I only started season #9 with just over 100 wins, my recent addiction to rated arenas has me in line for the 300 win achievement within the next week or two.

Now with all that rating talk in Arenas, my goal this season was to acquire a ranking higher than 2200 in order to purchase the best weapons and armor. While I feel that I am going to be much better in arenas by the end of this season, I don’t believe that I will grind out a 2200+ rating in one of them. The best way in order to do this in the current implementation though is to via rated battlegrounds. In the above picture alone you see ___ players with a 2200+ ranking, and from all accounts that I have seen it is very difficult to lose points from a battleground, while every win seems to raise you without consequence. Many non-2200+ arena players are in line for the “heroic” Vicious Gladiator gear as of now because of rated battlegrounds, so my guild taking note has begun taking them a bit more serious. Vikt currently sits at 1096 (4 points from the “Scout” title) and is 17-7 so far in those.

Finally, if you already scoffed at the Vengefully Dedicated screenshot for Gladius being out of order with the Blizzard default, I am also in the process of changing my keybinds as well as my UI. So, the screens that you’ve seen for the better part of 2 years are going to change a bit as I’m working towards something a little more user friendly and using keybinds that are easier to manage – you know, now that I know what I actually need to use and how often. Before I was fine with having Empower Rune Weapon as Ctrl+C, however when bursting a target in arena I simply cannot pull this move off in the time, and thus need an easier keybind and then I need to make sure I don’t use it accidentally when I don’t need it…stuff like that.

Conquest Point Cap Chart

I found this beauty today in an aggressive Arena Junkies forums read, meaning basically that things at work were ungodly slow and I had time to catch up on more threads than what just happens in the Death Knight discussion. The post at AJ regarding this chart as well as explanations, discussions and corrections can be found here.

At the moment I am sitting at 1801 so if nothing changes I assume to be able to earn up to 1950 points next week, which means I’ll have to see what kind of remaining points I have cause it may be enough to get another 2200+ point item (head/bp/legs).

Enjoy the chart, if you comb AJ be sure to +rep Felbent (US-Stormstrike) on the chart.

I’m Not Dead

The frequency of my blog updates since the release of the expansion sucks and I know this. On top of what is probably the normal holiday blog slow-down period, my honor grinding that prior was a tank gear grind which was preceded by level grind has left me with little incentive to do anything but play the game. Well, a light is at the end of the tunnel in terms of my honor grind – but I’ll get back to that again later.

For those that visit for one thing or the other, allow me to provide “PVE” and “PVP” titles at the top of the thoughts in order to best make your visit to this post efficient. God help you if you read both.

PVE

One thing I have found that works to generate traffic to the site is to do guide posts. The most viewed posts on my blog after 92k hits are “4.0.1 Death Knight PvP Spec(s)”, “3.3 Unholy PvP Spec (2H)”, “3.2.2 Unholy PvP Build (2h)”, “4.0.1 Frost 2H PvP Results” and then “Level 69 DK Beast”. No where do you find any of my battleground stories, character history or anything of that nature, they are all essentially guides of some point that catch Google and generate an assload of traffic here. Where this leaves me is in a slight identity crisis, as originally I set out for web space to host pictures and stories of my exploits online. Instead I find myself wanting to provide information as I experience it, and I think that is what my now audience of approximately 700 unique visits a day wants to see more of as well.

At any rate, this post is essentially serving as a grab bag of what is going on, what I have planned and – you know I’m sure you’ve figured all this out already.

Anyway back to the guides, I said in a comment a few days ago that I would post a tanking … uhh something and I failed miserably at finishing it. Believe me I have written on it, but what I think is going to happen is that I am going to do it in phases and then link it in the sidebar as well. The first post will be DK Tanking Essentials (or something along that variety), attempting to simplify multiple tanking sites/guides aimed at the beginning DK. As always I’ll provide links to sites I value for information, and always remember that they know better than I do because I really could care less about testing the finer aspects of PvE. I don’t parse or overly test information, I find it and generally let you know if it worked or not.

The remaining posts will likely be a pre-heroic gear list as well as an intelligent way to spend your justice points, followed by a heroic gear list that will serve as a pre-raiding gear list. While I don’t see myself gearing this way for quite some time, you know at some point that I will do it and I am pretty good at using gear lists to plan ahead. I have also considered putting together a strategy guide for heroic raid bosses, but that screams a lot of work and I’m not going to commit to that. I will do the gear and basics posts though.

PVP

In addition, I have a bajillion thoughts on PvP at the moment and I’ve managed to produce absolutely zero of those thoughts on here. Well, I finished my honor grind last night in a sense that now every piece I wear has resilience on it, though I only have the 2 piece Gladiator set (+400 resilience) and boots with the rest being Bloodied Pyrium gear. In addition, about 3 wins tonight in arena and I will have the 3400 Conquest points necessary to obtain my Vicious Gladiator’s Decapitator – so what grind I’ve had to this point is about to pay off tonight in my first epic item in the Cataclysm expansion.

The whole plight to get here has been a bit rough. Horde queue times throughout the first 3 weeks has sucked – I mean, 10 minutes on average for a queue, only to get in and face 10 people in a premade because the Alliance can do so despite the 5-man group limitations. While I can’t fault the Alliance for doing this, I can say that this shit wasn’t a problem before they combined all the servers. As a result, dedicated Alliance PvPer’s (a.k.a. Horde rerolls cause we all know the Alliance would rather skin their own dragon than PvP) geared much quicker than the Horde, making the long bg queues turn into 5-minute murder fests once inside the instance. I can say that I have had a bit more luck as of recent in running them, however I am not sure whether to contribute that to the dedicated Alliance PvPer’s already finishing their honor grinds, God, the RNG or assistance of 4 other Drunk PvP members when queuing.

On top of amazingly easy battleground queues, Bleeding Hollow’s most well-known guild at this moment is the Alliance side’s ‘Tasty Beverage’, which steals the headlines for all the server firsts and whatnot since ‘Tempest’ left shortly into WotLK. While Tasty Beverage accumulates PvE server-firsts and farms content long before most guilds even progress to middle-tiered bosses, they also contain a decent amount of Gladiators that simply prove a little too much for the Horde to overcome when Tol Barad is being fought for. Bring together the coordination of an excellent end-game guild alongside a few guilds claiming emphasis on PvP as well as the current Tol Barad mechanics and you have an island of daily quests that many Horde have yet to experience.

Ya, you were probably wondering when I’d get into Tol Barad. Even though I have wanted to scream about the difficulty of accomplishing this (I know how, just convincing 39 other lemmings is difficult) I have just taken my lumps with the intent that I would become exalted with Hellscream’s Reach at some point. Well, apparently Blizzard is now offering up 1800 honor points for a win, and 180 points for a loss. Well, we’re not stupid, Tol Barad just became an impossible to get into 80-man Honor Point farm-fest. Instead of adjusting mechanics of this historical island (seriously, read the link), they create equality by urging both factions to simply alternate possession in order for all to get max-Gladiator blues in a relatively short amount of time. Well, I now know what all those before me have complained about when they said that “Blizzard is dumbing down the game”.

I mean holy shit. I’ve spent the last 2 weeks suffering ugly defeats, getting 30 honor points from a bad loss after a 15 minute queue only for you to start hand-delivering honor to bots and people who relatively could give a shit less about PvP? Why? This is your answer to fixing the current imbalances of Tol Barad? I sure am glad I spent the last 2 weeks grinding honor I could theoretically get in the next 2 days by simply sitting in Tol Barad on cooldown.

On top of that the Conquest point system sucks too. I mean, you can theoretically fill your Conquest cap per week by winning 5 or 6 matches of anything per week. Where’s the grind in that? If you have been playing as long as I have you have seen continual references made by the developers that they didn’t want the masses to migrate to the path of least resistance, and I applaud that sentiment. However, you make Tol Barad a piece of gear every 5 hours and people are going to be giving less than a shit about heroic dungeons they may or may not finish because of the intelligence factor required over the WotLK versions.

Few more random thoughts:

1. Nice to see Pheraldrood resurrected on the battlefield, amazing how you all hid behind a tree or lived to blow me off ledges during WotLK to now go out of your way to track me down to go 1 on 1. Sure, apply your bleeds and go bear form – I look forward to you again donning your feathers and watching you cluck like a chicken after the nerf bat is swung.
2. Can anyone provide me a reason why Ring of Frost has no way of telling what side cast it? In a 5v5 Blade’s Edge Arena last night we had a mage on our side with 2 opponent mages, with rings placed not only on the main gauntlet but on both side ramps as well. I honestly couldn’t find my ass with both hands; I was just running around hitting frozen people until we dropped a healer. Can we color-code that shit or something?
3. Am I the only one that thinks warlocks should maybe try tanking instances? Talk about hitting a sponge. I used to target warlocks early in group PvP and now I’d almost rather attack a protection pally.
4. Blizzard addressing DK mobility? Thanks, but I’d think rogues have a bit more reason to bitch about this than we do.
5. 31k, 18k, 44k! What? Oh sorry, I just died to a warrior.

I’ll get to Tol Barad later in more detail, but I’m going to try to allow the urge to curse pass me by. At any rate my expansion/holiday hibernation is coming to an end.

New Expansion, Same Results

If you’ve followed the site you already know, but if you don’t just do a search to the right on “wrecking ball” and see the near-misses I have recorded in the past. I used to think that maybe I wasn’t good enough – you know, like it was something only great players could get – but I think I’m getting past that and am just starting to accept that it will happen if its meant to happen.

All this for a silly achievement? I know, it’s stupid. But still, this achievement is like a tribute to badass melee in a battleground and I’m yet to pull it off. L2play amirite?!

Thrall’s Balls, It’s Been a Week

You have to admit that “Thrall’s Balls!” has to be amongst the greatest ways to express “Holy Shit!” in a video game that you’ve ever heard. Had it not been roughly 5:45 am last Tuesday morning I would have had the presence of mind to snap a screenshot of what was going on, but ya – pay no attention to the dirty blood elf screen I pulled off of Google.

Oh and *EDIT* – I did have my Thrall’s Balls pic:

So a week into the Cataclysm expansion has me weary and sleep-deprived. With one day of vacation left for the year I pulled a 22-hour marathon online that began at 3:40 am Tuesday morning and went to 1:30 am Wednesday. I made well into level 83 the first day and perhaps a bit more realistically grinded out the final 9.2 million experience finally on Thursday night, but I sadly still find reasons to maintain non-sustainable hours.

I decided to tank this expansion for the usual cast that gets mentioned here quite a bit, and the results of that have been pretty favorable. I was initially a tank when I started the game, however since returning I’ve been DPS ever since. Upset without an indispensable role should I want to do PvE content, I decided to tip the scales in my favor and the result has worked like a charm. I am currently sitting as 1 of 2 heroic-capable tanks in my guild, my dungeon queues are instant and the ability to get other guild DPS past the 40-minute waits for dungeons is a decent feeling. I’m sitting at a 335 item level and close to 145k health in five-man dungeons, but I’m sure I’ll post on this some other time cause tonight all that PvE stuff is about to go right to hell.

Tonight Rated Battlegrounds are going live, and despite my lack of desire to PvP much over the past week I am frothing at the mouth for a chance to try out the new battlegrounds. I know, I know – sellout – but switching specs to non-PvP friendly setup has had its effects on me. I don’t PvP as a protection spec (though am sort of thinking maybe…), and rolling on DPS items throughout this first week is basically dick-move. I’ve accumulated a few things in reserve, but essentially my gear is resilience-less and PvE defense – I didn’t have a weapon without a defensive enchant on it…

…until last night.

As I sat and considered the dungeon and reputation grinds I’ve endured throughout the past week, I decided I need to have a head-start entering the battlegrounds. I glanced at the Bloodied Pyrium PvP pieces and with current pricing I would end up spending around 20k to outfit myself. While oddly worth it in my view, I likely made a decision that will benefit me even more in the near future – which was to just spend the 20k leveling my blacksmithing from 450-525.