Centurion Enzminger

Since joining Drunk PvP my newly leveled/geared warrior (well, leveled anyway) is now holding the leadership of Vexare. This screen was taken during AV weekend a few weeks ago when I was making an attempt at leveling him up, but as quick as the urge to level/gear another character came left again and I really haven’t logged him in since.

I’m really only posting this cause I think he looks sweet. It’s not the ideal setup for a warrior in PvP, but if looks could kill this guy would be a Gladiator.

4.0.1 Frost 2H PvP Results

My initial impressions of Frost PvP sucked – it was awkward, I had no idea what to cast and when I started to figure it out I was in battleground disconnect hell. Either way, that frustration ended when I started figuring out to use my new arsenal of icy attacks.

The nuts and bolts of what the following battleground scoreboards show is what I am doing right now on a way more than average basis. I have been an absolute machine, dropping characters in 1 on 1 situations I struggled with pre-4.0.1 and dropping healers sans Holy Paladins (ridiculous right now btw). The priorities for single target frost is Diseases > Obliterate > Blood Strike (for the blood runes) > Frost Strike > Rime > OB (normal) > BS > HoW. For multiple-target situations the ideal priority abilities are Howling Blast if both frost/death runes are up > Death & Decay (if both Unholy runes are up > FS > HB > BS > DnD/PS HoW.

What this ends up being (and what some of you are looking for), is that I Icy Touch a target for the 50% slow, PS on the run-up and if you have multiple targets I Pestilence, Howling Blast, but if not I Obliterate and Frost Strike before burning the blood runes with BS. That’s about as simple as I can make it.

Anyway, the results:

This was really my introduction to 4.0.1. Running with Halomoo we were beaten fairly easy by the Alliance, but not as a result of lack of effort. Check the healing on Caska, an absolutely ridiculously good resto druid. In combination of her and the rest of the Alliance, no one died. Like…no one. What I wanted to show though was the scale of damage done – you’ve seen my damage generally always near the top, but check the separations in comparison.

This battleground featured a lot of damage from many people which resulted in many more kills. Again, note the separation of what I am putting out and what the rest are doing. There were a lot of flag pulls by both sides, but it was 1-0 the entire match until a really late cap occurred that solidified the victory.

This one was just frustrating because the Alliance flag carrier stayed in the middle of the battleground and chased our flag carrier in a giant group. There was literally no one else anywhere on the map except around the flag carrier. Frustrating, but again – frost damage noted.

This battleground was essentially Vexare’s first team battleground, and it turned out be one of the best ones we have all played together since we hit level 80 last year. We were down 1-0 down to 4 minutes left in the match, and Megachoo and his 3500 gearscore somehow solo ran a flag to midfield along the east side where Viktsnazz picked him up and escorted him back to the flag room. Exhilarating, but what a way to start off our 7-man guild.

This is essentially my only result from the weekend, as I used most of AV weekend to gear up my warrior. Last night saw myself, Ciampo, Megachoo and Mandazar run 3 AV’s in an effort to get a victory on Vikt. In the first match we went to Stonehearth Bunker, then capped Icewing Bunker before the Alliance won. In the second match we did the same, just in the meantime setting up a killzone beside Icewing Bunker until Drek’Thar fell again. In the final one, fed up with our failed blitz strategy we went old-fashioned: we 4-manned Balinda and then back capped both Horde towers with complete tower annihilation. From there we guarded Stonehearth for the last 1:30 and then raced up to an epic fight ranging from Stormpike Graveyard back to the Aid Station. In this situation I may have used Howling Blast no short of 8,000 times, so for the people claiming frost pvp is spamming HB can rest knowing that it was in this particular instance.

Either way, you’ve seen my results over the life of this site, and the damage increase is extremely apparent being in 40-man battlegrounds or 10. Frost 2H PvP is unbelievable at the moment, so if you haven’t given it a try I’d suggest you do so.

50k Honorable Kills

50,000 honorable kills, the halfway point towards bearing the title of this site, was achieved last night during a 264 HK, 1 million+ damage done-Alterac Valley that appeared destined for a blitz run before some asshole captured Snowfall Graveyard and pinned the Alliance back at the  Stormpike graveyard (you’ll later notice my stats in this battleground and 1 GY captured).

In what began with the “Enlightenment” on June 6th, 2009, my pursuit of this title has seen me:

• completely shun PvE
• realize I needed to PvE to gear for PvP
• get really good at PvE
• & then to only completely shun it again in anticipation of Cataclysm.

This blog chronicling my experiences in World of Warcraft I feel is doing exactly what I wanted to do, being to keep a journal of my progression from a “lol nub DK” to the guy you see tearing it up now. The mark of obtaining this title has certainly never dominated my goals online – I mean, we’re all playing to have fun – but it serves as an obtainable, grind-worthy goal that I have set out to obtain whenever that may occur.

Glancing back to my first month of blogging is funny to see me waxing poetic about minute details, where now I report my experiences in ultra-summarized form in order to address various other topics to comprehensively keep my crew updated on anything we do. I guess I am just very happy to say that there isn’t really anything I would’ve done different to this point. I have stories galore of our times in Everquest and Shadowbane, yet nothing tangible – I’m just very glad I decided to do this.

I think for the first few months I was getting about 9 visitors a day, whereas 16 months later I am steadily sitting at about 260 per day despite really only being linked on Slice ‘n Dice (thanks Sam). 43,932 people have visited “of the Horde” for a variety of reasons, and of those people that chose to drop a comment, email a question or talk to me on Twitter I greatly appreciate you helping me formulate this hobby into such an enjoyable situation. Again, thanks.

Anyway, here’s to just as an enjoyable push to 100,000.

The way Alterac Valley should look every time.

The result, and of note the paladin above me was rocking Shadowmourne.

Within striking distance!

Recent Decent Battlegrounds

Nothing too great about many of these battlegrounds, just preserving the moment more or less. In this one you do see Halomoo standing the background, and there exists visual evidence that he does – in fact – use totems.

This one I kept because it just went to show how good group PvP can be. There were 4 members of Vexare in here (Vikt, Halomoo, Mandazar and Viktsnazz) as well as 3 members of iPvP – another Bleeding Hollow (presumably) PvP guild. We annihilated the Alliance as our group was running the flags while theirs was camping the base of the graveyard hill.

Just an impressive showing by Mandazar and I.

Absolute epic AV that I ran with Halorit. 227 kills and 800k+ damage, all because of a certain asshole who caps Snowfall Graveyard…I love Alterac Valley.

Something tells me that half that shaman’s damage below me on the scoreboard was done by knocking Hordies off the cliff from the Lumber Mill. Seriously, I hate that freaking spell.

A good Isle of Conquest, another where I just decided to tank the final guy…or in actuality, I cast Army of the Dead and run in and let the rest kind of take care of itself.

Nice AV w/ Halo

This fight, if the resources had been extended to say…1500 for each side, was an old school Alterac Valley played the way it was meant to be played (or at least used to be, depending on what side of the fence you sit on). Halomoo / Halorit came down from his blue cloud for a night to run a battleground with yours truly and it turned out to be one of the best AV’s I have taken part in for a while.

We initially left the tunnel, mounted up on the Death Mammoth and killed Balinda with a few other people to start things off. Where I have been deviating for a little while was from there I have been going and capping the Snowfall Graveyard partly for needing the Graveyard achievement for Battlemaster and partly because I hate running a battleground that results in 10-15 honorable kills. And yes, I have spoken out about this in the past.

Anyway, a substantial portion of Horde remained at Galvager to defend him and were successful. Upon Halorit and I chasing off a paladin waiting out an SF cap, we went back to Galvager to help clear the stragglers and dropped a significant number of Alliance still trying to kill him. From there we road back to Drek’thar and cleared the Alliance that skipped past the Galvager ass-beating, and here is where it gets awesome.

Riding back we were treated to group PvP skirmishes at Iceblood Garrison, the Field of Strife, Stonehearth Bunker, Stonehearth Graveyard, Stormpike Graveyard, the Stormpike Aid Station and then finally dropped Vanndar Stormpike after slaughtering the map in one massive movement from Frostwolf Keep to Dun Balder. A picture for visualization purposes:

Perhaps the old system of fighting over choke points for hours on end wasn’t the exact system Blizzard had in mind for Alterac Valley, however this game last night was about as good as an experience as I believe you can have in this battleground.

Terribad Night in BG’s

If you follow my Twitter posts (all 22 of you) you read my bitching this morning about going 1-7. Well, I’m getting ready to log in tonight – and the more I think about WoW I’m waffling to get on because of how bad it was. Oh, and I was mistaken on the whole 1-7 thing, it was 2-6 but the first victory here gave arena points for yesterday.

This was the only battleground I ran the night before last, and honestly – if you can’t win a Warsong Gulch on US-Ruin then you’re trying to play on a bad night. You can tell by the damage done that I was in a pretty good pug, and there was an Alliance rogue named Gnardawg. How sweet is that?

(Holla if you just did an Andy impression)

In this AV I decided against the whole blitz thing that everyone tries to do, and honestly unless you spot a badass tank and a guilded healer the chances of a successful blitz are slim to none. In my experience, the ideal blitz comes when someone does the instructions at the beginning and state they are in a premade. They assign groups to certain things, they have a tank and they have healers – unless these things occur, kill Balinda and hold onto towers…don’t run to Vann to sit while the Alliance win.

Back on subject, in this one there was no such tank, there was no such healer, so I killed Balinda and then went re-capping to give the douchebags a shot if they got their act together. They didn’t.

In this AV, glancing at my 4th group member you’ll notice a warrior by the name of Cudmaster, sitting pretty in full ICC 25 heroic gear. We rushed to Vann, he said heal me and charged after confirmation from everyone else – but turns out he and I were the only ones that did.

In this one it was obvious that Cudmaster was a bit pissed, and pleaded for heals in the tunnel. Again, we got there and you can see where the rest of the raid is (and if you don’t care to look it’s in the middle of the goddamned map).

After trying two straight AV’s as the Call to Arms I decided to go random, and what better BG to redeem myself than in the only battleground the Horde wins frequently (you know, after AB, EotS, IoC and WG).

(If you’re following at home that means we suck at SotA as well, just slightly less than AV).

In this one the Alliance employed a great strategy, where the top 2 from Stormrage jumped in the demolisher and roasted anyone that came close to it. The paladin followed close behind, but the Alliance honest to god captured the relic in about 1:30. On offense we had one person break the wall in the whole seemingly 30 seconds we had to win, but ya – you see the results there.

Ahh, off to Arathi Basin – the first battleground all night that we have a better than average chance of winning. I mean of course, unless your resident DK ends up 3RD IN HEALING.

Amazing. No one on the team had any motive to go anywhere, and after running to defend the Farm from the Alliance I stood with 2500 health remaining while 2 priests and a shaman stood there with me. I finally sat down to eat, then got up and bandaged myself in amazement that none of them tossed a heal. Even if you don’t have a healing spec, you can throw a damn 4k heal on me to at least pretend like you give a damn.

SO – what I did for revenge: I stood up in front of everyone until the Alliance came down from the Lumber Mill to attack. I let them run up and when they got close I mounted and took off. The faux-healers got hammered, we lost the farm, and I stood on the bridge in route to the Gold Mine laughing irl. Dick? Yes, but seriously (we were also already down like 800-300).

Bear with me, almost there. By this time Mandazar logged in and I thought at least I have another guy who has a relative clue of how to win. Well, he and I slaughtered the east side, but in less than 2 minutes the Gate of the Yellow Sun was under attack…really? Really. We lost.

Success! Finally! We blitzed, charged in with no towers down and got one. For those that support the blitz, allow this screenshot to show that it is possible…and of course let the other screenshot(s) show that it rarely works.

Hopefully tonight doesn’t suck as bad.

How Random?

A complaint I see on many different forums stems from how – not – random the random battleground feature is. Well, after running what seemed like 10 Strand of the Ancients in a row I started marking down which battleground was selected and with what frequency it occurred.

I started keeping track of the data 50 matches ago, as I couldn’t necessarily tell you which battlegrounds were random and which were selected from the screenshots prior to that. Other variables to consider in how these were likely selected would be time of the day, server population and perhaps how many battlegrounds were running at that particular point – but I really didn’t think about all of that from the start and I didn’t want to start over…so ya. Additional conditions you could argue would be that I rarely go into battlegrounds alone, and that my group typically consists of at least 3 people. We all play generally between 10pm and 1am EST. But anyway, this chart is only about frequency.

What my poorly constructed pie graph shows is that essentially Eye of the Storm was the most selected battleground at 28% of the time, Strand of the Ancients and Arathi Basin at 20% a piece, Warsong Gulch and Isle of Conquest somehow being tied with 12%, and then Alterac Valley at 8%. If anything can be taken from these 50 games, it’s that the top 3 random battlegrounds selected are all 15 vs. 15, and that those 3 alone accounted for 68% of the random battlegrounds I was in.

If you are interested in the results of the 50 battlegrounds (I know how everyone likes to relocate to a server where their side dominates), we went 30-20 overall – and it is really an all or nothing scenario…Horde either rapes, or sucks bad. We went 3-7 in Strand of the Ancients and 1-5 in Isle of Conquest, and if you just figured out why you never see those 2 battlegrounds mentioned much on this site then you just found out. On the other end of the spectrum, we went 11-3 at Eye of the Storm, 7-3 in Arathi Basin and 6-0 in Warsong Gulch. The PvE race that is Alterac Valley came in at 2-2, but truth be told AV would show similar numbers to SotA and IoC given a larger sample size.

School of Hard Knocks

If you were working on School of Hard Knocks at some point this past week then you are certainly familiar with this achievement, which forces the player to capture a flag in Eye of the Storm, assault a flag in Arathi Basin, return a flag in Warsong Gulch and capture a tower/bunker in Alterac Valley. What I am going to talk about is how hilarious I find the whole role reversal, where PvE suddenly has to PvP to achieve something…and my god are the results horrifying.

Hard Knocks needs to go
BG Children’s week Achiev.
Children’s week: School of Hard Knocks
Why children’s week meta is so hard???
Children’s week PVP
Children’s week complaint
School of Hard Knocks
Guess no proto drake…
Remove EOTS from School of Hard Knocks….!!!
School of Hard Knocks and BG Que Times
Please remove School of Hard Knocks Achiev.

That enough? I mean that’s just the last 3 days, and the event has been over for 2 of them. Even check out the Wowhead comments section where everyone has their strategies set aside to get the achievement. It’s terrible to do, but just this one time I have to sit back and laugh at what it’s like when those tables of PvP/PvE are turned.

I did the achievement Friday night before leaving town, and it took me 5 BG’s to accomplish the 4 tasks, with the only repeated one being Warsong Gulch (which is arguably the easiest). My EotS cap came with about 30 points left in the game after all the faster pc’s beat me grabbing the flag (as evidenced by my Nostradamus-like comments in the pic on the top), and because of On a Pale Horse I can drill the AB and AV requirements about :20 into the battleground. Of note, the Horde won all 5 BG’s because the only one I went out of my way for was EotS, which was a matter of us holding 2 nodes, them holding 2 nodes and the rest of the BG fighting on the flag.

Anyway, note the role reversal for future reference and remember the 5800 gearscore raiders getting 3-shotted in battlegrounds.

Oh and I had to include this shot – someone actually grabbed the flag and jumped down the ledge to the bottom-right section of the map.

The Alterac Zerg

The quote in the screenshot unfortunately sums it up. Alterac Valley is no longer a Battleground; it’s a collection of over-geared players racing to the end boss to pick up honor. The birth of this phenomenon began after Patch 1.11 when many NPC’s were removed from the battle, and now that players have reached a gear level that makes the bosses trivial no hope is left for those of us that remember how great Alterac Valley once was.

Well, I want my old AV back.

I can remember the launch of battlegrounds, their half-hour queues to get into them and the occasional all-day battle. Grinding battlegrounds to the point of negating a personal life used to be the norm, and racking up a few hundred kills in a multiple hour rugby-like scrum in AV was the best way to do it. The objectives that we all conveniently bypass in today’s fights were earned with blood back then, and after capping that objective it wasn’t uncommon to lose it as a result of the casualties it took to originally get it.

If you were fortunate enough to get into the launch of a 40 vs. 40 battle, the original clash occurred around Snowfall Graveyard, where the Alliance would be scattered from the entrance to Balinda and on up the hill. The Horde would engage in the Field of Strife as they progressed up the other side of the hill, and the original cap would stand for a fairly substantial period. The guardian NPC’s were tough to fight because of the lack of gear available, and with constant groups running back turning in armor scraps they would eventually be buffed enough to where they could defend the flag alone.

From this point the battle would surge back and forth, and only after a few well-timed pushes would you lose your Captain (being Galvager and Balinda). The fights always remained concentrated, where 25 of the defending faction would be around a particular point in the field while another 25 pushed to take it with both sides splitting approximately 15 people running turn ins.

Remember the mount turn-ins? The Horde would collect wolves around the starting area to unleash a calvary of frostwolf riders, and if you happened to be in the group that saw them approaching you would see an entire faction backing away. If the other faction managed to get a Winged Commander in the air you were essentially halted in place, as few ranged dps could withstand the firepower of them while trying to get them down. Ivus the Forest Lord and Lok’holar the Ice Lord made an appearance in every battle, and while they were up you retreated back behind strong NPC’s as quick as possible.

On one hand I say I want all this back, but on the other I know why it went away. I mean, in the other battlegrounds you received your marks in a much more timely manner, and in AV’s case you would be deprived the honor from the battle if you did not finish it. I still remember running an AV before a class in college, only to log on 6 hours later into the same AV. It was a little overdone back then, but at least all the above mentioned elements that made it great were present. There has to be a middle ground.

I haven’t read of any improvements on the horizon, though for nothing to occur in the face of having rated battlegrounds strikes me as something that simply will not (can not) happen. People have different ideas of how these changes could occur and I applaud them, but for now – please…Blizzard – give me an exciting Alterac Valley again.

Few Battleground Screens

This would be an example of what battlegrounds can be like when grouped with members of your own guild. This particular match was quite a ways back, but having Halo, Luna and Drunk to heal led to me being the equivalent of a battering ram. What I did find though was that the more people we put into our group, the better the competition we faced which led me to believe, “where are all the weak pugs I get stuck in against premades?”

This one lacks the prior exchange, but trying to convince Eleet to join me instead of running a few heroics while he was trying to gear up led to a discussion about how bad the Horde sucks at Isle of Conquest on US-Ruin. He reluctantly ran to get the daily, joined and watched me carve a path directly through the middle of the battlefield and then camp the Alliance base for a while until the rest got the gate open and we killed Halford Wyrmbane.

If I can post the good ones I can sure post the bad ones. This one is significant because of Dormammu, which if you just clicked his name now remember me praising him for camping my level 63-ass back in July. Well, this just in – he’s still really good. This was a battleground that I zoned into very late trying to get the daily done, but it was close enough that I welcomed the mark despite fighting out of the Defiler’s Den. You will notice the pally had one death, and you can blame my cooldowns for that (I mean, who focuses the 35k hp’d pally?).

Just to break up the monotony of BG scores, seriously….Operation Dumbo Drop! This wasn’t planned, I just got a kick out of the way it looked on the way down. You could really take some bizarre screens if you chose to take this concept and organize it with a premade.

Here I knew that I had killed quite a few people, but with Halo turning into a devout bluebie lately I had a few more deaths than I would have liked. That said, how ridiculous is that hunter’s battleground? If I knew (or better yet, cared) how to type in those characters I’d link you to his armory or something. On top of our games, we were losing this battle the entire way but managed to hold our main towers and kill theirs very late, making for a great match down to the end.

On this one I thought I was heading for my first wrecking ball match, but I died near the end and couldn’t get the kill shots I needed in the first place. In the same manner as the first screen of this post, along for the ride are Halo, Arccadun and Pollie – all guildies looking for a little blood.