Just Saw Invincible

You can sort of follow the chat on what just happened. I was the first person to arrive at docks after several people expressed the need to get them prior to the match starting, and when I turned around to look I saw about 6 people behind me. While the BL in the chat said he doesn’t run from anyone, well – I’m not an idiot, I’ll go kill something else.

Anyway on my way back to the forst I thought I saw the horse from HToC but upon closer examination I saw the wings sticking out…ya, I’ll be damned – Invincible! His rider, Zorop of Magtheridon, and I were in a beeline back to the fortress to defend the keep when the screenshot was taken.

We were pretty overwhelmed when we got back by the entire Alliance force leaping in via catapult (with no glaive protection, you’ll note we won this one fairly easily later on), and behind myself and Zorop we pushed out over a few rezzes to re-take the fortress and eventually win the match. Shortly thereafter I snapped a few pics:

…and just because I always post the scoreboard anyway:

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.

First Week Back

After being on vacation for 10 days I was admittedly more interested in playing World of Warcraft than I was blogging about it, but after a week of battlegrounds and a little pre-expansion questing I need to dump some screenshots.

My first battleground back completely illustrated a post I read on Cynwise’s Battlefield Manual ironically during said vacation, entitled “The Battleground Scoreboard” that talks about all that is wrong in the way that battlegrounds are scored. This could not be more true if you analyze the lopsided Horde domination in all aspects of PvP, however still losing to an organized Alliance team. The Alliance had 2 feral druids and a rogue that capped bases behind us, an elemental shaman and a boomkin that blew us off the ledge at the lumber mill – just all the elements of a successful Arathi Basin team minus geared Gladiators.

Also, I posted recently about a badass hunter being your best friend in a battleground, and in that you had Draxiel from Skullcrusher just pouring damage into the Alliance. Again, we lost, so all for naught.

Again with the hunters, this time being Bohan from Shattered Hand (in complete PvE gear) and Hektor from Magtheridon. These hunters lit everything up so effectively that I somehow was never the target of a group and that my defensive cooldowns were enough to keep me alive most of the time, which is plus considering I’m always at the front of the battle. Four more damn kills and I would’ve got my wrecking ball achievement…shit.

This is of course the anti-first picture, where we dominated all the stats and still won. I would assume that Strand of the Ancients is much more conducive to one of these types of results than Arathi Basin is, because if you lose out in the mass PvP in and around the demolishers you pretty much don’t fair very well. The reason this battleground is shown is because I inherited (stole, whatever) my new saying when I capture the relic in SotA or Wintergrasp…except I spell it right.

You know how every portfolio, resume or whatever has that one item in it that supposedly shows versatility? Ya, this is me claiming I can do more than bash heads in Eye of the Storm. You’ll note in the bottom of my UI that I go to the extent of keeping Swiftness Potions in my inventory, as well as alternate between Unholy (run speed) and Frost (tank) presences in order to be an effective flag carrier. If you’re losing a lot of battlegrounds and not taking similar steps, try re-evaluating your approach (quit being a tightass!).

This is the obligatory “we defended Wintergrasp and I kicked ass in it” screenshot that pretty much makes every screenshot-dump post that I do. To judge your own personal asskickings, download the WinterTime addon from Curse which will not only tell you when Wintergrasp starts, but how many kills and honor you earn while inside of it. It also comes with extra achievements which in no way count towards your total, but it still kind of rocks when you earn things like “Won Wintergrasp wearing no pants”.

Of note there is no achievement for that, but you get the idea.

Such a questing whore, told you I was trying to tie up some loose ends before Cataclysm.

While you can’t tell in this picture, I finally decided that I could tank bosses at the end of battlegrounds. While I am certainly not ready to tank Alterac Valley and all the tower guards yet, I decided that I’ve watched enough people sit around long enough when the waiting party was sufficient to take down the end boss. You know the routine, 15 people standing outside the boss in AV or Isle of Conquest and everyone looks at each other with their dicks in their hands? Ya, I’ve started going frosty and charging bosses – pretty good results so far.

While this final battleground doesn’t look like much, we were actually even around 350 with the Alliance beginning to take the upper hand. I ran down towards the Gold Mine and helped a warrior and a druid take out 2 Alliance as well as the respawn, and immediately after the battle a warrior named Gormic from Mannoroth stepped up, inspected me and said let’s roll together. We capped the mine, he hopped on the Death Mammoth along with Mandazar and ripped the blacksmith from 4, the lumber mill from about the same and then went Operation: Dumbo Drop back to the blacksmith in route to a 5-cap. It was perhaps one of the most dominant runs against superior numbers I’ve had without a healer…it was ugly for the Alliance.

Backlog of BG’s

This was really the only battleground I have ran with my brother in a long time. After zoning into the random battleground, screaming “SHIT!” as loud as I could after seeing it was Strand of the Ancients – it really turned out pretty ok (as evident in my comment in guild chat). You could even say Eleet outplayed me – nice to have some competition now and then.

When I talked Eleet into playing I wanted one of those unkillable paladin pricks to run around with, and when he plays he is just that. It would be scary to see us running around more than once every two weeks.

Another Strand that we actually won, where Mandazar and I carved up a pretty bad set of Alliance. I really can’t remember much else other than that about this one.

But this one on the other hand I do. See, one of the defining ways of discovering a noob Death Knight is their use of Death Grip. New 80’s for some reason have a fascination with death-gripping everything in sight, but sometimes you have some interesting experiences with ones that probably shouldn’t suck. I have never been death gripped more in a battleground by one DK than I was by Pulverized the Kingslayer, who had some unhealthy fascination with fighting me instead of…you know, even getting off the beach. Even travelling around with a pocket holy paladin – well, you can see the results for yourself.

This is just one of those absurdly fruity family pictures, but this warlock named Infectiion and I pretty much won an Eye of the Storm on our own. See, I am a pretty habitual Draenai Ruins crasher off the start, and then I work my way around nodes that seem to be unguarded or have little opposition – meaning if there’s less than 3, I and whoever (if anyone is with me) are going to take the node or tie up half the BG in trying to defend it from us. Anyway, we had 2 nodes and were getting raped at the flag, and with a huge lead the Alliance then took the Felreaver node…

I was running towards the middle and decided to assist the solo warlock there, and this was the end result. The rest of the Horde was short-sighted on the east side of the map, while this warlock and I defended FR by ourselves for the rest of the battleground. He wasn’t geared very well, but I just went into peel and root mode and AE’d everyone down while they attacked him. He pretty much used every ability available to warlocks to live through most of this, but whatever he did he did it very well.

I mean, I know it’s old, but seriously – “that’s what she said” jokes still make me laugh. The art of the joke always lies in the presentation, and when it hits you when you don’t expect it … I dunno, just funny.

Well, speaking of “that’s what she said jokes” ….

This was just Mandazar and I the other night. We were smoking them like 800-300, then 1150-600ish – and ya, then we got our asses kicked. Just goes to show, even when you gift wrap a battleground in a pug that you think it would be impossible to lose – you just never know.

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.

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.

Patch 3.3 PvP Changes

There’s a ton of changes to the game in Patch 3.3, but the only ones that will affect you from a PvP standpoint are:

Arenas

• All abilities that have base cooldowns of 10 minutes or longer cannot be used in Arenas, down from 15 minutes.

Battlegrounds

• Battleground Experience: Battleground experience gained is now based on the level of the player gaining experience, rather than the highest possible player level in that Battleground.
• All level 71-80 Battleground daily quests will now award 25 Arena points in addition to their current rewards.

Wintergrasp

• You must now have the following ranks to build or pilot siege vehicles:
  • Rank 2: Build/pilot Catapults.
  • Rank 3: Build/pilot Demolishers.
  • Rank 3: Build/pilot Siege Engines.

The Arenas bit is just further evidence that Blizzard is going with shorter cooldowns, however if you weren’t able to use it prior in Arenas you still can’t – it’s just now possible to use it more in Battlegrounds (Army of the Dead for DK’s, for example).

The extra Arena points for completing the Battlegrounds PvP daily is a welcome addition as it essentially brings you 175 additional points per week. The hidden benefit is that it may make the Horde on Ruin suck less in certain ones. I swear that it is impossible to win in Alterac Valley, Arathi Basin or the Isle of Conquest as of late. Simple strategies to all 3, yet complete moronification occurs somewhere in between level 79 and 80 for the Horde and persists forever thence after.

The Wintergrasp change – oh thank god. Hopefully the increased rank to build catapults will deter people from hanging around the vehicle shops in order to build one the moment they achieve the first rank, and instead make their way to the base and stay until First Lieutenant is achieved. Come to think of it, I wonder if Wintergrasp can still be glitched to achieve top rank instantly?

Black War Kodo

When I was leveling an Alliance character I remember getting my battleground marks and having virtually nothing cool to spend them on, but with the Horde I swear I stared at the selections for 10 minutes and finally settled on a coin flip between the Black War Kodo and Red Skeletal Warhorse.

Last night the Horde was awesome. I first finished my pvp daily (a day late) for the Isle of Conquest in a game that had all the makings of us getting destroyed – what a difference a few days makes. After last week being in an IoC that saw a miraculous stand at our base only to have our offense fail on the High Commander Halford Wyrmbane, we got owned at the docks in the beginning but made a quick recovery by capturing the workshop and hangar in route to a very quick victory.

After that I ran three Warsong Gulches and won all of them 3-0, even gaining the Warsong Expedience achievement on the final one. I’m not exactly sure why the Alliance on Ruin were so bad last night, but if Thursday night happens to be the big raid night for the top guilds then I’ll be sure to set aside extra time next week.