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?!

Drunk PvP

Earlier in the week an opportunity presented itself to my crew and I to join up with the best PvP guild on the server. As we stood, 6 of us debating on whether to mass recruit a PvP force in hope that several stuck around and didn’t suck – we chose to jump to the confines of a 100+ member guild with the entry barrier of needing a 1750 rating in Arenas.

Well, we picked the right night to do it because premades started shortly thereafter. The results? Ehh, disgusting. A collection of players like this should be illegal, and it would appear that the 6-member crew that was once Vexare – Vikt, Halomoo, Ciampo, Mandazar, Viktsnazz and Megachoo – has obtained what we have been searching for since we came to a PvP server. Rated battlegrounds are going to be awesome.

How about we start off the night with an Eye of the Storm? Honestly I can’t believe we let them even score.

The second match was about as close to perfection as could possibly be. The only death by the Horde in this match was a DK from Skullcrusher, as our guild was only supplying 13 of the 15 needed.

This match proved a little more intresting, as we sort of just trade bases up the middle of the map. The Lumber Mill stayed alliance due to an elemental shaman and a boomkin guarding it (hate that fucking typhoon spell), and the mine stayed Horde because Ciampo and 2 other members of the guild stayed there. It wasn’t until Drunkscooby decided to camp the stables that we really established a steady hold on resources as we traded the farm and blacksmith back and forth.

The warrior above me on the scoreboard, Jùicyj, was one of the reasons I was enamored with this guild to begin with. A few months ago I ran an ICC 10 with many members of this guild and the people outside were having difficulty zoning in. Jùicyj and I went out and killed 9 people in route to summoning stone without a healer, at one point fighting 4 people at a time. There’s just something to be said for being surrounded by people who know how to play their classes.

A much quicker AB, we cleaned up mistakes from the first one and won this one only allowing 50 points. Ciampo died twice, not sure how because we completely steamrolled our way into the Alliance graveyard.

If you use Xperl like I do, seriously…how the hell do you click off buffs? I thought I’d be all awesome and whatnot, morph into a dwarf during our fight to take the last node and ended up guarding it for the entire battleground because I couldn’t mount up to leave. As Mandazar says in the screenshot, apparently it does that right now, but ya.

Here’s the one you expect from me. If you’ve followed from the beginning, you know that I either get well over 20 killing blows and die once or I don’t die at all and get less than 20. The Wrecking Ball achievement will be the death of my online persona one day, I swear it. This is another example, as I once again laid waste to a battleground only to come up short again. The bitch of this one that a battleground just before this (which for some reason I cannot locate the screenshot) we camped a graveyard until 2 members got their 20-0, to which I was unable to do because I died running the flag back by myself while the rest of the guild was AE’ing the graveyard. I sincerely felt bad for the Alliance in the battleground, however remembered all the times it has happened to me as well – sweet vindication.

If you ever are stuck in this situation? Leave the battleground, they’ll get bored eventually when no one respawns.

More Frost Testimonies

Yusehz of US-Shadowburn is an Orc Death Knight swinging a Heroic Bryntroll with a Death’s Choice trinket. By comparison I am swinging a normal Bryntroll with a Greatness card. Yes, he does have better gear than me but that doesn’t take away from the fact that his screenshot here is completely what I was linking here.

Eatspie of US-Retaliation is an Undead Death Knight swinging an ilevel 277 Gladiator Polearm with a Whispering Fanged Skull. Yes, this screenshot is utterly disgusting and I believe was posted in order to make us all feel inferior, but same as the one before and my post before these, frost damage is exponentially high in relation to our normal performance right now.

Also of note, Yusehz earned a Gladiator title in Season #8 and Eatspie has a high arena rating of 2400+. These are exceptional players putting up these numbers.

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.

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.

Warlock Ownage

It could be the bind on account pieces, but who wants to believe that? I genuinely think I may have missed my calling as a warlock after queueing up a battleground for the first time on Jastas, my (now) level 20 warlock who has spent the better part of a year alternating between my bank alt and my “hey, how awesome would it be to have a ranged PvP?” alt. I logged him in Friday night just to get the troll illusion from the Zalazane event, and for some reason decided he needed to get his mount so I whipped out 5 levels in order to do it.

Prior to this battleground I had never played a Warsong Gulch in the 10-19 level bracket, and after the results of this one I guess I can see why level 19 twinks were separated into their own brackets. I utilized my one macro (dunno the spell names, but on the screenshot it casts #1, 2 and then 3) on everyone in the battleground and they were dropping faster than a restoration shaman to a wizard cleave. I was close to high damage despite solely following and guarding the flag to and from the bases. Imagine if I actually farmed out the other 7 pieces of gear I could equip?

My 700+ hit points were more than a level 18 paladin on my team, and at one point I actually utilized my staff to critical melee someone for 112. At any rate, I feel as if I am a successful melee in PvP because I can feel the fights and position myself accordingly, and as a ranged player I think I can use that same knowledge to not get hit and still dish out massive damage.

Then again, I was level 19 in a battleground with bind on account gear, but a single death away from the (here we go again) wrecking ball achievement at level 19 has to show some promise, right? A level 80 caster would be a lot of fun, it’s just too bad I’ll likely never level one up.

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.

187k Honorable Kills

I was doing some inspecting after seeing some high gearscores before Warsong Gulch started, and saw that Keeb of the Horde had 187k honorable kills. If you’re an enhancement shaman or are working on one, I’d check out his profile and talents and work off of that.

Dude was good. For a complete pug we destroyed them really quickly while he and some others were camping the graveyard, which is always pretty cool considering the Elune pre-made we were facing (which SUKS).

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.