Is this a Timeless Isle rort?

In the Timeless Isle there is the capacity to earn special “bloody coins” currency by adopting the mantle of Ordos and killing others. Get enough coins and there are some nifty non-combat rewards and even a cool mount for 500x of the buggers. On my PvE realm flagging like that is still a dangerous act, as many folk will take the opportunity to fight and the buff takes away a lot of your health. I imagine that on a pvp realm it is one hell of a fast and deadly activity.

I found a group of characters up on the very northern tip of the Isle who appeared to be having their own little Ordos party, where I can only assume they take turns dying and killing each other. A good idea really, but is it a rort?

To be fair they may not have been switching to kill each other for Bloody Coins. Perhaps there was some other RP activity going on, and I’d just found the new tunnel for the DeepRun Tram? I wasn’t invited to join them, and perhaps that was a good thing.

To get there I was riding over the water well beyond where any monsters or quests go, and it was very still and quite. Good on these players for finding a nook to sequester themselves. More power (and blood-coin-thingys) to them.

Happy Killing, TyphoonAndrew

Um, what? Interview with Blizzdevs

Listening to the one of latest Podcast from Legendary – about 15 minutes in they’re (Greg Street and Brian Holinka) talking through the effects of balancing Pvp vs Pve, and about how they’re not desiring to push one group into the other…forgotten about the Wrathion quest line already? Wish I had.

Great interview though. Particularly good for their perspective on Pvp in terms of balance holistically in the game, rather than at a micro level between classes and specs. A cynic might view it all as boilerplate stuff, but if you listen there is some meat in there on what they are thinking about when the choices are made, which I find really interesting. I’m a fan of knowing some of the process, even if I don’t follow the results.

Wrathion Story part 2 done!

Those pesky pvp battles were an absolute pain, and now my DK is thankfully back to grinding drops from raid bosses and farming mats to get further through the quest chain.

Generally I hated the pvp battlegrounds. Almost all the fights demonstrated that an organised group will crush a typical pvp set of random players. The battlegrounds where we died constantly were blisteringly frustrating.

The battlegrounds were a core of us followed some simple strategies were good, and generally we either won or came very close to winning.

I learnt:

• Any group is stuffed without a healer, and protecting the healer is actually fun. A particular Paladin teamed up with myself and another Death Knight and we roflstomped almost everyone for 2-3 minutes at a time before the Orb debuff made us crushable. As a set of three we moved through that Battleground together and it worked really well. Later it was a Druid who help me steamroll through the squishies are part of the fighting team.
• Stay as a group. i.e. when 3-4 players stayed in the middle of the Orb Arena (not its real name) we smashed the others. Especially when we had two players with Orbs.
• Fight within the game’s ideal zone. i.e. on the flags, carts, or in the center of the arena where you get the most points.
• Personal cooldowns are not for emergencies, they are for every second in the game. A moment spent in combat without them is pointless.
• Not that I intended to, but a particular Shadow Priest and Warlock on Horde are probably writing blog posts about how much Death Knights are broken and overpowered in PvP. I think I killed these particular two characters

Related articles

• Wrathion’s PvP Battleground Quests (typhoonandrew.wordpress.com)
• Tests from Wrathion (typhoonandrew.wordpress.com)

Quick PvP Round 3

PvP round three was much better. How you ask? Well I seemed to get into more teams that knew what they were doing, and were better able to bolster my silly ass through the experience. I did participate as well as I understood.

(Warning – Achievement screenshot spam).

Victory! One down, one to go.

Booyah! Wrathion’s silly pvp stuff done.

Mort in PvP, actually doing something bloody useful

For Temple of Kotmogu – 4x killing blows, 3x deaths, 48 Honorable kills and 4x Orb possessions, which also grants 403 of the 1600 points were mine. Another DK teamed with me for the match pulling in a very nice 498 points.

For Mines – less impressive and far more like the noob I am in PvP. 1x killing blow, 1x death, 26 honorable kills, and 2x carts controlled. If not for the frustration I think PvP could be enjoyable.

Best of all, this means I’m back onto the PvE based grind for the Wrathion quest chain. Happy killing, TyphoonAndrew

Wrathion’s PvP Battleground Quests

Go to hell whoever thought it would be wacky fun times to include a few pvp fights in a PvE quest chain.

I tried to be open minded.

I crafted, gem’ed, enchanted, etc a pvp set. Because I didn’t want to be carried too much.

I’ve joined fights and basically just got my arse handed to me.

Or the team are more interested in kill farming than actually winning.

Or teams that seem to get excited by the notion of the Perfect Loss.

I have no use for honor except buying more pvp gear, which I do not want once I have this lousy waste of bandwidth done.

If this is the only way that the PvP content will get seen by a majority of the playerbase, then your pvp content is *ahem* bland. This experience just tells me that pvp has not changed or improved fundamentally in 6 years. If I want to kill people I’ll play a 3d shooter, not WoW.

So go straight to hell, this part of the Legendary chain is plain crappy. I know it is supposed to be “hard“, but it is not supposed to be a shitty waste of my time.

Tests from Wrathion

Now that I’ve done the Test of Valor (yay, finally) I’m at the part in the epic quest chain to kill a special commander, and win two pvp battlegrounds.

I’m not keen to do the PvP part as I do not understand anything about the two games, and this late in the expansion I can imagine that random teams will not like a scrub. Tough luck for them though, blame Blizzard folks, the Epic quest chain is making me hurt your PvP fun. As such I’ve started collecting the ~458 pvp gear, so I don’t get roflstomped straight away and I won’t be a useless scarecrow for the team I join.

Getting a started Pvp set is cheap if you know the patterns (10-15 ore per item, + gems and enchants) or very expensive if you want to buy your way through the sets. I either crafted the items, or had them crafted except for one item. So an almost full kit out was around 2000g with gems and enchantments, with most of that cost coming from the gear I purchased and the gems/enchants. The 458 gear is a long way from the beautiful Conquest items that I can see the vendor selling (/drool). For a full gear-set 2k is cheap as chips. If only beginning PvE gear was so cheap; nice that there is a lower barrier to entry for PvP.

I’ve also purchased a pvp neck and ring with Honor, and using a few one handed LFR 483s to go Dual Wield Frost for the pvp battles. I;m not expecting to get top charts for Dps, and did not want to affect my main hand 2H dps weapon by reforging away to the “wrong” starts for PvE.

So far the biggest problem is bag space. A Dps, Tank, and now PvP-Dps set takes up a lot of space. I wonder if PvP-Blood is still fun and frustrating for the enemy? Coming to a battleground near you, Mortigen the scrub DK.

Happy Killing, TyphoonAndrew

DK Mullet Set – pvp tier

The new Death Knight set has been shared by MMO Champ – I’m calling it the mullet set. Business in the front, party in the back. … A mullet joke is better than the “me-so-horny” jokes you’ll see in Stormwind and the Deeprun Tram very soon.

The set without the helm is good, I don’t understand the helm design.

At least a few upgrades

Last week I was finally able to purchase the third t12 item, and I decided to craft the 365 weapons rather than waiting for either a price drop, or a totally lucky drop in Firelands. It feels good to have some upgrades.

It took me a long time to get the third t12 item, and I worked hard for it – was it casual? Yup. But you can get stuffed if you think it didn’t take a very long time. I’m not the best geared in my guild at all, but considering that I have never had a raid upgrade in Firelands, and have barely stepped in there, being around position 12 to 14 on the guild list is a small achievement.

Today I read news that the t13 items will not be available for purchase with Valor, but other gear will be. Initially I was totally disenfranchised by this. I think this is OK as long as the gear is almost the same as the tier gear. A tad less powerful is fine (eg. missing a Tier set bonus), but if the items are no more powerful than the 5 man rewards, then I will not be grinding Valor at all – and cannot see a reason to do the 5 mans beyond the basic gear-ups.

That will have a drastic affect on the tank population, and the amount of players we’ll see – so much so that I doubt it is even plausible for the Valor gear not to be almost as good. Not granting t13 rewards makes having those items more special, and I like that. If you are a raider and you got lucky enough to get them, then kudos. Just don’t penalise my role in the raid because I’ve geared a few items using Valor. That would be stupid.

So what does this all mean? It means I’m watching closing the announcements for gear as part of 4.3. Very closely.

Mort’s new Drake of the West Wind

One of the few things I like in game which is not strictly an advantage or with a great purpose is having some of the groovy mounts. I’m not a mount collector by any means, but there are a few I have that I really like.

The Drake of the West Wind is a nice looking dragon – and well worth the time and grind. I may even continue to do the daily quests.

Oh no, not again.

Seems that Ret Paladin are getting the nurf that the forums cried out for. And I don’t mean an adjustment, or a conservative change, or a series of tweaks. Its a fully blooded destruction of the class that reached beyond Ret pvp (where there were major issues), beyond Ret pve raiding (where there were adjustments needed), and right into Prot tanking (which was just getting good), and into Holy (which needed a dps boost).

Its right back to Blizzard saying they think they know where the class is going, and has a vision for it. Sure, I see your vision:

– Ret: melee dps without snare, cc, intercept, or flee abilities. Fun? maybe.

– Prot: tanking was really good, but being still grounded in abilities that are affected by every other spec change means that there is potential for damage to Prot in every other change. And then boosting aoe tanking of other classes (which needed it), and adding a new class to tank. Right, so who is looking for a Paladin tank when the other tanks are around?

– Holy: being a good single target healer. Same old story.

WoW Insider has a good post about this.

Confused about pvp

Essential reading for us clueless pvp players.

I need some help understanding pvp. /confused

My questions for the uber-gankers out there:

– Which rewards from the battlegrounds are the must haves for pve toons?

– Is there even a hard rule?

– Why is it even acceptable to have rewards that are good pve options in pvp, which are not also “solo grind-able” in pve?

– Do you think the gear quality will continue in the next expansion, so that pvp for pve continues to be a viable upgrade path?

You see I’m an old grumpy bastard, who used to think he was good at first person shooters when Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament were new. That was pvp in no uncertain terms. For a while I learnt maps, played a lot, and had a machine that made other gamers cry. I pwned before the concept of tea-bagging was popular.

Over time my attention for fast twitch games waned, my reflexes slowed, and I didn’t give much thought to pvp like activities. Then I started playing wow, and the idea of killing others in a somewhat fair competition was again an option. It wasn’t immediately exciting, and being on a pve server I chose not to do PvP. I figured I leave it to the kids, they’ll get excited about it, and stay out of my pugs.

But now I see pvp gear that would be very handy as pve rewards, and I’m told that pvp is not too hard and all you need to do is grind out the time. Battlegrounds especially are highlighted as a domain of severe disparity between the can’s and the can-nots, but if you’re killing to die over and over, you can get the gear. I was also warned that the time sink is huge to get the valuable gear.

To qualify this I started grinding BG Honor to get a Paladin main weapon upgrade. A prot pally with some resilience gear seems darn hard to kill (insert cockroach joke by BRK), but altogether useless at anything but defense. I have literally announced the incoming attack by 3 goons, and survived the time it took my comrades to run from the other side of the EotS map to defend the node. Then the screen cleared I was still standing on our node.

A typical pvp game for my pally is:
/Say “I’ll sit on MageTower, and yell when they’re inc.”
/cast rank 1 Consecrate
..wait..
/cast Perception
..wait..
[repeat till in combat, overwhelmed, or sap’ed]

Arena seems like a hot blooded gank fest. I have no doubt that it takes extreme amounts of skill and effort to get to the top ranks, and that you need to be devoted/organised to get the anywhere close to the top gear. Meh, I’m casual by choice as well as circumstance and a 3 minute death parade holds no value.

Battlegrounds appear to have a tad more story and strategy, but I can’t get a real picture on what roles to do, or what strategies are valid. If these strategies exist, then why are they not followed? That would be like trying to do a pve boss with a totally inappropriate group. Just silly.

Zone pvp seems the most natural expression of pvp, and indeed the most logical. A contested area that can be controlled and defended by the players in the area at the time is a great concept. But the it is very difficult to balance the needs of the pve levelers and the pvp zone players.

For now my plan is to ignore the logic, and sit in BGs till I have enough honor for my upgrade. Ignore the boredom, ignore the fools, and ignore the afk players. It seems a poor way to play, but the rewards are otherwise achievable.

Trying out a PvP 2v2 Team

With much trepidation I joined a WoW 2v2 Arena team created by a few guildies. Our goal (much like many of the new teams) is to get just enough points to get some of the great gear.

This was my first time in there, and we got spanked every time. Perhaps the team combo of a Priest and Warlock is not ideal, and I have a feeling that you need a CC such as a Rogue to really have a good game. Warriors and Hunters also have fear prevention now too, so its getting to be that all I do is DoT and die.

Oh well, somebody on the Horde side will be enjoying a quick gank, and we’ll get some points along the way.

Team name: Bad BuZZ – and I have no idea what it means, only that its not a drug thing.