Author Archive

Resilience & Season 8

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Wrap up of Season 7

I am overall satisfied with how Season 7 went for my RMP. We hit 80 roughly a week before the season started and geared our characters from all blues/greens to almost full relentless. I am happy to say that none of us bought rating to get weapons or any other gear, all of our progress was due to hard work and learning our comp. Although I had originally expected to end the season with a higher rating, I am fine with where we did end due to some bad losses to counter-comps where we would lose ridiculous amounts of points while hard wins would net us only a few.

Changes to Resilience

The change will double the value of resilience in reducing damage done by players. So depending on their current amount of resilience, characters might experience a 10 to 20% decrease in damage taken from other players. The critical strike chance and critical strike damage reduction components of resilience will remain unaffected by this change.

This announced change will hopefully bring arenas to where I think they should have been all of LK. The rise of cleave teams has done little good for arenas and WoW PvP. The meta-game as a whole has been who gets blow’d up first loses. There is zero strategy in most of these cleave comps other than pick a target (usually healer) and rush them down. We fought many beastcleave comps this season and each one was an uphill battle. Those games were rarely fun because it always ended in 1 of 2 ways:

  1. Can’t LoS hunter and there is no avoiding the burst. I die through PS with full buffs/battlemaster.
  2. I survive the initial burst and then we destroy them because they now have no strategy.

As my friend Nworby says, “If it is beastcleave, take what rating you think they are and then add 200.” This rang true many times as we would beat a beastcleave and think “we’ll probably only get 5 points for this win” and then find out that they were rated much higher than how they played.

Hopefully this change to resilience will bring damage down to where it needs to be and should have been all expansion. I think the reason this wasn’t the case was because of the opposite problem in TBC. It caused the devs to be too cautious with resilience’s effect so that each game didn’t turn out to be a drain game.

The change initially helps me out a lot. I will gain another 12.39% damage reduction and have a total of 24.78% reduction across the board on damage. This should help me be able to last longer while being trained.

Best memories of Season 7

Beating teams with much better gear – This is true for any season, but was a lot of fun this season. When you have those games that you are outgeared and sometimes outcomp’ed but you play so flawlessly that you get the win. This season, we were around 1600 rating and we played a team with 3/5 relentless and weapons. At the time, we were in almost full deadly and didn’t really stand a chance against their 1900 rating. We didn’t make a single mistake and predicted their every move that game. The 25 or so points that we gained was very rewarding.

Reaching 1800 – Our journey to 1800 was difficult to say the least. Not having furious gear from the previous season and also not having decent weapons really hindered our progression. We decided that the easiest way to hit 1800 would be for my 2v2 (rogue/priest) team to get it first and then we could push for it on our 3v3. We ended up within 15 points of 1800 roughly 15 separate times over 3 weeks. Every time that we got close, we would play a geared team and lose 20+ points. In the end, we hit 1800 on our 3v3 first beating a 2k team to get the final points that we needed.

Learning RMP – RMP is a very fun comp to play. While some of the cleave teams were rough matches, most of the others were a lot of fun. RMP requires a lot of coordination and is a lot harder to play than some other comps that I’ve played in the past. It is a comp that really relies on skill and teamwork to get the job done.

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Prot PvP

Friday, January 15th, 2010

Prot Warriors have been the topic as of late. You may have noticed a Prot Warrior team reaching 3000 rating and maybe the Prot Warrior team that played at MLG Orlando this past weekend. It is undeniable if you have played against them that Prot Warriors are a serious threat in PvP. With the current state, Blizzard has announced that they will be nerfing Prot Warrior PvP.

In the next content patch the current plan is to change Warbringer a bit so that it no longer allows Charge and Intercept to break roots or snares but Intervene would remain unaffected.

The diminishing returns on shield slam damage now starts to kick in when shield block value is more than 1960 (at level 80). It maxes at behaving as if your shield block value is 2072 when your block value is actually 3160 (again, at level 80). Remember this includes the scaling from both shield block value on gear AND shield block value from Strength.

There has been some heated resistance to these changes. There are many PvE warriors who are worried that it will affect their tanking. Likewise there are many PvP warriors who want Prot to be a viable option for them. I have two major problems with Prot Warriors (and Prot Paladins) in PvP:

1. They do not require resilience

There is (supposed to be) a reason that PvP gear doesn’t work in PvE and PvE gear doesn’t work for PvP. Resilience is that reason. You shouldn’t be able to step into arenas without resilience and not get insta-gibbed. Likewise, you should not be able to raid in PvP gear and top any charts. Right now, Prot specced characters can walk into arenas without resilience and survive.

Gear is and will continue to be a huge factor in arenas and PvP. This is most of what makes character development fun for me. It is a great feeling of accomplishment when you buy a piece of gear after a long honor grind or with arena rating. It is mainly what separates a character that just hit 80 and one who someone has devoted a lot of time into. Your gear defines your character.

I can remember back to vanilla WoW around the time that I hit rank 10 on my warrior. There were a couple warriors on the realm who had BiS gear. They would stand around Ironforge waiting for duels or just talking to their friends. Many people would gawk at their gear. For me, that gear was unobtainable and although I wished that I could have their gear, I knew that I didn’t want to put that much time into it. Today, gear is much easier to get but still separates the people who want to put in some work to advance their characters and those who just want the handouts. Try walking into an arena without resilience as a caster (especially healer) and you will get blown up so fast that it will take you back in time.

When Prot Warriors are allowed to not only participate but do well in arenas and PvP without resilience, it takes away the status of any PvP gear that is difficult to obtain.

2. They completely shut a caster down

When TBC first came out, I immediately crafted a mace when I hit 70 and specced into mace specialization. I wasn’t in the majority who chose to use the mace. Many warriors went with the Axe for the extra crit. I started playing some 3’s with another warrior and a druid. A few weeks into season 1 and my warrior partner switched specializations and crafted the mace because it was that good. Our double mace stuns carried our team up to around a 1900 rating. Any healer who played during S1, 2, 3 can remember how overpowered mace stun was. There really wasn’t any way to get away from a Stormherald wielding warrior who was stunning you every few seconds.

As much fun that was for me at the time, it was overpowered and there really was no skill involved with the stun. It was a proc that randomly happened and there was no way to control it. The healers that we hit did not have any options for getting away. When these situations come up where skill and knowledge are completely removed from arenas, you end up with complete RNG. You end up hoping that you don’t run into those overpowered classes because if they play it right, there is nothing you can do to beat them.

The way warriors stand pre-nerf, they have too many ways to completely shut down someone by themselves. AoE stuns, blanket silence, AoE spell reflect, interrupts, range (charge/intercept), and on top of all of that… burst damage. They are easy to heal because nobody is going to burst through 50k health, hard to kite due to Warbringer, and hard to get away from due to their snare and stuns/silences.

Now I’m not trying to say that playing a Prot Warrior doesn’t take any skill to do and you will hit 3000 rating. I just think that Prot Warriors have too many abilities that are designed solely around PvE that have now become too powerful in PvP. Powerful enough that it won’t just be a FotM class, but would stay this way unless it is nerfed.

Arenas are always more fun and rewarding when you win because of how you played and not because your class beats all.

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Arena Footage

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

As promised, here is some video captured during our arena matches last weekend. The matches are between 1850 and 1900 rating. We played many comps like beast cleave, mirror, spell cleave, TSG, etc. I spent a lot of time during these matches doing offensive dispelling, more than usual. The challenge of playing a disc priest is the balance between defensive and offensive play. I have had teammates get global’d during a holy fire cast.

RMP is a lot of fun because of the diverse strategies vs the various comps. We don’t just pick a target to try and global, we pick our CC targets and damage targets and switch when needed. Hopefully these matches offer some strategies for your RMP or other comp.

Match Breakdown:

Match 1: RMP

Get in combat early to prevent sap. Play very aggressive from the start. Offensive dispels on the mage/priest. Mage will CC the rogue while you hit their priest. If the priest doesn’t go down, switch to mage. Throw some defensive dispels on your rogue to help him stay in range. I wasn’t paying attention to the mage and got polymorphed and blinded (the reason Ballsagna went down).

Match 2: Beastcleave

Use CC early. Avoid the initial burst with bloodlust at all costs. I have been killed through pain suppression against this setup. Burn the shaman and CC the paladin. Try to pillar hump to keep hunter off of you. Dispel bloodlust if you have any extra globals.

Match 3: Double Healer (Druid/Disc Priest)/Warrior

CC the priest to take him out of the game and burn the warrior. Dismantle him before shield wall. If the initial burst fails, hard switch to the druid. They will try to outlast you (and they will) so burst is the key.

Match 4-5: TSG

The initial burst will usually be on you. Avoid it as long as you can. Be ready with pain suppression so you have a chance to last through strangulate. Hit the warrior HARD as he comes in to force him to go defensive and avoid a bladstorm on top of the damage. Shackle the DK’s gargoyle if possible. If the warrior gets a bladestorm on top of the strangulate, it is usually game over. Keep abolish disease up on everyone.

Match 6: Disc Priest/Mage/Paladin

We always go for the ret paladin against these comps. Try to force the bubble early and hope a Mass Dispel gets it off in one try. We started with a sap and full dispel of his buffs, then railed him.

Match 7: Warlock/Rogue/Disc Priest

CC on the rogue and dispel priest and burn. Priest can’t keep himself up through the burst.

Match 8: RMP (Shadowplay)

Hit their rogue. GG

Match 9: TSG

Watch the burst as before and hit the warrior hard. Don’t blow fear into a bubble like I do. Predict the burst and PS yourself before it happens. All damage on the Warrior while CC on the pally.

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Patch 3.3 Impressions

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Extra Arena Points

The new change to the PvP daily quest is that it awards 25 arena points as well as the honor and gold that it previously did. While 25 points doesn’t seem like that many, it sure adds up quickly. You can potentially get 175 points per week through doing the PvP daily every day. That amounts to a decent rating increase you would have needed before to get those points per week.

I like that Blizzard is giving new avenues for gear. I also like that they are starting to breath new life into BG’s. I can say that, of the BG’s I have played since the patch went live, people have been trying harder to win. The competition seems stronger and my teammates in random PUGs seem to want to win. I haven’t run across an afk’er yet (not to say that they aren’t out there). This attitude was reflected when Isle of Conquest was the daily. There was some really fun battles that took place because both sides were trying. This makes it more fun for everyone.

Extra Arena Points

Extra Arena Points

LFG Tool

I decided to see what the new LFG tool was all about. I initially did not like how it doesn’t tell you any information while you are in the queue to find a random group, but found that it does not take long. I can see this being a problem down the road when the “new car” smell has gone. If I queue for a random dungeon and it is taking an average of 20 minutes to get groups together, I think that is information I would like to know. I was queued as DPS because I’m enjoying the changes to shadow priests and don’t really enjoy disc healing instances.

It randomly put me into Heroic Violet Hold and matched me with decently geared people. We had a paladin tank who had 40k health unbuffed and a ret pally alongside a marks hunter. Our healer (resto shaman) was the least geared in the group and his gear definitely wasn’t bad. After about 30 seconds in the instance, the hunter left and almost immediately another replacement was found. The rest of the instance went very smoothly and I had a fun time running an old instance with random people.

Overall, this is the LFG tool that should have been in the game years ago. It almost makes finding a group too easy. I can see how some people are worried about it breaking up a server’s community, but I still see a lot of premade groups using the tool to find that last person. As a healer, I usually wanted to heal groups just to help someone out, it was always a lot of work to find that group that was looking for a healer. Not anymore.

LFG Tool

LFG Tool

Gear Changes

One of the patch notes that I had missed during the many times that I read them was the change to the arena gear set bonuses.

Arena Set Bonuses: The two-piece set bonus for all Wrath of the Lich King Arena sets now provides 100 resilience and 29 spell power or 50 attack power. The current four-piece bonus will remain, however it also now provides 88 spell power or 150 attack power.

This change put my priest at 1214 resilience. I like to keep around 1150 resilience to help against cleave teams who try to burn me. This extra bonus not only added spell power by itself, but added extra resilience so that I was able to re-gem some of my gear to lose the extra resilience and trade it for spell power. I now have about 2700 sp as disc which is a big improvement over a number of weeks ago where I was barely breaking 2k due to the amount of resilience that I had to gem for.

New Set Bonus

New Set Bonus

Arena Changes

We haven’t been able to do any arena matches yet to see what affects any new changes have on our games. I know the WotF nerf will take some time to get used to, but won’t affect my team much since I am the only undead. I will have some feedback to those matches tomorrow and hopefully some footage that I can show you.

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Featured Addon: Snowfall Keypress

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

It may never have affected you, you might not even have realized it, but keybound abilities in World of Warcraft do not activate until you release the key. This is usually a millisecond difference in most situations, but there may be a time where your key release isn’t instantaneous and the ability will come late.

In your arena matches, that little amount of time could be too late. We’ve all had that moment where a heal just barely didn’t go off in time or a CC didn’t hit quite fast enough.

The addon Snowfall Keypress aims to fix this problem. It makes all of your hotkeys activate abilities on key press not key release. Even if you feel that the little amount of time between pressing and releasing a key will make no difference to you, I would encourage you to download this addon and try it out for a week. Really, what can it hurt?

Head over to the downloads section or to WoWInterface to download this addon.

Playing another character

I have been wanting to start playing another character for some time now. I don’t mean quit playing my disc priest, I just need another character to work on during the “filler” time between arena matches where I just play another game as of late.

I have been thinking of leveling my horde paladin on Dragonmaw and doing some PvE tanking on him. On the other hand, it is pretty late in the expansion and I haven’t taken raiding seriously since early WotLK. Not to mention that I haven’t been in a raiding guild in quite some time.

I think I might go back to my holy paladin and get some PvP gear and maybe find a decent team to PvP with. If I do, I’ll probably have to transfer due to the lack of talent on Dalvengyr.

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Think Outside the Box

Friday, December 4th, 2009

A large part of what makes Arenas fun for me is the amount of competition. The same thing that turns people away from Arenas because they are too competitive, is the same thing that I like about them. The changing competition and inability to fully predict what the enemy will do next is what keeps me coming back. If you are more into raiding, imagine if your guild finally got to Anub’Arak except he changed tactics every time you tried to down him. There are no more phases, no more emotes or timers to predict when he’ll use his abilities; only raw teamwork can even come close to beating him. How many of you would still raid? How many wouldn’t fall asleep like you normally do when you run old content?

Playing RMP is the epitome of this competition. If you go into every arena match with set strategies and aren’t ready to break from those strategies, you will end up losing a fair amount of matches. It forces you to think outside the box, to come up with different strategies for each comp that you face and ultimately makes you create strategies on the fly. For example, when we face a mirror comp, we always have the same opening strategy but it rarely ends the same. Some RMPs will focus the rogue, some the mage, some the priest. Not to mention the many variations between. You have to be able to adjust your strategies on the fly and react/predict what your opponent is going to do.

How Casual is Casual?

I keep reading articles here and there about ex-WoW players or current WoW players who feel that the game is too hardcore for them. Whenever I run into a random person in RL who plays WoW, it seems like they don’t have any max level characters. The rare ones who do seem to have a single 80 that doesn’t have any gear let alone knows much about the game.

It would be fun to see statistics on how many players are really that casual. What percentage of accounts have 80s and how many of them actually see endgame PvE/PvP content. Just hearing that I have 3 level 80s makes these people look at me like I must play 24/7 and not have a job or a life. In actuality, I currently play WoW roughly 3-5 hours per week on average and could easily hold my PvP status with playing much less (1-2 hours per week).

On one hand, many would consider me casual because I play little every week. On the other hand, many would consider me hardcore because I have 3 level 80s all of which are in full Epic gear. Being a Hardcore WoW player is nothing what it used to mean. In 2005, I read a statistic that said less than 10% of level 60’s even saw MC let alone killed Ragnaros. Think about the old ranked PvP system where 1 person would get rank 14 per week per realm. Thats only ~52 people per realm per faction per year.

If the game gets to a point where epics are handed out freely without any work or any value, I will no longer have interest in the game. Take away that competition and the game will be a MMO version of peggle.

Live Stream

Lately, I have been streaming my play through Xfire. Add me as a friend or check out my stream at http://www.xfire.com/live_video/ferngully You can usually check out all of our Arena games and some other PvP that I do.

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Arena Points Alternative; Compare TBC to WotLK

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Arena Points Alternative

I just picked up my relentless weapons last week. Our current goal is to push for a 2000 rating once we pick up more gear. We are happy with the amount of points that we are obtaining per week currently and are happy to be in the top 1000 teams in our battlegroup with our gear. All of us have obtained every piece of gear that we wanted short of our relentless main set pieces.

Now the waiting begins. Currently, to complete my relentless set (not including the t2 weapon), it will take 8500 arena points to buy that gear or 10 weeks at our current rating. Obviously at some point we’ll have to get 2000 and higher for the gear and that will cut down on some time. Overall, I’m still looking at at least six weeks of waiting for arena points to calculate. This amounts to very little time spent working on this during a week.

When you are used to grinding out honor for offset pieces and playing a bunch of arena games for practice every week, then you hit the arena point wall and suddenly have no reason to log on anymore. Our gear is not good enough to push for above 2k right now and we are not trying to farm anything else. I find myself logging on and working to get random achievements and doing other frivolous character development.

So what can be done to fix this? The ability of obtaining arena points faster is currently based on your team rating. In a lot of ways, this means the better geared the team, the faster they get points. This leaves new teams and new characters in the dust to wait for the gear so they can be competitive. The immediate solution would be to allow points to be given out faster than once a week.

Rated battlegrounds will help this a little bit but will also suffer from the same limitation. The limitation is there because obviously you don’t want someone to be able to get a full season of gear within the first week if they play enough. There is no accomplishment to that and it makes the gear trivial to most people.

I have thought about this quite a bit recently and can not think of a decent alternative to the current system. If anyone has a good idea, please let me know and definitely send your idea to blizzard.

“Raid” on SW

We randomly started to harass some Alliance players the other night. By “we” I mean 5 of us and by “some” I mean over 20 Alliance characters. There were at least 5 prot paladins, 2 prot warriors, and 3 DKs who showed up for the fray. We were able to push past the entrance and into the wall of SW, but were forced back out because of going OOM and the sheer amount of Alliance who were defending.

Overall it was a blast and I was reminded about the nature and mindset that a lot of WoW players have. It doesn’t seem to matter how bad you outnumber the opponent or how many times they killed you, you must show your superiority when you get that one kill on them. Our group makeup was double rogue, mage, resto druid, and me (disc priest). We were able to pull off over 60 hk’s before one of us was killed because of the chain stuns/silences from the prot paladins. Immediately, the paladin dropped a flag of ownership on Darafeln’s corpse.

It was pretty funny that the paladin left the scene feeling victorious over us even after we killed him multiple times and dozens of his friends. Notice how this is a common theme in WoW. Watch how other players will brag about their skill or superiority no matter how much of a lie it is.

TBC vs WotLK

Patch 3.3 will introduce the final raid content of this expansion pack. In Ice Crown Citadel, we will most likely fight the Lich King. Looking at the games current state in PvE and looking back to TBC and vanilla, does ICC and the Lich King seem as epic of an achievement as Illidan or bosses like Twin Emporers in AQ40?

I just don’t get that feeling like I did in TBC where the final boss of the expansion was only really killable by the best raiding guilds on your server. It wasn’t just anyone who strolled into the Black Temple and killed Illidan. It was even an attitude that if you didn’t have Illidan on farm status, your guild was a joke.

I think that some of that attitude will remain, but overall the “hardcore” side of the game is dying out. I don’t think Blizzard is to blame for this. I get the feeling that the current player base is getting more casual every month and Blizzard is just accommodating for the largest common denominator. I kind of miss those times where the hardcore were somewhat a resemblance of the word instead of the current state where it is equally conceivable to say “I’m hardcore at Candyland”.

I feel that PvP has gotten more hardcore with the age of the game and PvE has tapered off. PvP still is challenging and refreshing to me where as there are very few bosses that really would challenge me as a player.

I am excited for Cataclysm because of going back to vanilla areas. I just hope that the old feeling is not gone by the time I get there.

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Doodadnox.com

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Doodadnox.com is our partner site. The purpose of Doodadnox is to give gamers (specifically WoW players) a very clean and straight forward place to upload their gaming screenshots, not to mention FREE. It is a place where people can browse and discuss other player’s screenshots as well as posting their own. The big draw to the site is the lack of advertisements and clutter that is associated with big image hosting sites. Check out the site and see these great features:

No Clutter

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Social Networking

Doodadnox also offers basic social networking tools. You will find a link to quickly share your screenshots to any major social networking site as well as a link to the direct image. There is also commenting directly on screenshots. Share your screenshots with the world and see what others think.

Free Screenshot Hosting

All of the bandwidth and space are free. Obviously there will need to be limits put in place at some point in time. We guarantee that these limits will not impede with 99% of the user’s bandwidth needs. The costs for bandwidth and space are covered by donations. There may be a need to put Ads onto some pages in the future to recoup the costs, but they will never get in the way of your screenshot viewing. We want the user experience at the site to be the #1 priority.

Other Benefits

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How Long Will You Play WoW?

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

I’ve always wondered how long I would play World of Warcraft. From the first few moments that I played it, I know that it would hold my attention for a while. Nevertheless, I couldn’t have predicted that I would still be playing it 4-5 years later. I probably would have laughed at the notion at the time. The longest I had ever played a single game was only for a few months at the time. In fact, I have “quit” WoW multiple times (more like took a hiatus). The 4-5 years of playing might never have happened.

The first time that I quit, it was some time before TBC. The game had the honor system for the super hardcore and raiding for the hardcore. Obtaining R13 wasn’t an option due to the massive amount of time needed to reach that rank. Also, I wasn’t able to spend enough time playing while in college to raid and actually get gear. There came a point where I realized that my gear was as good as it possibly could be without me raiding. Since I did not have time to raid, and had no other options of getting gear, I decided to quit. I really still wanted to play WoW, but couldn’t justify playing and not getting anywhere. That all changed a couple months later when Blizzard announced most of TBC changes. It was like they had read my mind and I started playing again. Coincidentally, I started raiding shortly after the game became more casual.

I played through much of TBC before taking another hiatus from WoW, this time for completely different reasons. It was during season 4 and I was playing my paladin. Our main focus was 3’s and our team makeup was Disc Priest, Ret Paladin, Ret Paladin. If you can remember season 4, you will see where our difficulties came from. The lack of a healing debuff or any real interrupts during a season where drain teams and double healers ruled the arenas left a sour taste in our mouths. At the time, ret paladin damage was lackluster at best. I had a lot more fun healing through hours in Zul’Aman with my guild than I did playing PvP. This was a low point in the history of paladins and I was tired of not having a good comp to play in arenas, so I quit again.

During this time, I ran a Counter Strike: Source server that grew to be one of the most popular servers in the world (top 100 out of 30000+ tracked servers). It was all a lot of fun, but ultimately I still wanted to play WoW, just didn’t enjoy it the way that it was. Yet again, Blizzard made changes that drew me back to the game. I have taken breaks from playing many times. Each varied from a couple weeks to a few months and had various other reasons (too busy, gone a lot, trying AoC, other MMOs, etc). Some of those times I was sure that I wouldn’t play again. Each time I was wrong.

So that brings me to to my original question. How long will I play WoW? I don’t think this question can really be answered. Whether another MMO steals my interest or if I just get tired after 5 years, I couldn’t say. Ultimately I’ll at least quit by the time the servers are shut off (which judging by the fact that Everquest is still going, could be another decade or so). Whether I play that long or not depends on if I continue to have fun playing a great game with friends.

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1800; Manual Dodge

Monday, November 16th, 2009

I had a long post written for this past weekend. It was the culmination of my frustrations over not being able to hit 1800 to get relentless weapons. For my gear, I was losing a lot of spell power by gemming for the resilience that I need to stay competitive in arenas. I have also been wearing a WG trinket instead of my battlemaster’s because of the resilience. There was no other solution to getting that SP back other than getting the relentless weapons.

So what was the problem? We played for the past three weeks without breaking 1750 on our 3v3. Every time we got close to 1750, we would lose a bunch in a row or lose big points with a single loss. My 2v2 team was able to hit 1787 max and was over 1770 on ten different occasions in the past three weeks, yet we were not able to hit 1800. After being stuck at those ratings for three weeks, one starts to wonder if it will be possible without buying the rating. It has always been the catch 22 of WoW for me. In order to get better gear you need to have a high rating, but in order to get a high rating you need to have better gear (if you aren’t willing to be carried).

Skill > Gear (expanded discussion)

In the world of PvP, the concept of skill being more important than gear is a common attitude. I think that a majority of players consider this to be true. I would say that I used to generally subscribe to that theory. The problem is that I know that most of the time, skill has nothing to do with the outcome of a PvP match. If you put a list together of the most important factors in determining the outcome of a PvP match, skill would be pretty low.

Now you have to understand that I’m talking 99% of the PvP that happens. Tom Chilton was recently quoted as saying 20-25% of WoW players play arenas and 1% of those hit a 2k rating. I would generally say that skill matters much more when you are over a 2k rating. So is it possible for a keyboard turner and clicker to hit 2k? Is it possible for a undergeared player to hit 2k? It is possible, but rare. Most of the time you will find skilled, knowledgeable players at this level and the undergeared are carried by others.

So that must mean that the other 99% of players who play arenas are bad, right? I don’t think so. I’ve played against a lot of people at lower ratings who were very good players. I have seen a lot of players who want to play with a friend so they are in a bad comp. I know that there are good players at lower levels of play (ones who could reach 2k given the right circumstances). I could only reach a maximum 1450 rating last season playing Warrior/Resto Shaman. Judging by my ratings, I would be considered a bad player. Nothing has changed between then and now for me except a new character and team composition.

On the same note, I have seen bad players at the 2k level. WotLK opened the play for faceroll teams to dominate. Most of these players can push 3 buttons to win and do not need to even think about it. Find a good stream of a faceroll team on Xfire and watch for a match when their initial burst fails at killing someone. Most of these teams have no idea what to do after that, they just give up. Nevertheless, these teams are over 2k and so are worshiped by many. Gear can carry you and so can your comp.

The attitude about skill being more important than gear comes from our wanting it to be true. We wish that PvP was all about who could play the best rather than who had all the gear.

1800

We were able to pull off some great wins this past weekend and hit 1800 in our 3v3. Our final win was against a ~2100 rated team to give us 19 points and get 1808. It was a Priest/Ret/Mage team that outgeared us considerably. We controlled the entire match holding their ret paladin to only 7.4k damage and their Priest to only 17k healing.

I will be able to pick up my Relentless MH on Tuesday when I get enough arena points and then re-gem most of my gear to compensate for the extra resilience. I will definitely enjoy the extra SP.

Manual Dodge

I had mentioned in last week’s post that I was starting a new guild. I finished getting the signatures the other night and was able to form the guild <Manual Dodge>. The guild is going to be a PvP oriented guild. I haven’t raided much since Ulduar and my priest is fully PvP geared so I do not plan on raiding with him in the future. I focus a lot on PvP because that is still a lot of fun for me. When you play this game fully for PvP and you are in a guild that is full of PvE fanatics, there is just a disconnect. I wan’t to play with others who like PvP, that is why I formed Manual Dodge.

We are planning on doing a weekday premade schedule. We will pick out one BG per weekday and make a premade for that BG. All BG’s will be covered every week and will rotate so that personal schedules do not make a player miss out on the same BG every week. Potentially, if you are able to play 15 games (wins) per day in the premade, you will be able to make over 65k honor from turn ins alone. Also, the bonus honor would probably be around 75k. This is a great and fast way to honor grind. Our premades will be open to anyone on our realm but guild members get priority positions and advanced warning on them.

I’m pretty excited about the guild and hope to meet some new people who love to PvP as much as I do.

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