Posts Tagged ‘PvP’

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.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Arenas | No Comments »

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.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Arenas | No Comments »

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.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Arenas | No Comments »

Horde vs Alliance

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

The Big Decision

We’ve all made the decision. Whether it was on a whim or a well thought out process, we have all chosen a faction in World of Warcraft. Everyone has different reasons as to why they chose to fight for the Horde or the Alliance. For me, my first character was Alliance because all of my college buddies were going Alliance at the time. They did go Alliance when we got the game, but ended up being on a different server (a story for a different time). I actually played through vanilla and some of BC before I leveled a Horde character. For me, there wasn’t really a decision when I first started playing. Since my friends were playing Alliance and I wanted to play with them, it was an easy decision.

As I played more and more and began to learn about the game, I sometimes regretted the decision of rolling Alliance. This was well before the days of faction changes and even transfers, so the only other option was to level another character. That was something that I was not willing to do. Cut to today and faction changes are relatively cheap (or expensive however you feel) and they are easy. This really negates a lot of old arguments as to which faction is better. If you think Blizzard favors a certain faction or if you feel that certain racials are more powerful or even if you just like the look and feel of the other faction, it is painless enough to obtain without needing to level to 80 again.

The Grass is Always Greener

It is a topic that comes up regularly amongst many WoW players and on the WoW forums (who reads those anyway?). It isn’t the debate as to which side has better lore, or which side feels better to fight as, it is the question of whether or not Blizzard favors a faction and balances the game accordingly. If you’ve played WoW, the thought has probably crossed your mind. Even if you keep in mind that most of these posts are by trolls and it probably does not represent the viewpoint of the majority, you still can’t help but notice racial “stereotyping” in guild, trade, or BG chat.

What I have come to find out is that the old adage “The grass is always greener on the other side” applies to this situation. When I played Alliance for the first couple years, I felt as though Horde had a huge advantage in certain situations. Back then it was mainly in AV and geared Shaman could literally 1 shot players. I then met a couple of people who lived in my dorm and they played Horde. It was fun to discuss the topic with them because 95% of the time, they felt the exact opposite. When I thought AV was imbalanced because the Horde base only had one way into it, they felt the same about the Alliance base. Even little things like how difficult Onyxia attunement was for Horde came up at times. Then when I leveled a Horde character, my outlook on the game began to change. I noticed that my thoughts switched and I began to feel like Blizzard favored Alliance (Although I have never felt that they actually favor a faction, I do think there are subconscious and accidental advantages to both factions).

Ultimately it comes down to personal experience. If you ask a player in a strong Alliance battlegroup which faction is better at PvP, they will most likely answer Alliance and visa versa. You have probably met a player who thinks their class is the absolute bane of blizzard. They cry over every nerf and can’t stop talking about how weak they are. Even if they are playing the most faceroll class currently, they genuinely feel that their class needs serious buffs. If you are completely honest, you have probably felt this way at times about your current main.

There isn’t a way to stop these perceptions that we have about the game. The best thing we can do is to know that we hold bias and make opinions based on that. I can guarantee that Blizzard already does this.

Epic Flying Mount

I finally saved up enough money even with buying epic gems and enchants as I geared up to get my epic flying skill. I have had the bronze drake sitting in my bags for a long time waiting to be used. This is my third level 80 and my first drake mount.

Bronze Drake

Bronze Drake

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Factions | No Comments »

Current and Future Battlegrounds

Monday, October 12th, 2009

The State of Battlegrounds

I was grinding some honor this weekend so I can switch out my trinkets with a Medallion of the Horde and a Battlemaster’s trinket. The PvP daily for Sunday was Alterac Valley. I tried multiple times during the day to complete the daily, but every AV that I was in turned into a turtle with Alliance winning. I gave up after multiple games and tried playing some WSG and AB to get the marks that I need for turn-ins. We lost so horribly in both, that I gave up all together. The honor grind is bad enough without the current problems with BGs. This made me think about the current state of battlegrounds and how they can be improved.

I guess it isn’t really a matter of winning or losing. Sure, winning games technically makes your honor grind 1/3 of what it would be if you lost every game. I wasn’t in a preform, so I wasn’t going in *expecting* to win every game. The problem was that I had to wait 12 minutes for a que to pop and then we not only lost, but we dragged the loss out. The last WSG that I tried, the alliance had a Resto Druid, Holy Paladin, Disc Priest, and a geared Prot Warrior. This would take a decent group of people to kill them, let alone a team of random scrubs. After a ton of turtling and losing the game because time ran out, it really got me thinking about the current state of battlegrounds and where it could go in the future.

Battlegrounds have come a long way

If you were around when battlegrounds were first introduced, you can remember having to run all the way to Ashenvale to play them (a particularly time consuming task for Alliance when the closest port was Darnassus). Those were the days that premades reigned supreme. If you were unlucky enough to play against one, your team didn’t stand a chance. At the time, many players were complaining about battlegrounds and how it took away from World PvP. Compared to today’s battlegrounds, those starting WSG matches did not even compare to how easy/fast/convenient battlegrounds are today. Whether you think that is a good thing or not.

Before arenas, battlegrounds were the only way for a player to get good PvP gear outside of raiding. It was for hardcore players only, nobody got GM without having 2-3 friends play on their account while they worked/slept/ate. For many people, it was a turn off because of the sheer amount of time required to get anywhere.

Cut ahead to today where battleground honor grinds is THE way for casuals to get gear. The current system is great because it opens up the opportunity for the whole playerbase to get PvP gear. The downside is that it opens the opportunity for the whole playerbase to get PvP gear. The same upside to the system is the same thing as it’s main downfall.

With all the improvements, I will outline some problems that I currently see and outlooks on fixing them.

Que Times

Depending on where you play and which faction you play as, these problems might not be existent or as noticeable. As it currently stands for my battlegroup, during peak hours of the day, a horde player can expect to wait in the que for 10+ minutes before playing anything other than AV. This has been a problem for a while. There does not seem to be enough horde players queuing for anything other than AV. I can see merging of battlegroups to fix the long que times, but this will bring up other issues such as lag and overpopulation of battlegroups.

The solution for this problem is a complicated one. It isn’t necessarily a problem with how queues work, it is more a problem of players not wanting to play battlegrounds. Blizzard needs to simultaneously keep working on the queues and somehow make Battlegrounds more worthwhile to those who take it seriously. With the announcement of rated battlegrounds, I can see an opportunity to take battlegrounds where they should be: A place for casuals to play PvP but yet not interfere with more serious PvPers.

Bad Players

Maybe it is just me, but it seems like the quality of the playerbase seems to be declining. It used to be a fairly rare occurrence that I would find a truly bad player and have a good laugh about it with my guildies. Now it is such a common occurrence that we don’t really even point them out anymore. We all know who I’m talking about; It is the warrior with spirit gear, or the hunter with the spec that looks like he closed his eyes and clicked wildly, or even the player who has decent gear/spec and still can’t seem to break 1000 dps. There is always the independent player who never seems to want to contribute to the team and the loner who tries to contribute but wants to do so by himself.

When you get stuck on a team with a bunch of bad players, it is frustrating. We’ve all been there. You are grinding out 62000 honor for your next Relentless offpiece and there are multiple people in the group who are going for their first deadly piece. In WSG, your team can’t seem to kill the FC who has one healer on him because everyone is just that bad. Frustrating to say the least.

Luckily, this problem should be solved with rated battlegrounds. Hopefully the low geared players will stay at lower ranks and will not end up playing the higher geared and skilled players. The change to battlegrounds in TBC where gear affected who you played against was a step in the right direction. Moving to rated battlegrounds is another great step.

Away from Keyboard

Over the history of battlegrounds, AFK’ing has been a problem. There have been many improvements to players combating AFK players in battlegrounds. We have the deserter debuff and AFK flagging as a result to the number of complaints there were of players in the AV grind. It seems like Blizzard has run out of solutions for this.

The first problem with the current system is that it takes too much effort from players to police the AFKers. You don’t always notice that player who AFKed in a spot that looks like they are participating. I am usually too into the fight and don’t want to take the time to look around for AFK players. The bright side is that if someone notices an AFKer and points them out, it is not hard to get them reported.

The second problem with the current system is that it doesn’t have very steep of a penalty. If a player is reported AFK over multiple battlegrounds and keeps doing that, then Blizzard will investigate and might ban their account for a short period of time. Really, that is no deterrence for the problem. The player still ends up taking up a slot for the remainder of the battleground match and in some matches can make a difference.

I think that the current measures would be adequate if two things were to happen: Battleground honor grinds need to be either shorter or more fun and the penalty needs to be steeper. If a players grind of 370000+ honor that it takes to get the season’s off pieces was more variant, I think people would AFK less. Also, if reported players had 1 minute to get into combat otherwise they would be removed from the battleground and given a 30 minute deserter debuff, that would stop many of the players who use a bot to AFK.

Future of Battlegrounds

I think anyone can get excited for the changes that are planned for battlegrounds in Cataclysm. I plan on being there and experiencing it all. For right now, we can just play together and make the best of the current system. So if you play on the Reckoning battlegroup and see me on my character Ferngully, be sure to give me a shout out (or a friendly /wave as I kill you if you are Alliance).

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Battlegrounds | No Comments »