Posts Tagged ‘Arena’

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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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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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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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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Relentless Weapons; New Guild

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

I should be getting back to my regular posting now. I have been hunting every weekend and it doesn’t leave me time for much else. It will be nice to have a weekend without all the traveling. I am also starting a new guild (which I’ll talk about below) and that has been taking up my time. You can expect more posts in the next few weeks, so keep checking back.

1800

We have been pushing to get 1800 in our 2v2 team. The weapon boost is a big upgrade for Ballsagna for his DPS and also mine for the extra resilience allows me to gear more SP. We have been 1700+ for about a month now. We had saved up arena points to buy our weapons because our MMR was over 1800 long ago and we were expecting to hit 1800. Up until we hit a wall.

With my being gone every weekend and Ballsagna’s schedule, we were left with very few opportunities to play. This left us with late at night games on slow nights. Usually there were very few teams on for the night and most of them were not near our rating. Every time we got above 1750, we would get matched up against a geared team or a counter-comp and we would lose big points (17+).

We have gotten over 1775 nine seperate times in the past month and yet haven’t been able to get the right matchups to get that 1800. Hopefully it will just be a matter of time before we get the right matchups to hit 1800 and get our weapons.

Everyone Has Relentless Weapons

I recently saw a Paladin advertising in trade chat, “LF Disc Priest for 3v3 rated 1440 must have 230+ weapon”. I was floored. Our 3v3 rating is currently 1700 and none of us have 230 weapons. I am using a 219 MH and a level 78 OH. We started the season as fresh 80’s with no gear and have worked our way to where we are currently. Too often, I see bad players who have relentless weapons. It reminds me of a druid on my old server who, after 300 games, was rated 1200. He even has a relentless weapon.

This is especially true when you get around 1800 and you don’t have your weapons yet. Every team has relentless weapons and does double the damage that your team can. It is a lot of fun and encouraging to get there without gear. We play teams that should beat us because of the gear difference, but we outplay them for the win.

The only teams that I hate playing are the geared faceroll teams. We played a few last week that could drop me in a stun (25.2k health, 36% physical reduction, 1162 resilience, pain suppression, and other passive damage reduction talents). Even with our trying to stop their insane damage with every form of CC that we have at our disposal, there was no stopping them. I don’t even understand why people play those comps. To me, that wouldn’t be any fun.

Skill > Gear

While I generally subscribe to this statement, it is only true when gear isn’t a huge factor. If you took a veteran player with a fresh 80 against an ebay character that is full s7 gear, who would you bet on to win? While there are other factors that come into play, as long as the ebay character has basic knowledge of how to play, they will win because of their gear.

We would all like to say that skill is always more important than gear, but this is just not the case. The game does take skill to be good at, but it also takes gear. Just enjoy the times when you bear a mirror comp who has better gear or that 200-300+ rated team who you should never have played.

The best thing is to use your gear disadvantage to learn your class and comp more than the people who are pushing 3 buttons for wins. When you finally get the gear, you will be a much better player and your team will be playing like there is no gear difference instead of being used to outgearing everyone.

New Guild

When I transferred and faction changed, I was originally looking for a PvP oriented guild but instead joined a guild that my friend was in. I have never raided with them mainly because of the times that they raid and haven’t really gotten to know anyone. I decided to jump ship and join a PvP guild. The problem is that there aren’t any big PvP guilds left on Dragonmaw and the ones that I found are not that active anymore.

So I have decided to start a guild. We have some great ideas in store for events and how to make a PvP guild work and make it fun so people want to join. I still need to get signatures, but should be able to get those tonight and will start recruiting soon. I will be posting more details about the guild in future posts so check back here for news. Also, if you are interested in joining the guild, let me know. We always welcome new recruits.

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