Saturday, November 22, 2008

The Death Knights are Spilling Into PvP

I mentioned before that I have a second druid. This druid is not a twink per se, but is primarily for PvP. That sounds a little odd considering that she was not 70 prior to Wrath, and I don't know if she'll get to 80 before Wrath is over. Rather, she's been a fun diversion as I try out the different brackets, because I find it entertaining to see the differences between the classes as players learn different abilities.

So she spent months being played on and off... 30-39, 40-49, and most recently 50-59. I picked up some honor rewards for her level, but really it was all for fun because I never intended to permanently stay in any one bracket.

I went into one of my off-again phases just prior to Wrath, and now that it's out, naturally I'm been leveling a lot. But I figured I'd take a short break this afternoon and do a little PvP.

What I had forgotten about was that everybody's new favorite class comes out of the Plaguelands at level 58, and they flooded the matches.



Seriously, what's wrong with these people!?

And that screenshot is a little forgiving. I didn't get the one of Warsong Gulch where it was 8 Alliance DKs vs. 7 Horde DKs and a smattering of other classes.

As a druid, I consider one of my most important roles to be flag-running. I can stealth into the enemy flag room and grab it while the defenders are distracted. I can streak across the field faster than anyone who's not mounted and break snares just by shifting in and out (which is macroed so it doesn't even take more than a split second). Then once I'm in base I can go into bear form and take a good amount of hits before going down. Being able to heal myself when the coast is clear is nice too.

I've run the flag dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of times, so I'm used to getting snared, dazed, and all sorts of awful things, but right now I'd have to say that Death Grip has to go down as one of the most annoying abilities ever.

It was almost like tug of war with the travel form kitty. One DK to the left of me yanked me, then less than a second later, another DK to the right of me yanked in the other direction. Getting away is going to be a much bigger pain, no matter what your class really, if these death knights don't start filtering out.

But! I did knock a couple off their high horses.

Despite the fact I like raiding as balance, I PvP as feral. It's been one of the weaker specs, but since the 3.0.2 patch landed it's gotten much better. I have much love for Infected Wounds. It keeps those tasty Alliance from running too far away. And it was also much fun watching this death knight think he was going to finish me off. (Just because, you know, he's a death knight. He thinks he's OP. He's all in blues. Etc.)

I was in bear form and we'd beaten each other quite low. I could practically see him waiting for his cooldowns to come up. So I popped Survival Instincts, Frenzied Regeneration, and topped them off with Barkskin. It was sweet revenge when he died to the wall of bear! Death Grip didn't get him out of that one!

And I could justify all the cooldowns because I was also guarding a node. :)

2 comments:

Pike said...

I was in AV the other day as a resto druid. Death Knights kept using Death Grip on me (I think Tree Form painted a giant target on my head) but I kept spamming heals and successfully running away, it was quite amusing actually...

Hana said...

Hehe... Yeah, I think tree druid make big targets out of themselves out there. :) But at least they got rid of the movement penalty for you guys so you can run better now.

I don't think Death Grip would have annoyed me so much if I wasn't the flag runner. It didn't bother me nearly so much in AB as WSG.

I haven't tried AV yet, largely because my feral's battlegroup has a history of spectacularly losing AV in the 50-59 bracket. I don't mind losing so much if people put in a good effort. It's the whiners that get me. :(