Flash of Light used to be my bread and butter spell. This blog is Flash of Moonfire because Flash of Light was such a key part of my repetoire as a holy paladin ever since I first hit 70 and started healing Karazhan.
But when Cataclysm hit I had trouble figuring out where I'd put it on my bars. The tilda, numbers 1-6, and F1-F6 are the keys I bind things to, with occasional Ctrl or Shift combinations. Flash of Light used to be number 2 since I hit it so often. Then it moved to F2 to be a little more out of the way since I didn't use it that often. Now...
Well, it's still on my bars, but it's not bound to anything. That's probably bad, but its usefulness has become so far out of sight and out of mind that I have trouble thinking of moments where someone died because I didn't use it.
The thing is... it doesn't heal that much for the mana cost (making it an expensive proposition for what you get out of it) and it still has a cast time unless there's an Infusion of Light proc (making it's usefulness while moving limited).
I've been doing arena the majority of Season 9 and since the start of Season 10. I've seen other holy paladins run themselves dry casting Flash of Light too many times while I'm still at 90% or more mana. Whereas when I need an emergency heal and Holy Shock and Word of Glory are on cooldown, I hit Divine Favor for that 20% haste and crit and chug out a speedy Divine Light or two (perhaps combined with Aura Mastery to ensure no interruption). I figure if I'm going to spend the mana I'm going to get the most health I can for it.
I'm sure there's room for a Flash of Light in there. Again, it'd be instant with an Infusion of Light proc, but as a cast time spell I just wouldn't use it. An IoL-enhanced Divine Light goes by so fast that 90% of the time it's too fast for my opponents to interrupt (gladiator level I am not, so YMMV).
Then this week I did some Firelands raiding with the second 10-man team in my guild as a fill-in healer. I know these fights on my druid, but for those I've always been dps or a tank. I had little to no experience healing them, so I was surprised by how much faith the raid leader had in me, suggesting we two-heal several fights, considering that my paladin had only the Firelands cape and a bizarre mix of BWD, troll dungeon, and PvP gear.
I thought that perhaps as I was doing PvE raiding I would find a use for Flash of Light, a reason to keybind it again, but I didn't.
It's not that there were no wipes that were my fault, being rather scrubbish for the duties I was assigned, but they weren't because I didn't get a quick heal off. I'm quick with my Lay on Hands and I'm not afraid to use it if I think a tank's gonna die.
Wipes were more due to missing the Smouldering Devastation cue on Beth'talic (I'm not usually on the web, let alone as a healer), being in the wrong place on Alysrazor (until recently I always tanked that fight so I had no concept of where the caster adds spawned and lost a dps and a tank because of range issues), and there was the occasional, for some reason or other I didn't think the tank's health was going to drop that fast so I wasn't ready with a heal.
But we cleared 6/7 and I two-healed Alysrazor and Rhyolith so at the very least I know I'm not bad. I was just on a bit of a learning curve, and I was the only healer who didn't let someone die to Torment on Baelroc so I was rather happy about that.
Getting back to Flash of Light though... I still didn't see when to use it. I thought maybe Baelroc would be the boss.
Torment's a nice stacking debuff that eventually chews through dps the higher it goes. But it ended up that I would Holy Shock, Word of Glory, and then roll almost immediately into Divine Lights to make sure no one dropped.
My mana was hurting almost every Firelands boss (inexperience healing the fights combined with not as geared as the rest of the raid), so if I needed a "save" I wanted it to be Lay on Hands because at least that would give me some mana back.
I guess I don't use Flash of Light because I try very hard not to be in the position where Flash of Light would be appealing to me; namely where someone's going to die and that little sliver of health would make it worth the cost of using it.
In PvP I use Holy Shock and Word of Glory as much as possible. If I use cast time spells I'm either using them under an IoL proc (making them very fast and hard to interrupt), I Aura Mastery to make them uninterruptable, or I prepare to cancel the cast if the possibility of getting interrupted exists and then cast again after the interrupt is wasted. It's rare I do unprotected casts in arena, and if I do it's because my partner is probably going to die in the next couple of seconds if I don't and all my cooldowns have been burned.
In PvE there are multiple healers and the the damage intake doesn't seem to warrant it. Tanks get hit too hard for Flash of Light to make much of a difference. And if they're dps or another healer, there is typically enough time between damage bursts to allow HoTs or a Holy Light to save them.
Showing posts with label pvp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pvp. Show all posts
Friday, September 2, 2011
Friday, August 5, 2011
[Paladin] KFC in Season 10 - Back to 3v3
I can't take 2v2 anymore, the half hour matches because neither side can generate enough dps to kill the other. Last night my partner and I were about to strangle ourselves after fighting our third arms warrior/resto druid combo.
(The problem with that match up is that my partner can't get range as a hunter and the warrior can't do enough damage to outdps my heals.)
I'm hoping that will end this season. We only played 2s this week because our newest teammate was out on vacation, but it looks like he's going to be a regular for Season 10. I can't say I'm going to miss those season 9 2v2 matches that took so long we even timed out at the 45 minute mark three times.
My new 3v3 team is a KFC comp, which does not stand for Kentucky Fried Chicken. (It stands for Kung-Fu Cleave, which honestly doesn't make much better sense, but there you go.) KFC consists of an arms warrior, a marksman hunter, and a healer. It's not as strong in 4.2 as it was earlier in Cata, but since my 2s partner is a hunter, we wanted a third player who would be able fill in the gaps in our playstyle.
We wanted either a DK to match our previous success in WotLK as a PHD team, or a warrior to try out KFC. Nothing else we knew of would be viable for a hunter (holy paladins can fortunately be shoved into many more comps). Fortunately, one of our priest guildies also has a warrior alt he likes to PvP on, so we found a new teammate.
We've played two weeks as a 3v3 team prior to this week's vacation, and we're starting to get the hang of playing with each other. There are better calls being made, more communication about cooldowns people need to know. My hunter partner isn't used to letting people know when he has dps cooldowns ready for some burst, because in 2s it hadn't mattered, but KFC kills with focus fire and when our hunter and warrior get their cooldowns lined up together, they can put out some pretty solid damage, particularly if it's middle of the fight when the healer's no longer expecting it.
There are still weaknesses though. We had some line of sight accidents, where someone didn't get healed, and I'm still getting used to figuring out just when the warrior is in danger of being pancaked. There were a couple matches where he died early, but the hunter and I managed to hold out for a frightfully long time 3v2, almost bringing the match down to a 2v2 multiple times before the other team finally ran me out of mana. I'm sure that's because we've been playing together so long I know exactly what the hunter's damage threshold is and can calibrate my heals accordingly. The knowledge of how to do the same with the warrior will come with time.
Personally, I know I have to get better about juking my heals. Sometimes when I'm feeling particularly canny I do this, and I admit it's really satisfying getting the other team to waste a cooldown on a fake-out, but it's not a regular habit. I think part of the reason I forget is that many times when I'm silenced it has nothing to do with casting a heal at all. It's far more common for a mage to preemptively counterspell me than for a warrior to interrupt me, largely because if a warrior is on me, I try to cast only instants or use measures such as Aura Mastery to make sure I don't get interrupted. If I'm doing an unprotected cast near a melee it probably means that I think someone's gonna die before my next Holy Shock/Word of Glory if I don't, which of course is why I should juke so I don't lose such a critical cast.
My other "I want to get better at" item is pillar dancing to avoid being CCed. It's easier in 2s because there are only two opponents to watch and one of them is usually trying to hide behind a pillar as well. But in 3s, there are more people to watch and generally at least two of them are happy to CC a healer. In extreme circumstances I've ended up hexed, then trapped, then feared for good measure, because everyone on the opposite team, including the healer, had a CC.
KFC is not a CC bonanza. For us, it seems the best tactic is to pick a dps kill target and then focus fire it while keeping the healer CCed/busy. I try to Rebuke, Arcane Torrent, or Hammer of Justice the healer if I'm free. If I'm the focus target of a melee I generally run in circles casting instants to stay alive while my teammates do their thing. But if I can't take the output then the warrior peels (love the whole charge and root thing) so I can get a breather. And if the hunter is left unhindered... woe to the other team.
Right now, I think the point we can most improve on as a team is target switching faster (when needed) and going on the offensive more. We have a tendency, particularly because we have a hunter who wants to hide in camo, to wait for the enemy to come to us. But when we think about it, it's very obvious to the other team that we have a hunter and he's near the entrance even if they can't target him, which just gives them time to execute their plan of attack, particuarly if they have a stealther.
On the bright side, we felt quite good about ourselves when we ran into another KFC team of the exact same composition (pally healer) and beat them not only once, but twice, and the second kill was solidly in our favor.
(The problem with that match up is that my partner can't get range as a hunter and the warrior can't do enough damage to outdps my heals.)
I'm hoping that will end this season. We only played 2s this week because our newest teammate was out on vacation, but it looks like he's going to be a regular for Season 10. I can't say I'm going to miss those season 9 2v2 matches that took so long we even timed out at the 45 minute mark three times.
My new 3v3 team is a KFC comp, which does not stand for Kentucky Fried Chicken. (It stands for Kung-Fu Cleave, which honestly doesn't make much better sense, but there you go.) KFC consists of an arms warrior, a marksman hunter, and a healer. It's not as strong in 4.2 as it was earlier in Cata, but since my 2s partner is a hunter, we wanted a third player who would be able fill in the gaps in our playstyle.
We wanted either a DK to match our previous success in WotLK as a PHD team, or a warrior to try out KFC. Nothing else we knew of would be viable for a hunter (holy paladins can fortunately be shoved into many more comps). Fortunately, one of our priest guildies also has a warrior alt he likes to PvP on, so we found a new teammate.
We've played two weeks as a 3v3 team prior to this week's vacation, and we're starting to get the hang of playing with each other. There are better calls being made, more communication about cooldowns people need to know. My hunter partner isn't used to letting people know when he has dps cooldowns ready for some burst, because in 2s it hadn't mattered, but KFC kills with focus fire and when our hunter and warrior get their cooldowns lined up together, they can put out some pretty solid damage, particularly if it's middle of the fight when the healer's no longer expecting it.
There are still weaknesses though. We had some line of sight accidents, where someone didn't get healed, and I'm still getting used to figuring out just when the warrior is in danger of being pancaked. There were a couple matches where he died early, but the hunter and I managed to hold out for a frightfully long time 3v2, almost bringing the match down to a 2v2 multiple times before the other team finally ran me out of mana. I'm sure that's because we've been playing together so long I know exactly what the hunter's damage threshold is and can calibrate my heals accordingly. The knowledge of how to do the same with the warrior will come with time.
Personally, I know I have to get better about juking my heals. Sometimes when I'm feeling particularly canny I do this, and I admit it's really satisfying getting the other team to waste a cooldown on a fake-out, but it's not a regular habit. I think part of the reason I forget is that many times when I'm silenced it has nothing to do with casting a heal at all. It's far more common for a mage to preemptively counterspell me than for a warrior to interrupt me, largely because if a warrior is on me, I try to cast only instants or use measures such as Aura Mastery to make sure I don't get interrupted. If I'm doing an unprotected cast near a melee it probably means that I think someone's gonna die before my next Holy Shock/Word of Glory if I don't, which of course is why I should juke so I don't lose such a critical cast.
My other "I want to get better at" item is pillar dancing to avoid being CCed. It's easier in 2s because there are only two opponents to watch and one of them is usually trying to hide behind a pillar as well. But in 3s, there are more people to watch and generally at least two of them are happy to CC a healer. In extreme circumstances I've ended up hexed, then trapped, then feared for good measure, because everyone on the opposite team, including the healer, had a CC.
KFC is not a CC bonanza. For us, it seems the best tactic is to pick a dps kill target and then focus fire it while keeping the healer CCed/busy. I try to Rebuke, Arcane Torrent, or Hammer of Justice the healer if I'm free. If I'm the focus target of a melee I generally run in circles casting instants to stay alive while my teammates do their thing. But if I can't take the output then the warrior peels (love the whole charge and root thing) so I can get a breather. And if the hunter is left unhindered... woe to the other team.
Right now, I think the point we can most improve on as a team is target switching faster (when needed) and going on the offensive more. We have a tendency, particularly because we have a hunter who wants to hide in camo, to wait for the enemy to come to us. But when we think about it, it's very obvious to the other team that we have a hunter and he's near the entrance even if they can't target him, which just gives them time to execute their plan of attack, particuarly if they have a stealther.
On the bright side, we felt quite good about ourselves when we ran into another KFC team of the exact same composition (pally healer) and beat them not only once, but twice, and the second kill was solidly in our favor.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Why I Don't Like the 4.1 Conquest Point Change
If you don't PvP, you probably were ambivalent towards the change in the number conquest points awarded in patch 4.1. If you're a talented PvPer and have an excess of conquest points, you're probably annoyed, but by now you probably primarily play for rating, not to buy things.
As for me, I have no aspirations of a title this season, since I'm only doing 2v2. I'm playing for fun and the thrill of making that clutch save, but that doesn't mean I'm not affected by the change. Since I'm not interested in how high I can get my arena rating, I play just to get my points for the week. Once I'm done, I stop.
And that brings me to the conquest point change.
Community Manager Zarhym wrote:
Now, I don't disagree with the time investment for epic PvP gear vs. epic PvE. My first two weeks of arena netted me my epic healing mace while the non-PvPers in my guild are still salivating for the maces off of Cho'gall and Nefarian. I don't have to worry about the whims of RNG. Two weeks of playing for a little over an hour and I got a mace better than anything out of a heroic.
I was actually quite surprised when I learned how quickly conquest gear came to me. I stopped doing any PvP other than arena and Tol Barad, just because I couldn't justify the time vs. honor gained (not to mention that when I first got my paladin to 85 the battleground queues were buggy for Horde). An hour of arena vs. an hour of battlegrounds? It's no contest.
Gillien is ilvl 356 in his PvP gear, and I'd wager I spent less time assembling that than I have Hana's 358 and she's my raiding main.
Considering that I agree with Blizzard's assessment, it might come across as strange that I don't like their change, but what bothers me isn't that they fixed it. It's how they fixed it.
When arena was first introduced it was as a casual form of PvP where people could earn gear and titles without doing the crazy High Warlord/Grand Marshal slog that was infamous during vanilla. The fact you only needed ten games a week made it very casual friendly. Any games played beyond the ten were attempts to increase one's rating and considering that ratings tended to settle after a while (except perhaps at the extremes), it was easy to figure out when to stop.
My Challenger-level 3v3 team had a rule in WotLK. We would play our 10 games, and then if we were winning, we would keep playing until we lost two in a row. This prevented us from playing into a losing streak, but if we were hot we wouldn't stop.
In arena it is expected that when you reach your appropriate rating that you will hover there, winning 50% of your matches and losing the other 50%. In that sweet spot between the start of Cata and patch 4.1 players earned enough conquest points to cap for the week from winning just 5 matches.
I liked the 4.0 Cata system. It promoted winning (since previously teams could get their points for 10 games even if they lost all of them), and if the 50-50 ratio held true people would still be playing their 10 games for the week. It seemed elegant enough to me.
But now I have to play more games to cap for the week. After the whole 10 games and you're done that has been around since TBC, I'm rather irritated that I'm now forced to play an average of 16 games in order to cap. It's a 60% increase in the time spent each week.
What I would rather have seen (though I'm sure it still would have been an unpopular choice) would have been an increase in the cost of conquest gear. Two weeks for an epic mace is ridiculously easy to obtain. Make it three or four weeks. Just increase the prices by 50%-60%.
Blizzard would get the same effect of increased time spent per each piece of gear earned, but without increasing the amount of time spent per week.
I found 10 games to be a reasonable amount of time for a casual player to do in a single night while still leaving time for other activities, and while some weeks I've had to do more than 10 games due to having more losses than wins, it still hasn't amounted to as many games as my 50-50 win rate of this past Thursday. If we get on a losing streak it could potentially make for a very long night and I don't like the idea of playing 20+ games in a single night in order to cap.
Equally I dislike the prospect of making arena night twice a week instead of once.
While I like arena for what it is (as in I've played skirmishes before for no reward), I admittedly like my purples as much as anyone else and I feel obligated to cap my conquest points just as a hardcore raider feels obligated to run heroics until valor points no longer offer any upgrades.
I won't stop playing arena due this, but it means less time to do heroics, less time for alts. Maybe I won't get a game of Tol Barad in that I would have otherwise joined. I don't raid on my paladin, unless one counts the occasional Baradin Hold. This isn't an alternate way of me getting gear to kill internet dragons. This is my one night a week PvP fun fest that gives me better gear for hitting a set number of wins.
As for me, I have no aspirations of a title this season, since I'm only doing 2v2. I'm playing for fun and the thrill of making that clutch save, but that doesn't mean I'm not affected by the change. Since I'm not interested in how high I can get my arena rating, I play just to get my points for the week. Once I'm done, I stop.
And that brings me to the conquest point change.
Community Manager Zarhym wrote:
We saw that Arenas and Rated Battlegrounds were over-rewarding players for the time investment required, particularly compared to point gains in PvE. We felt the change we went live with in the patch was a little bit too low and overcompensating though, so we buffed up the numbers for wins just a bit to 180 (Arenas) and 400 (Rated BGs).
Now, I don't disagree with the time investment for epic PvP gear vs. epic PvE. My first two weeks of arena netted me my epic healing mace while the non-PvPers in my guild are still salivating for the maces off of Cho'gall and Nefarian. I don't have to worry about the whims of RNG. Two weeks of playing for a little over an hour and I got a mace better than anything out of a heroic.
I was actually quite surprised when I learned how quickly conquest gear came to me. I stopped doing any PvP other than arena and Tol Barad, just because I couldn't justify the time vs. honor gained (not to mention that when I first got my paladin to 85 the battleground queues were buggy for Horde). An hour of arena vs. an hour of battlegrounds? It's no contest.
Gillien is ilvl 356 in his PvP gear, and I'd wager I spent less time assembling that than I have Hana's 358 and she's my raiding main.
Considering that I agree with Blizzard's assessment, it might come across as strange that I don't like their change, but what bothers me isn't that they fixed it. It's how they fixed it.
When arena was first introduced it was as a casual form of PvP where people could earn gear and titles without doing the crazy High Warlord/Grand Marshal slog that was infamous during vanilla. The fact you only needed ten games a week made it very casual friendly. Any games played beyond the ten were attempts to increase one's rating and considering that ratings tended to settle after a while (except perhaps at the extremes), it was easy to figure out when to stop.
My Challenger-level 3v3 team had a rule in WotLK. We would play our 10 games, and then if we were winning, we would keep playing until we lost two in a row. This prevented us from playing into a losing streak, but if we were hot we wouldn't stop.
In arena it is expected that when you reach your appropriate rating that you will hover there, winning 50% of your matches and losing the other 50%. In that sweet spot between the start of Cata and patch 4.1 players earned enough conquest points to cap for the week from winning just 5 matches.
I liked the 4.0 Cata system. It promoted winning (since previously teams could get their points for 10 games even if they lost all of them), and if the 50-50 ratio held true people would still be playing their 10 games for the week. It seemed elegant enough to me.
But now I have to play more games to cap for the week. After the whole 10 games and you're done that has been around since TBC, I'm rather irritated that I'm now forced to play an average of 16 games in order to cap. It's a 60% increase in the time spent each week.
What I would rather have seen (though I'm sure it still would have been an unpopular choice) would have been an increase in the cost of conquest gear. Two weeks for an epic mace is ridiculously easy to obtain. Make it three or four weeks. Just increase the prices by 50%-60%.
Blizzard would get the same effect of increased time spent per each piece of gear earned, but without increasing the amount of time spent per week.
I found 10 games to be a reasonable amount of time for a casual player to do in a single night while still leaving time for other activities, and while some weeks I've had to do more than 10 games due to having more losses than wins, it still hasn't amounted to as many games as my 50-50 win rate of this past Thursday. If we get on a losing streak it could potentially make for a very long night and I don't like the idea of playing 20+ games in a single night in order to cap.
Equally I dislike the prospect of making arena night twice a week instead of once.
While I like arena for what it is (as in I've played skirmishes before for no reward), I admittedly like my purples as much as anyone else and I feel obligated to cap my conquest points just as a hardcore raider feels obligated to run heroics until valor points no longer offer any upgrades.
I won't stop playing arena due this, but it means less time to do heroics, less time for alts. Maybe I won't get a game of Tol Barad in that I would have otherwise joined. I don't raid on my paladin, unless one counts the occasional Baradin Hold. This isn't an alternate way of me getting gear to kill internet dragons. This is my one night a week PvP fun fest that gives me better gear for hitting a set number of wins.
Friday, April 22, 2011
[Paladin] More Thoughts on Season 9 Arena
My paladin is starting to get decently kitted out in PvP gear, especially for an alt I haven't had much time to focus on. (I blame a combination of Dragon Age II and overtime at the day job.) My 2v2 partner and I have designated Thursday nights as arena night and I've since bought my Vicious Gladiator's Gavel as well as a new cloak, ring, wrist, and shoulders. It's kind of funny how quickly these Conquest points are adding up compared to previous seasons.
I love it.
I've realized that I really like Season 9 much more than previous seasons and it's because of the changes that have been made to allow people to buy epic PvP gear.
Back when arenas were first introduced in TBC everyone started at 1500 arena rating and went up or down, but as long as you played your ten games a week you got arena points. Gear had no rating requirements so you played, win or lose, and got your gear after you earned enough points. A lot of casual arena play occurred due to people who had no interest in titles but found it was a nice way to get gear.
Unfortunately, people also played who had no interest in arena itself, titles or no. They just wanted the gear, because it was better than what they could gear raiding Kara every week. I knew several people like that.
Then Blizzard added the rating requirement to get the best gear. Some people I knew stopped arenas altogether, because the gear they wanted (for PvE) was out of reach.
With WotLK, the urge to do arenas for gear largely went away. For certain classes a piece or two of arena gear could be sweet, but by and large PvE gear came from PvE. And arenas themselves changed.
Now players started at 0 rating and moved up. Gear could be purchased at 1100 rating and up, but it would take a good many games before reaching the appropriate rating, and it was frustrating to be accumulating arena points only to cap out at a point where points were coming in but there was no new gear to spend them on because the better gear was inaccessible. Or, perhaps your team got to the appropriate rating, but you didn't have the points to spend and by the time you did you'd lost that ranking and your chance at the gear you wanted.
I did have a good time with arenas in WotLK. I got my Challenger title for 3v3 and 5v5 in Season 6 (both teams were ranked high enough). I loved my teammates.
But after they stopped playing it was hard to get back into arenas again. My one remaining teammate was my hunter friend, and as I've mentioned, hunter/paladin is mocked as "terrible" to put it lightly. While we knew we weren't terribad players, we couldn't get a rating that mattered, and our gear couldn't get any better, which was discouraging.
These days in Cata, we're still playing, and while we aren't at our former Challenger-level glory, we're making progress and having fun. We progress without being concerned about hitting a number.
We're getting conquest points much more efficiently than earning honor points in battlegrounds (working a lot of overtime right now, time is at a premium), and as our gear has improved, we're finding hunter and holy paladin isn't quite the suck it initially appears to be.
That's not to say we don't hate the Dalaran arena anymore, or that my partner doesn't want to punch himself when healers start pillar dancing, but we're durable. We outlast other teams.
My partner loves the double dps groups. If I can keep him alive through the initial burst, we nearly always win. And I have a lot of burst healing. I've had Divine Favor and Aura Mastery up at the same time to let me chain cast a bunch of super fast un-interruptable Divine Lights.
If we fight a healer/dps combo, the fight is often longer, more likely to be dicey, but I have discovered something. Even with only 1600 resilience, I'm pretty durable against a single dps. It's only been these past couple weeks that it's become evident, but apparently my resilience is now at critical mass where I can start feeling comfortable with a dps beating on me while my partner does his business of pew-pewing a target.
After last night's rousing win ratio of 5-2 (only 5 matches needed to cap on conquest for the week), I started reforging some of the spirit off my PvP set to haste.
The reason for that is that I've noticed I haven't been hurting for mana the past two weeks. We had several matches where our opponents are dps (in which case the match is over one way or the other relatively quickly) or the healer goes oom way before I do.
We had one poor team where the disc priest was at 5% mana and I was virtually at full. We can outlast. If we're durable I can keep us both up primarily with Holy Shocks and Word of Glorys, weaving occasional Holy Lights or Divine Lights as necessary. I have kited a rogue in circles in the Lordaeron arena while keeping myself alive with nothing but instants.
I can only see this getting better. I used to be the squishy healer, never mind the plate, but I can only imagine how much the opposing team is going to hate me once I get even more PvP gear. It makes the PvPer in me grin.
I love it.
I've realized that I really like Season 9 much more than previous seasons and it's because of the changes that have been made to allow people to buy epic PvP gear.
Back when arenas were first introduced in TBC everyone started at 1500 arena rating and went up or down, but as long as you played your ten games a week you got arena points. Gear had no rating requirements so you played, win or lose, and got your gear after you earned enough points. A lot of casual arena play occurred due to people who had no interest in titles but found it was a nice way to get gear.
Unfortunately, people also played who had no interest in arena itself, titles or no. They just wanted the gear, because it was better than what they could gear raiding Kara every week. I knew several people like that.
Then Blizzard added the rating requirement to get the best gear. Some people I knew stopped arenas altogether, because the gear they wanted (for PvE) was out of reach.
With WotLK, the urge to do arenas for gear largely went away. For certain classes a piece or two of arena gear could be sweet, but by and large PvE gear came from PvE. And arenas themselves changed.
Now players started at 0 rating and moved up. Gear could be purchased at 1100 rating and up, but it would take a good many games before reaching the appropriate rating, and it was frustrating to be accumulating arena points only to cap out at a point where points were coming in but there was no new gear to spend them on because the better gear was inaccessible. Or, perhaps your team got to the appropriate rating, but you didn't have the points to spend and by the time you did you'd lost that ranking and your chance at the gear you wanted.
I did have a good time with arenas in WotLK. I got my Challenger title for 3v3 and 5v5 in Season 6 (both teams were ranked high enough). I loved my teammates.
But after they stopped playing it was hard to get back into arenas again. My one remaining teammate was my hunter friend, and as I've mentioned, hunter/paladin is mocked as "terrible" to put it lightly. While we knew we weren't terribad players, we couldn't get a rating that mattered, and our gear couldn't get any better, which was discouraging.
These days in Cata, we're still playing, and while we aren't at our former Challenger-level glory, we're making progress and having fun. We progress without being concerned about hitting a number.
We're getting conquest points much more efficiently than earning honor points in battlegrounds (working a lot of overtime right now, time is at a premium), and as our gear has improved, we're finding hunter and holy paladin isn't quite the suck it initially appears to be.
That's not to say we don't hate the Dalaran arena anymore, or that my partner doesn't want to punch himself when healers start pillar dancing, but we're durable. We outlast other teams.
My partner loves the double dps groups. If I can keep him alive through the initial burst, we nearly always win. And I have a lot of burst healing. I've had Divine Favor and Aura Mastery up at the same time to let me chain cast a bunch of super fast un-interruptable Divine Lights.
If we fight a healer/dps combo, the fight is often longer, more likely to be dicey, but I have discovered something. Even with only 1600 resilience, I'm pretty durable against a single dps. It's only been these past couple weeks that it's become evident, but apparently my resilience is now at critical mass where I can start feeling comfortable with a dps beating on me while my partner does his business of pew-pewing a target.
After last night's rousing win ratio of 5-2 (only 5 matches needed to cap on conquest for the week), I started reforging some of the spirit off my PvP set to haste.
The reason for that is that I've noticed I haven't been hurting for mana the past two weeks. We had several matches where our opponents are dps (in which case the match is over one way or the other relatively quickly) or the healer goes oom way before I do.
We had one poor team where the disc priest was at 5% mana and I was virtually at full. We can outlast. If we're durable I can keep us both up primarily with Holy Shocks and Word of Glorys, weaving occasional Holy Lights or Divine Lights as necessary. I have kited a rogue in circles in the Lordaeron arena while keeping myself alive with nothing but instants.
I can only see this getting better. I used to be the squishy healer, never mind the plate, but I can only imagine how much the opposing team is going to hate me once I get even more PvP gear. It makes the PvPer in me grin.
Friday, March 4, 2011
[Paladin] Oh My! Arena, How Have You Been?
This post is dedicated to my guild’s bear tank, Buik, for nagging me to update already. ;)
My paladin hit level 85 about a week and a half ago, and since that time I’ve started PvPing. Battlegrounds, then Tol Barad, and finally, last night, arena.
Given the time frame, I didn’t have time to earn honor for a full set of blue PvP gear for myself, and I didn’t want to splurge on crafted blues. I’m not shooting for a title at the moment. I just wanted to get back in the groove of things and do some 2v2 with my long-time arena partner Cursedhoof.
So I entered my first arena match in my PvE blues and greens with a blue PvP honor chest and my old 200 resilience PvP trinket from WotLK. I wanted to be better geared, but as Cursedhoof pointed out, at this point we have no rating to lose and we’ll still be getting Conquest Points, so after some reflection it didn’t sound like a bad idea at all.
Hunter and holy paladin has long been described as one of the worst 2v2 arena combos ever. Seriously, there’s a thread on that topic at Arena Junkies and you will find hunter/holy pally listed on the first page. We made it work in Season 4 (the last season of Burning Crusade) , but it wasn’t as strong for the seasons we played in WotLK (Seasons 6 and 7).
The problem with hunter and holy paladin is a lack of burst and that the hunter is surprisingly squishy. Line of sight issues are absolutely horrible for us. It actually wasn’t too bad for us back in TBC, when Nagrand and Blade’s Edge were the arenas of choice. While a good healer can pillar hump with the best of them, the arenas that kill us are the Dalaran Sewers (boxes hate hunters because they’re so small the hunter is forced into melee range if he has to run around the corner to get on the same side as the kill target) and the Ring of Valor (we haven’t played this one yet in Cata, but throughout WotLK he would have to dismiss his pet or it would bug out while trying to get off the starting elevator).
As part of getting ready for arenas, I decided to sacrifice my paladin’s prot spec to make my first spec completely dedicated to holy PvP.
It might sound a little funny, especially from someone who had previously earned an arena title, but I had never actually specced entirely for PvP. Throughout TBC I used an odd holy spec that allowed me to PvE, PvP, and even tank content up to normal Magister’s Terrace. Unfortunately changes were made to how paladins worked early in WotLK so I lost the holy tanking ability, but with dual specs that wasn’t an issue. I could use my second spec for prot and my holy spec was a good PvE/PvP hybrid. There were a couple points here and there that were sub-optimal for one activity or another, but overall it was decent enough.
So why did I change now?
Well, the reason behind the decision was primarily Light of Dawn, and then it snowballed from there.
Light of Dawn is an AoE cone heal costing Holy Power. No mana would be needed, but it would also mean that I would not be able to use the instant cast Word of Glory heal at the same time, since they both rely on the Holy Power resource. An AoE heal for two people, even three, is a waste. Light of Dawn is not an arena talent.
I also realized that with Pursuit of Justice being on the second tier of the ret tree it was within easy pickings of a PvP spec, should I want it. While running faster is fun in PvE too, really it’s a godsend in PvP. (Few things make me happier than frustrating the warrior or DK who can’t seem to keep up with or kill me.)
So I decided that this season I would try a full PvP spec. Besides, questing with a full PvE holy spec is awful, and I could do dailies in PvP spec but PvE gear.
Our first night in the arena
Our first night of Season 9 was not terribly smooth. I can’t speak for my teammate, but I was in terrible form. I died twice before getting my bubble off in matches where my death most likely cost us the game. I always reminded my Season 7 3v3 ret pally partner that he should never die without having already used his bubble, so I was needless to say kicking myself seven ways to Sunday over it. I think the problem is that I was remembering how long I would live in WotLK, but I have virtually no PvP gear in Cata so I kept underestimating how much longer I could really stay standing.
Bubble early, bubble often, is what I have to tell myself now.
We also encountered one pain-in-the-neck disc priest who, while unable to keep his PvP partner up, was a master at running around boxes in the Dalaran area. We ended up wasting 5-10 minutes chasing him around until he finally gave up and left. If we managed to catch up in the open we could get him to maybe 40- 50% health before he got away again, but his mana regen was so strong he was always able to heal up again while getting mana back. He went from 20% mana when his partner died to full when he only had to maintain himself.
Rebuke is truly something awesome now. As a blood elf paladin I now have three different ways to interrupt a healer, and as a result of that, I had a crowning moment of awesome to redeem myself in one of our matches.
We were fighting a feral druid and a resto shaman. I wasn’t having much trouble keeping teammate up, but the resto shaman was good about ducking behind pillars to avoid being shot at by a hunter. So while my partner stayed on the feral, what I did was run up to the shaman and Arcane Torrent when she was lining up a Healing Wave. She ran away, of course, and when the silence wore off she started winding up a Healing Surge. I ran up to her and hit Rebuke. And if my teammate hadn’t killed the feral by then, I had my Hammer of Justice ready for a third interrupt.
Hammer of Justice is the third interrupt because it’s possible to trinket out of it, but Rebuke and Arcant Torrent prevent spellcasting for a few seconds afterwards, which means the healer just has to eat it.
We ended the night comfortably maxed out on Conquest Points, and to my surprise, epic PvP gear is not all that expensive! I remember having to scrimp for weeks to hope for a piece of arena point gear, but not so much now. I can reasonably expect a new piece every two weeks, starting with my PvP weapon as soon as next week. This is probably old news to some people, but since I hadn’t been PvPing all I knew was that there was a lot of epic arena gear that didn’t require a rating.
Certainly there is 2200 rating arena gear, which I never expect to get, but I should be able to get quite a few pieces of the lower tier epics before the next season starts.
My paladin hit level 85 about a week and a half ago, and since that time I’ve started PvPing. Battlegrounds, then Tol Barad, and finally, last night, arena.
Given the time frame, I didn’t have time to earn honor for a full set of blue PvP gear for myself, and I didn’t want to splurge on crafted blues. I’m not shooting for a title at the moment. I just wanted to get back in the groove of things and do some 2v2 with my long-time arena partner Cursedhoof.
So I entered my first arena match in my PvE blues and greens with a blue PvP honor chest and my old 200 resilience PvP trinket from WotLK. I wanted to be better geared, but as Cursedhoof pointed out, at this point we have no rating to lose and we’ll still be getting Conquest Points, so after some reflection it didn’t sound like a bad idea at all.
Hunter and holy paladin has long been described as one of the worst 2v2 arena combos ever. Seriously, there’s a thread on that topic at Arena Junkies and you will find hunter/holy pally listed on the first page. We made it work in Season 4 (the last season of Burning Crusade) , but it wasn’t as strong for the seasons we played in WotLK (Seasons 6 and 7).
The problem with hunter and holy paladin is a lack of burst and that the hunter is surprisingly squishy. Line of sight issues are absolutely horrible for us. It actually wasn’t too bad for us back in TBC, when Nagrand and Blade’s Edge were the arenas of choice. While a good healer can pillar hump with the best of them, the arenas that kill us are the Dalaran Sewers (boxes hate hunters because they’re so small the hunter is forced into melee range if he has to run around the corner to get on the same side as the kill target) and the Ring of Valor (we haven’t played this one yet in Cata, but throughout WotLK he would have to dismiss his pet or it would bug out while trying to get off the starting elevator).
As part of getting ready for arenas, I decided to sacrifice my paladin’s prot spec to make my first spec completely dedicated to holy PvP.
It might sound a little funny, especially from someone who had previously earned an arena title, but I had never actually specced entirely for PvP. Throughout TBC I used an odd holy spec that allowed me to PvE, PvP, and even tank content up to normal Magister’s Terrace. Unfortunately changes were made to how paladins worked early in WotLK so I lost the holy tanking ability, but with dual specs that wasn’t an issue. I could use my second spec for prot and my holy spec was a good PvE/PvP hybrid. There were a couple points here and there that were sub-optimal for one activity or another, but overall it was decent enough.
So why did I change now?
Well, the reason behind the decision was primarily Light of Dawn, and then it snowballed from there.
Light of Dawn is an AoE cone heal costing Holy Power. No mana would be needed, but it would also mean that I would not be able to use the instant cast Word of Glory heal at the same time, since they both rely on the Holy Power resource. An AoE heal for two people, even three, is a waste. Light of Dawn is not an arena talent.
I also realized that with Pursuit of Justice being on the second tier of the ret tree it was within easy pickings of a PvP spec, should I want it. While running faster is fun in PvE too, really it’s a godsend in PvP. (Few things make me happier than frustrating the warrior or DK who can’t seem to keep up with or kill me.)
So I decided that this season I would try a full PvP spec. Besides, questing with a full PvE holy spec is awful, and I could do dailies in PvP spec but PvE gear.
Our first night in the arena
Our first night of Season 9 was not terribly smooth. I can’t speak for my teammate, but I was in terrible form. I died twice before getting my bubble off in matches where my death most likely cost us the game. I always reminded my Season 7 3v3 ret pally partner that he should never die without having already used his bubble, so I was needless to say kicking myself seven ways to Sunday over it. I think the problem is that I was remembering how long I would live in WotLK, but I have virtually no PvP gear in Cata so I kept underestimating how much longer I could really stay standing.
Bubble early, bubble often, is what I have to tell myself now.
We also encountered one pain-in-the-neck disc priest who, while unable to keep his PvP partner up, was a master at running around boxes in the Dalaran area. We ended up wasting 5-10 minutes chasing him around until he finally gave up and left. If we managed to catch up in the open we could get him to maybe 40- 50% health before he got away again, but his mana regen was so strong he was always able to heal up again while getting mana back. He went from 20% mana when his partner died to full when he only had to maintain himself.
Rebuke is truly something awesome now. As a blood elf paladin I now have three different ways to interrupt a healer, and as a result of that, I had a crowning moment of awesome to redeem myself in one of our matches.
We were fighting a feral druid and a resto shaman. I wasn’t having much trouble keeping teammate up, but the resto shaman was good about ducking behind pillars to avoid being shot at by a hunter. So while my partner stayed on the feral, what I did was run up to the shaman and Arcane Torrent when she was lining up a Healing Wave. She ran away, of course, and when the silence wore off she started winding up a Healing Surge. I ran up to her and hit Rebuke. And if my teammate hadn’t killed the feral by then, I had my Hammer of Justice ready for a third interrupt.
Hammer of Justice is the third interrupt because it’s possible to trinket out of it, but Rebuke and Arcant Torrent prevent spellcasting for a few seconds afterwards, which means the healer just has to eat it.
We ended the night comfortably maxed out on Conquest Points, and to my surprise, epic PvP gear is not all that expensive! I remember having to scrimp for weeks to hope for a piece of arena point gear, but not so much now. I can reasonably expect a new piece every two weeks, starting with my PvP weapon as soon as next week. This is probably old news to some people, but since I hadn’t been PvPing all I knew was that there was a lot of epic arena gear that didn’t require a rating.
Certainly there is 2200 rating arena gear, which I never expect to get, but I should be able to get quite a few pieces of the lower tier epics before the next season starts.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Revival of PvP Guilds in Cata?
I didn't raid in vanilla WoW, but I did PvP... a lot. My now neglected hunter alt was Exalted with the Warsong Outriders and Revered with the Defilers before the PvP system changed over with the advent of Burning Cursade. During TBC I joined a well regarded twink guild and enjoyed some 19s with my shaman and warrior. Some of my most memorable moments were team-oriented WSG matches against a tough opposing team where we really had to work together to crack them.
I missed that in WotLK.
That's not to say I didn't PvP at all. I had a blast in 59s on my feral druid until the ability to level in BGs kicked in. Then it was either level or stop playing (since static 59s didn't exist anymore), so I leveled.
I also did arena and earned my Challenger title on my paladin. I did have fun, don't get me wrong, but there's something visceral about battlegrounds that I liked; the team effort.
On my druid and hunter I really got a kick out of being able to call out the direction of flag runners, the number of incoming targets, the knowledge that it wasn't just how well I could push buttons, but how well my teammates and I could strategize that made a difference.
I remember hunkering down in the upstairs of the Alliance WSG base with three PvP guildies back when there was no timer and there was no flag debuff, and discussing how we were going to crack their turtle. Our team was half pug, but our puggers were doing a wonderful job of holding the fort, allowing the pre-made portion of us to focus on getting the enemy flag.
Our warrior was deemed the best decoy. He could survive a good beating. Our rogue would be the real flagrunner. On my hunter, I was on support duty with Wing Clip and Concussion Shot to slow pursuit.
The plan set, our warrior dropped into the flag room, grabbed the flag, and somehow, almost by sheer force of will, managed to run just outside of the flag room (graveyard side) before dying. He didn't get far, but it was far enough that he lured almost all the Alliance out to chase him.
The rest of us jumped down.
Bing! The flag was returned.
Our rogue grabbed it and ran down the tunnel, with the rest of us following.
The rest of the match I don't remember. I know we won. That may have been our last flag. But the strongest memory, the one that stuck, was cracking the turtle. We had died multiple times trying to get inside the base. We'd grouped up and tried a charge. We tried the decoy strat a couple of times before we got the one that worked. All told it was probably our fifth or sixth attempt that succeeded.
But when we broke free, it was glorious.
PvP as a guild focus largely died in TBC, especially with the introduction of arenas. Battlegrounds were for farming honor. Arenas were for earning gear.
I still played BGs, but not as much as I had before. In patch 3.2, Blizzard restricted games from starting unless they had a full group of people, and to compensate it was no longer possible to queue for three BGs and just wait to see which popped first.
As a result queue times shot up and I can barely stand to wait in them anymore. I can't remember the last time I was in a battleground, and I liked them! There's no such thing as a quick match before heading to bed anymore. When I need honor I just cash in some Stone Shards because I pick up more than enough of those from doing daily heroics.
I'm hoping that Cataclysm will see a revival in PvP guilds, especially now that we'll have rated battlegrounds and guild achievements that will require a significant number of guildies to participate in a match. If I can manage to find the time in between raid nights, I'd love to move my feral druid into a PvP guild and do some good old flag running again. She still has some achievements to get.
I missed that in WotLK.
That's not to say I didn't PvP at all. I had a blast in 59s on my feral druid until the ability to level in BGs kicked in. Then it was either level or stop playing (since static 59s didn't exist anymore), so I leveled.
I also did arena and earned my Challenger title on my paladin. I did have fun, don't get me wrong, but there's something visceral about battlegrounds that I liked; the team effort.
On my druid and hunter I really got a kick out of being able to call out the direction of flag runners, the number of incoming targets, the knowledge that it wasn't just how well I could push buttons, but how well my teammates and I could strategize that made a difference.
I remember hunkering down in the upstairs of the Alliance WSG base with three PvP guildies back when there was no timer and there was no flag debuff, and discussing how we were going to crack their turtle. Our team was half pug, but our puggers were doing a wonderful job of holding the fort, allowing the pre-made portion of us to focus on getting the enemy flag.
Our warrior was deemed the best decoy. He could survive a good beating. Our rogue would be the real flagrunner. On my hunter, I was on support duty with Wing Clip and Concussion Shot to slow pursuit.
The plan set, our warrior dropped into the flag room, grabbed the flag, and somehow, almost by sheer force of will, managed to run just outside of the flag room (graveyard side) before dying. He didn't get far, but it was far enough that he lured almost all the Alliance out to chase him.
The rest of us jumped down.
Bing! The flag was returned.
Our rogue grabbed it and ran down the tunnel, with the rest of us following.
The rest of the match I don't remember. I know we won. That may have been our last flag. But the strongest memory, the one that stuck, was cracking the turtle. We had died multiple times trying to get inside the base. We'd grouped up and tried a charge. We tried the decoy strat a couple of times before we got the one that worked. All told it was probably our fifth or sixth attempt that succeeded.
But when we broke free, it was glorious.
PvP as a guild focus largely died in TBC, especially with the introduction of arenas. Battlegrounds were for farming honor. Arenas were for earning gear.
I still played BGs, but not as much as I had before. In patch 3.2, Blizzard restricted games from starting unless they had a full group of people, and to compensate it was no longer possible to queue for three BGs and just wait to see which popped first.
As a result queue times shot up and I can barely stand to wait in them anymore. I can't remember the last time I was in a battleground, and I liked them! There's no such thing as a quick match before heading to bed anymore. When I need honor I just cash in some Stone Shards because I pick up more than enough of those from doing daily heroics.
I'm hoping that Cataclysm will see a revival in PvP guilds, especially now that we'll have rated battlegrounds and guild achievements that will require a significant number of guildies to participate in a match. If I can manage to find the time in between raid nights, I'd love to move my feral druid into a PvP guild and do some good old flag running again. She still has some achievements to get.
Friday, May 28, 2010
[Paladin] How I've Missed Arena
Ever since my Season 6 3v3 team broke up, I've haven't been able to hit my arena stride again. My S8 3v3 team was doing so-so, but it wasn't a good comp and communication between our two dps was lacking. Target switches weren't being called out in time, CCs weren't being coordinated, and the team lead doing the callouts wasn't always that aware whether or not it was possible for his orders to be carried out.
That's not to say he was a horrible player, I think he would have been fine as someone on my S6 5s team, but I don't think he was the right personality fit for the hunter I normally play with, especially as the lead dps making the call-outs. And then he decided to transfer to another server, which ended our 3s run.
So last night my long-time hunter teammate and I resuscitated our 2s team. We've spent portions of Seasons 4, 6, and 7 playing 2v2 together, so it's safe to say that even if we're not the best duo around, we at least have a good idea of what we're capable of.
For instance, if I'm the focus and I can reasonably take the hits, I don't try to LoS any melee on me. I do stay in motion, but I keep them right where my hunter can hit them. If they catch me while I'm hiding I'll kite them over and around obstacles to bring them in view of my hunter, because the less he has to move the more damage he can do.
Similar he always lets me know where he drops a trap so I can get opponents off of me.
I'm not sure what the plan usually is for a hunter/holy paladin duo, but we seem to work well as an endurance team. We don't burst anyone down unless they're undergeared, but the longer the match goes on, the more likely we're going to win. If we're fighting another dps/healer combo I usually gauge our progress by the other healer's mana bar. It might not feel like we're winning when our focus target keeps getting healed to full, but if my bar's at 90% and they're a third from empty I know we're going to make it.
We didn't run into any decent resto druids last night, which pretty much meant that none of our matches ended up being a half hour long, but we did run into a bunch of double dps and a horrible ret pally/holy pally duo. We only had a couple fights where we just got worked, and they seemed to follow the pattern of: "If we can survive the initial burst, we're probably going to win."
I think our most memorable matches were against an unholy DK/holy pally duo and a feral druid/ret pally combo. The DK/holy pally match was fun for me. It didn't end very quickly, and had a couple scary moments, but I got to kite the DK all over the Dalaran arena until his healer ran out of mana. I pretty much kept mashing my Cleanse button to keep diseases and Chains of Ice off me, maybe a Hand of Freedom every now and then, maybe stun the DK to give myself a little breathing room to heal if Holy Shock every five seconds wasn't enough.
I admit I like the feeling I get when I imagine my opponent seething "I just can't kill this holy pally!"
The match with the feral druid/ret pally combo was memorable because we had so many close calls. Though we ultimately won, it felt very much by the skin of our teeth. The feral druid wasn't shy about using his interrupts. I was Cycloned a lot, and he knew enough to go to bear and hit me with a Feral Charge after the second or third Cyclone wore off so he could lock me up for a longer than he would have gotten with diminishing returns.
The truly annoying thing about Cyclone as a paladin is that you can't bubble out of it. Trinket is the only way.
But communication was good between us. I liked that I was able to call out the Feral Charges before they happened, I was never surprised by them, and my partner managed to Deterrence or Disengage out of the worst scrapes, since he was their focus fire target. I don't know how, but he always managed to have something come off cooldown just when we needed it the most.
It was a long fight considering our opponents were double dps, but we managed to whittle down the druid before he could get a heal off (because he was good about healing himself) and then from there it was just recovery mode. We both had less than half health, my partner nearing the 25% danger zone, but I managed to heal him just enough to stave off any immediate chance of death, and then as the fight continued and his health bar rose it became apparent our remaining opponent wasn't going to have a chance.
I could relax.
I also have to say that my Divine Favor + Holy Shock macro saved our butts so many times. If I only had a split second between CCs, it would still be enough to heal over half my hunter's health bar and then I'd have an instant FoL the next time I got out of CC. I have it bound to the tilde key so it's very close by for those emergency moments.
I'm not sure we'll play again this week, but it felt good stepping into the arena again.
That's not to say he was a horrible player, I think he would have been fine as someone on my S6 5s team, but I don't think he was the right personality fit for the hunter I normally play with, especially as the lead dps making the call-outs. And then he decided to transfer to another server, which ended our 3s run.
So last night my long-time hunter teammate and I resuscitated our 2s team. We've spent portions of Seasons 4, 6, and 7 playing 2v2 together, so it's safe to say that even if we're not the best duo around, we at least have a good idea of what we're capable of.
For instance, if I'm the focus and I can reasonably take the hits, I don't try to LoS any melee on me. I do stay in motion, but I keep them right where my hunter can hit them. If they catch me while I'm hiding I'll kite them over and around obstacles to bring them in view of my hunter, because the less he has to move the more damage he can do.
Similar he always lets me know where he drops a trap so I can get opponents off of me.
I'm not sure what the plan usually is for a hunter/holy paladin duo, but we seem to work well as an endurance team. We don't burst anyone down unless they're undergeared, but the longer the match goes on, the more likely we're going to win. If we're fighting another dps/healer combo I usually gauge our progress by the other healer's mana bar. It might not feel like we're winning when our focus target keeps getting healed to full, but if my bar's at 90% and they're a third from empty I know we're going to make it.
We didn't run into any decent resto druids last night, which pretty much meant that none of our matches ended up being a half hour long, but we did run into a bunch of double dps and a horrible ret pally/holy pally duo. We only had a couple fights where we just got worked, and they seemed to follow the pattern of: "If we can survive the initial burst, we're probably going to win."
I think our most memorable matches were against an unholy DK/holy pally duo and a feral druid/ret pally combo. The DK/holy pally match was fun for me. It didn't end very quickly, and had a couple scary moments, but I got to kite the DK all over the Dalaran arena until his healer ran out of mana. I pretty much kept mashing my Cleanse button to keep diseases and Chains of Ice off me, maybe a Hand of Freedom every now and then, maybe stun the DK to give myself a little breathing room to heal if Holy Shock every five seconds wasn't enough.
I admit I like the feeling I get when I imagine my opponent seething "I just can't kill this holy pally!"
The match with the feral druid/ret pally combo was memorable because we had so many close calls. Though we ultimately won, it felt very much by the skin of our teeth. The feral druid wasn't shy about using his interrupts. I was Cycloned a lot, and he knew enough to go to bear and hit me with a Feral Charge after the second or third Cyclone wore off so he could lock me up for a longer than he would have gotten with diminishing returns.
The truly annoying thing about Cyclone as a paladin is that you can't bubble out of it. Trinket is the only way.
But communication was good between us. I liked that I was able to call out the Feral Charges before they happened, I was never surprised by them, and my partner managed to Deterrence or Disengage out of the worst scrapes, since he was their focus fire target. I don't know how, but he always managed to have something come off cooldown just when we needed it the most.
It was a long fight considering our opponents were double dps, but we managed to whittle down the druid before he could get a heal off (because he was good about healing himself) and then from there it was just recovery mode. We both had less than half health, my partner nearing the 25% danger zone, but I managed to heal him just enough to stave off any immediate chance of death, and then as the fight continued and his health bar rose it became apparent our remaining opponent wasn't going to have a chance.
I could relax.
I also have to say that my Divine Favor + Holy Shock macro saved our butts so many times. If I only had a split second between CCs, it would still be enough to heal over half my hunter's health bar and then I'd have an instant FoL the next time I got out of CC. I have it bound to the tilde key so it's very close by for those emergency moments.
I'm not sure we'll play again this week, but it felt good stepping into the arena again.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
[Paladin] Season 7 is Over
I'm a little disappointed in how season 7 turned out for me. My 2s team was just for fun so I never really expected much of it, but after having spent season 6 around 1700 in 3s it was a letdown struggling to make 1350, even if our team make-up stank.
My 5s started up and looked like it would be fun. Even if our rating didn't go very high, the points would have been nice in comparison to how my 2s was performing. Besides, I like the quicker pace of 5s. Dancing around with a resto druid for a half hour for a measly 4 rating points just kind of sucks. With 5s the matches go quickly enough that I consider it the best "casual" bracket, get in there, get out, assuming one can muster the teammates for it. But then our priest faction transferred and that was the end of that.
The theoretical bright star early in season 7 was going to be my 3s team. DK/ret pally/holy pally. The ret pally was a bit nubby by his own admission, but a good player and willing to learn. He and the DK were doing 2s together as double dps and doing all right. But then the DK vanished and for a while I had no 3s team.
Some time later the ret pally came back wanting another go at 3s. Not having another team to play on, I agreed to heal again and the ret pally nabbed a mage to fill in the third spot.
That comp was horrible.
It really made me miss my season 6 team and the control we had. I don't mind losing to a well-played team. I'll be disappointed, yes, but playing with a ret pally and mage made me feel like I was trying to fix a broken sink with only half a toolbox. Everything was unnecessarily hard and teams that would have been pancaked by my old S6 team were now rolfstomping us.
Then finally, far too late, a decent 3s team fell into place. It was only two weeks ago, and we hadn't the time to really devote to burning through the fat to our proper rating. Hell, we didn't even have much of a chance to settle into working with each other, but it has promise. I think we'll stay together for season 8.
It still involves the scrubby ret pally, who, while better than he was at the start of season 7, is still learning not to LoS his healer, but he's gotten better. His spec has improved and he's taken to reading Arena Junkies for advice. He has a full set of furious gear now and relentless where he's been able to get it.
But the biggest help I think has been the addition of Cursedhoof, the hunter from my season 6 3s team. He wasn't going to do 3s this season, but agreed to give it a shot.
So my 3s team is now almost the same as it was back in S6 except that we now have a ret pally instead of an unholy DK. I'm going to miss those AMZs and amazing Death Grips, but the ret pally has potential. He knows how to toss a quick emergency heal if I can't cast and he's quick with the BoPs (for our hunter). With a little more practice so the three of us can better settle into working together I think I might have a real team again.
My 5s started up and looked like it would be fun. Even if our rating didn't go very high, the points would have been nice in comparison to how my 2s was performing. Besides, I like the quicker pace of 5s. Dancing around with a resto druid for a half hour for a measly 4 rating points just kind of sucks. With 5s the matches go quickly enough that I consider it the best "casual" bracket, get in there, get out, assuming one can muster the teammates for it. But then our priest faction transferred and that was the end of that.
The theoretical bright star early in season 7 was going to be my 3s team. DK/ret pally/holy pally. The ret pally was a bit nubby by his own admission, but a good player and willing to learn. He and the DK were doing 2s together as double dps and doing all right. But then the DK vanished and for a while I had no 3s team.
Some time later the ret pally came back wanting another go at 3s. Not having another team to play on, I agreed to heal again and the ret pally nabbed a mage to fill in the third spot.
That comp was horrible.
It really made me miss my season 6 team and the control we had. I don't mind losing to a well-played team. I'll be disappointed, yes, but playing with a ret pally and mage made me feel like I was trying to fix a broken sink with only half a toolbox. Everything was unnecessarily hard and teams that would have been pancaked by my old S6 team were now rolfstomping us.
Then finally, far too late, a decent 3s team fell into place. It was only two weeks ago, and we hadn't the time to really devote to burning through the fat to our proper rating. Hell, we didn't even have much of a chance to settle into working with each other, but it has promise. I think we'll stay together for season 8.
It still involves the scrubby ret pally, who, while better than he was at the start of season 7, is still learning not to LoS his healer, but he's gotten better. His spec has improved and he's taken to reading Arena Junkies for advice. He has a full set of furious gear now and relentless where he's been able to get it.
But the biggest help I think has been the addition of Cursedhoof, the hunter from my season 6 3s team. He wasn't going to do 3s this season, but agreed to give it a shot.
So my 3s team is now almost the same as it was back in S6 except that we now have a ret pally instead of an unholy DK. I'm going to miss those AMZs and amazing Death Grips, but the ret pally has potential. He knows how to toss a quick emergency heal if I can't cast and he's quick with the BoPs (for our hunter). With a little more practice so the three of us can better settle into working together I think I might have a real team again.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
[Paladin] Arthas, Tacos, and Murlocs, Oh My!
It feels like time for a light-hearted name for a topic after my last post and not writing anything for a while. I've been busy with work, busy recruiting for my guild, and busy with Dragon Age (why yes I play games other than WoW). But rather than talk about the busy stuff, let's talk about what Arthas, tacos, and murlocs have in common, mainly that they're a component of my new arena team's sense of humor.
I hadn't been trying very hard to find a 5v5 team. I probably should have, but I've never been very good at pimping myself out in Trade; "Holy pally looking for 5s team. Experience at 1750+." It just makes me feel desperate and a bit sleazy. "I'm so hard up I have to resort to Trade!"
A former guildie of mine decided to pull the trigger though and start up the 5s team he'd been talking about. It sounded like it would be mostly a just-for-fun team, as he wasn't talking comps, strats, or anything, but I said okay. My last fun team did well enough for my Challenger title after all, and it's more fun playing with friends than strangers.
We ended up with a DK, a hunter, a ret pally, a holy pally, and a priest. We were thinking this could be good. The priest raids as disc so we were having sweet snacky dreams of Penance and Pain Suppression. Three dps and two healers. All good.
First order of business was to choose a name. And as anyone who's ever made an arena team knows, choosing an arena team name can be srs bzns. The DK suggested Be Your True Wipe, as a play off our guild name of Be Your True Mind. We were at one point considering Arthas Took My Candle as a guild name, so the ret pally suggested something to do with Arthas. The DK came back with Eat My Taco, which morphed into Arthas Ate My Taco, and then Murloc Ate My Taco, to Arthas Ate My Murloc's Taco.
Yes, arena team names are never glamorous.
There were many permutations involving Arthas, tacos, and murlocs until finally we ended up with Arthas Ate My Taco, and only because Arthas Ate My Murloc's Taco was two letters too long (can't say we didn't try).
Then we stepped into the arena, and we got plastered.
No problem. New team, just getting the kinks worked out. Priest has got to get better at staying alive so I'm not solo healing.
Rounds 2 and 3 saw us getting wiped again. Priest keeps dying and I don't mean worn down. I mean insta-gibbed. I'd seen him PvPing in BGs while outside of raids, but when I finally looked at him he's the only team member who is primarily in PvE gear. His resilience is probably less than 100. Apparently he's just getting back into PvP and hadn't done it since TBC.
Well, it's a just-for-fun team, I figure. I'll deal.
It's then that our hunter whispered to me. He'd noticed in the last fight that the priest was in shadowform. Turns out that yep, his PvP spec is shadow. Somehow this hadn't come up while we were putting the team together. I'd been solo-healing this whole time. Not that being shadow instead of disc really would have changed that. He still gets gibbed right off the bat and I don't think it would have mattered what spec he was with the gear he had.
We manage a few wins, priest is dead at the end of every single match except for one, which he said he lived through because he never got off his mount (I didn't check whether or not he was joking). We're essentially 4-manning every win and I'm solo-healing the whole thing.
On the bright side, it's surprisingly not too bad being a solo-healer, even as a paladin. The rest of the team is pretty sturdy. The rest of us already have 2s and/or 3s teams and sport a decent amount of resilience. We didn't have too many matches where we totally got blitzed down, even when we ran into a 2000 rated team and our priest was predictably dead in the first five seconds. But there are more issues to work with as a solo healer on a 5v5 team.
First of all, it's harder to keep track of everyone. I have no backup. My team members have to be more aware of what they're doing when they run away from me to chase after someone else. The worst instance was in Blade's Edge where half the dps jumped off the bridge to chase and the other half did not or could not. I can't heal people underneath the bridge while I'm healing people on top of it.
So I did what any good healer should and brought it up between matches in vent. It's all part of getting the kinks out of the system. If people want to jump off they just need to be aware of what it's potentially costing them and to let me know so I understand where they've gone. I try not to fall into tunnel vision, but sometimes it's hard to stay situationally aware of the locations of four teammates, five opponents, and who I have LOS on, and if I get a LOS error message I want to know what I can do to correct it, or know if it can afford to be corrected under current circumstances.
I'm not sure this team will amount to anything, the priest definitely needs better gear no matter which spec he uses for PvP, and it might be interesting trying a 4 dps, 1 healer setup, but for now it's just for fun. Arthas, tacos, murlocs, and all that good stuff.
I hadn't been trying very hard to find a 5v5 team. I probably should have, but I've never been very good at pimping myself out in Trade; "Holy pally looking for 5s team. Experience at 1750+." It just makes me feel desperate and a bit sleazy. "I'm so hard up I have to resort to Trade!"
A former guildie of mine decided to pull the trigger though and start up the 5s team he'd been talking about. It sounded like it would be mostly a just-for-fun team, as he wasn't talking comps, strats, or anything, but I said okay. My last fun team did well enough for my Challenger title after all, and it's more fun playing with friends than strangers.
We ended up with a DK, a hunter, a ret pally, a holy pally, and a priest. We were thinking this could be good. The priest raids as disc so we were having sweet snacky dreams of Penance and Pain Suppression. Three dps and two healers. All good.
First order of business was to choose a name. And as anyone who's ever made an arena team knows, choosing an arena team name can be srs bzns. The DK suggested Be Your True Wipe, as a play off our guild name of Be Your True Mind. We were at one point considering Arthas Took My Candle as a guild name, so the ret pally suggested something to do with Arthas. The DK came back with Eat My Taco, which morphed into Arthas Ate My Taco, and then Murloc Ate My Taco, to Arthas Ate My Murloc's Taco.
Yes, arena team names are never glamorous.
There were many permutations involving Arthas, tacos, and murlocs until finally we ended up with Arthas Ate My Taco, and only because Arthas Ate My Murloc's Taco was two letters too long (can't say we didn't try).
Then we stepped into the arena, and we got plastered.
No problem. New team, just getting the kinks worked out. Priest has got to get better at staying alive so I'm not solo healing.
Rounds 2 and 3 saw us getting wiped again. Priest keeps dying and I don't mean worn down. I mean insta-gibbed. I'd seen him PvPing in BGs while outside of raids, but when I finally looked at him he's the only team member who is primarily in PvE gear. His resilience is probably less than 100. Apparently he's just getting back into PvP and hadn't done it since TBC.
Well, it's a just-for-fun team, I figure. I'll deal.
It's then that our hunter whispered to me. He'd noticed in the last fight that the priest was in shadowform. Turns out that yep, his PvP spec is shadow. Somehow this hadn't come up while we were putting the team together. I'd been solo-healing this whole time. Not that being shadow instead of disc really would have changed that. He still gets gibbed right off the bat and I don't think it would have mattered what spec he was with the gear he had.
We manage a few wins, priest is dead at the end of every single match except for one, which he said he lived through because he never got off his mount (I didn't check whether or not he was joking). We're essentially 4-manning every win and I'm solo-healing the whole thing.
On the bright side, it's surprisingly not too bad being a solo-healer, even as a paladin. The rest of the team is pretty sturdy. The rest of us already have 2s and/or 3s teams and sport a decent amount of resilience. We didn't have too many matches where we totally got blitzed down, even when we ran into a 2000 rated team and our priest was predictably dead in the first five seconds. But there are more issues to work with as a solo healer on a 5v5 team.
First of all, it's harder to keep track of everyone. I have no backup. My team members have to be more aware of what they're doing when they run away from me to chase after someone else. The worst instance was in Blade's Edge where half the dps jumped off the bridge to chase and the other half did not or could not. I can't heal people underneath the bridge while I'm healing people on top of it.
So I did what any good healer should and brought it up between matches in vent. It's all part of getting the kinks out of the system. If people want to jump off they just need to be aware of what it's potentially costing them and to let me know so I understand where they've gone. I try not to fall into tunnel vision, but sometimes it's hard to stay situationally aware of the locations of four teammates, five opponents, and who I have LOS on, and if I get a LOS error message I want to know what I can do to correct it, or know if it can afford to be corrected under current circumstances.
I'm not sure this team will amount to anything, the priest definitely needs better gear no matter which spec he uses for PvP, and it might be interesting trying a 4 dps, 1 healer setup, but for now it's just for fun. Arthas, tacos, murlocs, and all that good stuff.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
[Paladin] So Long Prot Healing
Ever since Wrath came out it's been a little odd that the most viable 2v2 arena builds have been a fairly deep ret build (with some holy), and a really deep prot build (with some holy). The "proper" holy/prot build one would instinctively expect a healing paladin to use doesn't have enough damage, utility, or survivability in 2s and thus finds its popularity in 3s and 5s where its ability to heal two targets at once (and quickly, with Holy Shock) is more useful.
The holy/ret hybrid was nerfed at the start of Season 6, which fueled the migration to the deep prot build. With all the tankiness talents in the Protection tree, a prot healer would have a lot of stamina, a potentially everlasting Divine Plea, and most importantly Touched By the Light, which would rocket the paladin's spellpower above and beyond what he or she would have in a holy spec.
The trade off would be the loss of Holy Shock (no more instant heals), Illumination (but with an everlasting Divine Plea, who needs it?), Beacon of Light (which isn't that useful in 2s anyway), and other deep holy talents. But on the other hand, the prot healer gains a 20 second stun and a silence with Avenger's Shield. If one had a durable arena partner, say a DK or a warrior, then the instant heal might not be necessary, and the stuns and silences can lock up an opposing team's healer pretty well.
It's not hard to see why prot healing became popular for 2s. But it looks like it's going to end. Ghostcrawler wrote a couple things yesterday.
While I'm sure the deep prot healers will not like this change unless holy gets some sort of buff to make up for it, I'm rather pleased with it from a design perspective. It just never made sense to have such a strong healer come out of the prot tree, to the point that being holy just isn't worth it for 2s.
My focus hasn't been on 2s at all this season, and I think some of that may have been because holy just isn't as strong in 2s versus 3s and 5s and I have to use this spec for PvE as well (or give up my tanking spec, which I don't want to do either).
While I do occasionally see prot healers in 3s, they're much rarer. It's more likely I'll see a Beacon of Light up signaling that they're deep holy, since a holy paladin has a much easier time dealing with split dps (Beacon one target, heal the other, and use Holy Shock for quick heals when the switch happens). When I'm playing 3s and 5s I generally Beacon one melee and then Sacred Shield our hunter (because everyone likes focusing the hunter). This lets me heal a melee while also covering our hunter.
In 2s there's not much split damage so Beacon's much less useful. Also, 2s focus a lot more on shutting down one player while burning the other, which a holy paladin is not very good at.
What I would like to see in Season 7 is a little more utility in a holy paladin. Shamans have their totems (which drop four at a time now!), Hex, and Wind Shock, druids have Cyclone, priests can Mana Burn and Psychic Scream. Paladins have a stun on a 40 second cooldown if they spec for it. Unless they're blood elves with Arcane Torrent, that's about it for CC and interrupts. We heal, and we bubble, but Hand of Protection only stops physical damage, making it of little use against DKs and ret paladins and just about everyone at range. Only warriors and rogues are really stopped by it, and a warrior can break it if he wants to.
I can't say I'll miss prot healing having never tried it, but I hope paladins in general get something to make up for it, especially for 2s. I'd like to give it another shot in Season 7.
The holy/ret hybrid was nerfed at the start of Season 6, which fueled the migration to the deep prot build. With all the tankiness talents in the Protection tree, a prot healer would have a lot of stamina, a potentially everlasting Divine Plea, and most importantly Touched By the Light, which would rocket the paladin's spellpower above and beyond what he or she would have in a holy spec.
The trade off would be the loss of Holy Shock (no more instant heals), Illumination (but with an everlasting Divine Plea, who needs it?), Beacon of Light (which isn't that useful in 2s anyway), and other deep holy talents. But on the other hand, the prot healer gains a 20 second stun and a silence with Avenger's Shield. If one had a durable arena partner, say a DK or a warrior, then the instant heal might not be necessary, and the stuns and silences can lock up an opposing team's healer pretty well.
It's not hard to see why prot healing became popular for 2s. But it looks like it's going to end. Ghostcrawler wrote a couple things yesterday.
We are going to fix the specific scenario where a PvP paladin with a Prot build but spell power gear can heal for more than a Holy build in the same gear. We want to do this without messing up the Prot paladin trying to tank in PvE.
We will probably not make this change before the end of the current Arena season, but you can be thinking about your teams for season 7 with this change in mind.
Touched by the Light helps to solve a specific problem which is that paladins do both physical and magical damage and Prot paladins need both for threat (and damage). It works fine when the paladin is in tanking gear, and in fact was designed so that paladins wouldn't need to mix tanking gear with caster gear as they did in the past.
It is not balanced for a Prot paladin who decides to wear spell power gear. At that point you're double-dipping.
We have no problem with Prot paladins in PvP, but they need to be there because their survivability is an asset, not because they can out-heal an entire tree dedicated to healing.
There is a fine line between creative use of game mechanics and something that goes against our vision for the game. It's always going to be subjective. If the Retribution tree ended up being better at tanking than the Protection tree, or the Shadow priest was a better healer than the Disc tree, or the Marks hunter had a more powerful pet than the BM hunter, we'd take similar action.
While I'm sure the deep prot healers will not like this change unless holy gets some sort of buff to make up for it, I'm rather pleased with it from a design perspective. It just never made sense to have such a strong healer come out of the prot tree, to the point that being holy just isn't worth it for 2s.
My focus hasn't been on 2s at all this season, and I think some of that may have been because holy just isn't as strong in 2s versus 3s and 5s and I have to use this spec for PvE as well (or give up my tanking spec, which I don't want to do either).
While I do occasionally see prot healers in 3s, they're much rarer. It's more likely I'll see a Beacon of Light up signaling that they're deep holy, since a holy paladin has a much easier time dealing with split dps (Beacon one target, heal the other, and use Holy Shock for quick heals when the switch happens). When I'm playing 3s and 5s I generally Beacon one melee and then Sacred Shield our hunter (because everyone likes focusing the hunter). This lets me heal a melee while also covering our hunter.
In 2s there's not much split damage so Beacon's much less useful. Also, 2s focus a lot more on shutting down one player while burning the other, which a holy paladin is not very good at.
What I would like to see in Season 7 is a little more utility in a holy paladin. Shamans have their totems (which drop four at a time now!), Hex, and Wind Shock, druids have Cyclone, priests can Mana Burn and Psychic Scream. Paladins have a stun on a 40 second cooldown if they spec for it. Unless they're blood elves with Arcane Torrent, that's about it for CC and interrupts. We heal, and we bubble, but Hand of Protection only stops physical damage, making it of little use against DKs and ret paladins and just about everyone at range. Only warriors and rogues are really stopped by it, and a warrior can break it if he wants to.
I can't say I'll miss prot healing having never tried it, but I hope paladins in general get something to make up for it, especially for 2s. I'd like to give it another shot in Season 7.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Honoring Grinding for the Level 50-59 or 60 Post 3.2
Updated 8/18/09 - Additions in bold.
Even as I was trying to come up with a title for this post I thought it was retarded. This is a really obscure bit of info for a really obscure set of people, but seeing as I was caught in the twink dragnet for my not-really-twink, I figure there may be someone out there who will find this useful.
Post 3.2 has separated out the career twinks from the regular folk just passing through by putting people who turn their experience gain off into separate battleground queues. Regular folk will gain experience and thus be able to level up through battlegrounds alone. Twinks will never fear that they will level up under any circumstance.
In theory this is a win-win situation. The twinks who crave fights of skill where gear is not a factor (because all twinks are geared more or less the same) will only fight each other and the regular folk won't get two-shotted.
The problem lies with fact that the twink population is not all that high at any given moment. While lower brackets such as 10-19 and 20-29 generally have enough twinks playing that WSG and AB matches still happen, the higher, less popular, brackets from 40-49 and above don't have enough people who've stopped experience gain to actually have a match. When my 50-59 matches were going I generally wouldn't see more than five or six twinks, tops, and that's counting Alliance and Horde together. It's not enough to get a match going.
Also caught with the twinks are people who would like to take a break from leveling and just PvP a bit (and maybe pick up some gear). When I was leveling my paladin I actually parked in AV for a while and picked up two pieces of level 60 PvP gear. I never considered myself a twink. Not even close. I was just playing games for fun.
Now that's no longer possible. I doubt anyone will get more than one piece of Warlord/Marshal gear (if they're lucky) without turning leveling off. I'm pretty sure I'm no longer in a position to do so through battlegrounds without leveling, but I'm a determined person, and I'm missing one last piece of Warlord gear. If I can't get the honor through BGs, I'd find another way. I am the person who got the Horde Bros Before Ho Ho Hos achievement without the ability to fly. Once I set my mind to something I can be notoriously stubborn.
So for those who turned off XP at 59 or 60 and still want some honor, here's what you need to do.
Go to Silithus and pick up Report to General Kirika from an orc in Cenarion Hold. He's right by the flight master when you come in. That quest sends you to the Horde base in Silithus. If you're Alliance you'll get a similar quest to go to Marshal Bluewall.
When you report to General Kirika, she'll give you Scouring the Desert, which has you collecting Silithyst from geysers scattered around Silithus. Remember saying "LOL, we're fighting over sand" back when this feature was introduced? Well, this sand is free honor now.
After you do the first turn-in you can continue to grab any geyser you see and do the turn-in. There is no repeatable quest for it. You just grab and go.
If you're on a PvE server grabbing Silithyst will flag you, but fortunately Silithus is all but abandoned these days. The chances of getting ganked are extremely low, and if you're in it for the honor you probably have some gear to back you up.
How is the honor gain compared to BGs? It's a hell of a lot less exciting, but it's comparable to a 50-50 win rate without factoring any bonus honor from doing the PvP daily. If you normally win, the honor gain will be lower. On the other hand, if you're trapped in 40 vs. 18 AV, farming Silithyst geysers is actually better.
It'll feel a little slow at first while you get used to the geyser spawn points, but once you know them it only takes a couple minutes or so to run back and forth between a geyser and the Horde camp. Each turn in is worth 19 honor, which works out to about 450 honor per hour if you assume two and half minutes per turn-in. It's not great stuff, but surprisingly decent. With practice and better knowledge of spawn points I was able to bring that down below two minutes a turn-in, making for just over 600 honor an hour.
I would not advocate doing this for the entire Warlord/Marshal set, but if for some reason you just have to have it at level 59/60 this is a viable way to get that last bit of honor. I got over a thousand honor last night as I listened to music and just ran back and forth across Silithus.
There's a particular circuit I liked to run as Horde. I'd run the blue route in general, but would loop in the red multiple times. I found the spawn rate there is really good. Only once I could no longer find any in the red I would return to the blue route until I hit red again, at which point I'd repeat.
This image is from Wowhead and the pins mark the known spawn points for the geysers. I've found out that the running the red circuit is all your really need to do (as Horde). There's really no reason to go anywhere else. I used to think that all the silithyst spawn points on the map were tied together, but I think they're actually arranged in clusters. The circuit highlighted in red (plus a node or two to the southwest) are all in the same cluster, so if one node is collected, another one immediately spawns.
I've actually seen it where I will grab a node and before my very eyes I'd see the new one spawn in. I ended up turning my camera every which way as I ran back to turn in the silithyst so I could look for the next spawn. If I was lucky, the new one would spawn where I could see it and I'd be able to go directly to it for my next pick-up.
This made gathering so much faster. You just need to be aware of where all the local spawn points are (it's the ones to the southwest of the red that tricked me earlier) and you won't have to run all over the map anymore.
For some reason I would very rarely see two "new" nodes up while running back to make a turn-in, and I'm not sure how that happened. It's possible there are always two nodes up in a cluster and I just don't normally see them because I'm always picking up whatever I find, but in any case, they don't change the minimum of one I've always found in that general area. I did over 50 turn-ins without heading anywhere else.
When you grab the silithyst it puts a debuff on you that makes you move about 75% speed. Travel form form and Dash will not speed you up. Mounting makes you drop the silithyst. But if you stay relatively close to your factor base it's not a bad run.
There is also a world PvP quest in Eastern Plaguelands that gives 19 honor per tower capture, but it takes about five minutes to solo capture each tower, and that doesn't include travel time between towers so it's horribly inefficient (and you also have to rely on Alliance to have captured the towers).
On the forums there's a lot of talk about getting twink-only battlegroups so the entire twink population of WoW can be consolodated into one battlegroup, but I think the logistics behind that would probably be horrendous. Blizzard has at least four different server clusters and they aren't physically located anywhere near each other.
Other people are saying that they just need to be patient and wait for people to get bored of the new content on their mains and come back to twinking.
Finally, there's a comment from a GM that was copied over at Twink Info that says Blizzard is monitoring the situation and is waiting for things to settle down before they make any decisions.
I don't think I'm gonna hold my breath. I never meant to make 59 my feral's permanent home. I just like playing her for PvP and I wanted to get my Warlord set. Once I get my last piece I think I'll turn experience back on, maybe level my way to 61 via PvP so I get one level of being in Warlord gear in AV (assuming Horde isn't still outnumbered) and then hit up Outland.
Even as I was trying to come up with a title for this post I thought it was retarded. This is a really obscure bit of info for a really obscure set of people, but seeing as I was caught in the twink dragnet for my not-really-twink, I figure there may be someone out there who will find this useful.
Post 3.2 has separated out the career twinks from the regular folk just passing through by putting people who turn their experience gain off into separate battleground queues. Regular folk will gain experience and thus be able to level up through battlegrounds alone. Twinks will never fear that they will level up under any circumstance.
In theory this is a win-win situation. The twinks who crave fights of skill where gear is not a factor (because all twinks are geared more or less the same) will only fight each other and the regular folk won't get two-shotted.
The problem lies with fact that the twink population is not all that high at any given moment. While lower brackets such as 10-19 and 20-29 generally have enough twinks playing that WSG and AB matches still happen, the higher, less popular, brackets from 40-49 and above don't have enough people who've stopped experience gain to actually have a match. When my 50-59 matches were going I generally wouldn't see more than five or six twinks, tops, and that's counting Alliance and Horde together. It's not enough to get a match going.
Also caught with the twinks are people who would like to take a break from leveling and just PvP a bit (and maybe pick up some gear). When I was leveling my paladin I actually parked in AV for a while and picked up two pieces of level 60 PvP gear. I never considered myself a twink. Not even close. I was just playing games for fun.
Now that's no longer possible. I doubt anyone will get more than one piece of Warlord/Marshal gear (if they're lucky) without turning leveling off. I'm pretty sure I'm no longer in a position to do so through battlegrounds without leveling, but I'm a determined person, and I'm missing one last piece of Warlord gear. If I can't get the honor through BGs, I'd find another way. I am the person who got the Horde Bros Before Ho Ho Hos achievement without the ability to fly. Once I set my mind to something I can be notoriously stubborn.
So for those who turned off XP at 59 or 60 and still want some honor, here's what you need to do.
Go to Silithus and pick up Report to General Kirika from an orc in Cenarion Hold. He's right by the flight master when you come in. That quest sends you to the Horde base in Silithus. If you're Alliance you'll get a similar quest to go to Marshal Bluewall.
When you report to General Kirika, she'll give you Scouring the Desert, which has you collecting Silithyst from geysers scattered around Silithus. Remember saying "LOL, we're fighting over sand" back when this feature was introduced? Well, this sand is free honor now.
After you do the first turn-in you can continue to grab any geyser you see and do the turn-in. There is no repeatable quest for it. You just grab and go.
If you're on a PvE server grabbing Silithyst will flag you, but fortunately Silithus is all but abandoned these days. The chances of getting ganked are extremely low, and if you're in it for the honor you probably have some gear to back you up.
How is the honor gain compared to BGs? It's a hell of a lot less exciting, but it's comparable to a 50-50 win rate without factoring any bonus honor from doing the PvP daily. If you normally win, the honor gain will be lower. On the other hand, if you're trapped in 40 vs. 18 AV, farming Silithyst geysers is actually better.
It'll feel a little slow at first while you get used to the geyser spawn points, but once you know them it only takes a couple minutes or so to run back and forth between a geyser and the Horde camp. Each turn in is worth 19 honor, which works out to about 450 honor per hour if you assume two and half minutes per turn-in. It's not great stuff, but surprisingly decent. With practice and better knowledge of spawn points I was able to bring that down below two minutes a turn-in, making for just over 600 honor an hour.
I would not advocate doing this for the entire Warlord/Marshal set, but if for some reason you just have to have it at level 59/60 this is a viable way to get that last bit of honor. I got over a thousand honor last night as I listened to music and just ran back and forth across Silithus.
There's a particular circuit I liked to run as Horde. I'd run the blue route in general, but would loop in the red multiple times. I found the spawn rate there is really good. Only once I could no longer find any in the red I would return to the blue route until I hit red again, at which point I'd repeat.
This image is from Wowhead and the pins mark the known spawn points for the geysers. I've found out that the running the red circuit is all your really need to do (as Horde). There's really no reason to go anywhere else. I used to think that all the silithyst spawn points on the map were tied together, but I think they're actually arranged in clusters. The circuit highlighted in red (plus a node or two to the southwest) are all in the same cluster, so if one node is collected, another one immediately spawns.
I've actually seen it where I will grab a node and before my very eyes I'd see the new one spawn in. I ended up turning my camera every which way as I ran back to turn in the silithyst so I could look for the next spawn. If I was lucky, the new one would spawn where I could see it and I'd be able to go directly to it for my next pick-up.
This made gathering so much faster. You just need to be aware of where all the local spawn points are (it's the ones to the southwest of the red that tricked me earlier) and you won't have to run all over the map anymore.
For some reason I would very rarely see two "new" nodes up while running back to make a turn-in, and I'm not sure how that happened. It's possible there are always two nodes up in a cluster and I just don't normally see them because I'm always picking up whatever I find, but in any case, they don't change the minimum of one I've always found in that general area. I did over 50 turn-ins without heading anywhere else.
When you grab the silithyst it puts a debuff on you that makes you move about 75% speed. Travel form form and Dash will not speed you up. Mounting makes you drop the silithyst. But if you stay relatively close to your factor base it's not a bad run.
There is also a world PvP quest in Eastern Plaguelands that gives 19 honor per tower capture, but it takes about five minutes to solo capture each tower, and that doesn't include travel time between towers so it's horribly inefficient (and you also have to rely on Alliance to have captured the towers).
On the forums there's a lot of talk about getting twink-only battlegroups so the entire twink population of WoW can be consolodated into one battlegroup, but I think the logistics behind that would probably be horrendous. Blizzard has at least four different server clusters and they aren't physically located anywhere near each other.
Other people are saying that they just need to be patient and wait for people to get bored of the new content on their mains and come back to twinking.
Finally, there's a comment from a GM that was copied over at Twink Info that says Blizzard is monitoring the situation and is waiting for things to settle down before they make any decisions.
I don't think I'm gonna hold my breath. I never meant to make 59 my feral's permanent home. I just like playing her for PvP and I wanted to get my Warlord set. Once I get my last piece I think I'll turn experience back on, maybe level my way to 61 via PvP so I get one level of being in Warlord gear in AV (assuming Horde isn't still outnumbered) and then hit up Outland.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
[Paladin] Holy Paladin vs. Resto Druid - Arena Grudge Match
I haven't talked about arena much lately, largely because my 3s team seems to have plateaued at around 1750. We go up, we go down, but we don’t seem to be making any progress towards 1800. But I'm on a 5s team as well, which was started mainly for fun. It's a little bit of a wonky bracket since there are so few teams in it. We never seem to quite know what we'll get, whether we'll hit a team with 1300 MMR or 2000.
Last night we seemed to be in fine form though. We'd won four in a row without much trouble, and then we ran into an arena team that had really good momentum and unfortunately schooled us. They burned down one dps, then another, and finally our last one. They took out the other healer, leaving only me crying in the corner because I hate being the last one left. I like to put up a fight even when we're losing, it's just good practice, but with five on one I couldn't really expect to do much.
Sure my health was full, but I was down to about 15% mana. I probably could get a judgement or an offensive Holy Shock off, but I was fully prepared to get owned in two seconds flat. I wondered if I should just sit there and take it. And then something remarkable happened.
Everyone stopped moving. At first I thought I was lagged, the match had ended, I was dead, and my computer just didn't know better. After all, I was standing still too. Since my healing partner had died in the middle of my cast I'd yet to do anything else. I didn't realize that the only reason that I wasn't moving was because I'd been on the verge of giving up.
Then the other arena team started disappearing. First one faded out, then another. I perked up and on a whim, whacked the nearest guy with my mace. I was moving!
He faded out. What was going on? Was their entire team DCing?
Only the resto druid was left, and she wasn't in tree form. She starting casting...
"Hana," shouted my team leader over vent, "now's your chance! They all dropped out so the last guy could get the achievement!"
And with that, it was on!
I wasn't going to sit around and let some resto druid kill me for an achievement. I have more pride than that! And little did the druid know that my arena pet peeve is getting killed by another healer. It didn't look good with my mana bar being where it was, but I had hope. My teammates were cheering me on.
The druid seemed to think that a Starfire would do it. When it became apparent that I wasn't going to sit there and eat it (we were in the Dalaran Arena and I ran for the nearest set of boxes), she started Cycloning me and winding up Starfires to hit me as soon as they wore off.
I dropped down off the platform to break line of sight. I hit Divine Plea. When she started drinking, I drank too. She stopped drinking to Moonfire me and stop my own drinking. I put up Blessing of Wisdom and start using Judgement of Wisdom to get mana back. Her Cyclone and Starfire weren't working, I'd usually LOS her, but even when she did get me they didn't do enough damage to kill me before I healed. She went into bear form and started attacking me.
I kept healing through everything she threw at me. She popped out to caster form. Our mana bars were even. I'd heard the horror stories of holy paladin versus resto druid and knew that our match could last literally for hours.
No matter what spells she threw at me I always healed to full. I couldn't seem to beat her down below 40% before she'd heal. The winner would be decided through a contest not of our gear and class abilities, not even our skill, but by our determination to win. Whoever gave up first would cost their team the match.
My mana bar was practically full now. Hers was at half. She went into travel form and ran away to drink. I targeted our warrior and started casting Resurrection.
Obviously she couldn't have that happen. I was Moonfired and she ran away again. I tried rezzing our warrior again. She came back and Moonfired once more.
The pressure was on. She couldn't drink for more than a couple seconds or I would resurrect a teammate. I can only assume her Innervate was still on cooldown since she didn't use it. We played cat and mouse hitting each other then breaking away to drink or try to rez, until finally… I pulled it off.
I don't know how, maybe she was starting to give up, but I resurrected our hunter and landed a heal strong enough to keep him from being one shotted by a Starfire. She CCed him with Cyclone, but I stunned her to neutralize any CC advantage she might have had. When our hunter came out of Cyclone I topped him up with another heal, and by then it was pretty much over.
She didn't even tough it out, but quit the match.
My team leader said it was probably to deny me from receiving the Last Man Standing achievement myself, but I don't think I would have earned it anyway since I'd resurrected a teammate.
During the fight my team leader had informed me that the other team was worth a lot of points. I didn't know how much, but when the scoreboard came up it turned out that they lost over 20 points to us. We gained a whopping 19. I'm sure the other team was kicking themselves for dropping out after I was the only one left. I guess they thought I'd given up. Maybe they thought their resto druid could solo a holy pally with 600 resilience and 2000 spell power.
Whatever the reason, I'm glad I held on. We didn't have any other matches nearly as close last night. Indeed, we ended the night having played only the ten matches we were obligated to in order to earn points, and those ten matches were all wins.
I might not have gotten Last Man Standing, but we did get Hot Streak, and I have an achievement hungry druid to thank for it.
Last night we seemed to be in fine form though. We'd won four in a row without much trouble, and then we ran into an arena team that had really good momentum and unfortunately schooled us. They burned down one dps, then another, and finally our last one. They took out the other healer, leaving only me crying in the corner because I hate being the last one left. I like to put up a fight even when we're losing, it's just good practice, but with five on one I couldn't really expect to do much.
Sure my health was full, but I was down to about 15% mana. I probably could get a judgement or an offensive Holy Shock off, but I was fully prepared to get owned in two seconds flat. I wondered if I should just sit there and take it. And then something remarkable happened.
Everyone stopped moving. At first I thought I was lagged, the match had ended, I was dead, and my computer just didn't know better. After all, I was standing still too. Since my healing partner had died in the middle of my cast I'd yet to do anything else. I didn't realize that the only reason that I wasn't moving was because I'd been on the verge of giving up.
Then the other arena team started disappearing. First one faded out, then another. I perked up and on a whim, whacked the nearest guy with my mace. I was moving!
He faded out. What was going on? Was their entire team DCing?
Only the resto druid was left, and she wasn't in tree form. She starting casting...
"Hana," shouted my team leader over vent, "now's your chance! They all dropped out so the last guy could get the achievement!"
And with that, it was on!
I wasn't going to sit around and let some resto druid kill me for an achievement. I have more pride than that! And little did the druid know that my arena pet peeve is getting killed by another healer. It didn't look good with my mana bar being where it was, but I had hope. My teammates were cheering me on.
The druid seemed to think that a Starfire would do it. When it became apparent that I wasn't going to sit there and eat it (we were in the Dalaran Arena and I ran for the nearest set of boxes), she started Cycloning me and winding up Starfires to hit me as soon as they wore off.
I dropped down off the platform to break line of sight. I hit Divine Plea. When she started drinking, I drank too. She stopped drinking to Moonfire me and stop my own drinking. I put up Blessing of Wisdom and start using Judgement of Wisdom to get mana back. Her Cyclone and Starfire weren't working, I'd usually LOS her, but even when she did get me they didn't do enough damage to kill me before I healed. She went into bear form and started attacking me.
I kept healing through everything she threw at me. She popped out to caster form. Our mana bars were even. I'd heard the horror stories of holy paladin versus resto druid and knew that our match could last literally for hours.
No matter what spells she threw at me I always healed to full. I couldn't seem to beat her down below 40% before she'd heal. The winner would be decided through a contest not of our gear and class abilities, not even our skill, but by our determination to win. Whoever gave up first would cost their team the match.
My mana bar was practically full now. Hers was at half. She went into travel form and ran away to drink. I targeted our warrior and started casting Resurrection.
Obviously she couldn't have that happen. I was Moonfired and she ran away again. I tried rezzing our warrior again. She came back and Moonfired once more.
The pressure was on. She couldn't drink for more than a couple seconds or I would resurrect a teammate. I can only assume her Innervate was still on cooldown since she didn't use it. We played cat and mouse hitting each other then breaking away to drink or try to rez, until finally… I pulled it off.
I don't know how, maybe she was starting to give up, but I resurrected our hunter and landed a heal strong enough to keep him from being one shotted by a Starfire. She CCed him with Cyclone, but I stunned her to neutralize any CC advantage she might have had. When our hunter came out of Cyclone I topped him up with another heal, and by then it was pretty much over.
She didn't even tough it out, but quit the match.
My team leader said it was probably to deny me from receiving the Last Man Standing achievement myself, but I don't think I would have earned it anyway since I'd resurrected a teammate.
During the fight my team leader had informed me that the other team was worth a lot of points. I didn't know how much, but when the scoreboard came up it turned out that they lost over 20 points to us. We gained a whopping 19. I'm sure the other team was kicking themselves for dropping out after I was the only one left. I guess they thought I'd given up. Maybe they thought their resto druid could solo a holy pally with 600 resilience and 2000 spell power.
Whatever the reason, I'm glad I held on. We didn't have any other matches nearly as close last night. Indeed, we ended the night having played only the ten matches we were obligated to in order to earn points, and those ten matches were all wins.
I might not have gotten Last Man Standing, but we did get Hot Streak, and I have an achievement hungry druid to thank for it.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Feeling the Tides of War Change
It's not uncommon to hear broad statements about battlegrounds. Horde always win AB. Alliance always win AV. WSG is 50-50. Or maybe even Horde suck in this battlegroup and they lose everything. They're probably not that accurate (except maybe the 50-50 one), because nobody always wins. There are exceptions, though they may be few and far between. And of course a patch can drastically change the balance of a battleground to the point that the usual losers are now the usual winners.
But usually that kind of shift is accompanied by a patch. Sure battlegrounds can be cyclical in who wins the majority of the time, but once a pattern is established, it's harder to break it. That's why there is something afoot in the realm of 51-60 Alterac Valley in the Shadowburn battlegroup. Something so unusual I'm not sure I've seen anything like it.
When the Horde in Shadowburn's 51-60 AV complain about hardly ever winning, they're really not kidding. Saying that the Alliance have that bracket on lockdown is an understatement. I've spent close to a year there. I've never been a continuous participant. I play 50-59s (and 51-60 AV) haphazardly to burn off steam, with up to a month between games, but I can safely say that the Horde there have been utterly demoralized. Even the Alliance complain that too many matches end with the Alliance farming Horde in their spawn cave. Matches of 40 vs. 18 in the Alliance favor are not unheard of. Horde will queue and then don't accept, or they leave at the first AB or WSG that pops… or just leave because it sucks being farmed.
In a run of 50 AV tokens, exactly 6 of those came from wins. Which means I played 46 matches, 2 wins to 44 losses. That's how bad Horde have had it in AV.
But something's different now, something's changing, and it looks like I've landed right in the middle of it.
I'm not sure what caused it, but the Horde in AV seem to be growing a backbone. On Wednesday night I entered an AV expecting to just kill time until AB or WSG popped. Someone said something to the effect of "Good job on the last one. We almost had it. We'll get it this time." Not the first time someone's said that. I've been in previous matches where those words came out and we promptly ate it.
I didn't stay in the whole match because AB popped and I went for it. But I was in a PvP mood so I kept requeueing as AB or WSG ended. That's when I started to notice that AV was not automatically popping like it usually does. There are typically so few Horde that there's always space as long as AV is up. Clearly something was different.
When I did get into my next AV I was in the tail end of one where we were winning! Neither side killed the enemy general, and the Horde stalled out at the choke point before Stormpike Graveyard, but the Alliance ran out of reinforcements first. We'd won! AB popped first after I requeued, so I went into the match, but after a minute or two AV popped again. Normally I would do my usual click Hide and then Leave Queue, but this time I thought about it, and accepted.
We ended up pushing the Alliance all the way to their base. We didn't kill Vann, and we were nowhere near doing to them what had happened to us, but it was different! And the Horde couldn't stop talking about it. "OMG, we're winning!" "I don't think I've ever won before!" "What happened to the Alliance?" One guy even suggested that we go easy on them the next match. I dryly replied that "I've lost too many times to give them that luxury."
As it turns out, we lost that next match. On Thursday I didn't have much time before raid so I only got in one match which was another depressing 40 vs. 18 (clearly the winds are not entirely in our favor!), but Friday was good again.
We won a couple matches, and then lost my last one of the night, but we did manage to kill Vann! We even had an advantage in numbers by a whopping 10 people at once point!
The tides of war are changing. The Horde are queueing again, accepting those invites, and staying in the matches once they're there. The fights are becoming more even. We're winning, we're losing, but our losses aren't necessarily a total loss. We still manage to save a couple towers. Drek is still alive. The long-time Alliance players are saying they think it's doing some good for their teams to have a couple losses. From what I've heard queue times are awful for Alliance when so few Horde play because everyone wants the easy honor.
I don't want AV to turn into a reverse farm-fest for the Horde, it's only momentarily fun, and we're clearly not at that point anyway. In the past the Alliance repeatedly killed Drek without breaking sweat. It was normal to lose all our towers. Only one of my recent wins was that complete. We generally run the Alliance out of reinforcements instead.
But right now, I'm having fun. Even when we're losing I'm still enjoying myself, because on the nights where we've been winning, our losses haven't been that complete soul-crushing loss we've been having for months. It's amazing what the difference is when there are still a few towers up. I'm just hoping this lasts, that the tides really have changed and this isn't something that's going to be gone in a week.
The next patch is looming and when it hits I'm going to have a make a choice whether or not I want to make my 59 feral a real twink and gear her appropriately (because I don't have the gear and enchants to stand up to proper twinks). The 50-59 bracket, and the 51-60 for that matter, might not have enough twinks to support twink-only matches, in which case my only choice will be to resume leveling. That decision's probably going to happen in less than a month. Patch 3.2 is already downloading. How much longer can the PTR remain up?
If I'm going to have to leave, it'd be nice to go out on a high note.
But usually that kind of shift is accompanied by a patch. Sure battlegrounds can be cyclical in who wins the majority of the time, but once a pattern is established, it's harder to break it. That's why there is something afoot in the realm of 51-60 Alterac Valley in the Shadowburn battlegroup. Something so unusual I'm not sure I've seen anything like it.
When the Horde in Shadowburn's 51-60 AV complain about hardly ever winning, they're really not kidding. Saying that the Alliance have that bracket on lockdown is an understatement. I've spent close to a year there. I've never been a continuous participant. I play 50-59s (and 51-60 AV) haphazardly to burn off steam, with up to a month between games, but I can safely say that the Horde there have been utterly demoralized. Even the Alliance complain that too many matches end with the Alliance farming Horde in their spawn cave. Matches of 40 vs. 18 in the Alliance favor are not unheard of. Horde will queue and then don't accept, or they leave at the first AB or WSG that pops… or just leave because it sucks being farmed.
In a run of 50 AV tokens, exactly 6 of those came from wins. Which means I played 46 matches, 2 wins to 44 losses. That's how bad Horde have had it in AV.
But something's different now, something's changing, and it looks like I've landed right in the middle of it.
I'm not sure what caused it, but the Horde in AV seem to be growing a backbone. On Wednesday night I entered an AV expecting to just kill time until AB or WSG popped. Someone said something to the effect of "Good job on the last one. We almost had it. We'll get it this time." Not the first time someone's said that. I've been in previous matches where those words came out and we promptly ate it.
I didn't stay in the whole match because AB popped and I went for it. But I was in a PvP mood so I kept requeueing as AB or WSG ended. That's when I started to notice that AV was not automatically popping like it usually does. There are typically so few Horde that there's always space as long as AV is up. Clearly something was different.
When I did get into my next AV I was in the tail end of one where we were winning! Neither side killed the enemy general, and the Horde stalled out at the choke point before Stormpike Graveyard, but the Alliance ran out of reinforcements first. We'd won! AB popped first after I requeued, so I went into the match, but after a minute or two AV popped again. Normally I would do my usual click Hide and then Leave Queue, but this time I thought about it, and accepted.
We ended up pushing the Alliance all the way to their base. We didn't kill Vann, and we were nowhere near doing to them what had happened to us, but it was different! And the Horde couldn't stop talking about it. "OMG, we're winning!" "I don't think I've ever won before!" "What happened to the Alliance?" One guy even suggested that we go easy on them the next match. I dryly replied that "I've lost too many times to give them that luxury."
As it turns out, we lost that next match. On Thursday I didn't have much time before raid so I only got in one match which was another depressing 40 vs. 18 (clearly the winds are not entirely in our favor!), but Friday was good again.
We won a couple matches, and then lost my last one of the night, but we did manage to kill Vann! We even had an advantage in numbers by a whopping 10 people at once point!
The tides of war are changing. The Horde are queueing again, accepting those invites, and staying in the matches once they're there. The fights are becoming more even. We're winning, we're losing, but our losses aren't necessarily a total loss. We still manage to save a couple towers. Drek is still alive. The long-time Alliance players are saying they think it's doing some good for their teams to have a couple losses. From what I've heard queue times are awful for Alliance when so few Horde play because everyone wants the easy honor.
I don't want AV to turn into a reverse farm-fest for the Horde, it's only momentarily fun, and we're clearly not at that point anyway. In the past the Alliance repeatedly killed Drek without breaking sweat. It was normal to lose all our towers. Only one of my recent wins was that complete. We generally run the Alliance out of reinforcements instead.
But right now, I'm having fun. Even when we're losing I'm still enjoying myself, because on the nights where we've been winning, our losses haven't been that complete soul-crushing loss we've been having for months. It's amazing what the difference is when there are still a few towers up. I'm just hoping this lasts, that the tides really have changed and this isn't something that's going to be gone in a week.
The next patch is looming and when it hits I'm going to have a make a choice whether or not I want to make my 59 feral a real twink and gear her appropriately (because I don't have the gear and enchants to stand up to proper twinks). The 50-59 bracket, and the 51-60 for that matter, might not have enough twinks to support twink-only matches, in which case my only choice will be to resume leveling. That decision's probably going to happen in less than a month. Patch 3.2 is already downloading. How much longer can the PTR remain up?
If I'm going to have to leave, it'd be nice to go out on a high note.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
[Paladin] Quick Arena Update
Ended the week at 1765. Raiding four nights in a week and being on two active arena teams while still trying to keep a couple nights free for personal stuff sure makes for a crowded playing schedule. We only got in 10 games this weekend, but they were enough to push us back over 1750 so that when I log in this evening I will be able to get my Furious chest.
The range of people we're fighting is starting to get a bit wilder. We actually ran into one 2200 team and a couple 1400-1500 teams. I can't help wondering if that's because there are fewer teams at our rating playing on any given night now.
I have no remaining suppositions for what rating to shoot for, or even what piece of gear I want next. The Furious chest is going to wipe my bank of arena points, though if I wanted to and my rating remained steady, I could buy the Deadly shoulders next week if I felt like it. It doesn't seem worth it though. And yet, I'm not sure what piece of Furious gear I can save for.
There's a surprising lack of gear at 1800. There's just nothing; no honor gear, no arena gear. At 1850 I could get a shield, though again that will take another three weeks of points. I also could get a weapon at 1850 which would be much cheaper in the way of points, and I have the honor for it, but I'm not sure if they would be worth it. It seems most of the top 3v3 holy paladins forsake the Furious weapons and shield in favor of PvE equivalents. There's probably some itemization reason for it.
Of course, this assumes we can push onward, because if we don't, what I can buy becomes a moot point.
Unrelated to arena, the whole faction change business might be the first time I use a paid service beyond my monthly fee. If there's any character I've wished I had reason to play again, it's my 51 Alliance warlock. All her old guildmates transferred away and I only play Horde these days, so it would be nice to bring her into my current guild.
The range of people we're fighting is starting to get a bit wilder. We actually ran into one 2200 team and a couple 1400-1500 teams. I can't help wondering if that's because there are fewer teams at our rating playing on any given night now.
I have no remaining suppositions for what rating to shoot for, or even what piece of gear I want next. The Furious chest is going to wipe my bank of arena points, though if I wanted to and my rating remained steady, I could buy the Deadly shoulders next week if I felt like it. It doesn't seem worth it though. And yet, I'm not sure what piece of Furious gear I can save for.
There's a surprising lack of gear at 1800. There's just nothing; no honor gear, no arena gear. At 1850 I could get a shield, though again that will take another three weeks of points. I also could get a weapon at 1850 which would be much cheaper in the way of points, and I have the honor for it, but I'm not sure if they would be worth it. It seems most of the top 3v3 holy paladins forsake the Furious weapons and shield in favor of PvE equivalents. There's probably some itemization reason for it.
Of course, this assumes we can push onward, because if we don't, what I can buy becomes a moot point.
Unrelated to arena, the whole faction change business might be the first time I use a paid service beyond my monthly fee. If there's any character I've wished I had reason to play again, it's my 51 Alliance warlock. All her old guildmates transferred away and I only play Horde these days, so it would be nice to bring her into my current guild.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
[Paladin] Three's Company: 1750
It's Tuesday, so that means crunchy sweet arena points here I come. We really did it this weekend. My 3v3 team hit 1750 and our next achievement milestone. When I first joined my team I didn't think we'd get this high, and certainly not this quickly. I thought we'd plateau earlier on and I'd end up spending my arena points on the Deadly set to gear myself up before we could push on to anything better.
Instead I find myself hoarding points for Furious gear. Even with a 1700+ rating it'll take 3-4 weeks to get any set-piece aside from the gloves. Granted we'll get more points every week the higher we go, so it could eventually be faster, but I'm starting to wonder, how much higher can we go?
The three of us didn't have a lot of play time available with the Father's Day holiday this weekend so we shot for our ten games and stopped shortly thereafter. This actually resulted in us ending below 1750 for the week since we lost our last couple of games, but we're not that concerned. None of us would have had the arena points to buy anything this coming Tuesday even if we'd maintained the 1750 rating, so we'll just work on getting back to 1750 next week.
We lucked out and didn't run into any RMP this week, but we did run into two different teams that used a dual-healer setup. One was a warlock with a druid and a priest. The other was a death knight with a priest and a paladin.
We'd never seen anything like them before and found out that they completely wreck havoc with us. We have very little CC (especially anything that can be chained) so it's hard for us to lock someone down for more than a few seconds. This made it incredibly difficult for us to burn through their heals. We almost got the priest down once in the priest/paladin/DK team, but at the last second he managed to heal up and we never got him close again.
The biggest irritation in facing a dual healer setup is that it leaves one of the healers (priest *cough*) greater freedom to do utility functions such as dispelling and mana burning.
I rarely run out of mana in 3s. Unless I'm being burned, I shouldn't run out unless I make a bad judgment call. I'm trying to get better at breaking LOS, but sometimes it's hard when Holy Shock is on cooldown and a teammate needs a heal. That said, I think I did a good job for the most part this weekend, but I'm not the only possible burn target, and when our hunter gets burned it really hurts his dps. One match I even threw wisdom on him mid-fight because he was almost empty.
With today's points I should be at about 2000 arena points to spend, so if we hit 1750 again this weekend and can hold it until next Tuesday I should find myself the proud owner of a new chest piece. I don't have a PvP chest yet (Archavon has not been kind to me, and I can't bring myself to buy the Deadly or wear the Hateful), so this will be much appreciated.
Instead I find myself hoarding points for Furious gear. Even with a 1700+ rating it'll take 3-4 weeks to get any set-piece aside from the gloves. Granted we'll get more points every week the higher we go, so it could eventually be faster, but I'm starting to wonder, how much higher can we go?
The three of us didn't have a lot of play time available with the Father's Day holiday this weekend so we shot for our ten games and stopped shortly thereafter. This actually resulted in us ending below 1750 for the week since we lost our last couple of games, but we're not that concerned. None of us would have had the arena points to buy anything this coming Tuesday even if we'd maintained the 1750 rating, so we'll just work on getting back to 1750 next week.
We lucked out and didn't run into any RMP this week, but we did run into two different teams that used a dual-healer setup. One was a warlock with a druid and a priest. The other was a death knight with a priest and a paladin.
We'd never seen anything like them before and found out that they completely wreck havoc with us. We have very little CC (especially anything that can be chained) so it's hard for us to lock someone down for more than a few seconds. This made it incredibly difficult for us to burn through their heals. We almost got the priest down once in the priest/paladin/DK team, but at the last second he managed to heal up and we never got him close again.
The biggest irritation in facing a dual healer setup is that it leaves one of the healers (priest *cough*) greater freedom to do utility functions such as dispelling and mana burning.
I rarely run out of mana in 3s. Unless I'm being burned, I shouldn't run out unless I make a bad judgment call. I'm trying to get better at breaking LOS, but sometimes it's hard when Holy Shock is on cooldown and a teammate needs a heal. That said, I think I did a good job for the most part this weekend, but I'm not the only possible burn target, and when our hunter gets burned it really hurts his dps. One match I even threw wisdom on him mid-fight because he was almost empty.
With today's points I should be at about 2000 arena points to spend, so if we hit 1750 again this weekend and can hold it until next Tuesday I should find myself the proud owner of a new chest piece. I don't have a PvP chest yet (Archavon has not been kind to me, and I can't bring myself to buy the Deadly or wear the Hateful), so this will be much appreciated.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
[Paladin] Changes to all specs in 3.2
Wow, there's a boatload of stuff here. Too much for me to realistically comment on the whole thing without making this an extremely long blog post, so I'm just going to quote the snippets I find relevant to what I do or what I'll miss. If you want to read the whole post by Eyonix, it's here.
Protection
I'm not sure I like the idea of a Last Stand I don't have to push. On the one hand it's nice that it'll go up without any thought, and with a 2 minute cooldown it's unlikely that it would proc inconveniently (where you would want to be killed and then not have the proc available when you need it), but on the other I like being in charge of my own destiny. It makes me feel a better player if I push the button that saves my butt rather than the game pushing it for me.
I'm happy with the first change though. Damage leapfrogging over the 35% mark has been one of the reasons Ardent Defender isn't as appealing as it could be. Now that the damage won't leapfrog, it'll likely find its way into more tanking specs.
I agree it should be because we spec for it, but the fact it isn't always has never really bothered me. More stamina would help make it more appealing, but it feels like a bit of a bandaid if that's all they're going to do with it. I think something like more avoidance would make it extremely clear that "Hey, you want this for tanking!"
I haven't tanked high end content, and though I know a lot about tanking, I'm not tanky enough to have noticed that block value specifically is weaker than it used to be, save that hitting the old 102.4% avoidance (formerly uncrushable, now block capped) isn't what it used to be. I wouldn't dare tank a raid in TBC without the 102.4% avoidance.
But I've yet to hit the 102.4% avoidance on Gillien and I've comfortably tanked all of Naxx 10 and bits of Naxx 25. I think I could even do parts of Ulduar 10. So blocking? Not what it used to be.
Holy
I'm going to hope this means "in addition to" FoL's normal effect. If FoL is otherwise left alone this will give us a nice buffer on our tanks while we heal someone else. But would the HoT portion stack (say like a druid's Lifebloom, up to three stacks) or just be over-written by repeated FoL spamming? If it will not stack for a single pally, will it stack for multiples?
When I'm tank healing, I don't normally weave FoLs into my Holy Lights. If I need to use multiple HLs it's generally too risky to go for a FoL. And if I'm FoL healing, it doesn't seem like the HoT portion will be that useful unless it stacks. The HoT works best as a buffer, which means I have to leave the tank to heal someone else to get the most out of it. Fortunately, leaving the tank to heal someone else is more viable now thanks to this:
Now healing other people will not risk the life of the tank because overheals will continue to heal the tank. I'm extremely happy with this change because I'm the sort of person who likes to heal as much of the raid as reasonably possible while still keeping my assignment up. I hate to see anyone die as a healer, even if that person was not my assignment. (Exception being deaths due to stupidity.)
Bonus for arena: Since you do not have to be in line of sight with the beacon target in order for the beacon to get heals, it'll now be possible to overheal someone with the Light's Beacon buff (which shows that heals on this person will be mirrored on the Beacon of Light) and still heal the beacon target.
For instance, I run 3v3 with a DK and a hunter. The DK might run around pillars and such chasing after people, making it difficult for me to heal him, but he'll still be close enough for the hunter and me to be affected by Light's Beacon. With patch 3.2 I'll be able to heal myself or the hunter even if we're at full and still heal the DK who is LOS from me.
Blizzard is also looking into letting multiple Beacons of Light (from different paladins) stack on a particular target. For a Naxx or Ulduar raid I don't think this should be necessary, since there are often 2-3 tanks, and a healthy variety of healer types, but this will be nice for VoA pugs or Malygos runs which run the risk of having more holy pallies than tanks to Beacon. One horrible 25-man VoA run I was on ended up with five paladin healers. Ugh...
I rarely have an issue with PvE mana, and I've always healed with my PvP holy/prot spec (which results in me having a lower crit than most holy PvE paladins), so if Blizzard wants us to care about mana, this is a good place to hit us. I like caring about mana, it makes gameplay more interesting, so all this sounds fine to me.
And these changes will give me free license to play my holy paladin the way I like playing him; tossing out heals on the raid and still keeping the tank alive. (I love beacon, what can I say?) Earlier I couldn't always risk it because I would be risking the tank, but now it's all open season!
Retribution
Non-instant isn't so great, but it's still a ranged attack and I'm sure I'll use this in arena. The cast time makes it a risk against any team that can lock me out of my holy school, but it'll help when I'm clear to use it and my team needs a little dps.
Righteousness is a tanking seal? The only action bar I keep it on is the one I use when I'm soloing. I've heard it's better than Vengeance/Corruption on trash that's due to die before all five stacks gets up, but I'm too lazy to change my keybindings for it.
But with the buff to Vengeance/Corruption… phew… that's going to make some tasty threat. I'll probably drop my Armsman enchant (been thinking about it anyway) and replace it with the soon-to-be buffed Reticulated Armor Webbing.
There's a part of me that feels I'm about to miss out on an opportunity to understand what Seal of Blood is all about. I have never been ret, and have a ret set that is middling at best. I only put it together because I got so many Naxx 10 leftovers that people said should go to me on the off-chance I would ever use them. I might put that set on and tool around Icecrown for a little while and smack myself with SoB just to see what it's like.
While I've been writing this, the patch notes for 3.2 have gone up and it's a long list of stuff. We'll have to see how it all plays out.
Protection
Ardent Defender has two important changes. The first is that the damage can no longer “skip over” the 35% health level – it will always be reduced. Secondly, it has a new effect that if a blow would kill you, it instead sets you to 30% health. This portion of the ability cannot occur more than once every 2 minutes. Think of it as a Last Stand that you don’t have to push.
I'm not sure I like the idea of a Last Stand I don't have to push. On the one hand it's nice that it'll go up without any thought, and with a 2 minute cooldown it's unlikely that it would proc inconveniently (where you would want to be killed and then not have the proc available when you need it), but on the other I like being in charge of my own destiny. It makes me feel a better player if I push the button that saves my butt rather than the game pushing it for me.
I'm happy with the first change though. Damage leapfrogging over the 35% mark has been one of the reasons Ardent Defender isn't as appealing as it could be. Now that the damage won't leapfrog, it'll likely find its way into more tanking specs.
A second change to Protection is we want to make sure Blessing of Sanctuary is always the tanking blessing of choice. A likely change here is to have it boost stamina as well.
I agree it should be because we spec for it, but the fact it isn't always has never really bothered me. More stamina would help make it more appealing, but it feels like a bit of a bandaid if that's all they're going to do with it. I think something like more avoidance would make it extremely clear that "Hey, you want this for tanking!"
We also recognize that block does not provide the mitigation it once did. While we have long-term plans to change the way block works entirely, in the short term we are doubling the effect of bonus block value on items (so jewelry, but not shields).
I haven't tanked high end content, and though I know a lot about tanking, I'm not tanky enough to have noticed that block value specifically is weaker than it used to be, save that hitting the old 102.4% avoidance (formerly uncrushable, now block capped) isn't what it used to be. I wouldn't dare tank a raid in TBC without the 102.4% avoidance.
But I've yet to hit the 102.4% avoidance on Gillien and I've comfortably tanked all of Naxx 10 and bits of Naxx 25. I think I could even do parts of Ulduar 10. So blocking? Not what it used to be.
Holy
First, we are changing Flash of Light so that it places a heal-over-time effect on any target with Sacred Shield on them (the effect will be similar to Sheathe of Light). This should make Flash see a little more use.
I'm going to hope this means "in addition to" FoL's normal effect. If FoL is otherwise left alone this will give us a nice buffer on our tanks while we heal someone else. But would the HoT portion stack (say like a druid's Lifebloom, up to three stacks) or just be over-written by repeated FoL spamming? If it will not stack for a single pally, will it stack for multiples?
When I'm tank healing, I don't normally weave FoLs into my Holy Lights. If I need to use multiple HLs it's generally too risky to go for a FoL. And if I'm FoL healing, it doesn't seem like the HoT portion will be that useful unless it stacks. The HoT works best as a buffer, which means I have to leave the tank to heal someone else to get the most out of it. Fortunately, leaving the tank to heal someone else is more viable now thanks to this:
Second, and more importantly, we are changing the way Beacon of Light works. Currently, it does not count over-healing on the target. We are changing that. In other words, if you place Holy Light on a rogue who is already at full health, it will still have the full effect on a tank with Beacon of Light on them. This is a huge buff, particularly when you consider the Holy Light glyph which allows for a small amount of “splash” healing. This effect isn’t common when you use Holy Light on a tank because the tank is often standing alone. But if you heal the melee, you are likely to get a lot more total healing from this effect (while still healing the tank through Beacon of Light).
Now healing other people will not risk the life of the tank because overheals will continue to heal the tank. I'm extremely happy with this change because I'm the sort of person who likes to heal as much of the raid as reasonably possible while still keeping my assignment up. I hate to see anyone die as a healer, even if that person was not my assignment. (Exception being deaths due to stupidity.)
Bonus for arena: Since you do not have to be in line of sight with the beacon target in order for the beacon to get heals, it'll now be possible to overheal someone with the Light's Beacon buff (which shows that heals on this person will be mirrored on the Beacon of Light) and still heal the beacon target.
For instance, I run 3v3 with a DK and a hunter. The DK might run around pillars and such chasing after people, making it difficult for me to heal him, but he'll still be close enough for the hunter and me to be affected by Light's Beacon. With patch 3.2 I'll be able to heal myself or the hunter even if we're at full and still heal the DK who is LOS from me.
Blizzard is also looking into letting multiple Beacons of Light (from different paladins) stack on a particular target. For a Naxx or Ulduar raid I don't think this should be necessary, since there are often 2-3 tanks, and a healthy variety of healer types, but this will be nice for VoA pugs or Malygos runs which run the risk of having more holy pallies than tanks to Beacon. One horrible 25-man VoA run I was on ended up with five paladin healers. Ugh...
With the Beacon of Light change, the paladin can provide a lot more raid or party healing. To adjust for this, we are going to reduce the amount of mana returned by Illumination. If you use Holy Light too recklessly (such as on targets who don’t require that much healing) you do risk burning out of mana too quickly. Of course, they will still have Divine Plea and other mana regeneration mechanics.
These changes should lead to healing as Holy being more dynamic – you are going to be targeting a lot more group members than just the tank, while still providing massive healing on the tank. However, you won’t be able to just constantly spam your biggest heals, at least not on the more challenging encounters. There is an opportunity here for skilled players to really do some outstanding healing as paladins, but it’s going to take a little more effort.
I rarely have an issue with PvE mana, and I've always healed with my PvP holy/prot spec (which results in me having a lower crit than most holy PvE paladins), so if Blizzard wants us to care about mana, this is a good place to hit us. I like caring about mana, it makes gameplay more interesting, so all this sounds fine to me.
And these changes will give me free license to play my holy paladin the way I like playing him; tossing out heals on the raid and still keeping the tank alive. (I love beacon, what can I say?) Earlier I couldn't always risk it because I would be risking the tank, but now it's all open season!
Retribution
First, Exorcism has a cast time of 1.5 seconds but can be used on players again. This will let paladins use it in PvP, but not while moving towards a target.
Non-instant isn't so great, but it's still a ranged attack and I'm sure I'll use this in arena. The cast time makes it a risk against any team that can lock me out of my holy school, but it'll help when I'm clear to use it and my team needs a little dps.
Fourth, we are removing Seal of Blood and Seal of the Martyr. The damage recoil increasingly felt like a liability in PvE, and wasn’t serving to offset the massive burst damage capable in PvP. We are buffing Seal of Vengeance / Corruption and redesigning Seal of Command with the expectation that these are now the seals of choice for PvP and PvE. Righteousness can remain a tanking seal.
Righteousness is a tanking seal? The only action bar I keep it on is the one I use when I'm soloing. I've heard it's better than Vengeance/Corruption on trash that's due to die before all five stacks gets up, but I'm too lazy to change my keybindings for it.
But with the buff to Vengeance/Corruption… phew… that's going to make some tasty threat. I'll probably drop my Armsman enchant (been thinking about it anyway) and replace it with the soon-to-be buffed Reticulated Armor Webbing.
There's a part of me that feels I'm about to miss out on an opportunity to understand what Seal of Blood is all about. I have never been ret, and have a ret set that is middling at best. I only put it together because I got so many Naxx 10 leftovers that people said should go to me on the off-chance I would ever use them. I might put that set on and tool around Icecrown for a little while and smack myself with SoB just to see what it's like.
While I've been writing this, the patch notes for 3.2 have gone up and it's a long list of stuff. We'll have to see how it all plays out.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
[Paladin] Arena's Getting Harder, But Still Not Giving Up
We hit 1700 in our 3s team, and even though we're once again making progress by 50 points a week, the comps we're fighting are getting deadlier and deadlier. For one thing, we're running into RMP (rogue/mage/priest) fairly frequently now and that team drives us nuts.
Generally the rogue will gib the hunter, the mage will poly me, and leave our DK madly trying to pull the rogue off the hunter or trying to solo-finish a burn that had begun on the mage or priest.
Such a team can be beaten, but requires substantially more effort than any other comp due to their amazing ability to CC and dish out the damage when it counts. It's really no surprise that this comp has endured for as long as it has.
We've found we fair best when we run into the same RMP team multiple times because we can learn who's the squishiest. Every time we lose we discuss how we'll beat them the next time we meet them.
The other night we'd lost to a 2000+ rated RMP team two times in a row. Given their rating in comparision to ours it was the sort of thing we could've blown off as "Well, they're just better than us." It was the usual the mage kept me CCed, the rogue started gibbing the hunter, and the DK couldn't finish off the burn before the hunter died.
But even though we lost our first match to them pretty fast, we actually held out for a long time during our second match before we were killed. By our third match, we had a pretty good feel for how we'd approach them.
Match three opened in the Ruins of Lordaeron arena. We stayed behind the tomb in the middle of the arena floor, but pretty much expected that someone would get sapped and then the mage and the priest would run in.
Someone did. Unsurprisingly it was me. And then the mage and priest ran in.
Now everyone was more or less on the same side of the tomb in the middle, except the priest who was slightly to one side, but still in view of us and his teammates.
For those first few seconds no one really took any damage. With no ability for any of us to break line of sight, our DK dropped an Anti-Magic Zone to absorb the worst the mage could dish out. The hunter kept CCing the priest at every opportunity (Wyvern Sting/Scatter Shot), and between the hunter and the DK they managed to burn the rogue down.
Me? I was able to wait out the sap without endangering my teammates, and made a run for the AMZ in an attempt to get there before the mage might develop a taste for paladin BBQ. I got poly-ed instead. (But you never know... being able to switch burn targets in PvP is the sign of a good team.) I eventually blew trinket and bubble trying to get out of LOS from the mage's polys while still keeping my teammates alive and even then spent too much time running around as a pig.
The mage and the priest still put up a good fight after their teammate went down. Oddly enough I feel like I did just as much healing after the rogue died as before. It might have been I was so excited at the possibility that we were doing to win that I didn't want to screw up in the slightest.
We've noticed that RMP puts together a lot of momentum right at the start. Because of the rogue and the mage poly the fight nearly always starts on their terms. Even if we charge them first, they can quickly isolate and burn someone down. But if we can all live through the initial 30 seconds of the fight our chances are much better that we're going to win.
We suspect that the reason we lasted so long during our second match (during which our hunter was dead the majority of the time) is because they have a tough time burning through my heals once they can no longer CC me (Blind was used up, poly on diminishing returns, and I'd used Aura Mastery to prevent interrupts).
For our efforts in that final match of the night we got a sweet 20 points, which pushed us over the hump to 1707 for the week. We decided to call it there and not risk being pushed below it before getting our weekly allotment of points on Tuesday.
Furious Gladiator gear is so expensive I'm going to need another three weeks before I'll be able to buy the legs or chest. There's also the matter of getting to 1750 to get the chest in the first place, but I'm feeling good about our progress. It may take more than our ten matches in a week to get there, but I think we can do it.
Generally the rogue will gib the hunter, the mage will poly me, and leave our DK madly trying to pull the rogue off the hunter or trying to solo-finish a burn that had begun on the mage or priest.
Such a team can be beaten, but requires substantially more effort than any other comp due to their amazing ability to CC and dish out the damage when it counts. It's really no surprise that this comp has endured for as long as it has.
We've found we fair best when we run into the same RMP team multiple times because we can learn who's the squishiest. Every time we lose we discuss how we'll beat them the next time we meet them.
The other night we'd lost to a 2000+ rated RMP team two times in a row. Given their rating in comparision to ours it was the sort of thing we could've blown off as "Well, they're just better than us." It was the usual the mage kept me CCed, the rogue started gibbing the hunter, and the DK couldn't finish off the burn before the hunter died.
But even though we lost our first match to them pretty fast, we actually held out for a long time during our second match before we were killed. By our third match, we had a pretty good feel for how we'd approach them.
Match three opened in the Ruins of Lordaeron arena. We stayed behind the tomb in the middle of the arena floor, but pretty much expected that someone would get sapped and then the mage and the priest would run in.
Someone did. Unsurprisingly it was me. And then the mage and priest ran in.
Now everyone was more or less on the same side of the tomb in the middle, except the priest who was slightly to one side, but still in view of us and his teammates.
For those first few seconds no one really took any damage. With no ability for any of us to break line of sight, our DK dropped an Anti-Magic Zone to absorb the worst the mage could dish out. The hunter kept CCing the priest at every opportunity (Wyvern Sting/Scatter Shot), and between the hunter and the DK they managed to burn the rogue down.
Me? I was able to wait out the sap without endangering my teammates, and made a run for the AMZ in an attempt to get there before the mage might develop a taste for paladin BBQ. I got poly-ed instead. (But you never know... being able to switch burn targets in PvP is the sign of a good team.) I eventually blew trinket and bubble trying to get out of LOS from the mage's polys while still keeping my teammates alive and even then spent too much time running around as a pig.
The mage and the priest still put up a good fight after their teammate went down. Oddly enough I feel like I did just as much healing after the rogue died as before. It might have been I was so excited at the possibility that we were doing to win that I didn't want to screw up in the slightest.
We've noticed that RMP puts together a lot of momentum right at the start. Because of the rogue and the mage poly the fight nearly always starts on their terms. Even if we charge them first, they can quickly isolate and burn someone down. But if we can all live through the initial 30 seconds of the fight our chances are much better that we're going to win.
We suspect that the reason we lasted so long during our second match (during which our hunter was dead the majority of the time) is because they have a tough time burning through my heals once they can no longer CC me (Blind was used up, poly on diminishing returns, and I'd used Aura Mastery to prevent interrupts).
For our efforts in that final match of the night we got a sweet 20 points, which pushed us over the hump to 1707 for the week. We decided to call it there and not risk being pushed below it before getting our weekly allotment of points on Tuesday.
Furious Gladiator gear is so expensive I'm going to need another three weeks before I'll be able to buy the legs or chest. There's also the matter of getting to 1750 to get the chest in the first place, but I'm feeling good about our progress. It may take more than our ten matches in a week to get there, but I think we can do it.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
[Paladin] Have We Plateaued in Arena?
Two weeks ago we broke 1550 in our 3v3 team. Earning this achievement wasn't in doubt due to knowledge of our MMR (yay for transparency), but it was sure sweet to see it. We powered through to just over 1600 before we called it for the week.
The rating was high enough that I could buy my Furious neck and our hunter his gloves. (I didn't have the arena points yet because I'd bought my Deadly libram.) We were getting better as a team and our MMR continued to go up. I'm not sure what happened, but we really kicked it in gear that week. We faced multiple 1800+ teams, and event beat a 1900+ one.
We were feeling pretty good about ourselves.
Then this past weekend we ran in and it was like hitting a brick wall. Suddenly we kept losing matches, with the worst part being when we were 1-5 for our win record for the week.
Both our MMR and our actual team rating took a hit, and ruined my dreams of getting to 1650 for the week. I started having flashbacks to season 4, where I never got to buy my best arena gear because the time I had the points I no longer had the rating.
Fortunately our DK, who is something of our team leader, is more prosaic about arena and reminded me that ratings go up and they go down. Sometimes you hit a bad streak, but then you hit good ones as well.
The funny thing was, almost immediately after we had that conversation, our luck changed and we fought our way back up to 1600 again. We didn't have a lot of time to play this weekend, so we decided to call it there. No gains, but no losses for the week, and I would be guaranteed to get my Furious gloves once I got my arena points on Tuesday.
...Which I did, this evening. I'm now sporting my first piece of Furious Gladiator gear and it's nice enough that I'm thinking of tossing my PvE gloves away (non-set from Naxx 10).
This week we're going to try to make that push to 1650. Even though I had my plateau fear... I look at the 1800 teams, and even the 1900 team we beat two weeks ago, and I really don't want to think those victories could have been a fluke.
We probably just got a bit sloppy, and I know I'd made some judgement errors. I don't think there's a person on my team as self-critical as me, since so much of the survival of my teammates depends on me being able to stay out of CC and keep them healed.
Of course it'll be rougher now that Hand of Freedom has been nerfed (as if the nerf to my Nitro Boosts wasn't bad enough), but the loss of the four seconds shouldn't be game breaking. I'm specced for the improved version so mine lasts for 10 seconds, which is still decently long (or so I tell myself).
The next achievement milestone won't be until 1750, and I probably shouldn't raise too many hopes of getting there, but if we play like we did two weeks ago it should be possible. We just need to play a little smarter, gear a little more (I just finally broke 500 resilience), and I need to have fewer of my "oops" moments.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
[Paladin] Goodbye My Nitro Boosts
Despite all the nerfs that engineering gets hit by, despite all the complaints that it doesn't have any worthwhile self-enchants, I've been reasonably happy as an paladin engineer. Do I wish it was better? Sure. But I've had my fun with target dummies, repair bots, the portable mailbox, parachute cloaks, mote farming, the goblin rocket launcher (favorite way to do the first pull in Mechanar back when it was possible to tank as holy), and of course the overpowered goggles I could make before I hit the then 70 or now 80 level cap.
I admit one of the reasons I selected engineering over blacksmithing back when I first created Gillien was because I wanted the goggles. They looked cool, and blacksmithing had very little to offer a holy paladin that didn't come out of the Black Temple. And I found that despite all the whining about the profession, it actually wasn't half the pain to level that I thought it would be (I made a tidy profit while leveling through all the vanilla content).
Recently Blizzard took away the stealth detection from my goggles, which was a bit annoying, but to be honest I didn't use my goggles for my PvP helm. I'd taken a spare PvE helm with a fair amount of haste on it and socketed/enchanted it specifically for PvP.
What bothers me at the moment is the nerfing of my Nitro Boosts.
Last night's arena games may very well be the last time I'll ever do my favorite escape move (Hand of Freedom followed by Nitro Boosts to LOS an opponent who's snared me).
The Nitro Boosts had already been nerfed from their earliest iteration, but even nerfed, those 2 seconds of increased speed were fantastic. Nobody expects a paladin to sprint away from them.
Apparently they were too fantastic.
/sigh
Crygil goes on to say:
But the thing is, it's not like the boots are something I'd vendor. They're my WG PvP boots, and the Nitro Boosts (there are no Nitro Boots) are a self-only "enchant." I don't think I can wait for a future patch to fix them (because while turning off the Nitro Boosts in arena is easy to do, compensating their nerf in other ways requires testing so we probably won't see anything until the next patch) so I'm going to have to enchant them with something else in the meantime.
I'll have a choice between the +22 stam enchant or the Tuskarr's Vitality for +15 stam and increased run speed. I'm already using a Tireless Skyflare Diamond for my meta to get a run speed increase, so going with the latter of the two boot enchants will mean getting a new meta, and if I get a new meta I'm strongly considering the one that reduces the duration of silences.
I admit one of the reasons I selected engineering over blacksmithing back when I first created Gillien was because I wanted the goggles. They looked cool, and blacksmithing had very little to offer a holy paladin that didn't come out of the Black Temple. And I found that despite all the whining about the profession, it actually wasn't half the pain to level that I thought it would be (I made a tidy profit while leveling through all the vanilla content).
Recently Blizzard took away the stealth detection from my goggles, which was a bit annoying, but to be honest I didn't use my goggles for my PvP helm. I'd taken a spare PvE helm with a fair amount of haste on it and socketed/enchanted it specifically for PvP.
What bothers me at the moment is the nerfing of my Nitro Boosts.
After several attempts to balance the Nitro Boots ability in the arena, we have decided that we currently do not have an acceptable solution. Until we are able to better balance this ability it has been shut down in the arenas. We fully plan to continue working on this item and we intend to adjust it in upcoming patches.
Last night's arena games may very well be the last time I'll ever do my favorite escape move (Hand of Freedom followed by Nitro Boosts to LOS an opponent who's snared me).
The Nitro Boosts had already been nerfed from their earliest iteration, but even nerfed, those 2 seconds of increased speed were fantastic. Nobody expects a paladin to sprint away from them.
Apparently they were too fantastic.
/sigh
Crygil goes on to say:
We have plans to make certain that this item is still worth the investment made in it. So don't vendor it just yet.
But the thing is, it's not like the boots are something I'd vendor. They're my WG PvP boots, and the Nitro Boosts (there are no Nitro Boots) are a self-only "enchant." I don't think I can wait for a future patch to fix them (because while turning off the Nitro Boosts in arena is easy to do, compensating their nerf in other ways requires testing so we probably won't see anything until the next patch) so I'm going to have to enchant them with something else in the meantime.
I'll have a choice between the +22 stam enchant or the Tuskarr's Vitality for +15 stam and increased run speed. I'm already using a Tireless Skyflare Diamond for my meta to get a run speed increase, so going with the latter of the two boot enchants will mean getting a new meta, and if I get a new meta I'm strongly considering the one that reduces the duration of silences.
Monday, May 18, 2009
[Paladin] Making Progress in Arenas
With the passing of Out of Mana I'm not entirely sure where to get my holy PvP fix. Unlike PvE, which can be theorycrafted to death, PvP is more of an art. What talents you take, what spells you cast, matters much more on your group synergy than what a stranger on a forum says. That isn't to say that cookie cutter talent specs don't exist, because they do, but what works may vary by a handful more points from person to person than it would in PvE.
Unlike previous seasons, where everyone started off at 1500 and moved up or down according to their performance, now everyone starts at 0 and has to work their way up. In a way it's nice, because losing generally costs the player nothing and winning results in a big gob of points as the team rating makes its way to the players' matchmaking rating (which is, in a way, their "real" rating since that's what determines who fights who and how many points earned for a win).
On the other hand, that does mean a bit of grinding. Even at 40 points a win that's still a lot of matches to get up to 1250 (the first rating it's possible to buy anything at). The grinding does have some use, being that new teams can get used to each other and develop strategies without fear of just sliding down the ratings ladder, but it feels longer than it has to be, especially since the MMR still chooses opponents of comparable skill. There is not necessarily any steamrolling to be done on this grind.
I'm on two teams so far this season; 2s with a survival hunter, and 3s with an unholy DK and that same hunter. My focus is primarily on 3s since it's time intensive to grind out two teams and we get more arena points for the larger team. The hunter and I might invest more in our 2s if gearing becomes an issue (it's harder to get rating in 3s than 2s), but for now we're fine.
Pillar joined the battle (our team name) started at 1291 going into the weekend and ended at a tidy 1494. We're no longer getting 40+ per win now that our team/personal ratings are much closer to our matchmaking rating, so it's taking us progressively more wins to make any headway. A match against an equivalent team might net us around 10-12 points, 20 if we take down a team rated over 100 points more than us (man, was that sweet), but only 7 if we beat a team well below us.
I'm surprised at the range of teams we fight. We're hovering in the high 1500s for our MMR (though we did break 1600 for a short period last night), but the teams we've fought have ranged from the high 1300s to a whopping 1800. And yes, the 1800 smoked us. We did manage to fight a couple 1700s teams to a near standstill though.
Our consolation is that if we lose we generally end up losing to teams ranked above us, so in the end our rating continues to climb. One 1700 team in particular smacked us repeatedly over the course of last night. We didn't lose a lot of points to them, but it didn't help our win-loss record.
This is my first season actually seeing my team ranked on the Armory, and I'm rather surprised about it. We're 981st based off the 1291 rating we had last week. I'd heard that 3s are a lot less popular than 2s, and arena itself may not be quite as popular has it'd been in the past, so I suppose that's why we got a rating without even breaking 1300. Or maybe other teams just haven't grinded out to this point yet. It'll be interesting to see what 1494 gets us after maintenance this week.
My team's at the point where we're starting to tweak out specs and our strategies. I'm running a 52/19/0 spec with Divine Grace and Imp. Hammer of Justice, but even though I love using my stuns, I'm thinking of changing those two points out to Imp. Devotion Aura. Generally when we lose it doesn't feel like we're losing because I didn't interrupt their healer fast enough. It feels like we're losing because I couldn't keep my team alive. (On the other hand, it's extremely gratifying hitting the healer with a HoJ just as they or one of their teammates is about to die, since that usually nets us a win.)
Burst can be something vicious in 3s, with two dps focus-firing someone, particularly when they focus on our hunter. Having Imp. Devotion Aura will give me stronger heals and I'll still have DG for mitigation. I'm not that good at it yet, but I'm trying to get better at using DG and Hand of Sacrifice when I'm not being focus-fired as a way to mitigate damage to my teammates. Especially since I have Beacon of Light, if I can bleed damage off my teammates during early burst I can heal myself and the Beacon target at the same time.
I'm still working on getting off Aura Mastery too. I tried making a macro tying it to Holy Light (like my Divine Favor + Holy Shock macro), but for some reason it won't work even though AM doesn't invoke the global cooldown so I'm currently doing an awkward Ctrl+3, 3 button combo to first use Aura Mastery and then Holy Light. It just seems like it shouldn't take me two button presses to do what rightly should go in one, but I'm not sure why it's not working.
Next weekend we should hit 1550 for sure (I want my [Furious Gladiator's Pendant of Dominance]), though I'm hoping for 1600. I won't have the points to buy the Furious gloves yet, I'm still down a bit from having bought the [Deadly Gladiator's Libram of Justice], but my teammates will be able to start getting their gear and the higher rating let get me squeeze out more points come each Tuesday maintenance.
Unlike previous seasons, where everyone started off at 1500 and moved up or down according to their performance, now everyone starts at 0 and has to work their way up. In a way it's nice, because losing generally costs the player nothing and winning results in a big gob of points as the team rating makes its way to the players' matchmaking rating (which is, in a way, their "real" rating since that's what determines who fights who and how many points earned for a win).
On the other hand, that does mean a bit of grinding. Even at 40 points a win that's still a lot of matches to get up to 1250 (the first rating it's possible to buy anything at). The grinding does have some use, being that new teams can get used to each other and develop strategies without fear of just sliding down the ratings ladder, but it feels longer than it has to be, especially since the MMR still chooses opponents of comparable skill. There is not necessarily any steamrolling to be done on this grind.
I'm on two teams so far this season; 2s with a survival hunter, and 3s with an unholy DK and that same hunter. My focus is primarily on 3s since it's time intensive to grind out two teams and we get more arena points for the larger team. The hunter and I might invest more in our 2s if gearing becomes an issue (it's harder to get rating in 3s than 2s), but for now we're fine.
Pillar joined the battle (our team name) started at 1291 going into the weekend and ended at a tidy 1494. We're no longer getting 40+ per win now that our team/personal ratings are much closer to our matchmaking rating, so it's taking us progressively more wins to make any headway. A match against an equivalent team might net us around 10-12 points, 20 if we take down a team rated over 100 points more than us (man, was that sweet), but only 7 if we beat a team well below us.
I'm surprised at the range of teams we fight. We're hovering in the high 1500s for our MMR (though we did break 1600 for a short period last night), but the teams we've fought have ranged from the high 1300s to a whopping 1800. And yes, the 1800 smoked us. We did manage to fight a couple 1700s teams to a near standstill though.
Our consolation is that if we lose we generally end up losing to teams ranked above us, so in the end our rating continues to climb. One 1700 team in particular smacked us repeatedly over the course of last night. We didn't lose a lot of points to them, but it didn't help our win-loss record.
This is my first season actually seeing my team ranked on the Armory, and I'm rather surprised about it. We're 981st based off the 1291 rating we had last week. I'd heard that 3s are a lot less popular than 2s, and arena itself may not be quite as popular has it'd been in the past, so I suppose that's why we got a rating without even breaking 1300. Or maybe other teams just haven't grinded out to this point yet. It'll be interesting to see what 1494 gets us after maintenance this week.
My team's at the point where we're starting to tweak out specs and our strategies. I'm running a 52/19/0 spec with Divine Grace and Imp. Hammer of Justice, but even though I love using my stuns, I'm thinking of changing those two points out to Imp. Devotion Aura. Generally when we lose it doesn't feel like we're losing because I didn't interrupt their healer fast enough. It feels like we're losing because I couldn't keep my team alive. (On the other hand, it's extremely gratifying hitting the healer with a HoJ just as they or one of their teammates is about to die, since that usually nets us a win.)
Burst can be something vicious in 3s, with two dps focus-firing someone, particularly when they focus on our hunter. Having Imp. Devotion Aura will give me stronger heals and I'll still have DG for mitigation. I'm not that good at it yet, but I'm trying to get better at using DG and Hand of Sacrifice when I'm not being focus-fired as a way to mitigate damage to my teammates. Especially since I have Beacon of Light, if I can bleed damage off my teammates during early burst I can heal myself and the Beacon target at the same time.
I'm still working on getting off Aura Mastery too. I tried making a macro tying it to Holy Light (like my Divine Favor + Holy Shock macro), but for some reason it won't work even though AM doesn't invoke the global cooldown so I'm currently doing an awkward Ctrl+3, 3 button combo to first use Aura Mastery and then Holy Light. It just seems like it shouldn't take me two button presses to do what rightly should go in one, but I'm not sure why it's not working.
Next weekend we should hit 1550 for sure (I want my [Furious Gladiator's Pendant of Dominance]), though I'm hoping for 1600. I won't have the points to buy the Furious gloves yet, I'm still down a bit from having bought the [Deadly Gladiator's Libram of Justice], but my teammates will be able to start getting their gear and the higher rating let get me squeeze out more points come each Tuesday maintenance.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
