It hurts the other team when I PVP April 18, 2008

This week Bierd (the Shadowstep rogue) and I decided to add a third to our roster and go for 3v3s. Now, I’m generally against going in with a bigger group because every member you add to the group also adds to the coordination required to make your team successful. But I agreed to try it out to see how we’d do.

Softserv is Bierd’s ex-roomie and also a member of our guild. She’s an enhancement shaman, and over the past couple of weeks she has collected most of her Vindicator pieces and a complete S1 set to prepare for these arena games.

Well … we went in, and we owned. We only played ten games due to time constraints (i.e., it was 02:00), but we came out at 8-2.

The combination of Softserv and Bierd’s spike damage meant almost instant death for the other team’s healer.

Highlights and low points:

• vs. resto druid, warrior, rogue – Bierd and Softserv went after the druid (who was fairly resilient). I cloned the rogue and rooted the warrior for ten seconds. Then I cloned the warrior and rooted the rogue. Yeah, they got out now and then and got some hits on me, but nothing serious. Druid CC FTW.
• vs. BM hunter … and two others – We won against this team the first time, so the second time I was feeling a little bit cocky. Well, while Bierd and Softserv were taking their team’s healer down, I got killed. It was a bad, bad death. Bierd and Softserv managed to take down the first DPS member, but with the hunter beating on them the entire time, they were both low on health. Shortly after turning their attention to the hunter, Softserv was killed. Bierd was at about 5% health, and the hunter was close to 35%. We screamed at Bierd to Vanish and bandage behind a pillar, which he did (gotta love the Nagrand arena). The hunter stood there with his thumbs up his ass. Bierd Shadowstepped right into a Freezing Trap, but came back to finish the hunter off, getting us the match.
• vs. holy paladin, warrior, rogue – This was the first match we played. It was a bit of a clusterfuck and everyone seemed to keep switching targets. I would go to Cyclone a DPS (because the paladin was still alive), and someone would be attacking it. We lost it. In the end, we decided that against paladin healers we would kill the DPS first due to the difficulty in taking full advantage of the rogue and enchancement shaman spike damage on a plate-wearing class. I’m not a huge fan of that strategy, I think that between the two of them they should be able to take the paladin down. But … the strategy did work out for us later on in the night.

And that’s it for PVP until next week!

Light’s Justice vs. Shadowfury April 15, 2008

Last night we didn’t have enough people signed up or online to run SSC for Leo. There were many sad panda faces all around. But not wanting to idle, half of us decided to go run some old world content for shits and giggles. I suggested ZG because I wanted to hit friendly for the Brilliant Mana Oil recipe. So we did it. We went into ZG and cleared the instance (bar Edge of Madness). Yup, I even had the quest item to summon Gahz’ranka because an ex-guildie had wanted to come in here for her turtle Polymorph book. Anyway, it wasn’t long after we entered the instance before Hakkar went down:

On Yojamba Isle, a bunch of group members donated all of their coins and bijous to me. I was able to bijou-smash myself halfway through Friendly … while the rest of my raid ran around STV griefing lowbie horde! Hehe …

In PVP news, this week I did my arena games with Bierd, a SS rogue. We ended up at 5-5, dropping our rating by just a couple of points. One match that stands out in my mind was versus a BM hunter and a destro lock. Bierd and the hunter suffered a DKO, so it was me up against the lock (at full health) and his felhunter. I got him down to low health while maintaining my health near full, but it wasn’t long before we were both OOM. Whenever I had mana, I’d Moonfire him or Lifebloom myself. Whenever he had mana, he’d Shadowfury, Drain Life, or Drain Mana. Every time I got him low enough that I thought he’d die, he’d be able to drain himself up a couple hundred hit points. At first my strategy was to stay at max range so that I could outrange the drain spells and not eat as many ticks. After a couple of minutes, I realized that this match would go on forever until one of us switched our strategy up. So the next time I had enough mana for a Moonfire, I ran in, Moonfired the lock, and began whacking him with my mace. He went down and we took the match. Decent weapon skill FTW.

srs bsns April 7, 2008

Guild administration has posted a guild charter on our website for review by all guild members, detailing new rules regarding recruitment and guild conduct. Guildies were asked to read the charter and then post “/sign” to indicate that they had read it. So far we’ve had eleven people sign the charter. That’s diligence, folks … that’s fucking diligence.

Perhaps due in part to the fact that no one read the new guild rules, raid sign-ups, invites, and start time were still a complete clusterfuck last night. We managed to start pulling a good 20 minutes late with only about 23 raiders present.

By the time we got to Hydross, we had a full raid. We had a slew of people who were new to SSC, and it took a couple of tries to get Hydross down. I was especially impressed by one of our newer warriors who was responsible for tanking an add during transitions and got the hang of it very quickly.

Lurker was a breeze, as usual … all of the newbies got owned by Spout, but that was to be expected, LOL.

As it was getting late after Lurker, we decided to go clear Gruul’s Lair instead of trying Leo. I think that was a great call on leadership’s part, because it gives us all of tonight to go back to SSC and take that sumbitch Leo down!

In PVP news, we were 8-2 in arena this week. Half-decent frost mages continue to be the bane of our existence. I did EOTS until my fingers bled on Friday night and finally got my Vindicator’s boots. Then my realm got to phase 3 and I turned my T4 shoulder token in for S1 shoulders. Pookies is now sitting at about 9500 HP unbuffed, which isn’t too shabby at all!

Finally, Pookies dropped 375 mining to take up herbalism. As soon as I get herbalism to 375, I’m going to drop it and pick up alchemy. The reason I’m leveling herbalism first is that I figure that all the training costs and time spent farming will be worth all the gold I’m going to save on mats later. And the reason I’m taking alchemy is because 1) mining is fucking useless, and 2) I want that new exalted stone from Shattered Sun Offensive … /drool

Oy vey! March 24, 2008

All of my friends know that I have never been that big on PvP. In fact, I pretty much downright hate it. My toons are rolled on a PvP server because and only because I originally rolled here to play with a friend (who has since gone back to our old server).

Anyway, in spite of my loathing of PvP, I have done a little bit of battleground and arena grinding to pick up a couple of pieces of PvP gear. All of my arena teams have been very hit and miss, with none of them showing any real promise.

Until now.

Over the weekend my friend Colossal and I decided to mess around on a friend’s old (and unused) arena team, Oy Vey. A resto druid and an arms warrior, we marched bravely (well … he marched bravely) to the arena battlemaster and we queued up. By the end of ten matches, we were 7-3. That’s not bad at all. I’ve had it in my head for so long (mostly because of past arena experiences) that I suck at PvP … but I think I actually did OK. Not to mention that 2v2 is infinitely, infinitely easier than 3v3 or 5v5 (which may explain why you get less points each week for the same rating).

One thing I noticed is that, at least in the lower rating bracket in which we were playing, a lot of teams didn’t have a healer. Being relatively new to the 2v2 scene, I’m not sure if two DPS is a common 2v2 arena build, or if these are teams that are simply queueing up to lose ten games each week and get their arena points. For the most part, these teams were cake. I’m talking about the two warriors, the elemental shaman and hunter, etc.

Anyway, things I learned this week:

• Always trust your partner to follow the predetermined strategy. When I saw Colossal attacking a warrior before a paladin, I started Cycloning the paladin. Later, I found out that Colossal was just Hamstringing the warrior for me, but his plan was to hit the paladin immediately after. We lost that round.
• Always precast Abolish Poison against rogues… possibly even on both team members (I have to experiment with this). You should never have to trinket out of Blind, plus you know that Wound Poison is going to be a bitch.
• Shadow priest/frost mage really, really sucks.

This week I think we’re going to focus more on trying to get our rating up a bit instead of just playing ten games and then stopping.