Back in Black (my return to the 5v5 arena bracket)

Huzzah! I have finally found a team that is nice enough to take a halfway decent Rogue along for the ride. =)

Our team, modeled after a successful 5v5 team (ranked 3rd) in their battlegroup, is housed around a 3 melee DPS / split DPS setup with, unfortunately, minimal CC. But that’s neither here nor there… the setup works, also against some difficult setups, but not all obviously. But I have to say, this is the most fun I’ve had in a 5v5 team since my original stint in Season 1 in Unstoppable’s team.

This past week was our initial trial with this setup as [Paladin / Rogue / Priest / Warrior / Shaman]. We adjusted our specs (they aren’t the exact same as the team we modeled after) after getting more comfortable with the general game plan, adjusted our gear accordingly, and continued to learn from our mistakes and how to play effectively and successfully against a variety of teams. Overall, we had a winning record and gained about 50-ish points after 30-ish games… which isn’t bad seeing as though we were trying new strategies and getting better at working together as a whole. The main game plan was to nearly split our 3 melee DPS to put the other team on the defensive and force their healers to heal instead of CC or Dispell/Purge/Cleanse. It worked surprisingly well against our first opponents for the 6 games we played (4-2), which ironically we knew in the game and some were the alliance alts of our guildmates. =p

Things started to break down when we would fight good teams with high levels of DPS, specifically the one 4 DPS team we faced. Our tactic of splitting our DPS into their group didn’t quite work as they would simply focus on one of us (Shaman or Priest usually) and we would suddenly find ourselves down a man. We tried to counter them with their own tactic, but we basically traded our Shaman for theirs and we found ourselves in the same boat as before. Luckily, we stopped playing them after 2-3 losses in a row… makes people yell. =/

We also had a string of fights with a fellow Sargeras Horde team. After dropping the first 2 games, we pulled our heads out of our asses, went back to our main game plan, and rattled off 2-3 wins against them. Then we faced a drain team. God… damnit. ><

This drain team was perfect in how it controlled the fight, and kept our melee away from their respective targets. I was on the Druid, as usual, as I consider myself very successful in shutting down Resto Druids better than most Rogues due to a scary amount of patience. Anywho, this Druid knew exactly how to keep me away thanks to the Hunter’s slowing traps. And on top of that, the Hunter was Entrapment spec… lovely. Within a minute, our healers were out of mana, our Shaman was near death, and our Warrior and myself were stuck on the trap’s area of effect. Needless to say, we didn’t lose too many points from the loss. But we did get our revenge later that night against another drain team. This other team was way easier and the Hunter, thankfully, was a different spec than the norm. To sum it up, the Druid ran AWAY from the rest of the group and AWAY from the Hunter traps. Not smart at all. And while I was being as annoying as possible to this Druid, the remainder of our team dropped 2 of their guys on the other side of the arena. When the Druid shifted into travel form to help, my 5 point kidney shot opportunity I was waiting for presented itself, and with the help of our Warrior and Shaman, he was the 3rd casualty.

All in all, yesterday was the most fun I have had in the 5v5 bracket in a long while. And, we’re starting to mesh quite nicely against some odd and difficult teams. To make a long story short, after dipping below 1700 for the first time, we recorded 5-6 straight wins against varying team builds to bring us close to topping 1800 for the first time.

I WILL have my weapons DAMNIT! ><

GrizzlyAdams does NOT have a beard!!!

Over the course of the last few days, I thrust myself back into the world of alts and created a new character… a class I have never played and one that irritated me since the beginning of the game… a Hunter. Even the character creation screen was irritating, rejecting my first few names. By the way, who else in their right mind (other than me) would have come up with a character name of Dirk McGirk?!

Bastage.

So my new alt, aptly named ShootrMcGavn (had to shorten it because it wouldn’t all fit) to pay homage to Happy Gilmore, began his quest in Durotar. Now coming from an Undead Rogue with an ungodly number of “days played” (I have never leveled an alt past 28… and my current highest is around 26), my knowledge of the Durotar quests is a bit limited, especially starting in the Orc village. But, I got through the quests, got used to playing a ranged DPS class, and even got myself a nifty pet… a ravager from the Draenai starting zone. Boy, was that fun trying to get to that area as Horde. =p

I was thinking about naming him RobertPaulson… his name is Robert Paulson… his name is Robert Paulson… but I felt that I should keep with the Happy Gilmore theme and name him GrizzlyAdams. I was upset because he does not have a beard, and he should, because he’s Grizzly Adams, and he had a beard according to Lee Travino. So Grizzly and I ventured out into Durotar, killed some bad dudes, got ganked by some jerkoff 19 Dwarf Hunter (who got promptly snuffed by the 58 Orc Hunter that was following me), leveled my pet a bit more, geared out myself in the finest AH greens, and routinely poked fun at guildmates that did not immediately grasp what was so funny about my character/pet name combination.

Other than that, I haven’t really got into the meat and potatoes of the alt game. I haven’t tried out my PvP skills as a hunter… if any… and I still need to get some better gear and get used to playing in a group. I’m sure it will come to me eventually. If anything, this will train me on leveling an alt efficiently once the Death Knight class is released… if they start at level 1 of course.

Oh and Virginia, my jacket size is 44 long and… my right arm is just, a little bit longer than my left… =)

Shrimp Day! (The Unification of PvP and PvE)

Actually, that’s what it says under the cap on my Sobe:Power… so… I digress.

But honestly, with the most recent change on the PTR, making epic Hyjal/BT gems available for 15 badges each, is there any question NOW that Blizzard is trying to break the barrier between PvP and PvE… while inadvertently merging the two? Is this a bad thing? Absolutely. In my opinion, the gear obtained through each of the section’s means should be separate. Because, let’s face it… WoW has broken down into two factions: The Arena Specialists, and the Raiding Masters.

Players have been complaining about this for a while now, even before all these changes were being made on the PTR. I would imagine it started around the same time when arena gear became available using BG points, dubbing them “welfare epics”. But honestly, this argument can only be 1-way, as the PvP’ers were seeing more and more geared out PvE’ers muscle into their territory. It can’t work both ways. If a PvE’er complains about someone raiding in PvP gear but with the same effectiveness, someone needs to be kicked in the face… hard. It’s a one way street. You can succeed to a point in flat out PvE gear and spec in the arenas and BGs***, but the reverse can never happen due to resilience being a useless stat in instances, and a complete waste of iLvl.

*** Case in point – my Season 2 3v3 team housed a Disc/Holy Priest, Combat/Assassination Rogue (me), and a Feral Druid. The Priest was 50/50 PvE/PvP gear, but myself and the Druid were full PvE spec and gear. Our first target rarely survived our initial burst and we climbed up to 2100 by season’s end, only playing around 10-15 games per week. ***

From all the screenshots on the WoW news sites, it looks like more and more things are being put in place to give PvE’ers the opportunity to purchase PvP gear through PvE means. Now granted, that stuff isn’t the greatest PvP gear you can get, but some of the pieces… it actually is. Take into account the PvP cloak you could buy with badges at the beginning of Season 3. That’s arguably the best PvP cloak you can obtain. Hell, with some classes, some of the earlier arena gear is somewhat better than the later stuff. But again, I digress. And now with the badge-to-gem option upcoming in 2.4, PvP’ers can boost their gear’s strength with items from a raiding instance they have never stepped foot in. Now, I know it’s not a huge upgrade, but it’s the beginning of what could be the worst mistake Blizzard could make if they eventually combine the two aspects of the game.

Ultimately, skill will always beat gear, but gear will also increase the margin of error allowed and still be successful in any fight. I just hope Blizzard knows where they are going with this in the long run. I would hate for it to turn into a system where PvP’ers could purchase PvE gear using arena points, or worse… BG points. That would bring the merger to a definite close, and in turn, make both sides equally unhappy… and make crappy players look like they know what they are doing.

My head hurts now. =/

2.4 PTR – My first impression

We had our first run of Sunwell last night and had an interesting time with the sights, the lag (oh the lag), the Sunwell trash mobs, and our first attempts at Kalecgos. Here’s the rundown.

--- SIGHTS ---
The island where Sunwell resides… I guess I’ll just call it Sunwell Isle… is not terribly flashy, but rather basic and in tune to the normal blood elf visuals and architecture. I didn’t get a chance to explore more than the Staging Area and the instance bridge due to way too many people in one damn place, but I’m sure it will look fine. I just hope that it’s not a carbon copy of the outside visuals of Silvermoon City. I require depth. I also think that the general layout is a bit too bright. These are corrupt high elves… why is everything still so cheerful with bright colors? It makes my eyes water a bit. =/

--- INSTANCE: SUNWELL 25-MAN ---
It’s another one of those “inside looking out” instances, like those in Hellfire Peninsula. I like it so far, but again, bright colors make seeing the targeting circles on the mobs, and sometimes the mobs themselves a bit hard to see (I’ll have to adjust my gamma just for this instance I think). The layout of the instance, at least up to Kalecgos, is nice and clean. Nice big open areas, no suppression room type places, and no crowded hallways make this enjoyable (the bridges are the closest to being crowded, but they are more than wide enough). Also, putting repair and reagent vendors in the beginning of the instance was genius. Thank you Blizzard.

Now… the mobs. They are fairly straight forward in how to beat them. No tricks or LOS fighting so far, as they are similar to the packs in the area between the Mother and Council rooms in BT. The solo machines are pretty simple too, and they come with spiffy sound effects for their “chain lightning” type attacks. The interesting part was fighting the normal packs with a Scout added in. The Scouts will run to a nearby machine to activate it, and basically create a wipe as you can’t fight the pack, and the Scout, AND the machine. We found out the hard way that the Scout had been changed to make it immune to ALL CC… so we had to rush the Scout and melt it and then deal with the pack with the machine still deactivated (we later pulled the machine solo for loot). Fun stuff eh? We also ran into an interesting bug (we think) with the room at the top of the ramps right before Kalecgos. The mobs in the room, as well as the patrol that SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN UP THERE, were respawning almost immediately after killing them. Moving into the final bridge area before Kalecgos seemed to fix it. It’s not a mini suppression room as pulling the mobs out of the room and onto the bridge makes them evade and reset.

--- KALECGOS ---
This is a unique fight, requiring coordination and lots of communication between raid members. In the fight, you must battle Kalecgos as a Dragon outside, AND battle a demon who is trying to kill Kalecgos as a Human… kind of like an exorcism. Thankfully, both battles should be rather quick as the Dragon and Demon were both dropping fast. The problem was the mechanics of the fight and the rotations needed to defeat both enemies. Due to the simultaneous fight, you need 2 tanks and enough healers and DPS on both ends to win, but thanks to an arcane buffet Kalecgos does in Dragon form, a rotation must be made else the stacks will get too high and people will get 1-shot. We found that the buffet can be removed with Ice Block and CloS, so at the very least, Mages and Rogues can last longer on the Dragon fight than other classes. The portals that spawn to take you into the Demon fight explode arcane damage upon appearing… and they are buggy. You have to click the base of the portal to make it through, as I later found out sitting at a portal clicking like crazy, only to watch it vanish. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to experience the Demon side of the fight that much, but it seems pretty straight forward. You just can’t let human Kalecgos tank the Demon as he won’t survive… oh yeah, and the Demon does shadow bolt volleys. More fun stuff. We know what to do, we just need to work on our rotation and how to communicate it will the entire raid effectively.

--- NEW COMBAT WINDOW ---
It broke the important things. It broke Omen, and SCT, and any other UI addon that involves parsing or changing the combat window. It looks silly and did not need to be changed.

--- NEW INTERFACE WINDOWS ---
I understand they were going to simplify them and organize them, but why change what is working? Now we get to learn the new windows and categories to figure out where all of our custom settings are. Bleh.

--- LAG ---
The outside world lag was to be expected, I understand that much. The lag was fairly OK for most of our 3 hour run in Sunwell with only a handful of spikes (1 of which caused a wipe thank you very much). Combining the different regions and countries into a central PTR was very foolish. They would already lag like crazy, why add to it? Oh, right, almost forgot… CRITICAL ERRORS. I couldn’t remember the last time I got a critical error in WoW (been over 1 year) until I played on the PTR. I had 3 for the night, 2 while loading into the Sunwell instance itself and 1 in the middle of the Kalecgos fight. Others weren’t as lucky as I heard the same people at least 5 times last night exclaim they received a critical error. I at least hope the information we send to Blizzard about the error helps them to correct issues as simple as loading into an instance before this is released.

--- OTHER NOTABLE THINGS ---
1. At any given point outside of instances, you will see at least 2 Rogues with both Warglaives.
2. General Chat is more of a circus than the General Chat on your home server.
3. There are some very clever character names indeed.
4. Count on most of your UI to work flawlessly, except for anything with your combat window of course.
5. Oh yes… there will be lag.

When is it OK to buy/sell raid drops?

I’m writing this due to an in-game mail sent to my guild leader, requesting to purchase Illidan’s Warglaives in the event they drop. My initial response on Vent was “Did you tell him to go &$^% himself?”… was that too harsh? Let’s find out.

The reason for my response was due to the following:

1. This player wants to buy legendaries.
2. I highly doubt this player (probably a Rogue) is in a guild that is either clearing or progressing through BT. If they are, W-T-F??!!
3. MM has 3 main Rogues (The Big 3 as I call us, as we are 3 of the best PvE Rogues on Horde Sargeras) and only 2 OH Warglaives have dropped… no MHs. EVER.
4. The player was offering 2500g per Warglaive. GG undervaluing THE best swords in the game currently, and possibly through 2.4 and into the next expansion.
5. I will assume this player has zero knowledge of the Illidan fight itself, and therefore, a raid liability.

Given that, and the fact that I don’t know or want to know who this player is, I would say my response sufficed. Now… when would it be correct to buy/sell raid drops?

It would be OK (in my opinion) for a guild to SELL raid drops if and when:

1. Nobody in the raid needs or wants the item.
2. The item in question drops consistently from trash mobs and/or is not BoP (i.e. Hearts of Darkness, Gems, etc.).
3. The guild no longer really goes into the instance where it drops.
4. The player wishing to BUY is not a liability in the raid for the mob that drops the item.
5. Payment is sufficient and fair to both BUYER and SELLER.
6. The sale opportunity is initiated by the guild itself.
7. The item is a Quest drop, and the player complies with #4 above.

It would be BAD / STUPID / DISHEARTENING for a player to attempt to BUY raid drops if:

1. The player has no gear from the instance in question (no, patterns do not count).
2. The item is a legendary item.
3. You aren’t in the guild. You didn’t work together with us to beat this content. The drop rates are low as it is. NO.
4. The player does not negotiate with the guild or is 100% set on paying a certain price less than the weapon value.
5. The player’s main motive is to gear the character out then sell it.
BTW, having the Warglaives on a character (say, a Rogue) could increase the account value by at least $800-$1000. At 5000g for both, the real life cost of that 5000g comes nowhere near the real cost of the account with the items themselves.

Don’t get me wrong… this isn’t an elitist post. This is simply a guide (and a warning) on if and when it would be proper etiquette to obtain raid drops from a main raiding guild. Hell, I even followed these steps with an Alliance guild (Eminence) to craft the Leather haste bracers… which later fell out due to the announced haste rating nerf and lack of guild communication.

So if you’re polite about it, then you will be taken into consideration. However, if you honestly think you can get an item that guild members still need or without first asking them if they are up for sale, the guild will probably poke fun at you for a few days for not having the common sense to ask before making the offer… more so depending on the item.

2.4, PTR crashes, and character copy queues… oh my!

Yup, 2.4 is now officially on the PTR and not quite stable yet (which was expected). Thanks to the people at MMO-Champion and WorldofRaids, loads of confirmed loot info, class ability changes, boss encounters (well… only a couple actual fights as of yesterday) and instance screenshots were made available to our eager minds. So, out of those, what has me excited (and pissed off) exactly?

1. Already too many melee dagger loots!
--- Is Blizzard still trying to shove this piece of cake down our (Rogues) throats? We want more variation without having to be in a certain direction or position to the mob… or at least that’s what I feel. I need more stat pictures of the swords, maces, and fists.

2. New fist weapons!
--- OMG! The weapon skins picture on the above websites showed there were at least 3 fist weapon models in 2.4, with one of them having dropped already with some nice stats. I’ll be waiting for the matching MH shortly as that one was not the matching pair in the picture. But hey, it’s bulky, spiky, and it looks cool.

3. New heroic 5-man offers little to zero upgrades for BT raiding guilds!
--- I nearly saw this coming. I’m upset, but not really since our (MM) primary focus will be the 25-man instance. But still, I expected some of the items to be near upgrades.

4. Kael’thas is on crack!
--- Or was. Have you seen the picture of Kael 2.0?! HIS DAMN FACE IS MELTING! If that is what happens to Blood/High Elves after a dark arcane withdrawal, I’ll be sure to keep the lovely ladies away from that crap, else I’m going to move even more attention to the Draenai ladies. Hey, I have needs! =p

5. Confirmed 25-man loot already comparable to current T6 in power!
--- This was also a bit upsetting as I was expecting the items to be a bit more powerful than they currently seem to be. Currently, most of the Sunwell drops seem to be around the same power (sometimes slightly better) than the BT/Hyjal gear... at least for Rogues. I had already run the DPS points numbers on the new gear (2 AP = 1 AGI = 1 CRIT = 1 point) and most of the pieces are on the same level or higher slightly, depending on if you need haste rating or armor penetration. I will remain optimistic as I am sure there is more to come, giving more options to those already with T6 to swap pieces out for other stats. This brings me to my next point…

6. T6 is being expanded to 8 pieces!
--- I am both really excited and really pissed off at this, so let me explain. Yay for Blizzard in creating the last 3 pieces of the set, which allows classes to replace gear and keep their bonuses. But, why not add more bonuses to the set… like a 6 piece or even a super 8 piece bonus? Hell, the old T3 Naxx set had 9 friggin pieces with a max 8 piece bonus (of course 8 piece sets were the norm back then, but still). This would at least give us the option to either, keep a couple of the bonuses and swap pieces out, or to keep all the pieces and obtain even stronger bonuses.

7. More loot with haste rating!
--- Stop please, or at least change haste rating back somewhat to what it used to be so it’s not entirely worthless. Waste of item level points in my opinion.

8. Armor skins are re-colored older skins!
--- I personally haven’t seen them all, but this is still upsetting… yet I understand what goes into creating a new item graphic with the correct character mountings (see my earlier blog mentioning the fist weapon mounting headache). The art team really needs to start creating new graphics and armor skins. It really sucks walking around and seeing handfuls of people with the same armor skins with slightly different color schemes. Will the upcoming T7 and Arena Season 4 sets look the same?! I know it’s a lot of work to not only create the art for the skins, but to eventually make the mountings for all character types, but to the average player… it looks like laziness.

Well, back to the grind I guess. Maybe Illidan will drop a legendary tonight… if people actually FRIGGIN SHOW UP! ><

A moment to gloat

Yay votes! Boo for the 2 NO votes! WRU comments?!