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Why the PVP Hate?

During my “what the Hell am I doing on the road before the sun even peeks over the horizon” drive to work, I was listening to the Convert to Raid podcast (Episode #152). Koltrane was reading an email from a listener, and for once it was something I could relate to. After all, CtR is a raiding podcast and I’m not what you would call a raider (unless you’re talking about raiding the fridge, in which case I can get pretty hardcore). The listener’s email involved PVP hate.

“Hey all, I would really like for you to discuss on the podcast why people do not like PVP. Especially those who go out of their way to proclaim PVE content only, like you do on your show. There are many reasons why people may cite, including “I just don’t like it”, that are perfectly acceptable. I’m not suggesting that someone who hates beets eats beets, cause beets are yuck. I think there is more to this issue than a simple dislike. PVP is fun. PVP is more challenging than playing against a scripted PVE encounter. You will learn more about your character, its strength and weaknesses, and teamwork, in PVP than you ever will in PVE. and more importantly, there is no part of PVP that will diminish any part of PVE. It’s win-win. I think PVE people are missing the most important part of the game – the unexpected.”

As a PVE player who has been doing a fair bit of low-level PVP recently, I feel I can weigh in on this subject. Also, blog content baby. I can see why people hate PVP. The CtR hosts touched on it as well during their response. It all boils down to a single word: frustration. Your tolerance for it will determine how you feel about PVP.

When my Windwalker Monk rolled into Warsong Gulch for the first time, I was ready to wreck stuff. Halfway down the field, I was sapped, then feared, then rooted, then blown to pieces. Rinse, repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And… well, you get the idea. That is frustrating, and one of the biggest causes of PVP hate (and rage nosebleeds). That feeling of helplessness when you don’t know what you’re doing, or knowing there’s nothing you can do, sucks donkey balls. There’s no learning curve with PVP. You don’t dip your toe into the water and slowly ease into it. You jump into the deep end and get stabbed in the throat, kited by hunters, and either doggy paddle or say “screw it” and sink.

Engaging in PVP does have its pro’s and cons though.

PROS

You learn different aspects of your class – Once the rage nosebleed subsides, you can’t help but flip through the spellbook to see if there’s something in there to get out of roots, or fears. Sometimes you may notice other players of your class who seem to be able to slip out of CC abilities, or bust out spells you’ve never seen before. If you want to not get killed, you are forced to evolve.

You adapt to PVE quicker – After leveling my Windwalker Monk in PVP, I decided to try something different and queued up for a dungeon. Once I popped into my group, I found myself tab-targeting mobs and hammering on them as fast as I could. In PVE, there’s a script that the NPC’s need to follow. While the NPC is trying A-B-C, you’re skipping B and going right to STAB-IN-FACE. In PVP you’re used to having to react quickly.

Sweet gear – Even at end game, most people try to score PVP gear. It’s better than the quest greens, and some of it is just under raid quality gear. PVP gives honor (and conquest points in rated games), and it doesn’t take too long to scrape together enough to get a few pieces to get you started. Also, it’s some of the hottest transmog gear you can find outside of raiding.

Different way to level – When Warsong Gulch was the Call to Arms, my newbie Monk was getting a level per win and a sweet chunk of honor points. Merculees is level 35 with over 2000 honor already. For people who are tired of the questing grind, PVP is an interesting alternative.

CONS

Frustration – Sometimes people just can’t get past it. Like I said, there’s no easing into PVP. Screaming at the monitor because that damn rogue seems to be hunting you down is enough to drive a person away from BG’s.

People are clueless – Try watching arena matches on Youtube. It’s impressive the way they move together, verbally communicating and in some cases simply anticipating each others moves. You don’t get that in battleground. Unless someone actually speaks in the instance, people tend to scatter like leaves in the wind. That’s how people get stomped on. The group that sticks together, wins. I don’t care how good you are, one person will not last long against two or three opponents of equal levels. You can waste 20-30 minutes in a BG, only to end up losing and getting a handful of honor points just because your scatterbrained teammates spread out across the map to look at the flowers.

Does PVP suck? Not really. The frustration sucks, and how people deal with it determines if they will continue with PVP. I used to stay far away from it, but after learning more about the Windwalker Monk I’m definitely doing it more. I still get kited by Hunters because screw those guys, and shanked by rogues because screw them too. But I kill my share, deal with the BG losses, and it all kinda works out.

What are your thoughts on PVP? Yay or nay?

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Tags: Convert to Raid, Frustration, Gear, Koltrane, Leveling, PVP

Bajheera’s ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

Anyone who has even looked at PVP sideways knows Bajheera. Good PVP’er, great dude. Fellow gym rat. Even got his own WoW NPC (coming soon!).

So you just know a guy like that is going to do the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.

And he’s going to do it in a most epic fashion.

What I like the most about this video is that he not only does the challenge, but he actually tells (and shows) people that he’s donating as well as raising awareness. I haven’t seen any other Ice Bucket Challenge videos where the person admits that they’re also donating.

To learn more about ALS and/or to lend your support to the cause, check out http://www.alsa.org/

Posted on August 20, 2014 | Video

World of Windwalker

Aug 20

Posted by Donny Rokk

The experiment continues.

I remember when I first started leveling my Windwalker monk. I figured I’d play around until level twenty or so, pick up the daily quest (which gave a 60m xp buff), and probably lose interest. Playing him in PVP seemed amazing, but that had more to do with what I expect was the Call to Arms for PVP being Warsong Gulch, given the amount of xp and honor I was getting per match. Once the sweet perks dried up, and I kept dealing with Alliance groups who seemed to forget which way to go to find the Horde flag, I began to feel like the Windwalker experience was starting to sour.

Then I remembered that PVE is also a viable way to level. Better, some might say. Especially with a 50% xp buff through heirlooms, and 50% through a daily quest. So I booted up my Zygor Leveling Guide and decided to try my luck with AI mobs.

Merculees is now level 34. Zoom.

I enjoy playing the Windwalker monk but I can’t pin down exactly what the draw is. I’m still using the killswitch macro (which you can read about HERE) but even if I wasn’t, there isn’t any complex patterns when it comes to killing with the Windwalker. Healing, rez, debuff, silence, all things the Death Knight can do. Maybe it’s the rolling, or the flying dragon kick that I like so much. Maybe it’s just something different than the plate-wearing killers I’m used to playing. Judging by the Crash Course video, things don’t change all that much at endgame either.

The drawback to leveling so quickly is that my professions are falling behind. I only have one – Mining – but I’m now in zones I can’t mine in because my skill level is too low. My playtime is still limited, so I can either continue leveling my monk, or go back and level my professions. I had considered getting skinning as well, given the amount of animals I was killing. I’d get xp leveling both professions (not so much with the skinning until the animals turned at least green), but I’d make more by completing a single quest at level.

I also started running dungeons. The xp is nice, the other players are hit and miss. No comments about anything I’ve done, good or bad (but how often do random players in a group make positive comments about anyone other than themselves anyway). No news is good news I guess.

The PVP is something I still want to do. But I admit, it’s frustrating. It’s tough running to a flag, or a node, and being the only one nearby. You look at the map and see your teammates either clustered together somewhere way off from where they should be, or so spread across the map it looks like the zone has measles.

Serenity now, serenity now.

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Tags: Dungeons, Leveling, Monk, Professions, PVE, PVP, Questing, Windwalker

Monk PVP Leveling

Aug 5

Posted by Donny Rokk

As you can see, there have been changes with Merculees. Where to start…

Low Level Monk PVP?

After running a few quests in Westfall I decided that Merculees the Shirtless would queue up for some PVP action. I was curious was the XP was like in BG’s. I didn’t have to wait long before Merc appeared in Warsong Gulch. No one commented on his cloth shoulders, or even his lack of shirt. Maybe they were intimidated at his manliness. Maybe they just didn’t care. In any case, the horn sounded and off to the bloody races we went.

Low level PVP is a real treat when you only have three buttons to mash. Despite still having only a vague understanding of how to Monk, I found myself slowly figuring things after multiple gruesome deaths. Before I knew it, we had won Warsong Gulch and I popped out of the Battleground and back into the farmer’s field where the quests had been taking place. I looked at the xp bar and was disappointed to see it had only moved a few ticks. A bit dejected, I was finishing up the quest I was running when I happened to look at my character pane. Was that right? I scrolled back through the event window and realized that, yes, I had done more than get a few bubbles of xp. I had gone up an entire level!

No way. That couldn’t be right, could it?

I queued up again for another BG, and got back in right away. Another fifteen minutes of dying, less than before at least, and another win for the Alliance. Boom, another level! Also, more honor in the bag. At this rate, I thought to myself, I could be ready to buy some sweet transmog gear – or actual useful gear – in no time!

With each battleground win, Merc leveled. Not bad for twenty minutes of work (if that). I was so impressed with the leveling in battlegrounds that I stopped to weigh the pros and cons between leveling through BG’s rather than through questing.

Pros:

Decent XP – One level per BG win, half a level per loss.

Quick – twenty minutes max, and I didn’t have much of a wait once I entered the queue.

Honor – Sure I would cap eventually, but I was working for something at low level that would benefit me at higher levels.

Higher levels? Was I actually thinking about taking this monk past the level twenty cap I had initially placed on him?

Cons

Level Cap – I wasn’t planning on taking him further than level twenty, so the honor wouldn’t really be beneficial.

Inexperience – There may have been only a couple of buttons to mash, but I still didn’t know what the Hell I was doing in PVP.

Gear – I was missing out on quest gear or items that would fill in the blanks left by the heirloom gear.

Reading that list, the cons really came out weak. Plus, by focusing on leveling through BG’s I knew exactly how much time I had to commit, which is good if you only have so much time to play. At best, I could commit to a twenty minute session to gain a level. At worse, probably forty. Depending on the quest, I couldn’t guarantee the amount of game time I’d need to level. So to maximize my xp/time ratio, PVP was going to be the way to go.

Dress For Success

If I was going to make a serious run with Merculees, I decided that I needed to get all the xp bonuses I could get. That meant it was time to get the man a shirt. Step one was using some of the Justice Points on Herculees to buy the leather heirloom chest piece. Step two was mailing it to my Enchanter on another server. With the new (new to me at least) change where any level enchant could be put on an heirloom item, I dropped Greater Stats on it and let it scale down. I sent it to Merculees and got him ready to party.

The Lazy Man’s Way To PVP

Like I said, there were only a few buttons to master when it came to playing the PVP game with a low level Monk. Roll to the target, Jab to get Chi, Tiger Palm for the buff, then Blackout Kick. Fists of Fury would be an option if the target was rooted or otherwise incapacitated. If Merc was incapacitated, there was the Human racial or Monk talent to get him free. Seemed simple enough, but it got to be annoying to try and get everything working as smoothly as everyone who continued to gut Merc.

There had to be a better way. Between Master Youtube and Sensei Google, I found the answer.

And by answer I mean a one-button macro that I could hammer on to do everything I needed to.

I went to Curse and WoWInterface to find an addon that would let me extend the macro character limitation. SuperDuperMacro was one of the one suggested. If you’re so inclined to try this yourself, feel free to pick it up.

After that, it was just a matter of copying and pasting into the box to generate my own single button killswitch.

The Killswitch Macro:

#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=0.3 0,0,0,0,
/castsequence reset=0.3 0,0,0, jab
/castsequence reset=0.3 0,0, tiger palm
/castsequence reset=0.3 0, blackout kick
/castsequence reset=0.3 rising sun kick
/use energizing brew
/use tigereye brew
/use 13
/use 14

Here’s the explanation of the macro, more or less:

Now this macro was obviously not designed for low level monks. Rising Sun Kick, Brews, and Trinkets are not even on the character radar. But Jab, Tiger Palm, and Blackout Kick certainly is. In theory, the button would cast or use whatever was applicable, which meant it could still work for me.

This macro is also not for the PVP pros out there, or even players who like to squeeze every drop of dps out of their character. This is for people like me, who are okay with just being somewhat competitive (or at least borderline functional).

Results

With ten hours of casual /played, Merculees dinged 22. Most of the level ups I didn’t even see since the battleground results board would pop up and block the notification. The only time I’d really notice the “ding” was when a new ability would float onto the action bar. From reading various PVP blogs, Merc just stepped into abilities where he could really shine in PVP.

But is the experiment over? Will I continue with my Human Monk, or should I start one Horde-side? I’m having fun with him, and I’m not doing horribly in PVP. I may continue with the Main Monk and see how thing progress. At some point, maybe the learning curve will catch up with me. Maybe I’ll get sick of PVP, or get tired of getting stabbed in the neck/back. Until then, low level PVP with Merculees the windwalker Monk may be the way spend some quality time.

Quality Time and PVP. Never thought I’d see the day, at least for me.

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Tags: BGs, Class, Enchants, Heirloom, Leveling, Low Level PVP, Macro, Monk, One-Shot Macro, PVP, Warsong Gulch, Windwalker Monk PVP

What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been

May 7

Posted by Donny Rokk

Apparently the Internet is not filled with assholes.

Let me start by saying that this post is a bit late, but this is the price we pay when we have other things to do. But I think that by letting this post soak a bit, stew in its own juices you might say, it has had the potential to turn into something more. Something delicious.

I’ll start by posting this –

That, as you might have noticed, is a purple proto-drake. You obtain said creature by completing the Meta Achievement What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been. That’s right, you too can fly Barney the Dinosaur if you complete a few (like, just about all) of the World Event Achievements.

It’s what I did, you see. Well, I did and I didn’t.

First, the “What I Did” part –

School of Hard Knocks, the nightmare of an achievement, was the last hurdle for me. And let me tell you Internet, PVP players are not cool with PVE folks dragging their kids through a battleground. BG after BG, I’d hear in raid chat that people resented the fact we were there, that they were not going to help us complete our stupid objective, and as far as they were concerned we Care Bears could all just roll over and die in a ditch.

(Incidentally that last part was only voiced once, BUT YOU GUYS WORDS CAN HURT OK!)

School In Session

I finished two parts of the School of Hard Knocks achievement pretty quickly – Assault a flag in Arathi Basin and Assault a tower in Alterac Valley. The flag was simple enough; just race out of the gate and get the flag. The Alterac Valley tower was a bit different. I ran into the tower and there were a bunch of Alliance folks standing there by the flag. I watched them and waited for them to attack. When they didn’t immediately try to stab me in the eyes or fire lighting bolts at my testicles, I suspected these folks might be on the same page as me. So I rolled up and capped their flag without any hostility on their part.

Naturally I was killed as soon as I left the tower.

Punch In The Eye (of the Storm)

Capturing a flag in Eye of the Storm took some time, but even more luck. After about six of these BG’s, I understood the strategy the opposition would use. They would send two people to capture towers, and send the rest to stand by the flag and murder the shit out of anyone who showed up with an orphan. See, if you had an orphan it was a safe bet that you weren’t a PVP’er, and therefore didn’t have PVP gear. Under those circumstances, getting anywhere near a flag was akin to sticking your head into a wolverine’s cage: you were going to get ripped to pieces, it was going to hurt, and there was no way around it.

Lady Luck decided to clock in after her obvious drinking binge and gave me a drunken wink while she showed some leg to the opposition. The flag respawned… and no one was there.

No on except me.

I grabbed the flag and ran like my ass was on fire.

Now I’m not a PVP guy. I know warriors have all sorts of tricks, trinkets, and abilities to help them survive. But at that moment, with a herd of pissed off Alliance people attacking me and trying to kill me, all I could think was COMEONCOMEONRUNRUNRUNRUNDON’TDIEAAAAAAHHHHHH.

Somehow, I capped it. With Hordies healing me, running interference, and just being there for me, I capped the flag.

I finished off the BG and don’t even remember if we won or not. I still had one battle(ground) left to fight.

Friends in Low Places

Warsong Gulch.

You’d think this achievement would be easy enough to do. Just fill up the flag room with Hordies, wait for an Alliance player to run in, let him grab the flag, kill his guts out, return flag. Easy peasy.

Not so much if the Hordies don’t care about orphans. Heartless bastards.

In retrospect it might have been better to get this one done on the first day. More people would have been doing the achievement, and probably could have opted for the pile on and kill strategy. I ran it in the middle of the week, after the big glut of achievement hunters already had what they needed. So when everyone charged out to grab the Alliance flag and all the glory that goes with it, only three of us sat back with our orphans.

Great. You know what works worse than three PVE players hanging back to “protect” a flag? Having a druid flanked with rogues roll in like SWAT and take the flag, leaving only disappointed corpses behind.

I didn’t want to admit defeat. Maybe the next BG would be luckier. But I suspected that Lady Luck had passed out for the evening, leaving me with the hangover.

Death after death, gnome rogues unwrapped my entrails like it was Christmas morning. Side note – people who make fun of (or hate on) gnomes either a) have never faced a gnome rogue in a BG, or b) have had their ass handed to them by a gnome rogue in a BG. They’re small enough that when they cut you open, they can crawl inside your torso and make you dance like a bloody hand puppet.

In an act of suicidal desperation, I chased after the druid flag carrier. I chased her right into the heart of the Alliance fortress. She stopped in the tunnel and I started attacking her. Now was my chance! Now was my best and only chance!

I then watched her drop the flag right in front of me. In a panic, thinking I’d killed her or somehow knocked it out of her hands, I picked it up and returned it. This was promptly followed by the achievement spam, and then by my death as the gnome rogues caught up with their flag runner and ran me through.

This was the “What I Didn’t Do” part of the achievement. I didn’t kill the flag runner. She gave me the flag because she saw my orphan and knew I needed the achievement.