I have recently come to the conclusion that PvP guilds are doomed...at least on Normal servers. I make this sweeping generalization off of my own experience, YMMV, but I have generally found the following rule to be true:
When someone needs a group, they go to their guild for PvE content, and to their friends for PvP content.
Nobody says "Hey guys, let's all get together and go raid BH!" Well, ok, maybe they do and I'm just not seeing it, but I think by and large the first impulse is to go to your guild chat first. And it's a simple reasoning -- I think people are selective (reasonably) about who they put on their friends lists, and usually when you open that up you don't see 9 friends all online at the same time, in a capable level of gear, to go run something for PvE. But you can PvP with any number of people.
And precisely BECAUSE less organization is needed for PvP(on balance; rated BGs are a different animal), people are loathe to sacrifice their PvE guilds to join a PvP one -- how will they advance their PvE game, EVER, if they're stuck in a PvP guild? Especially when they could (or perceive that they could) meet both their PvE and PvP goals by being in a PvE guild? Speaking as someone who has both tried to create a PvP guild, and also someone who has been a part of (I think) most of the attempted PvP guilds on my server, all of which sputtered out and died, it doesn't look like a format which works. It is possible that rated BGs will change that, once they acquire a secure place in the community. In the meantime, I would like to share with you a story about me. It's a successful community story, and it's about PvP. Rare, I know.
Once upon a time, there was a group of friends. They liked to PvE together, but unfortunately they also all had a lot of alts and it was kind of unreasonable to try and have every one of them friended so that you'd know when they were on. This was before RealID -- I can see you with that suggestion on your lips -- and so we created a custom channel, joined it on all of our alts, and thus we could communicate together in that channel no matter who you were on, without having to devote 30% of your FL to one person's alts. Thus was born /KITTEN* chat.
*not the real name.
My wife was in a hardcore raiding guild at the time, as I recall, and their healing team used a custom chat channel to communicate during raids if they didn't want to clutter up normal raid chat with their healing nonsense. Or maybe they were using it to convey subtle healer-wisdom like "Person X is going to drop really low on this fight, but that's because he's an idiot who stands in fire, so don't heal him." One of the things that worked well with /kitten was that it gave us a way to communicate with several friends at once -- instead of whispering each individually -- who all happened to be in different guilds.
And I got to thinking...well that's an awfully useful device. And not very many people use it, I don't think. How could I use a channel to my advantage?
I think you can probably see where I'm going with this -- when you PvP with friends, or are trying to on a large scale, it would be nice if you had a way to grab them all up at once instead of having to whisper several people one at a time. So the next time I ran some premades (that went well, incidentally), I suggested at the end that they all type
/join pvppremade
so that we could join up again the next weekend. Which we did, and it was also successful. It started small, but the more we did the more people we got into the channel. Inertia carries! The real astonishment of the channel is that taking a two-month break from WoW, I came back to find the channel still in existence, with several people still in it. I don't think it was being actively used, but the point is the network was still there for me to pick up the pieces and start reassembling premades fairly quickly.
I highly recommend this strategy -- it's low-risk, most people will join a channel if you invite them. It's not like they're leaving their guild, after all. You don't need to do any special /create pvppremade -- just type /join pvppremade (or whatever you decide to call it), and if you're the first person there it will create the channel automatically.
The downside is that you can't control it; the "Owner" of the channel seems to be the person who's been in it longest, devolving to the next-longest once that person leaves. And you can't keep people out, except via the headache-inducing method of implementing (or changing) a password on it, and then informing everyone you want to keep in the channel of said password.
That's my method, and I thought it might help other PvPers out there struggling to find groups to run with. I'd be interested to hear what other people have done to cope with the general "I can't leave my PVE guild for PVP" sentiment!
Showing posts with label pvp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pvp. Show all posts
Friday, January 21, 2011
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Basic Resto PvP Tips
Aloha people, having been 85 for ... uh ... six days now, I am now totally knowledgeable and educatable about some PvP tips for trees. Although I guess they're not trees anymore.
SPEC:
I am running with 2/3/36 currently, as a minor modification from one of Lissanna's specs on her site. I am unlikely to change this when the patch hits. I pulled the point out of Swift Rejuv to put the last point into Perseverance.
There are points in Nature's Bounty already, which whill become much more valuable to our PvP once the patch hits. For PvP, faster is almost always better, and turning our efficient heal into a faster heal is big plus on my book. I think in BGs currently I'm getting kicked out of HT / Nourish probably a good...third to half of the time.
Malfurion's Gift I don't think is particularly valuable. OOC is nice for PvE, but over in the PvP area we've been dealing with gimped mana pools for a LONG time in order to get the resilience to survive, so use your tools you've always been using and don't worry particularly about getting OOM. In a BG, die. You rez with full mana ;-). In arena...get out of combat and drink. Those are standard tactics and they haven't changed. You are not locked into combat for an extended period of time like you are in PvE. The other PvP talents are more valuable, drop this for them.
Fury of Stormrage is, IMO, lackluster. Mana, again, is not really an issue we have the leisure to worry about, and wrath isn't a good thing to cast unless you're tree-formed anyway. It's the non-specced cast time that kills us on this (which tree form already fixes), not the mana cost. The 12% chance to proc an instant SF sounds like a lot but you're rather limited by RNG there to make this really worthwhile. Wrath is something you snag when you have a few spare seconds, not something you can generally afford to spam until you proc that off.
I'm jury-out on the T1 talent Blessing of the Grove. I can see the MF buff being useful for gunning down people running away in arena -- I specced 21 points into balance for that purpose back in wrath -- but I don't see where the viable points can come from. Possibly out of GotEM; what with *everything* refreshing our LB stacks (post-patch), the loss of the bloom buff may not be as yuck as it initially seems.
ROTATION:
Ha, you people are silly...rotation in PvP. Cast what's faster. Staying back is more important in wrath than it used to be, what with our much-heavier reliance on cast times. Don't be in the thick of things!
ToL if there's a mage around. I discovered to my dismay in arena that druids no longer have immunity from sheeping...you can't shapeshift out of it anymore. I'm pretty sure if you're already IN a form, you can't be sheeped. But be wary! Mages are not your friends anymore. I am told reliably that the PTR patch notes have been updated to no longer confer sheeping immunity when in ToL...gg blizz... We do have a bit of vengeance in that we can cleanse the sheeps off other people now (<3 Nature's Cure!). I think maybe mage / tree may have finally reached its viability point in 2s... *hope hope*. Tangent: 5-10 this week to start the season, which was actually really good I thought considering that we were 2 months out of practice. And that between us we had a combined 1600 resilience (1200 for me, 400 for kity). You could almost call it 6-9, as I missed the queue on one of them and Kity in her glorious mageyness still managed to kill one of the opposing team without me there. IN SQUISHY CLOTH. So if I hadn't missed the queue...probably a win.
Also: if you are at a node, use Wild Mushrooms on the flag! I know they're practically worthless in PVE at the moment, but when you're sitting there waiting for people to show up and attack you, it's not like you have anything better to do...and they're an excellent emergency-flag-tag-stopper. They won't kill anyone, but they might buy you the time you need to get someone over to the flag who can. And you'll be healing that person as they do, right? RIGHT?
Stampeding Roar is useful in a flag-running situation in TP or WSG, but elsewise treat it like a second dash CD for solo-benefit only.
GLYPHS:
...are mostly the same as in PvE. I have a major glyph slotted for Barkskin still, but that's a personal choice. I think for PvP the major (pun intended) requirements are that you put into Entangling Roots for the insta-cast, and into Treant for the camouflage I mentioned in my last post. I know, I just said a minor glyph was required...that makes me a special internet snowflake, tell me you've read anywhere else that someone required you to pick up a minor glyph ;-).
Glyph of Regrowth is still not worth it, I don't think, though I may need to do some more experimentation with it. Despite PvP placing a higher value on regrowth than PvE does, the glyph retains the same trouble -- it will auto-refresh itself *during the period of the hot* if they fall under X% health, and the hot only lasts six seconds. Window's too narrow to make this one a good pick. You're still not going to be blanketing this around, and the gains are therefore less than using your more standard PvE prime glyph selection.
Gearing to be discussed in a later post :-). Also a foray into the Rated BGs this weekend which will hopefully go well *crosses fingers*
SPEC:
I am running with 2/3/36 currently, as a minor modification from one of Lissanna's specs on her site. I am unlikely to change this when the patch hits. I pulled the point out of Swift Rejuv to put the last point into Perseverance.
There are points in Nature's Bounty already, which whill become much more valuable to our PvP once the patch hits. For PvP, faster is almost always better, and turning our efficient heal into a faster heal is big plus on my book. I think in BGs currently I'm getting kicked out of HT / Nourish probably a good...third to half of the time.
Malfurion's Gift I don't think is particularly valuable. OOC is nice for PvE, but over in the PvP area we've been dealing with gimped mana pools for a LONG time in order to get the resilience to survive, so use your tools you've always been using and don't worry particularly about getting OOM. In a BG, die. You rez with full mana ;-). In arena...get out of combat and drink. Those are standard tactics and they haven't changed. You are not locked into combat for an extended period of time like you are in PvE. The other PvP talents are more valuable, drop this for them.
Fury of Stormrage is, IMO, lackluster. Mana, again, is not really an issue we have the leisure to worry about, and wrath isn't a good thing to cast unless you're tree-formed anyway. It's the non-specced cast time that kills us on this (which tree form already fixes), not the mana cost. The 12% chance to proc an instant SF sounds like a lot but you're rather limited by RNG there to make this really worthwhile. Wrath is something you snag when you have a few spare seconds, not something you can generally afford to spam until you proc that off.
I'm jury-out on the T1 talent Blessing of the Grove. I can see the MF buff being useful for gunning down people running away in arena -- I specced 21 points into balance for that purpose back in wrath -- but I don't see where the viable points can come from. Possibly out of GotEM; what with *everything* refreshing our LB stacks (post-patch), the loss of the bloom buff may not be as yuck as it initially seems.
ROTATION:
Ha, you people are silly...rotation in PvP. Cast what's faster. Staying back is more important in wrath than it used to be, what with our much-heavier reliance on cast times. Don't be in the thick of things!
Also: if you are at a node, use Wild Mushrooms on the flag! I know they're practically worthless in PVE at the moment, but when you're sitting there waiting for people to show up and attack you, it's not like you have anything better to do...and they're an excellent emergency-flag-tag-stopper. They won't kill anyone, but they might buy you the time you need to get someone over to the flag who can. And you'll be healing that person as they do, right? RIGHT?
Stampeding Roar is useful in a flag-running situation in TP or WSG, but elsewise treat it like a second dash CD for solo-benefit only.
GLYPHS:
...are mostly the same as in PvE. I have a major glyph slotted for Barkskin still, but that's a personal choice. I think for PvP the major (pun intended) requirements are that you put into Entangling Roots for the insta-cast, and into Treant for the camouflage I mentioned in my last post. I know, I just said a minor glyph was required...that makes me a special internet snowflake, tell me you've read anywhere else that someone required you to pick up a minor glyph ;-).
Glyph of Regrowth is still not worth it, I don't think, though I may need to do some more experimentation with it. Despite PvP placing a higher value on regrowth than PvE does, the glyph retains the same trouble -- it will auto-refresh itself *during the period of the hot* if they fall under X% health, and the hot only lasts six seconds. Window's too narrow to make this one a good pick. You're still not going to be blanketing this around, and the gains are therefore less than using your more standard PvE prime glyph selection.
Gearing to be discussed in a later post :-). Also a foray into the Rated BGs this weekend which will hopefully go well *crosses fingers*
Monday, September 14, 2009
Thoughts on WG Zerging
So as I've been trying to record numbers for Wintergrasp I've begun noticing a trend. Simple, deadly trend. It goes something like this:
When we attack in two places, we win.
When we try to keep forcing through one path to the keep, we lose.
I think that there's a certain merit in the One Path, One Win mentality, in that it groups up your force for maximum effort in the smallest space. I think it's also worth considering that WG changed a while back with the addition of the southern towers actually meaning something, and that the corresponding point to our maximum effort in one spot, is that it makes it really easy for the horde to figure out where to put *their* maximum effort. Almost every offensive game I've been in recently, even the ones we won, resulted in the loss of our southern towers, to the point where I think you can almost say that it's axiomatic that you have 20 minutes, not 30, to capture the keep. And whereas before you could overcome horde defenses by hard-pushing through two walls and getting to the keep, I am not sure that that remains a viable alternative. Time favors the defense.
But if you mount a secondary attack, even if that's only a diversion, you force the horde to split their defenses -- and if you THEN mount a concerted effort on one side, you may be able to break through before they can switch people back over off the diversionary side.
It's interesting that that seems to be at such a complete contradiction to strand of the ancients, the BG most like WG, where you *do* want to mass everyone at one place. I think that may be b/c the map is smaller on SOTA, and so it's easier for the defense to switch from one side to the next and cover a split-attack. I find that a good way to win strand against a split attack is to pile your defense on one side and wipe out the tanks there; you'll lose the other front-gate, but with only two tanks (and damaged ones at that) you can regroup and stop them at the second gate (or lolth forbid, the yellow gate) and the loss of momentum is often irretrievable.
Thoughts to think on *shrug*
When we attack in two places, we win.
When we try to keep forcing through one path to the keep, we lose.
I think that there's a certain merit in the One Path, One Win mentality, in that it groups up your force for maximum effort in the smallest space. I think it's also worth considering that WG changed a while back with the addition of the southern towers actually meaning something, and that the corresponding point to our maximum effort in one spot, is that it makes it really easy for the horde to figure out where to put *their* maximum effort. Almost every offensive game I've been in recently, even the ones we won, resulted in the loss of our southern towers, to the point where I think you can almost say that it's axiomatic that you have 20 minutes, not 30, to capture the keep. And whereas before you could overcome horde defenses by hard-pushing through two walls and getting to the keep, I am not sure that that remains a viable alternative. Time favors the defense.
But if you mount a secondary attack, even if that's only a diversion, you force the horde to split their defenses -- and if you THEN mount a concerted effort on one side, you may be able to break through before they can switch people back over off the diversionary side.
It's interesting that that seems to be at such a complete contradiction to strand of the ancients, the BG most like WG, where you *do* want to mass everyone at one place. I think that may be b/c the map is smaller on SOTA, and so it's easier for the defense to switch from one side to the next and cover a split-attack. I find that a good way to win strand against a split attack is to pile your defense on one side and wipe out the tanks there; you'll lose the other front-gate, but with only two tanks (and damaged ones at that) you can regroup and stop them at the second gate (or lolth forbid, the yellow gate) and the loss of momentum is often irretrievable.
Thoughts to think on *shrug*
Sunday, December 21, 2008
PvP Boomkin Builds
So I was looking yesterday, and noticed that wowwiki has finally got around to doing some basic boomkin builds that should "get you started" on the pvp front. I'm not really particularly happy with either one of them, though I recognise the need to spec partially into the resto tree to get Omen of Clarity at least, and not go 71 points into balance like I'm currently doing (hey, I like to explore my tree fully). Anyway:
Firstly, the more "serious" pvp build, I like this one less than the other but it has its benefits. I really dislike that this tree tosses both insect swarm, the most mana-efficient dot in the game, and eclipse which I find to be a dps boost. Begin controversy arguing now. I agree with the elimination of starfall, I have that currently and I can count on 0 hands the number of times that I've cast it and not had it get me into exponentially more trouble with the huge range on it. I understand you could put a major glyph into it but I'm already packing the SF & Wrath ones, with the third already slotted to MF after I calculated it would give me a 300-point damage boost (lose 600 from the initial, gain 900 in the dot part). I could toss the wrath glyph I suppose but it's not that worthwhile a talent to me. I'm eh on the elimination of IFF and BoP -- both dropping your chance to hit. I particularly like that IFF when talented gives you an extra 3% crit chance on the target, and it brings you to a 99% hit chance which is pretty damned good. I could probably spare BoP with the hit dagger from the Kirin Tor, at least till I pick up some Arena weapons which probably won't have any hit rating on them. Gale Winds I think is not a particularly useful talent, the added cyclone range is nice but I don't think it's going to be that useful in arena where you close gaps too quickly for any range to really be important.
Second build, allegedly a mixmash if you need more pve viability, I like more. I like this stuff we're getting out of the resto tree, I hadn't realised they added boomkin benefits to some of those talents so it's good to spec into both furor and master shapeshifter. Intensity's a must, obviously, so I would keep this resto side of the tree how it is. Many of the same complaints apply to this build though at least they kept insect swarm. Dreamstate I'm not sure is that important, I don't have OOM issues in Arenas or BGs, deaths are too quick, and you already have Intensity so...
I think I'm going to try this one when I hit 80. Yes I did throw some stuff into Dreamstate after all, but only b/c I had nowhere else to put the last couple talents (same rationale on Owlkin frenzy). Keep my eclipse and the hit chance at 100% (I guess you never know when that extra 1% might be important...).
I wish I knew more about Nature's Splendor -- it increases the length of your periodic spells...does it also increase the damage/healing so that you have the same amount per tick? Or is it the same amount just spread over a longer time, ie, you get less per tick? Nobody seems to have any definitive comments on it one way or the other.
Firstly, the more "serious" pvp build, I like this one less than the other but it has its benefits. I really dislike that this tree tosses both insect swarm, the most mana-efficient dot in the game, and eclipse which I find to be a dps boost. Begin controversy arguing now. I agree with the elimination of starfall, I have that currently and I can count on 0 hands the number of times that I've cast it and not had it get me into exponentially more trouble with the huge range on it. I understand you could put a major glyph into it but I'm already packing the SF & Wrath ones, with the third already slotted to MF after I calculated it would give me a 300-point damage boost (lose 600 from the initial, gain 900 in the dot part). I could toss the wrath glyph I suppose but it's not that worthwhile a talent to me. I'm eh on the elimination of IFF and BoP -- both dropping your chance to hit. I particularly like that IFF when talented gives you an extra 3% crit chance on the target, and it brings you to a 99% hit chance which is pretty damned good. I could probably spare BoP with the hit dagger from the Kirin Tor, at least till I pick up some Arena weapons which probably won't have any hit rating on them. Gale Winds I think is not a particularly useful talent, the added cyclone range is nice but I don't think it's going to be that useful in arena where you close gaps too quickly for any range to really be important.
Second build, allegedly a mixmash if you need more pve viability, I like more. I like this stuff we're getting out of the resto tree, I hadn't realised they added boomkin benefits to some of those talents so it's good to spec into both furor and master shapeshifter. Intensity's a must, obviously, so I would keep this resto side of the tree how it is. Many of the same complaints apply to this build though at least they kept insect swarm. Dreamstate I'm not sure is that important, I don't have OOM issues in Arenas or BGs, deaths are too quick, and you already have Intensity so...
I think I'm going to try this one when I hit 80. Yes I did throw some stuff into Dreamstate after all, but only b/c I had nowhere else to put the last couple talents (same rationale on Owlkin frenzy). Keep my eclipse and the hit chance at 100% (I guess you never know when that extra 1% might be important...).
I wish I knew more about Nature's Splendor -- it increases the length of your periodic spells...does it also increase the damage/healing so that you have the same amount per tick? Or is it the same amount just spread over a longer time, ie, you get less per tick? Nobody seems to have any definitive comments on it one way or the other.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
*drool* PvP gear!
PvP gear is out as of Tuesday, and with it my flirtation with 10-man raiding. Back to what I know and love, Boomkin pvp! I think that I'll restrict my PvE gear to drops off heroics, especially as that lets me continue my exclusivity viz a viz not grouping with death knights.
There seems to be a slightly skewed requirement here with regard to arena ratings, to wit --
No Rating Moderate Rating Uber Rating
Gear Savage Hateful Deadly
Accessories Hateful Deadly n/a?
And of course there are currently no weapons available besides the Deadly ones which is ridiculous as they have a 2030 rating requirement on them.
If you take the simple route to getting savage gear, ie., mixing with arena points instead of trying to do straight up honor which is much more expensive, you should be able to get full gear & accessories after the trifling total of 347,200 honor and 1625 arena points. Which is not terribly bad considering that you could get I think around 5000 honor every four matches, and you could pick up a piece of gear every week assuming you did the arena matches. 278 matches later, you have a full gear set! To say nothing of what you start with, which for me right now equates to approximately 25k honor. It's really nice I think that they dropped the mark requirement on any pvp pieces, reducing marks to the sole point of turn-ins for yet more honor. I admire what they did before which seemed like an incentive to get you to do certain bgs, but I don't think you really lose that here since you'd still need to do all the bgs about equally (except AV, praise Lolth that was the one they dropped in exchange for strand of the ancients) in order to have an even turn-in rate.
Gear, no choice on -- obviously it's the savage wyrmhide all the way. WRT to accessories though there's a little bit of choice, at least on some of the gear. Do you want hit, crit, haste, or mp5? Hit is *just* about worthless I think, as you'd expect with a primarily pve stat. There's a 96% hit chance against an equivalent level, which all the BGs are at 80, so you only need 4% more and boomkin have an automatic 4% from talents, and bumped to 7 if you bother (or have time) to cast IFF on your target. Ditto the worthlessness of mp5 or spirit on gear -- you die so fast in a BG there's no way you run through your entire mana pool...I don't think it's happened more than a handful of times in all the BGs I've done, though on occasion it has occurred in longer-running arena matches. So...crit / haste / spellpower? Spellpower trumps on importance I think, but between the other two what do you do? I'm inclined to give a slight edge to haste here, if only because people are stacking serious resilience nowadays which somewhat lowers the effectiveness of crit; but on the other hand it's an extremely useful pve stat and much as I might like to, I don't spend 100% of my time in BGs so :-).
The savage gear nets --
blue xxx
red xxx
yellow xx
meta x
There is also a prismatic one that you could add to your belt slot with a belt buckle...at least I assume any serious person would do so.
For the meta I'm tossed between the Ember Skyflare (25 sp, 2% int) and the Enigmatic Skyflare (21 crit, 10% reduced snare/root). I think the ember is probably better for overall usage, especially with druids slipping out of roots through shifting and the medallion of the alliance for getting out of fear. If I start running into a ton of locks in arena though I'll probably switch out for the Impassive Skyflare (21 crit, 10% reduced fear).
As per usual I think we're shooting for blue-int, red-spellpower, yellow-crit. The yellow I'm figuring on Perfect Smooth Sun Crystal (+14 crit), for red Runed Scarlet Ruby (+19 spellpower), and blue...as usual blue provides trouble, tending to be more PvE-useful than PvP, tons of spirit and mp5-based gems, and little to choose from pvp-wise. There is of course the old fallback to straight stam boosts a la Solid Star of Elune...but I'm more inclined I think to go with something like Forceful Forest Emerald (8 haste, 12 stam) or Jagged Forest Emerald (8 crit, 12 stam) so I'm at least getting something caster-useful out of it.
My guild recently had a Vent Meeting where I was yet again reassured that This Time things will be, you know, different, and we're going to be Super Serial about PvP / arenas, etc. My confidence in such promises dwindles every time it comes up and goes unfulfilled. But the beauty of arenas, of course, is that I don't *need* my guild to do them. Where it suffers is trying to do BG premades, a chimeric dream that I have that the few of us pvpers in the guild have never been able to convince the rest of the folks to come along for. I rather suspect that I'm going to have to go with my fallback on this one, trying to do premades with Meridius, though the chat channel they allegedly created for that purpose seems to have died as I haven't heard anything on it for a long-o time.
Time to hit 80 already so I can start implementing this :-)
There seems to be a slightly skewed requirement here with regard to arena ratings, to wit --
No Rating Moderate Rating Uber Rating
Gear Savage Hateful Deadly
Accessories Hateful Deadly n/a?
And of course there are currently no weapons available besides the Deadly ones which is ridiculous as they have a 2030 rating requirement on them.
If you take the simple route to getting savage gear, ie., mixing with arena points instead of trying to do straight up honor which is much more expensive, you should be able to get full gear & accessories after the trifling total of 347,200 honor and 1625 arena points. Which is not terribly bad considering that you could get I think around 5000 honor every four matches, and you could pick up a piece of gear every week assuming you did the arena matches. 278 matches later, you have a full gear set! To say nothing of what you start with, which for me right now equates to approximately 25k honor. It's really nice I think that they dropped the mark requirement on any pvp pieces, reducing marks to the sole point of turn-ins for yet more honor. I admire what they did before which seemed like an incentive to get you to do certain bgs, but I don't think you really lose that here since you'd still need to do all the bgs about equally (except AV, praise Lolth that was the one they dropped in exchange for strand of the ancients) in order to have an even turn-in rate.
Gear, no choice on -- obviously it's the savage wyrmhide all the way. WRT to accessories though there's a little bit of choice, at least on some of the gear. Do you want hit, crit, haste, or mp5? Hit is *just* about worthless I think, as you'd expect with a primarily pve stat. There's a 96% hit chance against an equivalent level, which all the BGs are at 80, so you only need 4% more and boomkin have an automatic 4% from talents, and bumped to 7 if you bother (or have time) to cast IFF on your target. Ditto the worthlessness of mp5 or spirit on gear -- you die so fast in a BG there's no way you run through your entire mana pool...I don't think it's happened more than a handful of times in all the BGs I've done, though on occasion it has occurred in longer-running arena matches. So...crit / haste / spellpower? Spellpower trumps on importance I think, but between the other two what do you do? I'm inclined to give a slight edge to haste here, if only because people are stacking serious resilience nowadays which somewhat lowers the effectiveness of crit; but on the other hand it's an extremely useful pve stat and much as I might like to, I don't spend 100% of my time in BGs so :-).
The savage gear nets --
blue xxx
red xxx
yellow xx
meta x
There is also a prismatic one that you could add to your belt slot with a belt buckle...at least I assume any serious person would do so.
For the meta I'm tossed between the Ember Skyflare (25 sp, 2% int) and the Enigmatic Skyflare (21 crit, 10% reduced snare/root). I think the ember is probably better for overall usage, especially with druids slipping out of roots through shifting and the medallion of the alliance for getting out of fear. If I start running into a ton of locks in arena though I'll probably switch out for the Impassive Skyflare (21 crit, 10% reduced fear).
As per usual I think we're shooting for blue-int, red-spellpower, yellow-crit. The yellow I'm figuring on Perfect Smooth Sun Crystal (+14 crit), for red Runed Scarlet Ruby (+19 spellpower), and blue...as usual blue provides trouble, tending to be more PvE-useful than PvP, tons of spirit and mp5-based gems, and little to choose from pvp-wise. There is of course the old fallback to straight stam boosts a la Solid Star of Elune...but I'm more inclined I think to go with something like Forceful Forest Emerald (8 haste, 12 stam) or Jagged Forest Emerald (8 crit, 12 stam) so I'm at least getting something caster-useful out of it.
My guild recently had a Vent Meeting where I was yet again reassured that This Time things will be, you know, different, and we're going to be Super Serial about PvP / arenas, etc. My confidence in such promises dwindles every time it comes up and goes unfulfilled. But the beauty of arenas, of course, is that I don't *need* my guild to do them. Where it suffers is trying to do BG premades, a chimeric dream that I have that the few of us pvpers in the guild have never been able to convince the rest of the folks to come along for. I rather suspect that I'm going to have to go with my fallback on this one, trying to do premades with Meridius, though the chat channel they allegedly created for that purpose seems to have died as I haven't heard anything on it for a long-o time.
Time to hit 80 already so I can start implementing this :-)
Friday, December 12, 2008
Other shouts --
I found a nice blog the other day so if I may point other boomkin in the general direction of Gray Matter, I'm sure he'd appreciate the visits!
Also, on the Traumatic Shift front, I changed my mind and went for daggers instead on the vague and possibly unfounded idea that I'd be able to find more crit on a dagger than a mace. And also the fellow above seems to think the dagger from the Kirin Tor rep reward is pretty much one of the best pre-raiding one-handed weapons ever so that played a factor too. I got a nice off-hand to replace my AH junk yesterday by getting into a group for nexus and getting the Tome of ... something I don't remember the name of, off of Anomalus. Thanks to Telk, Sylene, Aldimere, and guildmate Xirlok for putting up with my anti-DK policy.
Strange but true story: had a conversation with Telk while I was looking for a group (difficult as a dps anyway, more so with said policy) which was actually fairly civil about why I refuse to group with DKs. So I noted that in an attempt to wrap up the conversation, something like "thank you for being so courteous, it's above the flak I usually get" and his response was all, "I guess you can be a bigest against dks...my is racist against trolls". Huwah? Reply to courtesy is to descend into calling me a bigot? Anyway I thought that was a write-off until Aldimere who was the leader of the group invited me in and look, there was Telk in the group. Weirdness. It almost makes me wonder if I could just shortcut the tiresome attempts of people to "convert" me to DKs by saying I'm a bigot. Hard to argue with that, right? The wife thinks otherwise, that it would intensify argument. I have not yet seen a good enough argument to convert me, the most cogent being "well so you're against warlocks too?". I think there's a fundamental difference between calling in demons from another plane and enslaving them to your will, and forcibly reanimating dead corpses and desecrating their post-death experience. Other people apparently would lump that in the same group. I split that on two reasons: one, I think there's a difference between enslaving an evil demon, and enslaving a good person. Fine line, yes, but wouldn't you feel better about making Hitler your personal slave and Mother Theresa, even if you hated slavery across the board? And two, from a practical standpoint I have to draw a line somewhere or I'd never be able to play. Excluding one class is tough but doable, even though it probably virtually excludes me from anything over a 5-man run, but excluding two would be impossible, I'd be reduced to solo play all the time. And that would suck as I've been making a slight priority shift in Ihra with the expansion so that I want him to have some good PvE gear as well as PvP gear. Prior to wrath, I walked around in a full set of PvP gear all the time with I think 2 rings and a set of bracers to switch out for PvE.
Also a shoutout to Carbonite, a lovely add-on. I downloaded it on the recommendation of some guildies who said it was better than Quest Helper, in order to power-level my mage Forol on my wife's server. I have been generally satisfied with it, even though the map supercedes Cartographer's and doesn't tell me instance levels anymore. But two days ago it came in amazingly handy. I was farming caribou meat in BT and I passed a 71 DK. In direct violation of my policy I allowed him to live because hey, he was 3 levels under me and I felt an odd stirring which was probably pity though I can't tell for certain. His response: to wait for 5-10 minutes until I was heavily engaged with two other mobs, and then jump me and kill me. I rezzed, and Carbonite via its interesting "friends list for gankers" told me where he was on the map, which was way far away and I'd've never found him by myself. I was able to hunt him down and murder him like a dog. For the record he was mounted and not engaged in any fighting at all so it was a much fairer fight than he gave me.
PvP notes on that fight: I again continue to hate how you have to kill unholy(? I think?) dks twice, first as themselves and then again as a ghoul. That's not cool, they're hard enough to kill anyway and then to give them an extra life adds to the unfairness. I'm still not sure what happened in dragonblight a few weeks ago where I had to kill a ganking DK three separate times before she died for good; wife came up with the theory that she had a soulstone on her maybe. I don't know but that needs some serious nerfing. Also I started the fight by rooting, which has generally been my answer to dk's having insane melee dps, stay as far away from that as possible. And he death-gripped me thus nullifying the roots. I understand that's on a 30-second cooldown so if i had to do that again I guess I would root, expect to be death-gripped, and shift to travel to get the distance back while my trees pounded on him.
Also, on the Traumatic Shift front, I changed my mind and went for daggers instead on the vague and possibly unfounded idea that I'd be able to find more crit on a dagger than a mace. And also the fellow above seems to think the dagger from the Kirin Tor rep reward is pretty much one of the best pre-raiding one-handed weapons ever so that played a factor too. I got a nice off-hand to replace my AH junk yesterday by getting into a group for nexus and getting the Tome of ... something I don't remember the name of, off of Anomalus. Thanks to Telk, Sylene, Aldimere, and guildmate Xirlok for putting up with my anti-DK policy.
Strange but true story: had a conversation with Telk while I was looking for a group (difficult as a dps anyway, more so with said policy) which was actually fairly civil about why I refuse to group with DKs. So I noted that in an attempt to wrap up the conversation, something like "thank you for being so courteous, it's above the flak I usually get" and his response was all, "I guess you can be a bigest against dks...my
Also a shoutout to Carbonite, a lovely add-on. I downloaded it on the recommendation of some guildies who said it was better than Quest Helper, in order to power-level my mage Forol on my wife's server. I have been generally satisfied with it, even though the map supercedes Cartographer's and doesn't tell me instance levels anymore. But two days ago it came in amazingly handy. I was farming caribou meat in BT and I passed a 71 DK. In direct violation of my policy I allowed him to live because hey, he was 3 levels under me and I felt an odd stirring which was probably pity though I can't tell for certain. His response: to wait for 5-10 minutes until I was heavily engaged with two other mobs, and then jump me and kill me. I rezzed, and Carbonite via its interesting "friends list for gankers" told me where he was on the map, which was way far away and I'd've never found him by myself. I was able to hunt him down and murder him like a dog. For the record he was mounted and not engaged in any fighting at all so it was a much fairer fight than he gave me.
PvP notes on that fight: I again continue to hate how you have to kill unholy(? I think?) dks twice, first as themselves and then again as a ghoul. That's not cool, they're hard enough to kill anyway and then to give them an extra life adds to the unfairness. I'm still not sure what happened in dragonblight a few weeks ago where I had to kill a ganking DK three separate times before she died for good; wife came up with the theory that she had a soulstone on her maybe. I don't know but that needs some serious nerfing. Also I started the fight by rooting, which has generally been my answer to dk's having insane melee dps, stay as far away from that as possible. And he death-gripped me thus nullifying the roots. I understand that's on a 30-second cooldown so if i had to do that again I guess I would root, expect to be death-gripped, and shift to travel to get the distance back while my trees pounded on him.
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