Specializing and You!

Why should you specialize?

Because you don’t have time to do everything! I could end the article here, but you might be disappointed.  Specializing in WoW is quite possibly the only chance a “casual” player has at accomplishing anything other than some Halloween candy and maybe holiday fruity cake. The point is there are two main ways to go here, three if you enjoy wreeking havoc on the in game economy.  However, I intend on briefly discussing PVP and PVE here and then will later write guides to help all the students, married to someone who doesn’t play wow, works five jobs, and has twenty-seven kids person(small exaggeration).

PvP

Player vs Player, Pwnzor vs Pwnzee, Nub vs n00b, call it what you will, but it is all we gamers have in the way of excising some sort of force and power over another person. In WoW PvP comes in the form of Battlegrounds, World PvP(ganking until WOTLK), and the amazing Arena.  The beautiful thing about BG’s and Arena is that each helps the other.  A player needs gear from both, experience from both, and bragging rights from both so play both.  The PvP forums will become your closest ally other than maybe your fellow teammate or energy drink.  After memorizing every forum post about your preferred class, a player must practice!

Practicing is where every PvPer casual or hardcore gets his edge and his ability to pwn nubs. However, it’s never enough to just play and play and play, a player must learn, observe, and understand why they lose a match and even why they win matches.  It’s true a person may lose since their gear is lame and Mr and Mrs Season 4 just slapped the *#%! out of them, but most of the time it’s because they had no idea what to do against the combo they faced and just assume it was a fluke or the other classes are OP.  ….STOP….BREATHE….Start recording your games, start doing Arena and BG’s when you would normally waste time playing on the AH.  Lastly unless some other portion of the game is requires your attention PRACTICE! You are a casual gamer and an hour to you is a month to the hardcore.

PvE

Player vs Environment, or Player vs WORLD, OK I don’t have fun titles for this, but just the same READ THE FORUMS! Yet again gear from PvE is made for PvE, so if a player wants to raid then raid.  No One logged into to BC one day and went to Black Temple with level 70 greens and lived. Blizzard has made phenomenal improvements on game progression.  Please do 5-Mans, Then Heroics, Then 10’s and then the 25 MAN RAID! Oddly enough they increase in difficulty as the gear gets better.

Final Note

In case you didn’t notice the same steps apply on each area, practice, do the events/games, and read the forums.  However, you may have not noticed the part where I discussed wasting your time and gold on Epics in the AH, reading about nerfs and who is OP, jumping around IF or UC spamming trade chat, or even trying to be amazing at everything.  THATS BECAUSE I DIDN”T MENTION IT SO DON’T DO IT!

Thank You

Bill Tripod(aka Kohrin 70 Warrior-Uther)

WotLK PvP Changes and Blue Posts

There’s been loads of changes in the past few days for WotLK, specifically related to PvP. Take a look at a few of the most recent blue posts and updates regarding pvp in the last 48 hours.

WotLK PvP Recap from Zug Gaming

• Berserker Rage Change
• Season 4 End Date
• Arena Match Making System Change
• Build 9014 Class Changes
• Honor Points will NOT Reset for WOTLK
• New Honor Items for Patch 3.0.2

PvP Developer Q & A

Why is it so hard to measure skill in a battleground and have rated BGs ?
I wish it were that simple. However, for a rating system to reasonably zero in on the skill of a single player in a game with teammates it takes a number of games approximately equal to ten times the number of players participating on that player’s team.

So for example, for a rating system to have all the information it needs to know to figure out how “good” of a battleground player you are in Alterac Valley, it needs to take about 400 games to do it (10 times the number of players on your team). Unfortunately, that’s without the additional complexities of being able to queue solo versus queueing as a group, etc.

It would be kind of annoying to have to play about 400 games of AV before the system could decide what items you’re eligible for. So, there are some complexities in creating a system to work around that problem (among others).

Archavon changes (Lake Wintergrasp Boss)
We don’t plan to change Archavon, as he needs to have compelling loot that isn’t something you can’t possibly get another way. However, I think it’s important to note that Archavon does not drop the helm or shoulder slots (or weapons), which are the hardest to obtain both in pve and pvp.

Why is PvP gear available for purchase for PvE tokens with no rating requirement ?
To put it simply, you can’t endlessly wipe on raid bosses and get these tokens. At some point, you have to succeed. Even then, the pvp gear you get from these tokens is 1 tier behind their pve value (ie: the ilevel 213 pve tokens from Nax 25 only get you “Hateful Gladiator” gear which is ilevel 200). It’s not possible to get the “best” pvp set items through pve.

Are there any plans of allowing us to attain PvE gear through honor/arena points?
For the most part (lack of tanking gear aside), if you have the highest-end pvp gear, you can do fairly well in a “tier behind” raid (ie: 10-man nax). So, for the most part that dynamic already exists.

WotLK Battlegrounds Changes

No Honor Points Increases for WotLK

Battlegrounds wins/losses and honorable kills will not award experience after the next patch, nor upon the release of Wrath of the Lich King. It could always happen somewhere down the road as we work to improve PvP progression, but there are no plans for changing this in the immediate future.

Battlegrounds Discussion with Tigole

Actually, we have been discussing new battlegrounds quite a bit lately. Wrath of the Lich King will feature Strand of the Ancients (attack/defend) as well as Wintergrasp (non-instanced, world PvP).

But past that, we are exploring ideas that would involve expanding our Battleground content in future patches and beyond. We believe we have some strong ideas for improving Battlegrounds and PvP as a whole in the game and we’re definitely going to focus on improvements in the future. Now, it’s very early to be talking about some of this stuff but I think it’s important for the community to know that it’s on our minds.

Our general thought is that we could provide more BG content over time. The BG content that we could provide could be of higher quality with a higher degree of accessibility. Overall, we’d like to have more content and variety. We also want the gameplay experience in the BGs to be better directed. We’re also exploring the concept of a complimentary “competitive” bg system as well. Over time, we’d like the focus of PvP to shift back to being more BG-centric and more focused on Horde versus Alliance — the core of our game.

We’re also planning on improving some Battleground and PvP features in general. For example, we want to give you the ability to queue for Battlegrounds from anywhere in the world. We’re also going to explore EXP gain through the PvP system as well as low level itemization to support that.

Please don’t take this post as a promise. This won’t be an overnight process. Not all of these things are set in stone and guaranteed to happen. It would take us a while to shift in this direction. But these are some of the current thoughts on the development team. I think it’s important for you guys to know some of our thought process in regards to PvP.