Archive for the ‘Wintergrasp’ Category

I returned to Wintergrasp twice yesterday. The first match was epically boring, because we had 25+ players and we saw a total of three members of the Horde: a death knight, a warlock and a paladin. That led them to have over 130k health a piece! It was like taking on some crazy elite mob. That made it hard to get siege engines to drop their towers (we were on defense) because there was just about no one to kill. We did though, and kind of just chilled until the timer ran out. It was the most lame WG match I’d ever been in

The seconds match I attended was more even. I got my 5,000th honorable kill this match, which is kinda lame for how often I do WG. We again chased the Horde around the map, slaying them left and right. Afterwards, I found myself exactly 2 stone keeper shards from my Black War Mammoth. Again, for how often I play WG I probably should have already had one, but I used to cash in my stone keeper shards for honor, and a couple hundred went toward heirlooms for my alts. Still, I’m almost there now.

I found myself in Wintergrasp twice the other morning, once as my prot PvP spec and once as my main ret PvE spec (because I was in a hurry). The first match – the one I joined as PvP – was a thorough butt kicking of the Horde. We had them pinned down to their graveyard and just slaughtered them every time they rezzed. It was fun! I did really well too, and only died once, killing – or helping kill – dozens of the Horde.

The second match (the one I joined while ret) wasn’t so pretty, but it was more entertaining. I joined a little late, only about three minutes late, but already it was a disaster. The Horde was in the eastern side of the keep! After dying over and over again, we finally accrued enough manpower to stand up to them (our numbers started out pretty low for whatever reason). We finally pushed them out of the east side of the keep and down to the Sunken Ring workshop. I and a number of allies then rode back to hold off an attack on the west side of the keep. They got in there, too, but that’s all the farther they got. We had actually dropped all of their towers, but that still left us with 10 minutes to hold out, and we did it. Yes!

I had a good morning.

I’m back at last with a non-Cataclysm-related post. I wanted to catch folks up on where my characters are.

Lug and Pig are now level 29. I’m almost to my current goal, level 30! Lug still has those heirloom shoulders so leveling hasn’t been real bad. He’s been in the Hillsbrad Foothills allot lately, taking a break from Thousand Needles. That place is not allot of fun to me.

Gav was in Wintergrasp again today. I did ok, dying twice – once one-on-one to an Orc rogue, which never should have happened except that I was 90% asleep at the time. I had him dead to rights and couldn’t finish him off. Dammit. While running back after that death, WoW froze and crashed. When I logged back in, the battle was down to 45 seconds and everyone was just chilling in the courtyard. WTF happened to the Horde? No one was fighting, and I had been standing in one of the side areas of the fortress when my game froze and came back to find myself alive. Weird.

With the honor I earned in WG, I went to Stormwind and bought a mount I’ve wanted for a long, long time – a Black Battlestrider. I wanted one the first time I saw one but they used to cost Battleground tokens. No more! A mere 50k honor and it’s mine. Gav’s happy now.

I ran Azjol’ Nerub tonight with a decent PUG, but the final boss gave us trouble. At one point our tank was dying and the healer (a dwarf priest) was struggling to keep up with the damage, so I pitched in with my Flash of Light spell. On another occasion, after a wave of mobs in that battle, our DPS warrior was down to 20% health. Our healer was busy doing who-knows-what (he seemed to think that healing the tank was his only job) so I was going to hit the warrior with a Sacred Shield and then a Flash of Light, but then the boss popped back up. With no time left, I fired off my Lay on Hands spell to put the warrior right. We then finished off the boss as I activated Avenging Wrath to lay the ‘smack down’, as they say.

This was after a Wintergrasp match where I notched a slew of kills and only died once. With a rather balanced match, the Horde had little to no tenacity, making the battles easier. The other day I was in Wintergrasp to see about buying some stuff with my Stone Keeper’s Shards when I was jumped by a Tauren shaman. He hit me with Thunderstorm and caught me off guard. When I finally realized what was happening, I was down to 40% health. Fortunately, I was still on my gryphon so I flew away to heal. When I got back, he was pulling the same trick on a few other players. I landed behind him, and it was Hammer of Justice, Crusader Strike, Divine Storm, Hammer of Wrath, game over. Seriously, it was one of those kills where it was over before the stun wore off. I hate those when I’m on the receiving end, but proud when I pull it off. This after whopping that Orc warrior in WG the other day. I think I can somewhat hold my own one-on-one with an average-skill or lower PvP player these days. Not bad, says I.

Oh yeah, and that PUG I mentioned at the start? I got a Pug for that PUG, thanks to an achievement. Nice!

This morning was rather boring. I ran three heroics – Oculus, Ahn’Kahet: The Old Kingdom and Gundrak. The Oculus run was interesting since there was no synergy in our group – everyone was kind of doing their own thing, but it came together to make a win. In Ahn’Kahet, I nabbed the achievement Volazj’s Quick Demise for my troubles. In Gundrak, we stormed the place and were done in no time. Then the most interesting part of my morning happened: I went to Wintergrasp.

For the first time in quite a while, I queued up for a Wintergrasp match. The battle saw the Alliance with a near full raid while the Horde attack consisted of – no lie! – less then 10 players.  They wound up with Tenacity x20, which made things harder. I was getting crit for 15k a shot! We eventually got our act together and moved in large packs since the Horde players weren’t going in groups. I don’t care how much tenacity you have – 10 on 1 is bad odds. Or good odds. Depends on which side your on.

In any case, our battle took around 10 minutes, but that’s all I needed to die four times. It was odd, really, that most of the Horde were Blood Elf paladins. They had like one warlock and a warrior, and then a handful of Blood Elf pallys. One in particular was really vicious, accounting for half of my deaths and a ton of other player kills. Still, even he folded under our massive population advantage. Death to the Horde! lol

Here we see Ineveitable taking his pet Mistsabre out for a flight. How nice. Now if druids were supposed to be able to ride their land mount in flight form, that’d make this a boring shot. Instead, it makes Sights Seen. Sometimes glitches are more fun then features.

Ah, my raid. I’m so proud of ‘em.

What happened was that I was in Wintergrasp this morning to try out a new prot PvP spec. I’d built it not long after getting my subscription started back up, and had spent about an hour practicing my spell rotations on the hapless wildlife in Storm Peaks. I got to Wintergrasp right after the queue started (15 minutes before the match), and stayed until the match began. When it did, I noticed this little icon near the top of my name, like a little crown. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, so I let it go. As the battle wound down, I got a faux achievement from my Wintertime plug in. I was curious, but didn’t have time to look it up at the moment. When we won Wintertime gave me another shamchievement.  I congratulated the raid on the win, and came through in chat with the prefix [RL]. Raid leader? Oh, so that’s what the icon meant. The two notices from Wintertime were for leading a full raid and leading a defensive victory. Big deal.

I died five times early on (really out of practice), but was alive through the last half of the battle. I actually went the first 2/3rds of the fight before remembering to use my talented Hammer of Justice on the horde. Oops.

Well, I did nothing of note, and got the job via random dumb luck, but I can at least claim – in all honesty – to have lead a successful defense of Wintergrasp. I’ll just leave out the part about not knowing about it until the match was over.

That kinda ruins the moment.

Recently Gav dropped his Holy spec for a PvP Prot spec. The reasons are many, but chief among them are my dislike of healing’s stress and my desire to do better in Wintergrasp. However, it seems I may be wasting my time. Most of the time now, the Horde on my server hardly even contests Wintergrasp. Case in point: the other morning I took my new PvP Prot spec to Wintergrasp (after spending upwards of an hour leveling my one-handed axe skill) and was shocked to see everyone getting their butts kicked by a few random Horde. They had, it turned out, a Tenacity of more then 15. However, there seems to be very, very few of them. We estimated there were about six Horde total in Wintergrasp. With those paltry numbers they were easy enough to beat back, tenacity or no. It was to the point where I was recognizing the same Hordies over and over again. They were decimating our ranks early as we tried to go in small groups, but once we started hanging around in large numbers even a tenacity of x17 wasn’t that big a deal. They’d ride a vehicle up to the keep and 10-20 of us would decimate it. They actually got into the main courtyard while we were still disorganized early on, as you can see. Death to the Horde!

I had bought up some new Prot gear for Gav prior to the battle, including a Teldrassil Protector and Titan-Forged Bracers of Triumph. Since I’m not planning on using this spec for PvE, I’m stocking it up with Resilience. Hopefully this will keep my dumb butt alive longer.

Last night saw an interesting shift in Gavelier’s adventuring career. My guild leader made mention that we only had one healer in our 60+ members, so I opted to drop my prot spec for holy. I’d never actually healed before, but Gav was holy spec through his 20s, so it wasn’t a totally alien concept. So, with great anticipation, I went to Ironforge and respecced my prot to holy.

The first thing that struck me is that I knew next to nothing about the talents in the holy tree. I spent a good half hour just reading them and seeing how they would affect me. Once I was set on my talents, I spent another hour arranging them on my action bars for ease of use. Out went most of my damaging spells and in went healing powers. I moved Flash of Light and Holy Light to prominent positions on my main action bar, and put Holy Shock center stage. However, the spell sucked. I wondered if it was just my gear that was causing it to do only 519 healing/340 damage. I finally remembered I had to go train it, at which point it hit full stride.  I was scared to leave town, though, since I was effectively damage-neutered. What I needed was someone to heal. I logged for the night without firing even one of my new spells once.

Popping in this morning, I swapped back to ret to run some dailies. When I got back to Dalaran, I was ready to queue with the masses for Wintergrasp when I had an epiphany: Take Holy to WG! There’s allot of healing to be done there! And so it was.

My biggest problem was my severe lack of caster gear. I had only managed to secure some new glyphs, and that was it. I was hamstrung with less then 7k mana, which seemed way short. I held strong to my conviction, though, and went for it. Holy Shock became my primary healing spell, with Flash of Light during HS’s cool downs and Holy Light for big heals. I was following the front line when I noticed a death knight with under 1k HP. I fired off my Lay on Hands spell for them, setting them right. I also cleansed quite a few players, keeping them alive. In the end, I was the third most successful healer in the raid, having healed over 176k HP of damage. I also wasn’t on the leader board for overheals, meaning I wasn’t wasting my time or mana.

It was a fairly successful trial by fire, I felt. There was a big ‘yeah, healers!’ after the battle, so I felt good. Maybe I’ve found my niche at last.

In my latest Wintergrasp match tonight, I was again on defense. Allot of defensive battles for the Alliance on my server, to be honest. Anyway, it went haywire about ten minutes in. I spent the first 8-10 minutes on a northwestern cannon, and did fairly well. Around 10 minutes in, though, the Horde made their push, and broke down most of the western walls.

You can see where I marked my cannon, but the important parts are all of the red x’s. Those were parts of the fort that the Horde dropped. Yup, half of the fort was down. I’m not sure about the far eastern half, since I was so preoccupied with the west. Anyway, we won again, this time destroying their towers and cutting their attack short. The last tower fell as we were being swamped at the gate with mere minutes to go. I actually didn’t die, either, thanks to lots of healing spells and good luck. I went in as a retadin for a change, and enjoyed being a little killing machine again. I was happy to take on a siege engine, one-on-one, because they were easy, slow-moving prey to me. According to the game, I helped account for 178 kills this match. Hell yeah!

In respect to my prot spec, I bought a Titansteel Bonecrusher today, and spent about an hour or two leveling my one-handed mace skills. Hopefully that’ll up my prot DPS a little.