Archive for the ‘PvP’ Category

Tol Barad! I entered my first match today and with two other players I got two kills with no deaths. Go me! However, I arrived at the last minute. Literally – there was only sixty seconds left when I got there. Damn it all.

I had earlier been busting ghosts on the Peninsula, and that was fun. It wasn’t too hard, but when I was killing folks in that nearby ‘hood I got attacked by a villager and three bandits, all at once. Thankfully, a combination of Avenging Wrath, Hammer of Wrath, Sanctified Wrath, Divine Storm and Lay on Hands saw me through it. Yay!

You may notice that in the top picture I’m carrying a shield. Yes, I’m going prot for PvP again. However, I’m also considering trying to tank for the guild. We have a critical tank shortage so I’m considering learning how to do that. Wish me luck – I’ll need it.

The time of darkness is coming to an end. Light will shine on this world once more, as we enter a new age.

Gavelier is back. Alazar lives again.

So, what have I been up to? Well… dying mostly. Or coming darn close. While Thinning the Brood on Tol Barad Peninsula  I was routinely set upon by multiple Darkwood Lurkers and occasionally drew the attention of a Darkwood Broodmother. Fun. I didn’t die here though, thanks to desperate key banging and the help of a Draenei shaman once. I tried to clean up a nearby neighborhood and saw a hunter under siege by a number of mobs so I tried to help, but they quickly died, leaving the three angry mobs to be my problem alone.  I dove off a nearby ledge to a lower area and only one of the mobs followed. I killed that one as the other two finally made their way down. I killed them too, so again I didn’t die. So why did I say I’ve been dying allot? I’ve lived through every danger so far.

This is why. The Isle of Conquest, my first battleground since restarting my subscription and I got my head handed to me over and over. Every encounter I got in ended with my death. I stayed alive for awhile occasionally, being a tough kill, but a kill I was. I had one killing blow (a lucky shot on a group kill) to 5 deaths. Five deaths may seem too few for the complaining I’m doing, but the Horde overran the game in short order, so it wasn’t a very long match. Dammit.

I also spent time getting my spell rotation down on one of the standard lvl 85 training dummies, doing 5k DPS. It’s a starting point, so we’ll see where I go from here. Off we go!

Finally. It had been too long. Absence, as they say, can make the heart grow fonder. I had to do it.

I had to hit up Wintergrasp one last time.

I’ll likely never got back after Cataclysm launches on Tuesday so I wanted to go back and have one more great match. What I got started out abysmally slow, but ended up being perhaps my favorite match ever.

Blizzard now regulates the number of participants to create even matches, and at the start there were exactly four Alliance players, with me playing Raid Leader. We took everything that was able to be captured in the first five minutes, and then stood around and stared at each other. Finally we got organized and I led the most coordinated, communicative, and well-organized Wintergrasp defense I’d ever seen. Everyone was in touch, and we had all our bases covered, so to speak. Now, if only there was someone to fight.

I was running through the Broken Temple factory (seen above) when I noticed our control had gone down to 50%. A Draenei priest tipped me off that there was a hidden rogue near  by. We smoked out the undead rogue and killed him. Finally some action! Not long after things picked up with an Orc hunter, a troll shaman, a blood elf mage, an Orc Death Knight and some others joining the fray. It was time to put out organization to the test. We pinged our foes on the mini map to keep tabs on them. I was once under assault by the death knight, hunter and mage all at once at the Broken Temple (where most of the action took place) when my allies rode to my rescue. I did the same later, bailing out our Draenei priest buddy who called for help since he was specced for healing.

At one point I caught a troll shaman in the open and began to attack her. It turned out she was a restoration-specced shammy.

Kudos to you, Sisstah – you were (to be blunt) a freaking pain in the ass to kill. My saving grace was having my Draenei priest buddy (God, I wish I knew his name, I think it was Judgeandjury but don’t quote me on that) along for the ride. He healed me some and kept her fire elemental busy while I finally laid the smack down. This was a long and tedious freaking fight. She didn’t do allot of damage but she’d keep healing her stupid ass. Finally, two-on-one was too much and she fell. My big ‘hoorah’ moment came when I tried to take a siege engine down to one of the towers.

This dumb, apparently suicidal Orc hunter kept attacking my ride! I tried to tell him to stop but he wouldn’t listen. I warned him that it was in his best interest to leave me in the tank – I was much more dangerous to him on foot. He ultimately broke my ride, at which point he and his crocolisk assailed me. I was down to 15% health so I bubbled, healed to 80% and proceeded to beat the ever loving tar out of him. Ha! Gav: 1, stupid-ass Orc: 0.

We ultimately won with 45 seconds left to server restart. Go team!

I’m back finally. I’ve been playing allot but not taking many pictures so that’s partially why I’ve been slow to post. Anyway, here’s what Gav’s been up to since patch 4.0.1 hit.

I hit up Wintergrasp as soon as I could and had a ball. I died once, but that was it as we blitzed the Horde in an offensive siege. Word of Glory is a God send sometimes in PvP. I also really dig Blizzard’s new raid frames. They worked wonders in Wintergrasp and eliminated my need for the plugin Grid.

Today I joined my first post-4.0.1 random heroic and it was obvious that I was rusty. It’s been almost a month since my last heroic dungeon, but that’s no excuse for forgetting to take down Crusader Aura for Retribution. I also wasn’t thinking and tried to cast Blessing of Kings on everybody (like I used to have to) when a single cast now covers the entire group. I actually needed to cast Might instead because our druid was already covering out stat buff. It was uneventful until our healer died during a bad pull. Fortunately for us our tank was a blood-specced death knight and all of the DPS could self-heal so we survived. Our druid even battle-rezzed our healer. Go team! I nabbed the Lodi Dodi and King’s Bane achievements on this run as well. It was a good night.

For whatever reason I opted to ride WoW down to the server shutdown tonight, enjoying my last action in the Wrath of the Lich King, patch 3.x era. I have amazing memories from this series of patches. I went hit levels 60, 70 and 80 during these patches. One of my very first posts here covered the changes in the original Wrath content patch. I ran my first dungeon, heroic dungeon and raid during these patches. I fought my first battlegrounds during the 3.x run, and of course, I fought relentlessly in Lake Wintergrasp.

Actually, that’s one of the things I did while riding the Wrath patches to their end. The Alliance again successfully repelled the Horde, even though they had a tenacity of 10x (and health in the 100k range). I went as prot again and had fun. Once that was over, though, I opted to go to Ironforge to wait to train.

While waiting for the server to shut down, I fished for Old Ironjaw. No luck, as you would imagine.

There Gav now sits, waiting for the servers to go live with patch 4.0.1 so he can train his new skills. What will he do with them first? Maybe Wintergrasp again, maybe a random heroic. Only time will tell – and the time will come tomorrow.

Just for kicks, here’s the new Return to Graveyard button on the PTR. Why is Gav seeing it in Elwynn Forest of all places? The Horde.

I was on the PTR the other night and was just milling about after completing the first string of pre-Cataclysm events and noticed the Horde stalking around south of Goldshire in PvP mode. A number of us went forth and killed them, at which point they respawned and got killed again. And again.

So how did I die? Well, at one point we had them on the run, scattered and seemingly rattled. I opted to jump one I had cornered and – I thought – alone, but now I realize that I couldn’t have possibly telegraphed my attack any more then I did. I hopped off of my mount early, ran for a short to close the distance, judged and then cast my stun. It was at this point that every freaking Horde in the area came down on me. Once in one small area they were easily killed again, but I didn’t live. Dammit.

Oh well. I got a few kills, saved some people, was doing ok and then pulled a dumb-ass move to get killed. Typical Gav.

We take a break from our PTR coverage to discuss what’s going with Gavelier on Live.

I’m not going to open this post with the trite pirate speak, but it is Pirates Day in Azeroth. You can speak to any commoner to get a pirate costume for a short while or speak to Dread Captain DeMeza in Booty Bay to get a 12 hour costume. Make sure you visit DeMeza to get your holiday achievement.

You may notice that I’m going ‘sword and board’ in the above pic, rather then wielding my usual Tyrannical Beheader. That’s obviously because I’d been off playing in a PvP scenario. This time, it was my first excursion into Warsong Gulch. That’s a cozy little battleground, ain’t it? I took my Dread Corsair  buff to the battleground (after waiting 9 minutes!) and had a great round. Sure it was mostly because my team was awesome and the horde seemingly gave up towards the end of the match, but I still had a good round.

I also (because we blitzed the hell out of the place) got a couple of achievements: Warsong Expedience and Warsong Perfection. I say the horde gave up at the end because after pitched fighting around the middle of the zone on our first two flag captures, they were nowhere to be seen on our third run. We all just tailed the flag carrier into our base without seeing a single hordie.  I never died, which was weird. I got hit hard a few times, but never enough to drop me below 50% health. I credit our healers (a couple of paladins and a priest) and my stocking up on resilience with stuff like my PvP armor and the flask I quaffed. I did crap damage but was in the middle of everything for 19 honorable kills. I was using my Seal of Justice, so that may have contributed to my low damage output (that and I don’t have a decent one-hander) Aw well.

It was a PvP morning for Gav. I joined a random battleground and ended up in Alterac Valley.

It was kind of sad for me because I followed a contingent to attack the Horde leader, and we did – and I died – but the Horde was just a little faster, and we lost. The next battle was Arathi Basin, where I’ve never won.

I want to point out that I went to AV as ret to try out my new axe, which failed miserably. I decided to go prot in AB, which made a huge difference.

I died once early on when I went into battle thinking I had backup (but I didn’t) and another time during a scrum near the lumber mill. Those were my only deaths though. Thanks to good durability, judicious use of my powers and superb healers, I pretty much locked down the farm. People came and left, but I held it down. A couple times I thought I was screwed only to be saved by the sudden appearance of a healer on our side. Thanks, guys! I ended the match with 2 deaths (least of anyone with at more then 1 kill), 5 killing blows (4th on our side) and 71 honorable kills (best on our side). Go Gav!

Oh, and thanks to running those dungeons last night, I got a mammoth reward.

My Black War Mammoth! Finally!

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.