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I am a casual PvPer.  I don’t have a high arena rating.  I don’t have a high rated MMR.  I don’t have some cool title or mount.  I am one of those guys who likes to run BG’s and you have probably yelled at me because i made a basic mistake somewhere at sometime.  I am not l33t. Now that disclaimer is out of the way, let’s talk.  No.  Really.  In PvP, you can’t be silent.  I know, you are a raider.  You are used to keeping quiet so the tank or raid leader can call-out important stuff.  You can’t be silent in PvP.  You also don’t need to be overly verbose.  Say it; say it quick, short and to the point.  (FYI, you still can’t stand in the poop.)

That said, I hope you don’t need to be told what to do (ex: Go to Mines).  Knowing a zerg is inbound and you are not needed where you are at should mean one thing to you.  Get moving (and say it in vent).PvP is such a dynamic battle.  Your enemy may not do what you expect.  They do not follow some programmed formula.  The best you can do is expect human nature and even that may fail at times; both the expectation and their human nature. Read more…

GUEST POST by Gerissar… A casual player who recently transferred his Mage to Bound.  You may have heard some listener feedback from him in prior shows. His involvement in Bound has raised the guild’s PVP activity to new heights.

Who hasn’t run a random? You need to if you want to cap that last big of conquest for the week.  Don’t get me wrong; twenty-five points is measly when compared to what you need to buy an item. So you join the queue and wait. Next thing you know you are shoved into a mix of heals and DPS (maybe a tank) with varying gear and skill.

What do you do? Do you drop and wait out the debuff? Do you just run around doing your own thing and hope that it all works so you win? Do you take charge, lead the group and plan a victory? Read more…

With 4.2, Blizzard has injected the new content with eight new hunter pets, all of whom are not only rare elites, but are specifically designed to WTFpwn you if you swoop in and try to tame it like a “normal” hunter pet. This had a significant impact on my decision to resub to WoW. My exploits taming pets in the game are documented on here and stalking the prey, taming and forming a relationship with the pets that I tame is the reason that I have always run BM, even though it is pretty much a garbage spec as far as DPS goes. I really enjoy seeing hunters in Stormwind with exotic pets and trading stories about the taming process. Maybe it is because I am on an RP server, but all the BM hunters that I have talked to are of the same mindset.

Having tamed a couple of the new hunter pets, I can say with certainty, that there are two distinctly different experiences that I had encountered while huntering. Hunting Ban’thalos, is a tricky affair. Ban is a spirit beast owl, yes an owl, that is way up in the air above the Sanctuary of Malorne. Like way up there. I had to park myself in a tree and then mount up and fly up some more to tag the owl. Drop into the tree, freeze trap, and tame beast. Bam sounds easy right? It always sounds easy on paper. Read more…

So over the last month we have seen many buffs and nerfs to PvP. From a 100% resilience buff to a 10% healing nerf. Over the next few paragraphs I will be expressing my opinion on each buff and nerf to pvp.

If you have been following this at all you will see that our good friend(or enemy) Bornak over on the WoW forums has been a busy man. Lets go over what has happened. Firstly in season 7 we saw the up rise of protection specced warriors and paladins doing well in arenas. Protection specced warriors were a huge challenge, they had an incredible survivability, and a rather large amount of burst damage which was the problem. So to keep protection a viable PvE spec they upped the threat of the burst abilities and lowered the damage. This was needed. There was far too much survivability with a prot warrior, which there should be, and a huge amount of burst.  That is where the problem came along. If you look at any of the classes you either have survivability or burst not both. So to fix it and not effect PvE, Blizzard went ahead and made this very simple and easy change. Read more…

Well 34 was a little better than 32 and 33, but I am seriously questioning my decision to try this.  What was I thinking?  Am I a jackass?  I think I have realized that when people say they leveled up in the Battlegrounds (BGs), they are either masochists or they do a combination of BGs and questing.  For these people the BGs may be the primary means of leveling, but they are also getting a huge infusion of experience from questing while they are waiting for the BGs.

There have been many times where I had to wait 20+ minutes to get into one of the two BGs that are available at this level.  This is a slow process when you are not questing. That is how I know that most of the people who claim to have leveled a number of levels in the BGs also supplemented them with questing. Let me just put it this way; leveling in BGs without any supplementing takes either extreme patience or you’re as crazy as a loon. Read more…

We have all heard the rumors and reports from people who have leveled their toons in the battlegrounds.  Well I am a skeptic and I don’t totally believe all of the reports of how easy or how quick it is in the BG’s.  So, I decided to do something about it and test out the theory on how easy it is to level in the BG’s.

Over the next couple weeks I am planning on leveling my toon almost solely in the BG’s.  The reason I say “almost” is the fact that I am planning on leveling my cooking and doing some exploring at the same time.  The cooking will most likely require some killing and xp gains in the process and while I explore I am bound to be pulled by some mobs and will need to kill them also.  In the end however it is my plan that 90+% will be from the BG’s.

Okay, here I am a level 30 Paladin ready to enter the first Arathi Basin of my leveling experiment.  I am ready to be pwned and mocked as a level 30 pally when I am facing too many higher level 30’s.  This is going to be an experience!

I am now Level 31 and the first level did not go so well.  I was killed so many times I do not care to count, I was somewhat useless to the horde in many of these battles.  It was not pretty.  The saving grace was that Arathi is somewhat fun, but this level in Warsong is like having someone slowly insert a steak knife into my eyeball. Read more…

“Time and tide wait for no man.”

If this quote is true in life, then it’s doubly true in WoW.  Patches, class changes, and new raid content seem to be coming out every couple of weeks to change the core game play of WoW.  Getting left behind is a real concern for WoW players, especially since the introduction of new and powerful loot can quickly leave players lagging (forgive the pun) in their class roles.

After showing up late to the party for the last patch, I was bound and determined to be on the “Bleeding Edge” of the new 3.2.2 patch content (or at least as bleeding edge as I can be without playing on the PTR… we’ll call it the Oozing Edge).  I logged on, jumped into a ten man Onxyia raid and promptly had the retro Nemesis Skullcap to show off to other jealous locks on my server (due to my stunning DPS…and the fact that I was the only Warlock in the group).   I felt, at least for the moment, that I’d gotten the monkey off my back.

This pressure of “get in and play while it’s still new” is facilitated by “leaked” patch notes, WoW podcasts, Blue Posts on the official WoW forums and WoW news sites all working together to drive an incredible amount of traffic to the game on patch day.  It’s often theorized that Blizzard times their releases to cannibalize the player base of other MMOs (see WOTLK coming out around the same time as Warhammer and Patch 3.2.2 being released in the same month as the launch of Aion and Champion’s Online).  Whether or not this is true remains unclear (although coincidences abound).

What is clear is that the massive amount of hype swirling around patches drives home the opportunity costs of playing other games.  Whenever I steal a few hours in Fallout 3 or try to revisit saved games in Fable 2, I’m constantly thinking about what I could be doing in WoW.  For myself (and I’m sure many other players), WoW has obliterated my interest in other games.  Time in Fallout 3 doesn’t translate to hours, it translates to lost instance runs and missed battlegrounds.  The pressure surrounding patches simply drive home how deeply Blizzard has their claws sunk into their players and how easily we can dance to Blizzard’s tune.  Fortunately for Blizzard and myself, I love the song they’re playing.