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Welcome to another installment of Dead or Alive. I will be your host and today I would like to talk about the ins and outs of Arenas for the new player:

The first question is… What are arenas?

Arenas are areas set up by the Steemwheedle Cartel where players can create a team of 2, 3, or 5 and face off against another team of the same size to the DEATH for gear, titles, mounts and glory. You can find everything you need to make a team and play one in Dalaran sewers or at any one of the 5 arenas located around Azeroth. We have The Ring of Trials in Nagrand, The Circle of Blood in Blades Edge Mountains, The Ruins of Lordaeron in Tristfal Glades, and The Ring of Valor in Orgrimmar. Each offer a variety of different obstacles to use at your disposal.

There are three different scores a player can obtain and this is where it gets confusing for most people. You have a team rating, personal rating, and match making rating (MMR). The easiest to understand is the Team Rating so lets start there.

Read more…

In a recent post I made reference to running the battlegrounds (bg’s) as a lowbie and some of the benefits. I thought today it would be best if I delved further into this subject and really addressed the bg’s issue in this post and for those of you that read my posts for levels 35-70, I will also be addressing the bg’s for those levels this weekend.

For a long time now a debate has been raging over the balancing of PvE and PvP. The debate is, nerfs come to classes unfairly due to PvP and how its ruining the game. I am sure that many of you will agree with that statement. The fact is, yes nerfs happen to PvE and PvP because said skill is used unfairly. For example lets take a look at the incoming Fan of Knives (FoK) nerf. FoK is a rogues only AE skill and I’m sure that if you ask and one in PvE including rogues they will say yes it is a bit over powered compared to other AE from mages and warlocks.

Enter PvP
Your 5v5 team is very excited to play games this week. Everyone is on, pumped, and ready to kill! The queue pops, the strats laid out and you charge in expecting victory only to lose because your casters and healers cant cast due to a rogue spamming FoK. Everyone is slowed, has wound poison, and mind numbing poison on. There is massive damage going out to everyone on your team and this rogue pretty much solos you. You exit the arena wondering how to prevent that from happening again but consistantly lose to teams with rogues. This is what most teams have been trying to figure out for months. Now asking the same question as before: Who is going to complain to Blizzard that this is unfair? Since there is an actual person on the receiving end, they will. This is just one example which can carry over to the many other nerfs that have come about, but a good one. Since there is not an actual person behind the PvE situation you will see less complaints. So when the nerf comes it falls on PvP’s shoulders to take the brunt because they complained the most.

There are defiantly ways to avoid the QQ sessions on both sides and you can see it in many forms already: With fear effecting NPC’s differently than players, Resilience effecting player damage only, and some player made items such as rocket boots and mind control caps not being allowed in arenas at all. Blizzard is making huge steps in separating PvE and PvP and so far it looks good. Until they find a way to separate both aspects of the game, PvE will continue to see Nerfs based off PvP complaints. Just know Blizzard is always working on ways to further separate the two and will keep learning from their mistakes.

-Aellerian

Welcome everyone to the first installment of the dead or alive blog. We will be talking about everything from beginner to advance PvP tactics and news. In this article we will talk about 3.2 and what to expect from this patch and how it effects PvP.

Last week Blizzard let out the most important patch to effect PvP in World of Warcraft since the installment of Arenas. I wanted to take a moment of your time to go over this and point out some points that come with it and how it is effecting you and me. You can check out the patch notes over on the official site for the full report.

Isle of Conquest

The biggest change some may argue is the new battleground: Isle of Conquest. Where the Alliance and Horde are pitted against each other once again to fight over precious resources that will help them inevitably defeat the Lich King himself. Simply put, this battleground is amazing. Wherever you go, there is something to do. The only dull moment I could find in the first 50 games played was running between nodes trying to get the achievements. When you first hop in it all seems a bit overwhelming with the large map. Where do I go? How do I win this? Best idea is to follow everyone else and ask plenty of questions. Once you get used to the battle 3 or 4 times in you should do fine.

Even with all the great things about this battleground there is always a downside. You cant make everyone happy right? The only flaws I can see with this battleground are that both sides immediately go for the hanger. If you control the hanger 100% of the time and have participation from people jumping in, you will most likely win. Also what goes with this strategy is graveyard camping. If the enemy controls your base without capping the keep flag they can possibly control you in the graveyard that is next to your keep thus making you inconsequential to the battle because every 30 seconds you are dying! Even with these 2 small flaws its rare that either happen. You most likely wont control the hanger 100% of the time because the other side is going for it too and if they don’t control the hanger then they wont be camping your graveyard!

Resilience Changes and YOU

That being said, what I believe is the most important change in 3.2 for PvP would be the resilience change. Blizzard has changed resilience from reducing DoT damage, mana drains, critical strike chance, and critical strike damage; to reducing critical strike chance, mana drains, and ALL damage done by players against you. This one change has made resilience THE most important stat in PvP. If you don’t have resilience you are missing out, bottom line. Once again, this change comes with a downside, what is great for most will make someone too great. There are complaints about healers and their ability to survive but it is not an impossible task to take them down. I know as a priest I still die very quickly, and often to melee classes.

BG EXP!

Another major part of this patch for PvP, and I would be silly to not mention it, would be BATTLEGROUND EXPERIENCE! When I first heard this little snippet I was overjoyed. I said to myself “Aellerian, You can finally spend 100% of your time PvPing if you really want to improve your toon.” That is, until I actually put it into effect. If you don’t know, the brackets go from 10-19, 20-29, 30-39, and so on and so forth till you hit 80 when there is a dedicated one end-game level players. The level 10-19 bracket only consists of Warsong Gulch, and it gives hardly any experience for the time spent in the battleground. With games averaging 10-15 minutes and some going to the full 20, I am making only 1 bar per battleground with each level going much slower than questing. On the other hand, once you reach the level that Alterac Valley comes in, you will level quite quickly. The experience that comes from AV is amazing. My rogue is level 77 and going leaps and bounds from Alterac Valley only. My advice, if you want to start PvPing with a new toon, it would be wise to gain experience via questing until level fifty when you can enter Alterac Valley. Between battlegrounds you could do some questing or just kill random mobs to make it go even faster.

Will It Ever End?

Finally I would like to give a little attention to the end of Season 6. There is no official end-date but it has been announced it will be no later than August 25th. At the end of the season your rating, personal rating, and arena points will be reset. Your hidden match making rating will stay the same. There will be a week in between season 6 and 7. So get those games in, get your rating, get your title, and kick ass!

In closing, I will say 3.2 is by far the most important patch to PvP since Burning Crusade. It is a lot to take in and more is still to come. There is another mini-patch coming to fix the little bugs that are out right now with classes and battlegrounds alike. Until then, let us hope that the new movement for PvP improvement will continue and will see great new things in the future!

-Aellerian

This week on The Rawrcast Show we will be joined by Tim from El’s Extreme Anglin’! Together we run through the ins and outs of the upcoming fishing changes planned for 3.1, revisit a few changes made in previous patches, and discuss the development of the fishing profession community within World of Warcraft.

So, crack open a Captain Rumsy Lager, whip out your huge rod, and plan to join us for the live show this Saturday at 4 PM, CST on Ustream!~

My name is Taffybag on the Horde side and JebusChristo on the Alliance side, and I am a hunter. Yes I have 2 hunters at 80, so you probably hate me even more now. I started playing WOW 3 or 4 months after BC was released. Why did I venture into the World of Warcraft? Well I liked to play a few PC games, but I had just bought a MacBook Pro, and WOW was the only game the store had that ran on a Mac. So as you read the rest of this post please keep in mind that I had no knowledgeable friends to point me in the right direction when it came to general or hunter specific game mechanics.

What made me decide to play a hunter?

The cashier at CompUSA, where I bought the game, asked if I had ever played, I replied with “No young man, I know nothing of this game” his response was play a warrior or a hunter, little did I know how much more the WOW community would have loved me if I rolled a warrior. But back to why you probably hate me.

You hate me because I killed that mob you were running towards.

Hunter hate starts early, so when you were level 17 in the Barrens killing manbearpig people and running towards that one last mob you needed to complete your quest I shot him from 30 yards away and tagged him, and you got really mad. See we were both new to the game and I just didn’t get the concept of being polite and that I didn’t need to tag every mob in my range. I’ll admit, it’s my bad, but I know better now, so let’s just bury the hatchet.

You hate me because I have a pet.

Listen, I am a hunter, no one else likes me, blizzard knew this would happen, so I have my trusty pet who always loves me, as long as I keep feeding him. Maybe my crab pinned you in in Wintergrasp while I shot you with my exploding bullet of death. Maybe my Devilsaur went all big and red during a raid and obscured your entire UI and you didn’t notice that a void zone had formed under you. Whatever the case just remember that my pet also ate 30% of the damage you were going to get a few times through Roar of Sacrifice and the little bugger has died so many times as a speed bump for stray mobs that were heading for healers in the hope that he could delay them long enough for a tank to pick them up.

You hate me because whenever things go wrong I find some out of the way spot to lie down and play dead.

Yes I can feign death, and yes I will do so when all is lost. I mean, just because you have to pay a repair bill doesn’t mean that I have to. And 50% of the time I have jumper cables, so if you get lucky I might save you some time running. All right it can be frustrating during a wipe fest, but it’s not just me, that rogue in the party is vanishing and saving his own narrow behind.

You hate me because there are a lot of me.

Back in BC, hunters on the realms I played on were always the most heavily represented class. And with lots of players you end up with lots of bad players. I am not saying there are more bad hunters then there are other classes, it’s just that there were so many more hunters that you were more likely to run into a bad hunter. I always got miffed when I would read LF DPS NO HUNTERS. If you just started playing in WOTLK then you probably aren’t as familiar with the glut of hunters, just think of it this way, Death Knights are the new Hunters.

You hate me because I cleared Kara at least 3 times without ever casting a single steady shot.

I don’t blame you though, I even hate myself for that. I had no idea what a shot rotation was, I would open up with an aimed shot then string together my instant casts, something like serpent sting, silencing shot and yes, even scatter shot. How could I be so bad? Hunters are easy to level, even if played badly. That’s how I got to 70 without knowing that steady shot should be used. But it’s not all my fault, see even hunters hate other hunters. On my first server good hunters kept their knowledge to themselves and didn’t like to share it. It ensured that there was less competition for the few coveted guild spots out there and that way even less competition for raid spots and loot. I learned to play from visiting Elitist Jerks and TKASomething, because while hunters on my realm didn’t share there knowledge the cats on message boards just couldn’t shut up about how to play, and I am eternally grateful to them for that.

You hate me because I destroyed the damage meters when we first started WOTLK raiding together.

Hey, don’t get made at me, I didn’t design the game. Hunters are the worst scaling class. We start off really hot when we get our first few shiny epics, but we just don’t keep gaining that steam throughout the current content. There are plenty of non hunters that out dps me on several fights. So don’t be mad, as you get more gear you will get closer and one day may even beat that hunter.

Time for the big finale, I wish I could say there was one last thing that made you really hate me, but unfortunately in the current build of wow there are two things.

If you PVP, you hate me because I killed you in arena.

Now let me say that my arena team, Catalina Wine Mixer, has yet to play a single match, but based on what I have read on the Blizzard Damage Dealing forums, I single handedly annihilated your 2v2 team, while I ate a slice of cake and played online poker. Supposedly every shot I release in arena crits, my explosive shot hits for 7k per tick, my kill shot hits for anywhere between 12k and 16k depending on who you talk to, and deterrence, disengage and frost trap make it totally and completely impossible to deal even 1 point of damage to me. I am a god in arena even though I haven’t played more than 50 matches in my entire life. In all seriousness folks, those damage numbers were posted by non hunters on the forums. We all know that’s not what’s happening most of the time, in fact I have never seen a 7k Explosive Shot tick while fully 25 man raid buffed. I am not getting into the whole hunters are or aren’t OP in arena, I am just saying don’t believe the crazy numbers people are posting all over the place in regards to hunter arena damage. I think if we all come together, we can be reasonable and come to the understanding that it’s actually Death Knights and Retribution Paladins that are entirely to OP for not just arena, but all PVP, teeheehee.

If you PVE, you hate me because I got your Betrayer of Humanity, Journey’s End, Sinister Revenge, or just about any other melee weapon you wanted.

Get over it, it’s time to learn that every piece of loot is hunter loot. Nah that’s not it. It’s just that blizzard is sort of crazy. See we don’t actually use the melee weapon, but in WOTLK they provide us with loads of sexy and valuable stats. I am not saying that I deserve any weapon as much or more than a druid, death knight, titan grip warrior, or rogue, just that melee weapon upgrades do provide a nice DPS upgrade for us too, it’s not just all about the gun. But I will wait for my Journey’s End until all the Bears and Kitties have theirs if it will make you love me.

Well anyway, I am new here, and I am around to answer your questions and provide insight on any topics you might be curious about. So if you want to know anything about being or dealing with hunters level 1-80, send an email my way.

~Taffybag, member of rawrbitchrawr