PvE Tokens and Badges Tradeable for PvP, Arena Gear

Late-breaking news this evening reports that the latest achievement on the Sunwell Plateau on the PTR unlocked a vendor that will exchange tier tokens and badges for different seasons of arena gear. I talked a little about patch 2.4 altering the pvp gear progression path to move people back into instances yesterday when discussing purchasable, reputation-based pvp blues that will be added to the game, but it looks like Blizzard's changes are set to make this even more dramatic. Here's the current exchange rate:

• Tier 4 tokens = equivalent Season 1 pieces (gladiator set)
• Tier 5/6 tokens = equivalent Season 2 pieces (merciless gladiator set)
• Badges of Justice = Veteran's boots (40), bracers (25), belt (40)
• New T6 tokens = equivalent Vindicator's gear (boots, bracers & belt)

I expect a lot of QQing about raiders getting free epics, but the truth is that the current pvp gear progression is even more time consuming than raiding -- a serious pvping friend of mine who's leveling a warlock for arenas did the math and figured he'd need to log 100 straight hours of Alterac Valley to gear his character up for Season 4.

While this change might even be a bit too far in the opposite direction, I still maintain that increasing the pace and means by which players get pvp gear is going to make all arena play -- not just the high end -- much more about skill and much less about who's managed to log enough pvp time to get ___ amount of resilience.

Faction-Based PvP Gear In Patch 2.4

Patch 2.4 is poised to transform the face of PvP for the better, and as someone with two alts doing casual 2v2s, there's a lot I'm excited about.

By now everyone's probably aware that 2.4 heralds the removal of diminishing returns. This should increase honor gains dramatically, especially in turtling battlegrounds; Amanda Miller at WoW Insider has estimated that straight PvP combat will be nine times as lucrative than it is now.

But the thing I'm really excited is something that we saw in the patch notes, but I just recently found more information on: uncommon-quality PvP gear that will be available for purchase through faction vendors. The sets are ilvl 115, which makes them superior to the belt and legs from Halaa rewards but still inferior to Season One arena gear.

Although I'd initially been thinking this gear would be available via battleground reputation, it turns out that's not the case. Instead, each piece will be a reputation reward purchasable for gold from a different Burning Crusade faction. Shoulders and gloves will require honored reputation, but you'll need revered to obtain leg and chest pieces (strangely, hats seem to be inconsistent from one class to another).

The actual faction required for each piece varies from one set to another, but it looks like each set contains one piece each from the Sha'tar, Cenarion Expedition, Thrallmar/Honor Hold, Keepers of Time, and Lower City quartermasters. For the moment, you'll have to check MMO-Champion's screenshots or the PTRs to see which piece requires which faction, but I've linked to the Wowhead page for each set below.

Resto Druid - Kodohide Battlegear
Balance Druid - Wyrmhide Battlegear
Feral Druid - Dragonhide Battlegear
Hunter - Stalker's Chain Battlegear
Mage - Evoker's Silk Battlegear
Healy Priest - Mooncloth Battlegear
Shadow Priest - Satin Battlegear
Rogue - Opportunist's Battlegear
Resto Shaman - Seer's Ringmail Battlegear
Elemental Shaman - Seer's Mail Battlegear
Enhancement Shaman - Seer's Linked Battlegear
Warlock - Dreadweave Battlegear
Warrior - Savage's Plate Battlegear

As you might be able to guess from the names, it looks like all of this gear will share the same bonuses as the arena sets, allowing you to pair two rep PvP pieces with two pieces of arena gear for two +35 resilience bonuses.

For me, this is a really excellent addition that helps rebalance gear progression for new level 70s. I'm not one to cry welfare epics, but as previous seasons of arena gear have become available for purchase by honor, I've felt less and less compelled to send my alts into regular PvE instances at all. At the same time, the arena gear disparity at the 1500 mark feels so huge -- you can hit extremely well-geared players who have just formed a new team, or brand new 70s without any resilience or experience.

Providing a PvE reputation path to obtaining stepping-stone PvP gear will mean more folks running vanilla instances, will help normalize casual arena play so that it's more dependent on skill, and will reduce the currently massive time investment required to go from unbearably squishy to moderately survivable in PvP. As I see it, these are all fantastic outcomes.

6 Mods and Macros to Help You Win in Battlegrounds

Winning battlegrounds doesn't just take good gear, it also takes good organization. I've been running a ton of BGs, both pug and org, to farm honor for my arena-ing shadow priest and pick up the 2-minute PvP trinket for my mage, and the one thing that's struck me (especially in Eye of the Storm) is how much more honor I get when I'm a) running with an organized group (where everyone is well-prepared, in TS, and following directions) or b) in a pug that is actually communicating well. Today I thought I'd share five addons and one macro that I've found especially helpful in either organized or unorganized battleground pvp.

AlphaMap
AlphaMap is an excellent BG map mod that I have set up to pop up whenever I enter a battleground. The addon provides a transparent, scaleable map of the entire battleground that you can drag to anywhere on your screen. The huge advantage to this, of course, is that you have a constant view of the battleground's progress without ever having to hit M to look at the in-game map. AlphaMap will also display the location of everyone else in your raid on the map, and gives a special icon to the flag carriers in EotS and WSG. A right-clickable menu on the side of the map lets you broadcast information like the number of nodes needed to win in AB, the location of a flag in WSG, or the number of enemies incoming in AB.

Deadly Boss Mods
DBM is familiar to many raiders as one of the two main contenders (along with BigWigs) for raiding boss mods and timers. If you're already using DBM and want to take advantage of its battleground timer features, just make sure you have the Battlegrounds suite installed and enabled. (If you're looking to pair timers with a good map mod, I recommend AlphaMap.) Fans of other boss mods or folks looking for pure PvP addons can find similar functionality with Capping.

Stinkyqueue
Without Stinkyqueue, there would be no organized Alterac Valley. (Without Stinkyqueue, I might never play Alterac Valley again until patch 2.4.) Stinkyqueue is a mod that allows you to join AV as a premade group. Technically speaking, it just synchronizes the queue requests to greatly improves the chances that your entire group will end up in the same Alterac Valley, but the effect is largely the same. Here's how it works: everyone in the raid must have Stinkyqueue downloaded and enabled, and must talk with the battlemaster to open up the queuing window. The raid leader types /sq q to simultaneously queue everyone in the raid. For Ace fans, Lightqueue is the Ace alternative, and will work even if some of your raid is using Stinkyqueue.

Capping
Capping is the Wowace heir of Battlefield Commander, an old standard long-favored by PvP veterans. (Battlefield Commander is no longer being maintained.) It's an all-in-one informational BG mod that provides popup maps and timer bars, and lets you broadcast the estimated time to win or time until a node caps by ctrl-clicking the bar. To move the timer bars, click them once to highlight, then drag them by the title text that appears above them. Capping also provides a flag carrier frame that you can left-click to target the flag carrier in WSG or EotS.

Wopumentia's BG Defense Macro (modified by Snapfizzle)
This macro will call out incoming enemies along with your location, which it automatically detects in the first line. It broadcasts via a raid warning if your BG leader gives you assist. For minimal disruption while you're dealing with the incoming wave, just mash the macro once for each incoming enemy. Three lines of raid warning = three enemies to deal with. This macro is especially useful in AB and EotS.

/script mP = GetMinimapZoneText( );
/script cL = "";
/script if ( IsRaidOfficer( ) ) then cL = "RAID_WARNING"; else cL = "BATTLEGROUND"; end
/script SendChatMessage ( "<<"..mP..">> has inc! 1 per spam...", cL, nil, nil);

There are also addons out there that do the same sort of thing (see AlphaMap, which has a similar menu), but if you ask me, this is a far simpler and more lightweight solution. Just type /m, create a new macro, copy and paste the green text above, and drag the macro to your toolbar.


Whether you're just starting out in PvP or looking to improve your game as a battleground veteran, I hope this list had something useful. If you have another favorite battleground mod you'd like to share, please leave a note in the comments!

How I Stopped Worrying and Loved the Hunter

It's been almost embarrassing to admit it, with all the great hunter blogs out there extolling the class as well as the fine examples in my guild, but after getting my own hunter to 70, I just really wasn't feeling it. It just all felt so complicated, so much micromanaging to play a dps class.

And then there's the pulling. See, I don't actually like pulling, as far as I can tell. Perhaps it stems from being a mage, but there's something intrinsically suicidal about having one's job be to run ahead and shoot things in the face.

I did regular Shattered Halls run followed by heroic Ramparts a few weeks back, and although it was a good guild group and things went smoothly enough, I'd never felt more off my game. (Also, my gun broke in the middle of Ramparts. This didn't help any.) It's like the 5 man hunter playstyle just wasn't meshing with my own finely attuned PvE ranged dps skills. Sure, I appreciated hunters more than ever, but did I really want to play one?

And so my hunter went back to sitting dormant in Skettis, earning me a few gold here and there with daily quests, until The Boy and I decided to form a 2v2 team with our alts. I named us the Dark Iron Scraps, and up until this week, the name was the best thing we had going for us. Quite frankly, we started with no gear and 11k health between the two of us. His mage was sporting PvE tailoring epics, and I was in... well, quest greens, some of which were leather. To be frank, we're still pretty atrociously geared, we've lost at least 80% of our games, and our rating is abysmal.

But back to huntering, because here's the thing: I respecced for arena this week, and suddenly I'm having fun with my hunter! Ramekin's now 0/42/19, and for being such a noob, he's the most godawful arena pest you've ever laid eyes on. My other arena partner, A Moonkin in San Francisco, says he could've told me that months ago:

Me: Wow, my hunter is annoying now that I've respecced for arena.
aMiSF: Well, duh.
Me: Heh.
aMiSF: Oh, you have buffs on you? Lemme get rid of those. What's that, you want to heal? Well we can't have that do any good, let's just cut that in half. Oh, you want to cast spells too? Now now, none of that.
Me: Just think of these as gifts. Like this lovely scattershot.
aMiSF: Oh, and here is an animal for your face. You can't CC him, so just deal with it.

Nerf By Numbers

I've been thinking a lot about arena strategies and gear over the past week, now that I'm doing shadow priest/moonkin and hunter/mage 2v2s regularly. Admittedly, the hunter/mage combo has a definite 'losing for the epics' feel to it, as The Boy and I only have about 12k health combined on our alts.

Reading 2v2 arena strats requires a certain amount of tolerance for the old rock/paper/scissors class-based QQing. Just for fun, I thought I'd do a little Google survey to see who the teeming millions think really needs a nerf. Apparently paladins aren't overpowered at all!

Screenshot Sunday: World PvP Remembered

This week's screenshot features one of my favorite moments in World of Warcraft ever, as well as my first real taste of WoW celebrity. Operation: Everything Must Die was a 900+ person world PvP raid orchestrated on Dark Iron by the Penny Arcade Alliance (with which my guild, Annarchy, just so happens to be affiliated).

On November 29th, 2006, just days before dishonorable kills were removed from Blizzard's honor formula, we canceled all scheduled raids in the 12-guild Alliance just moments before they were about to begin, and launched a multi-pronged attack against every major horde city, with additional groups of lowbies sent to Brill, Tarren Mill, and Crossroads.

The shot above is from my mage's archives, and made the rounds of WoW blogs and websites back in the day (in most, you can still see the green bar representing my Brood of Nozdormu rep on Firkin). Just moments before this picture was taken, Annarchy and the Disciples of Divx were stationed at the bottom of Darrowmere Lake waiting for the signal to invade the Undercity, with warlocks providing underwater breathing to everyone as we summoned more people in. As the attacks on other cities got underway, we surfaced and grouped up to charge.

Once inside Undercity, the lag made every cast a thirty-second affair. With the news that Cairne, Thrall, and Vol'jin had bit the dust, we killed Varimathras and had Sylvanas to 50% when the server went down for the first time. Dark Iron never really recovered for the rest of the night.

Thinking back, it'd be nice if Blizzard provided a little more incentive and technical support for large-scale world events like this (fingers crossed for the Sunwell opening events not being as laggy as the AQ gates). Right now, forming a world PvP raid to kill a racial leader gives a small amount of gold per raider, plus a chunk of honor. Though I'm not sure exactly how much you get these days, I do know that I see far fewer capital city raids than I used to; with a few exceptions, people have found better ways to spend their time.

Back in December, Eners on Drak'thul gave a number of suggestions for how to encourage raids to take on the racial leader, instead of abandoning this aspect of the game entirely. His thoughts:

• Boost the gold and honor reward for killing faction leaders
• Create a cool buff (like the Warchief's blessing, or the turn-in for Magtheridon, Onyxia, or Nefarion's head) that would increase honor gained by everyone involved in the kill for the next hour
• Make a new title for players who've killed all of the opposing faction's racial leaders
• Develop a quest or quest line that rewards honor or rare loot for killing racial leaders

Silvais of Dragonmaw server adds one more suggestion to the mix: why not let each racial leader have a small chance of dropping a unique version of their race's mount?

How about you guys: have you raided the opposing faction's capital cities? What kinds of changes would make you want to go mano-a-mano with Thrall or Bolvar?

I Want This Nightmare to be Over!

image by Jeff Kubina
I was feeling some empathy for my old friend Aran today while trying to complete today's daily battleground quest. Alterac Valley was the name of the game today, and for some reason the Alliance just could not get their act together in the Shadowburn battlegroup.

It was like the first day of 2.3 all over again: no one knew how to play the new AV. I started the morning out with turtles.

"WTF u nubs take SH!" Stonehearth Graveyard, it seemed to my fellow puggers, was the lynchpin by which we would halt the onslaught of horde and win the day. This lasted for about four games.... then I gave up and made some oatmeal. Seriously people, your pug AV strategy is "hold SH"? What are you, nuts?

This afternoon brought me back for more pain, in the form of spreading ourselves too thin, favoring Galv over anything with, say, a timer on it, and leaving no defenders on our only graveyard. Now, I'm no AV wizard (oh wait -- yes I am! *pew pew*), but the lack of basic competence was enough to make me question my resolve ten times over.

See, I've been trying to complete the BG daily every day, rain or shine, and then quit after that unless I find an org group to play with. It's a nice strategy that lets me net at least 500 honor a day; often a lot more, since pugs are rarely successful on the first try. Up until now, this has meant I play a moderate number of BGs every evening on my priest and mage -- maybe six a day, on average.

Today took me 23 games to get one win on my priest. I don't think I can bear swapping over to my mage to do it all again.

On a related note, in between BGs I've been reading through my blog roll and trying to catch up on all the stuff I missed while at my parents' house for a week. Sometime around AV #19 I hit Tobold's proposal to make raiding more like PvP. Like so many of the posts Tobold writes, it's carefully argued and thought provoking (seriously, head over there -- even if you disagree wholeheartedly with him, there's food for thought), but when I consider the proposed outcome, I can't help but find it ludicrous.

As a voice for the casual WoW player, he's musing on the possibility of creating a new level of randomly-puggable PvE raiding with the same sort of guaranteed return on your time invested that you get with the PvP rewards system. That is, easy versions dungeons where killing anything would get you points or tokens that you could grind to turn in for PvE loot.

Now, maybe I'm just too far removed from the so-called casual masses of WoW, but a pure battleground-like pugging of even an incredibly nerfed Karazhan sounds horribly painful. I mean, let's face it. You can debate the merits of resilience and AFK mechanics all you want, but at the most basic level, battlegrounds do not require rebalancing. That is, even if you throw two horribly unbalanced, incompetent and disorganized teams together, someone is still going to win.

The same can't be said for raiding, even in a nerfed form. A pure pug of level 70s, even a balanced one, could easily fail at BWL from lack of coordination alone. Making raiding more accessible isn't a bad thing, but if there's one thing running battlegrounds daily has taught me, it's that the true lowest common denominator in WoW can be staggeringly low.

With this in mind, battleground-style pugging just isn't a good solution. Unless of course you'd like to go through 23 different raid groups just to get Attumen down on a bad day. But if you ask me, that doesn't sound like fun for anyone.

8 Resto Druids and Some Bears Walk Into a Gulch

I'm finally feeling better, and I've got a bunch of posts I've been itching to write for GMW: on fighting Kael, on my forays into arena, and even on (oh noes) Guild Drama.

But first, since I mentioned our guild's all-druid Karazhan (they've actually had to schedule two different runs, we have so many druids!), I thought I'd point you all to another all-druid extravaganza via YouTube: the all-druid WSG.

If you've ever wanted to watch a rogue get punched to death by half a dozen trees, a would-be flag carrier come face to face with ten stealthed cats, or the carnage that ensues when an entire team of druids cast hurricane at once, this video is for you.



It's like fighting the entire goddamn Savannah!

If I Had a Hammer

image by David Blaine










If I had a hammer, I'd enchant it with soulfrost in the morning, and mind flay horde in the evening all over Azeroth.

Unfortunately, Tuesday morning means maintenance time, and the start of Arena Season 3 means extended maintenance for everyone. So my shadow priest will have to wait a bit longer to get her shiny new [Amani Punisher] enchanted.

That's ok though. When I log in, it's straight to the vendor in the Champion's Hall to buy myself some [Veteran's Dreadweave Stalkers] at the new rock-bottom honor prices. Spooky boots are few and far between, and my [Shattrath Jumpers] are looking a little scruffy.