Thursday, August 28, 2008

I can haz Brutal stuffs PLZ?

Yesterday I picked up my season 4 belt and am about 3k towards the neck. I picked up my Season 4 helmet the day before. My Warlock is now over 13K HP unbuffed, 400 plus resilience, and 1200 spell damage.

We did some arena last night and as per usual we started off slowly going 0-4 in our first four games. We just cant seem to kill Priests unless we cut a nice burst in between his damn shields. We got Priest/Rogue, Druid/Warrior twice, and Hunter/Priest drain team. We probably should have beat the Druid/Warrior team, but they did a great job.

Then we played 8 more games and went 6-2. The last team we beat was a shatter combo (Rogue/Mage) and we got 22 rating for it. I pretty much just CC the crap our of the mage so he cant blow up Mura and make him Ice Block twice with my dots. Two times last night I managed to kill a Rogue 1 on 1. The second time I did it with less than 50 percent mana after he had vanished and ate himself back to full health.

On a side note, Mura checked out Armory and noticed that we are the only Warlock/Ret Pally combo on our server above 1500 rating lol. We finished last night at 1716 and will be working our way to 1800 pretty soon.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

What kind of Junk do you horde?

I know that everyone has that one thing (or things) that they just wont get rid of. There are probably things we have wished we would have kept as well. As for me, Im not really a collector per-se, but I do have a buch of crap.

Number 1 has to be pets. I dont know that I own any pets on my paladin and I only have the Gold Medal Pet on my Warlock, but on my Warrior I have Willy, one of the Crocodile Pets, a cat, the macaw, and a few others. Do I really need all of those pets? Do I need to have linken's sword and boomerang in my bank? Not really, but that is a damned cool reference to Legend of Zelda.

There are other things that I wish I had kept. On my warrior, I wish I had saved my Tier 0.5 pieces. I worked harder for those than any epic that I currently have and vendored them the first chance I got (aka when BC made greens way better than pre-BC blues).

For some of us, we collect things for nostalgia. For others it can be a form of end game. Their only purpose it to obtain all of the pets that they can. I remember reading a blog where the Author was attempting to collect every type of cheese that could be found in-game.

So, what do you horde?

Monday, August 25, 2008

1700 rating!

I finally got my arena team to 1700. I picked up my season 4 boots and will be purchasing my season 4 helmets as soon as the points roll over. I am also only 2.5 k honor away from getting my season 4 belt.

I think alot of team may underestimate my team due to it being a non cookie cutter type team. We have trouble with priests in general, but we beat most other combos pretty nicely. One of the normally annoying classes that we seem to smash to bits it the Druid. They usually dont last very long with my CCing them and Mura smashing their face off.

On a side note, I was kinda pissed this Saturday when I logged on to find that a bunch of people who usually go to my kara run started a run like 4 hours earlier. I thought it was bullshit, but the fact that it took them so long to clear it made me a bit happier. On a personal note, I proposed to my GF in San Francisco this weekend and of course she said yes! All in all an incredible weekend.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

The PVP Grind

Been grinding BGs like crazy the times that I have been able to play. In the last two days that I have played I have gained 18k honor. I have enough marks and honor for my season 4 boots but my 2s partner didnt log on so we didnt get to push to 1700. I would get the belt, but the boots are such a HUGE upgrade over my frozen shadoweave boots, so I am gonna see how my next arena session plays out.

I have noticed that Alliance in my Battegroup is doing a bit better, but we are still losing more than we win. I have been turning in alot of marks for honor. I basically queue up for all of the BGs except AV and flip thru them until I find one the is at leas partly done (if none of them are I just end up settling on the last one so I dont get the deserter debuff). This has been a much quicker way to earn honor.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Arena and other such stuff

As always, I started the weekend with Saturday Night Kara. It was a nice, quick run with no wipes and took less than three hours. This was the second straight week we only took two healers. On Curator, we actually hit his enrage right as he finished the first evocate. He was also pulled while we were clearing the last trash mob and we picked him up without a single death. We had very few deaths as a whole (except for the pug mage who seemed to die every other pull. I led in the pew pew department by about 250K damage......and that was after I accidentally turned off bite instead of growl on my pet.

I also did what I have done so much of lately.....PVP. On Saturday I did a bunch of BGS and ended up getting over 5k honor for the day. The following day, we decided to do Arena to get our rating back up. We went from a 1568 rating to a 1660 rating and I went and bought my season 4 ring. My next goal is to get to 1700 and get my season 4 boots. After getting the ring I was left with a few hundred honor. So I went out and did BGs.....a TON of them. I ended the day with about 13k honor and hopefully if all goes well I will get my season 4 boots. Next week I will be getting my Brutal Chest and gem it with for resilience/stamina and damage/stamina.

Over the past several weeks I have become a much better PVPer. We also figured out the strength of out team. Besides my obvious crowd control and pet silence, I usually apply dots to both targets then CC. Mura does absolutely ridiculous burst damage (hence the team name "Mura Smash"). Two DPS generally arent a problem. Most healer/dps teams arent too bad either. Discipline Priests are the ones we have the most problems with. Mura has figured out that if he is working on the dps, the healer has to heal the DPS while my dots tick on both. If he then quickly switches over, he can basically two shot the healer.

I have found that the easiest healer for me to control is the paladin. If I can make him bubble quickly he is done for. After the bubble he gets feared and dotted. When he breaks fear I wait for him to cast and then silence him. When the silence is up I death coil him and then fear him again. Rinse and repeat until he is dead.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Oh Cruel Arena, why must you mock me so!

So the arena struggle goes on. We started the night at 1586 and I had hoped to at least get to 1650 so I could get my ring. What happens? We lose out first 4 matches. 4x Disc Priest/Rogue, and one Disc Priest/Hunter. It is ridiculously had to kill a Disc priest. And Rogues have so many cooldowns to blow mutliple times that it makes it very difficult to kill them as well. We were down at 1504 and things were looking bad. So we win the next 7 games in a row. Basically during the evening, everytime we played a two dps team we won. If we played a team with a Discpline priest we usually lost.

So we are going up and down in rating. We get to a high of about 1632 , but end the evening in the 1550's. Why you ask? Well at some point in out 1500-1600 bracket we ran into a Warrior/Druid combo. The Druid was wearing SEASON 4 SHOULDERS!!!!111!1!!one!! WTF is he doing in that bracket. Wew couldnt do anything to him. It was completly ridiculous.

That is my biggest beef with arenas. Teams that have already made it to the top starting over at the bottom to feed their Epeens. I would like to get my Brutal Gear as well. Quit rerolling teams when you previously had a 2200 rating. That is just bullshit.

Another bit of a gripe I have is why does everything in 2s have to be so damn cookie cutter? All you see is Warrior/Druid,Shaman Priest/Warlock,Hunter,Rogue Mage/Rogue. All of the combinations are the same. Just because you face a certain class shouldnt mean that you automatically lose.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Trolls

I cant stand them. I dont mean the WoW race. The ones who spam trade channel and endlessly annoy people on forums.

Trade Channel Trolls- Trade channel is for goods and trade. Not for talking about anal (devastate) or Murlocs. It is annoying when you ask for a service in trade chat and it gets covered in 3 seconds by people spamming retarded random crap.

Forum Trolls- The ones who hand around on the forums for no other reason to make fun of someones gear/gems/enchants or just to put them down in general. For example, there is a mage on my realm forum that hops into most threads with a "lol INT gems are for noobs" or something to that effect. Is it really neccessary to be a troll all the time.

Dont feed the troll and they will die.

Monday, August 11, 2008

I hate Monday

Going back to work sucks. Now on with the WoW. I ran kara as per usual this weekend and got Dory's Embrace for my Warrior. I wasnt able to do any Arena on my Warlock as my arena partner did not have his desk top and I wasnt going to do arena with a partner using a laptop mouse lol.

I did quite a bit of badge farming over the weekend as well. Got the 40 badges I will need from EoTS to get my season 4 boots once I hit 1700 (which I hope will be this week). Mura, my PvP partner got his Resto Shaman into the best PVP guild on the server Ramrod. Last night I did 5 WSG with Mura, two other long time in-game friends, and two other members of Ramrod. We completly dominated, winning all 5 by 3-0 scores. That was a nice quick 15 badges for a BG that is often a major pain for me. I usually finished top 3 damage, and I was also usually top 2 in healing lol.

I like playing my warlock, and the more I play, the better my strategies against other classes become. I have become very good an the manual fel hunter silence and I can only imagine how much it annoys healers. Dots get him down to 40 percent while he is healing team mates. He goes for a heal, and gets feared. Dots still ticking. He breaks the fear with his trinket and get silenced and drained. Dots still ticking. He tries to heal again, fear or deathcoil and he is dead.

I also found the I enjoy running into large groups of Horde (as long as they dont include a bunch of rogues) and just throwing up as many dots as I can before I die. If they dont have any healers with them I can kill several of them even after I am dead.

Friday, August 8, 2008

PVE>PVP?

So, with the news that you can get a tabbard for completing a battleground and a pet if you win one, it got me thinking. Why cant you make any money in PVP? Sure you can get a small amount of copper from killing and looting players, but that doesnt add up. Why cant there be a way to make money in PVP? People have to make money thru pve to respec so that they can pvp. They PVP for their gear, but then they have to turn around and PVE so that they can gem and enchant their shiny new purples.

This doesnt really make alot of sense to me. You dont have to PVP to be good at PVE, but you do have to do the opposite. This got my thinking....why cant corpses of players drop a bit more silver (not out of their own pocket) or some vendor trash. Also, why not make the drop rate for greens, blues, and epics slightly worse for PVP and make them drop from players. To make it so that the game does not get slowed down, there will be no rolls on these items. Whoever has the right to loot it (much like PVE) is the one who get the item. Whoever loots the body, the item goes automatically to who it was supposed to go to like auto loot.

This would make it a bit more profitable for players who prefer PVP to do what they want. PVPers dont have to run BT or SWP to get PVP gear, so why should they have to PVE for money. Well thats about it for my rant. This comes from someone who has septn much more time in the PVE aspect of the game. I have done my share of PVP and enjoy it, but there is really no profit to be had.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

A little bit of burnout

I dont know what it is, but I find myself far less motivated to play lately. I havent been able to raid for a while, so when I am on I usually PVP. I am so damn sick of BGs. I have enjoyed arena for the most part, but it is the same formula seemingly every week. I start the week poorly on Weds nights when we get matched against a bunch of teams with season 3 weapons and are still in the 1600 bracket. Then on the following Sunday we usually get the rating back up to a decent level. Yesterday we had druids or rogues in pretty much every game we played. We only saw 1 shaman, no hunters, 1 or 2 paladins. Every team seemed to have a warrior, a rogue, a druid, or a priest on it.

Since Arena has been the only enjoyable thing I have been doing lately, it makes my whole gaming experience suck when I meet a team that has two brutal, 3 vengeful and was in the 2000s last season. It is just annoying. I think I need to get into a decent 3v3 or something because unfortunately, there is way too much rock paper scissors in 2s.

I actually logged off last night an hour earlier that I normally would. I was just that bored. I couldnt bring myself to do another BG and heroics seem like a waste of time to me at this point. Im not going to get into a pug that may not even make it all the wat thru the instance. Im sure alot of people are feeling my pain at the moment. I dont have time to raid, but pvp feels like somewhat of a dead end. I cant bring myself to level yet another toon to 70 (although I have been tempted to level my druid for pvp).

It also probably doesnt help that I see my friends on less and less often. Many of them are playing AoC at the moment, but Im not so sure my machine could run it (and if it did, I would have to play a low graphic settings. Oh well, perhaps my enthusiasm will pick up by this weekend. We shall see.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Back from Mini Vacation

Had a great time in Idaho and really enjoyed seeing my Grandparents. I got back on Sunday but didnt play any WoW until Monday Morning. I did the fishing and cooking quests on my Warrior. Then I PVPed. All day. On my Warlock. First I did some more arenas to see if I could at least get pur rating back over 1575 so I could get my bracers. We ended up at 1647 including beating a Druid/Warrior team that we got 25 rating for. I then proceeded to do AV. Alot of AV. I ended up getting 8000 plus honor and getting my bracers that day. Next up is the ring.