Nice cup of tea

As a largely solo player, I see PvP as the way to best to advance my character. I also really enjoy it – in a battleground context – so I don’t feel any guilt in using PvP as a way to get some epics. I’m not going to be raiding, and I doubt I’ll ever set foot inside Karazhan, so these aren’t welfare epics for me. Along with the crafted ones, they’re probably the only epics I’ll ever achieve. Besides, all the PvP epics have PvP stats that would make them unsuitable for serious PvE play, so it seems someone disingenuous to compare like with like.

Much has been said about the Alliance being bad at PvP, particularly in the battlegrounds, but I never put much stock in the idea. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why one side would be better than the other, as the classes are well balanced, and especially now that both sides have equal access to paladins and shaman. And not having played much PvP, I didn’t feel qualified to comment. But I’ve been playing lot more battlegrounds recently, and I’ve been losing.

At the moment, I am level 52, and progressing at a very leisurely pace to seventy. Once I decided to start a serious PvP career, I set up a spreadsheet to track the token and honor costs of the items I wanted to buy, as well as how many of each BG token I have, the amount of honor I’ve earned, and my progress towards buying everything I want. I aim to hit the ground running when I finally reach seventy, with a few honor-bought ex-arena and PvP reward epics ready to equip.

This has made me notice something about the costs of PvP equipment: the honor requirement seems to be much, much higher than the token requirement. I don’t earn honor at anything like the same rate as I earn battleground tokens. So what I am supposed to do with all the tokens I will have left over? For example, at the moment I have around 25% of the tokens I need to buy the basics of what I want at seventy (armor set, epic weapons, trinket) but only 3% of the honor required. Does honor get much easier to come by in the Eye of the Storm or in higher-level matches?

One of the more interesting things I decided to track in my spreadsheet is my win: loss ratio. After every match, I mark down whether it was a win or a loss for the Alliance, and I’m sad to say the numbers I’ve gathered support the idea that the mighty Alliance royally suck at battlegrounds:

Wins:	3	(13%)
Losses:	21	(87%)

This is a combination of Warsong Gulch, Alterac Valley, and mainly Arathi Basin. I also concede that the only common factor in all of these matches is that I was playing, but that’s a thought too terrible to think about. I like to think that I am a decent player (don’t we all?), and I often fall in the top half to quarter of the scoreboard. I’m also keen on playing as a hunter correctly, which I think means:

• DPSing down anyone and everyone, prioritising cloth and leather wearers;
• Using my Viper Sting to drain mana from mana-sensitive classes such as mages and priests;
• Using Concussive Shot and my pet’s Intimidate to slow down classes that would otherwise like to be nimble: rogues, cat form druids, flag bearers, anyone running amok;
• Having my pet Intimidate and harass as many people as possible;
• Using traps to slow and freeze opponents in strategically important points: near flags, objectives, chokepoints.

Notice I said “I think” this is how I supposed to play my class. Maybe I am wrong, and should concentrate only and whole-heartedly on damage output, or lurking at the back setting traps. This leads me nicely to what I believe is the core of the problem I’m having with PvP, and often with PUG grouping in general: everybody expects everyone else to know what to do, and consequently no one says much of anything. The net result is no tactics or plans are formed, and the Horde steam roll ahead, with us disorganised and dying in silence.

Now, am I part of the problem? Certainly. As an Alliance PvP player, dying in the battlegrounds on the losing side, yes, I am the problem. We all are. I am PvPing in mainly quest greens, with the occasional blue and my beloved epic [Hurricane]. I don’t have any PvP-centic +stamina or +resist gear, so I don’t have thousands of health and warlocks have no trouble DOTting me into the ground. But I’ve got to start somewhere!

Still, there is the nagging thought that if I rolled a horde character on a server in the same battle group, I would be on the winning side 80% of time… But that isn’t the way to improve myself. Time to get back into the battleground queue, and keep practising.

For the Alliance! /salute

Labels: pvp, stala