A Real Dance Party

I’m a wallflower. I’ve always been a wallflower. I know. I can hear the exclamations of disbelief. “No, Lajos! Not you!” Yes, I’m aware it’s a shock.

I, like so many others, gaze in envy at the myriad festivities that RG publicizes on her blog.  On rare occasions, I have been involved. Good memories, but due to conflicting schedules, few and far between. Such is the life of a left-coast player on a Central Time server. (Cue violin music)

Lament aside, I generally find plenty to do in WoW. This weekend, I continued my obsession with PvP, and in between, renewed my efforts on the Auction House, and traveled around, picking up the last few recipes required for the Chef Achievement, etcetera. Along the way, I dropped in at one of the most famous dance parties on Azeroth.

Especially with Cataclysm-ic changes on the horizon, I was definitely stoked to see this one first hand.

Just One More Reason…

… I love my job.

Our CFO (and one of the original founding partners) is a wonderful lady that we in Tech refer to as “Mrs. Claus”. She takes care of her boys in Tech, insuring that we have the necessities to do our job – Gummy Worms, Starbursts, animal crackers (in case we feel the need to bite someone’s head off, or chew some ass), and a tub o’ peanuts.

This week, however, she noted that it was National Junkfood Day, and this is a small portion of the spread she organized for our corporate office. Val, we love ya!!!

Moar PeeVeePee

So yeah, I’m a bit obsessive. I’ve tried leveling my lock a few times over the last week, but it dulled real fast. Right now, I’m immersed in mage PvP mode, and I keep feeling the compulsion to hit the “H” key and queue up for a random BG.  Why fight it?

With this weeks arena matches in the books, this weekend was a running mixture of heroics, an Ulduar 25 and 10 for the weekly, and lots of bgs. As RG mentioned, Saturday afternoon Fiaked, Hartbane, Kalyon and I teamed up on a string of random bgs, and while I wouldn’t put it in the “pwned” category, it is true that we won pretty much every BG we went into.

So, a couple notes on the incessant whining on Winterhoof that “Alliance sucks in Wintergrasp”, and on the Whirlwind battlegroup in general that “Horde dominate bgs”.  None of these is particularly new or earthshaking, but I’ll repeat them here anyway, if for nothing else than to display the fact that I get it.

1. Battlegrounds in General – Know the objectives. If you don’t know, ask. If you’re too timid to ask, shut up, listen, and stick with the crowd. Even if they’re “not doing it right”, battlegrounds are about coordinated effort, and while you learn, you’re much better sticking with a group. Curb your heroic tendencies, you’ll live longer.
2. Bases are King – Particularly in Eye and Arathi, but the theory applies in some form to pretty much all battlegrounds. In those two in particular, if you consistently control 3 bases, you will win. The flag in Eye is only of use when you can only hold 2 bases, and need an edge, or when you hold 3 bases, and want to speed up the victory. If you’re going for the flag with less than 2 bases, you’re doing it wrong.
3. Think Logically – If you have 3 bases in Arathi or Eye, and half a dozen Horde show up to attack one, that means one of theirs is going to be lightly defended.
4. Don’t Road Fight – This is a reflex that’s really hard to overcome, but it must be overcome, nonetheless. The only time you want to road fight is when you have a numerical base advantage, and you can tie up a significant number of the enemy on the road, so they can’t attack your bases. Guess what? This is what the enemy has been doing to you in all those BGs you lost!
5. In Wintergrasp – If you keep throwing your forces at a single point, the enemy will mass there, and unless you outnumber them drastically, you will be stopped. If you ignore your towers, they will be destroyed, and you will run out of time.
6. Moar Healerz – To all those healie types who come to bgs and heal me… I love you, no shit, let me buy you a beer. That’s why paladins, druids, and priests can be such terrors in battlegrounds… they bring their own healer.
7. Communication and coordination – a group of 4 or 5 people who are on the same page can dominate a battleground.

Case in point… on Saturday, in Warsong Gulch. While Kalyon and Hartbane were back on defense, Fiaked and I went on the offensive. We ran into 3 Horde outside the upper tunnel, 2 of them mages, and took them out, then got some cooldowns, and rushed the flagroom. Five enemies in there, with TWO resto druids. Neither was well geared, and it showed. We burned both of them, and held out long enough for a few other teammates to show up, and a flag cap soon followed. None of it was particularly due to MY skill. I played my class, we communicated on Vent, I got heals, and good things happened.

Like the arena, being on Vent is huge in actual fights. But I did a lot of battlegrounds solo over the weekend, and invariably, when people played as a team, and paid attention to the objectives instead of just “see Horde -attack Horde”, we did well.

Wintergrasp is tough for Alliance on Winterhoof, because yes, we’re generally hugely outnumbered. That’s only going to change if we encourage more people to come out. It’s still possible to win, though, even when outnumbered, if people play smart, and coordinate. Even outnumbered, you have to spread out to attack from Broken Temple, and Sunken Ring simultaneously, and to defend the towers. When you get right down to it, it’s the “Bases are King” principle. If you control all the bases, the enemy has to dispatch forces to take them back, and to do it effectively, they have to send a larger force. So, effectively, 2 people on a base can keep double, triple, or quadruple that number tied up. That’s X number of fortress defenders that aren’t up stopping siege vehicles. That’s the numbers game that allows a smaller force to win on attack.

Defense is another matter altogether. Realize, from the start, that Blizzard didn’t design Wintergrasp to be defended effectively. They WANT it to change hands. The best bet there is to build catapults to go out and kill siege vehicles as fast as possible, and to send out squads to kill towers. Only after towers are down should defenders try to cap Sunken Ring and Broken Temple.

Anyway… a good tally this weekend. I was able to upgrade a ring, so I’ve got Relentless and Wrathful rings on, and I’m only a few WG marks short of being able to swap my PvE Bloodmage shoulders for the Titan-Forged Shoulderpads of Salvation. When my arena points come up for this last week, I should be able to swap my Hood of Fiery Aftermath for the Relentless Gladiator’s Silk Cowl. I might even manage another upgrade as well.

Diary of an Arena Recruit Pt1

So… I’ve done PvP. Or at least I thought I had. Sheesh.

I’ve sweated it out on the BGs, building my first PvP set… then I started raiding with RG, and was in a totally different mode. I got moderately competent, enough to not embarrass myself too much, anyway. Then came the Arena tournament (it was all about the pet) and the competitive gene kicked in, and now I’m back in PvP mode. With a vengeance. As in getting up at 5AM to do bgs before work.

I’ve gone on ad nauseum about the things that frustrate me about trying to learn to PvP.  I’m a researcher. An obsessive one. The problem is, all the research in the world doesn’t help when you’ve facing a shaman and a DK, the shaman drops four totems and sics his wolves on you, and the ghoul is crawling all over your ass. All the research in the world won’t help in that period of about 2 seconds that you’ve got to react, because by the time you search the memory banks for “2v2 – Shaman/DK”, you’re already in the deep kimchee.

I’m a big fan of analogies. Visualizations and pictures are more effective for most people in grasping a concept than just words. Visualizations and mental pictures are created in the imagination. The imagination typically works better when it has a familiar frame of reference. That’s what analogies are all about.

So, here’s the analogy. Take the career couch potato, who decides he wants to become a UFC fighter. What are the steps?

The first step is going to be to get to the gym, and start working out. Sure, they could buy a bunch of exercise equipment, put it in the garage, read the manuals, read tips online, etc., but face it… it’s going to be much more effective if he buys a membership to a decent gym, and gets a good personal trainer who can teach him how to do things right.

And I’ll end the analogy there for now. I finally found “my personal trainer”, so to speak. Kaif did a 3s team with RG and I during the Arena Tournament, and as badly as I sucked on the ‘lock, I was somewhat surprised when he was willing to do a 2s team with my mage. Obviously, the man has a masochistic streak in there somewhere. But I digress…

Lajos has teamed up with his priest Fiaked. So how are we doing?

Well… that depends. Ask me after the aforementioned Shaman/DK has just reduced me to Ghoul-chow, and I’d say I sucked. ( And I emphasize “I”, because I’ve seen Fiaked virtually solo a 2-man after I got nuked early. Yeah, I’m no expert, but the worst that can be said is “Kaif’s competent”.)

Later, in the light of day, I’m a bit more objective. Yeah, I’ve got a long way to go. Emphasis on LONG. I suffer from tunnel vision. Kaif feeds me a lot of info, and it’s obvious that he’s seeing a lot of things that I don’t.  My knowledge of the various classes doesn’t even approach his. If I had the time, I’d level one of each to learn all that.

But all in all, as a team, we’re not doing too bad. We nudged over 1000 last night, before falling back under, and 3 of the losses we had were arguably due to one of us getting DCed. One in particular, we had the opposing team split across the arena, one out of line of sight, and the other down under 20% health, on Fiaked. It was as close to a sure kill as any I’ve ever seen. I actually watched an Arcane Barrage animation go off, and then my screen froze. ARRRRGGGGG!!!!!!

And yeah, there are lots of things I need to do. My UI needs a serious overhaul. Action bars need configured, etc. I need to change how I approach battlegrounds. Mostly, I’ve just been working on surviving and doing as much damage as possible. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but I need to start forcing myself to be more aware of what multiple targets are doing. Unfortunately, Gladius doesn’t work in battlegrounds, so I have to work on multiple solutions. Kaif is moving this weekend, so it should be a good chance for me to do some housecleaning and tweaking. I may even brave the barrage of “You suck!”s and do some random arena skirmishes. Frankly, that’s my first milestone… to get to a point that I can work with a random partner, and not be guaranteed a “you suck!”.

In any case, it’s going to be a race: my improvement curve vs. the degradation of Kaif’s patience. Speaking as someone who has a problem teaching someone else, my sympathies are with him.

And hey, if nothing else, I have blog fodder.