Ebb and Flo

So, yesterday, sitting at work, I was going through some old WoWInsider articles, and came across one from last June, an Art of Warcraft column talking about dealing with PUG battlegrounds. Most of it dealt with how to enjoy the experience, and not rage at it, and overall, was some really good advice. Most of it was redundant for me, things I’d sort of subconsciously realized and adapted to during the time where I was building my first PvP set, as it was the only way I could get any higher level gear, and that meant PUGS. It’s different in a battleground tho’, as there isn’t the rigid “this is how you handle this boss” attitude, and things are happening so fast, weaknesses of players (i.e., my own suck-age) are a lot less glaring, and so less likely to be commented on.

Looking back to then, I realized I’m in sort of the same situation. Back then, I was guild leader of a very small, tight guild, and raiding, even heroics, were beyond us. We were very PUG shy, when it came to instances, and my only real alternative was to do BGs, to get any sort of decent gear. Eventually, I ran into Repgrind, and found a high comfort level, and started getting into some higher level content. Eventually, my own guild fell apart, and I went to Crits, but left vs. right coast scheduling proved to make it extremely difficult to progress with them. Not long after, I decided to just take a break.

Now, I’m just a guild member, of a very casual guild, Moonlight Requiem, headed by one of the guys I work with. The guild is really just getting off the ground, but Caraway, the GM, is very good at getting people in. Most of the people I’ve met through the guild seem pretty cool, but I’m still finding myself soloing a lot. A big factor in that is the holidays. People have a lot of time off to play, and they’ve leveled at an insane rate. On the flipside, a lot of my play time has been sporadic, due to family aggro. It will be interesting to see now how it levels off, and what happens.

Doing a bit of introspection, I’m realizing that if I want company, I need to be more outgoing. LOL… not really my forte’, but hey, I’ll work on it. Looking at the big picture, Caraway has assembled what seem to be a really cool bunch of people, so in essence I have a “pre-screened” group.

Anyway, to get back to where I was originally going, I was musing on how far I’ve come. I started, unintentionally, on a PvP server, and used to gnash my teeth at the ganking. I moved to a PvE server, and once there, grew to really like PvP. Now I’m back on a PvP server, and while I still despise the random griefing, it’s more of a roll my eyes thing now, rather than real rage. And, full-circle, I’m back to taking refuge in the battlegrounds, this time for leveling as well as gear.

Originally, I’d planned on leaving Lajos over on Winterhoof, in Crits, but I’m starting to rethink that. I’ve got a perfectly good level 80 mage, well geared, sitting, doing nothing, and realistically, I’m not going to be spending much time over there. If I do, it’s not like I’m going to be in a position to run content. Basically, I’m just “keeping a presence”, and I’m debating whether it’s worth it. If I do a character move, I can bring money, heirloom items, etc. over that will make life a lot more productive on my current server, including leveling our guild.

And of course, I’ve got a guild bank over on Winterhoof, full of stuff that would be really useful. My DK sits as guildmaster, and the stuff languishes in an upper tab. Those people who stuck with the guild after the melt-down have given up and bailed, and I can’t say as I blame them. I just really lost my enthusiasm for WoW after the events of last summer. Now that I’ve rediscovered some of that enthusiasm, it’d be nice to profit from some of my labor.

U Rack-a Disciprine!!!

Just a nod to some of Nick’s stand-up comedy. It seemed appropriate, since I’m doing a disc priest.

It’s new territory. Most of the current info on the net is applicable to level 80+, or it’s outdated. Soloing, I’ve pretty much done PW:S, hit my target with SW:P, Penance, then Smite until dead, or Penance was off cool-down. Once I got Evangilism, I swapped that around, using Smite to build stacks of Evangilism, then throwing in Penance. Occasionally, I’m seduced by the shorter cast time of Mind Blast, and when mana issues arise, I’m wanding, but so far, that’s about it. Oh, and I got level 20. Finally! Along the way, I won a duel against a same-level Frost Mage, and lost a duel to a warlock. The first one hardly scratched me, the second pwned me hard after I blew my Penance on a by-stander (all worgen look alike, what can I say?)

Since I’ve never healed before, I’m not quite ready to start using the LFD as a healer. This weekend, I’m going to attach myself to Nick’s baby paladin, and follow him around healing. I want to work on cleaning up my UI, and getting used to actually being a healer, not a self-healing DPS. Should be interesting.

Edit: Added tags, including the most important one!

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.

Azeroth’s Axis Just Tilted a Tiny Bit

Last night, the unthinkable happened… an event that will have wide-ranging repercussions that will and resound through the very fabric of Azeroth, with echos in far off Outland. Compared to this, Cataclysm will be but a faint whisper of an aftershock. Dragon’s stopped in their tracks, and raised their heads, testing the swirls and eddies of magic that permeate the fabric of Azeroth. Garrosh Hellscream woke in a cold sweat, the vestiges of an un-recallable nightmare fading into the gloom. The Lich King in the middle of his speech to Svala Sorrowgrave, suddenly began sounding like Alvin the Chipmunk. Hogger suddenly went “Hrrrmmmmuh?” and fell dead after being hit with a staff by a level 6 mage.

Okay, it’s wasn’t that big a deal. But it was something that I really did not expect to happen. Nick and I joined Crits and Giggles.

As the post activity on my blog shows, I’ve been busy. Softball season ties up my Saturdays, but when all-stars rolled around, and my daughter made it, that went from “Saturdays” to “weekends”. I’ve bemoaned at length the normal challenges our guild faced, having such a small core membership, and apparently, the inevitable finally caught up with us. I wish everyone the best, have fun. That’s what it’s all about.

Meh, high-road be damned. It’s my blog, and as best I could tell, none of my ex-guildies ever read it anyway. I’m feeling something that’s a cross between hurt, bitterness, and just  plain sadness. Nick and I have could have been in Crits or Apathy months ago, and been raiding our little hearts out, but we stuck with our friends. I’ve sat around Dalaran for hours, turning down raid invites, because I wanted to stay freed up in case my guildies showed up and we could put together a heroic. I cheered my ass off when our group cleared their first heroic. While my guildies were working the auction house, and buying gear because they were too shy to run heroics, I was spending my money on guild tabs, a tundra-mammoth so I could run lowbies to flight points, repair bots, etcetera.

And then I stopped being on every night of the week, and my weekends were taken up by my daughter’s tournaments, and I logged on to find our core group gone, without a word. When I asked, I was told “they had no one to play with”. Ah well. I hope you find people to play with, and I hope they can keep you amused. I do wish you the best.

And a friend of twenty-five years who never mentioned a word of any problems in the guild to me, who in fact had been telling me over the past few months how well I handled the role of “cat herder”, lectured me on my lack of leaderships skills and “selfishness” - when she could finally be bothered to even return an email. Yah, sweety, I hear ya. Thanks for “smoothing things over” with everyone, while keeping me in the dark. Hope you enjoy those glacial bags that I bought for you because you were bitching at me about people filling up the guild tab that you paid for.

::Deep Breath:: Ok, got that off my chest. Cathartic. And yes, I know that all that is MY perception, and they may see things entirely differently. It’s over, it’s done, move on.

And to return to our regularly schedule programming, move on we did. I managed to get the guild bank someone straightened out, and promoted Zachiel, my utility toon to GM, and then told RG she could pull the trigger. And it was done. And it was good.

After a chorus of welcomes from the Crits crowd, and getting Nick in, we did a random, then went for Magister’s Terrace, first normal, then normal again, because Sol and Nick didn’t realize they needed to complete the quest to get into the heroic, and then heroic. It was a learning experience. For example, I learned that despite the tank running around and chain-aggroing everything in site, there was in fact method to the madness, and that did not in fact mean that I should start long-range pulling mobs standing off to the side. Go figure. My bad.

And as RG mentioned in her post today, the Phoenix Hatchling dropped twice in a row, and she didn’t get it. Nick and I will have to start scheduling play-dates for our new pets.

After that, RG was off to help Hartbane, and I responded to a call from a guildie in WG, only to undergo multiple ass-handings. I see I’m going to have to rebuild my PvP set, and get back in the swing of things. That, and get my ‘lock leveled. I still enjoy the mage, but there’s no doubt who my eventual main will be.

Holy shit. It just hit me. I have a guild full of people. Lots and lots of people. There’s bound to be some toons around my lock’s level to play with. Don’t get me wrong. One thing I could always count on from my ex-guildies was help, if they were on. (Despite my self-indulgent rant above, don’t think for a moment that these are “bad people”. It was just a bad situation that was poorly handled all around. ) But I don’t always WANT to have an 80 running me through instances or quests. I *like* challenge, and learning to play my toon. Simple math says I’m going to see more of that.

Most cliche’s have at least some truth behind them, and my own life experience has taught me that when something happens that seems earth-shaking, and terrible, it’s likely just The Power’s That Be forcing you into the change that you already knew, in the back of your mind, that you needed to make. One door closes, another opens.

To all my new guildies… it’s good to be home!