A Change of Scenery?

If you read World of Ming, you know that for some time he's been talking about an upcoming merger of his site with a corporate backer (Amped Sports in this case). Recently they have begun open beta for the new site, called Game Riot. Now, the problem with WOM is that it attracts the absolute worst the internet has to offer. I personally find the content of the site entertaining, but the sheer amount of nerd vitriol contained in the comments section is a little much, even for jaded internet assholes. The new site has a lot more features than WOM, which was really just blog software, so with any luck there will some kind of moderation going on. I've created an account over there, and basically everyone who signs up for the site can use their blogging software, and the visibility of even the lamest blog is pretty decent right now with all the people using the site.

So what I'm thinking of doing is maintaining the blog on that site for a bit to see if I can get a little exposure. My biggest issue is that I basically like to write about PVP but don't have the arena ratings to back up anything I say. The crowd that reads gameriot can be pretty harsh at times so if I get too much negative feedback I'll probably stop posting content on that site. Anyways, stop by, register and say hello.

Link to my profile: http://www.gameriot.com/user/Elbows/

It Never Ends.....Or Does it? No.

My progress continues in its own way today as I picked up Veteran's Mooncloth Slippers. Truly, I have yet to encounter a more fearsome and manly item name, but you can't say anything bad about the stats. As I neared the 18k honor required for this piece it dawned on me that I almost have all of the honor pieces that I want for my priest.

When I first hit 70 a month and a half ago, grinding the amount of honor I needed seemed like an insurmountalbe task. I had already grinded all the pieces except the belt on my warrior and to say the least I was (and still am) a little "AV'ed out". But now all I have left is the necklace and the 2 minute trinket, around 32k honor. With an AV weekend only 7 days away I have to say that I feel pretty confident that I will obtain all of the honor pieces before I get my first piece of arena gear. This puts me in kind of a wierd situation because since I hit 70 on my warrior back in February I have spent pretty much all my time not in arena inside AV. The prospect of not having to queue for AV anymore is pretty awesome, but at the same time I feel like an old person who's worked the same job for 30 years and doesn't know what to with themselves after they retire.

Not that I'm complaining, queueing AV every time you log in can really sap the life out of you. Since I need all the practice I can get on my priest I'll probably end up either queueing for some of the more enjoyable battlegrounds, looking for an arena team that plays a lot, or maybe even trying to find some rogues and warriors to duel, since those are my two toughest classes. Either way, it will be nice to finally put AV behind me.

Where Have I Seen This Before?

Mace warriors; if you don't have one on your team you probably hate them, and rightfully so. Stormherald beats my priest down so hard that it uninstalls WoW from my computer. I've been an Axesmith on my warrior since like February of 05, back when I had delusions of crafting my own Arcanite Reaper, and I didn't want to choose a new specialization in BC because I was finally going to be able to craft a useful axe. I probably should have gone macesmith though.

So what we have now is people crying about mace warriors, and I can certainly sympathize. The extra 4 second stun on the t2-3 really adds insult to injury with how often mace specialization procs to begin with. What it reminds me of is another mace that caused some teardrops to fall in the summer of 05. Before the enrage nerf and weapon speed normalization Arcanite Reaper warriors were tearing people apart. I should know, I got my reaper in April of 05 and it turned my character from a chump to a powerhouse overnight. When the first two battlegrounds were released (AV and WSG) I immediately became addicted to WSG and was playing that to grind honor, all day every day.

When BGs were released, I didn't really think AV was better for honor than WSG. Matches would end up in stalemates and it seemed counterproductive (It turns out I was wrong about that, and in the end Blizzard nerfed AV honor and removed join as group), but the reason that I switched to AV didn't have anything to do with honor. A couple of weeks after the BG patch, warriors, pallies, and shamans started showing up in WSG with a huge freaking black mace of death. Back then, the prevailing warrior wisdom was that crit was hands down the most important warrior stat. As a warrior you were pretty much judged based on what your chance to crit was, with decent crit being somewhere in the area of 28% with Axe specialization. Crit chance was a stat that I had carefully cultivated over the months and for a while I just couldn't bring myself to part with the 5% bonus from axe spec. Over time, warriors began to value attack power in addition to crit, and eventually sword spec became the most popular spec, but before the HWL greatsword became the "must have" weapon, The Unstoppable Force was the new darling of MS warriors everywhere. In addition to having almost 40 more top end damage than the reaper, TUF had a knockdown ability that procced constantly and owned casters so fucking hard. I remember being totally frustrated by pallies who would knock me on my ass left and right with the god damned thing. I had to have one. Just my luck, I got mine a couple of days before the nerf went in.

It was obvious to anyone who used the weapon that the knockdown effect was overpowered, and in a way, it's almost identical to the t2-3 BS proc. They both last about four seconds and are totally frustrating. Keep in mind, this was back before mace stun procs were on a separate diminishing returns and the stun chance was only 5%, so almost everyone chose 2h specializtion instead of mace spec. Nowadays mace spec is freaking great so in addition to the 4% chance to stun from the mace you get an extra 11%. Considering that Blizzard removed the knockdown effect from TUF and changed it to a crappy 1 secnod stun, I just can't imagine them leaving the current BS maces untouched. I actually hope they change it because if they don't warriors are at risk of having something else nerfed which will affect all warriors and not just the ones using the maces. However, if nothing is done (this is a possibility) we will just have to sit back and watch mace warriors play on a different level than the rest of us.

Re-thinking Gear Decisions

Since I hit 70, my short term goal has been to obtain two +35 resilience bonuses from the honor set and the S2 gladiator set. I picked up the honor gloves and shoulders in the first couple of weeks which only cost me 21k honor. The gladiator gear has taken considerably longer, and I am supposed to be picking up my first piece on Tuesday.

After this week I should have somewhere between 2100 and 2200 arena points. I just barely missed picking up the headpiece last week. My stats are pretty dismal, 9k unbuffed, 160 resilience and a laughable 670 healing. If I stick to my original plan and pick up the headpiece I stand to pick up almost 600 hp, 33 resilience and maybe 10-20 healing by replacing my shitty physician helm. Now, it's hard to say anything bad about 600hp. That was bring me much closer to my milestone of 10k hp unbuffed and puts me roughly 4 weeks away from the second 2pc bonus but I'm starting to have seconds thoughts about this strategy.

If you'll notice before I said that my bonus to healing was 670, this is roughly half the +heal that most arena priests are sporting these days, and most shadow priests have more +heal than I do just based off of their +dmg. It's embarrassing to say the least. What I'm thinking of doing is holding off on getting anything for another three weeks and then picking up this. That's a truly drool worthy main hand. Compared to my current main hand, another piece of physician garbage, I stand to gain roughly 9 stam, 10 int, 21 resilience, and.....wait for it.....280 healing. With that one piece I can drag myself up out of the gutter and finally flirt with 1k healing. I think it's worth it and don't see why I can't last another three weeks without an arena piece, I've gone this far.

Another reason for going in this direction is psychological. Unless something drastic happens I probably won't be getting over 1800 rating any time soon, so I'm looking at around 400 points a week for the time being. My original plan was to get the head and the chest and then pick up the main hand, but at this rate that means that I would be finally getting the main hand, along with any substantial +healing boost in October or some shit. That's a long ways off to finally get a good healing piece and I think that getting the main hand out of the way, which will leave me with more short term goals that can be accomplished in 4-5 weeks each, will give me a more immediate sense of progression and allow me to keep my morale higher throughout the gearing process. Plus that mace just looks fucking cool.

Is fake healing a waste of time?

One tactic that I always assumed I would use with my priest was fake healing. As a warrior, locking out heals, even for four seconds, was crucial to taking a priest out. If the priest can stay alive until weakened soul wears off, it can mean the difference between a dead priest and a lost match. Now that I've been PVPing with my priest for a bit, I've tried to use this tactic with varying degrees of success.

Out the various interrupts that the different classes possess, fake healing is only effective against a handful. Obviously priest silence, rogue improved kick, improved counterspell, spell lock, silencing shot and probably some other ones that I'm forgetting have a built in silence component that you will suffer regardless of what you do, but some these special attacks and others also have an interrupt component that will lock out the school that was interrupted.

It is the interrupt effects that we try to avoid by fake healing. Out of all the interrupt effects, I would have to say that imp counterspell is the most devastating. Getting locked out for 8 seconds SUCKS and it's off the GCD. Faking out a mage counterspell is definitely worth it. For other interrupt effects I'm not so sure.

Earth shock is 2 seconds, no big deal really, although it is an a 6 second cooldown which means that you may not be able to get off a gheal before the next one is up if you get pushed back.

The two that I've been contemplating the most are rogue kick and warrior pummel. In my undergeared state, having a rogue or warrior on me is a serious situation. It's not a matter of _if_ I'm going to die but rather a matter of "how soon am I going to die?". If I can live long enough for my teammate to CC the attacker or kill one of the opposing players I've done a good job, if not, we usually lose. In this scenario I need to do everything I can to get myself some healing. For a while now I've tried drawing the pummel or kick with a fake heal. Basically I just cast half the heal and then move forward a little bit, trying to take into account the lag between what I see on my screen and what the enemy sees on his. Most of the time I fake with Flash Heal, probably because that's the spell I go to first out of habit, and what I've found is that most of the time the person simply doesn't bite.

Seeing as how with mortal strike on me, my flash heals heal for about 700-800 (maybe even lower) it just might not be worth the warrior's effort to pummel it. I know on my warrior I definitely try to pummel every heal I can, but it just seems that either I'm cancelling the spell out to early and they're not really seeing it, or they just don't care. I've had more luck with rogues and am able to draw the kick more consistently. Unfortunately rogues have several other ways to stop us from casting even without kick (and they don't need 25 rage or range like warrior int shout or intercept), so it's not exactly free heal time at that point. The problem with this is that while I'm wasting time pretending to heal myself I'm getting beat on and not actually casting any spells. This brings me to the point of indecision that I'm at now, is it better to just try and heal and take the interrupt, knowing that in 4/5 seconds I should have a decent chance at getting a heal off, or do I need to work on my technique a little bit (l2p)?

Another down side that I've noticed is that once an opponent sees you fake a heal and doesn't fall for it, they're going to be ready for it next time. Also lag can make it difficult to know when you've actually stopped casting and your opponent has attempted the interrupt. I'm sure we've all had a fake heal that we were sure worked only to end up seeing "FLASH HEAL INTERRUPTED". Quartz can help with the latter issue.

I've tried a couple of different tactics to help with the problem. First is that instead of casting a heal I cast Mind Control. Most people don't like being mind controlled and will attempt to interrupt it, and if it does get pummeled/kicked then you're free to try and get a heal off. This is a better idea in BE Arena where you can actually do something useful with an MC'ed opponent. Mind blast can work too. Also, instead of Flash Heal I've tried Gheal. A warrior might be willing to ignore a flash heal, but the same cannot be said for gheal, it's pretty much guaranteed to draw the interrupt.

On an unrelated not, I picked up my Veteran's Mooncloth Belt today, which is a pretty nice piece and once again replaces a piece of physician trash. Plus I don't have to enchant or gem it for once! Slowly but surely I'm building my gear on this character, but it's still going to be a while before I'm able to tank any decently geared warriors or rogues. I can dream can't I?

A Case of the Mondays

Monday is a pretty emo day. Tuesday has been my least favorite day of the week since I was in middle school, but I usually feel pretty down on Mondays as I drive into work in the morning. So in keeping with the theme of /wrist-ing I'm going to have a little "woe is me" moment here.

This weekend I played the most arena matches in a given week since I started playing in the second week of S1. Since none of the people on my 3v3 team were "on all the time" including myself, we would usually have to schedule a time to play our 10 games and then maybe if we were lucky we would get an extra day to try and get our rating up. We usually never played more than 20 games a week. Now that I'm focusing on my priest and the 2v2 team I have with my brother it's a little easier to coordinate. We had been using our 2v2 team to get my brother some points on his terribly geared warrior but have decided to focus exclusively on getting our rating with this team up. Because we lost almost every game we played with myself and the warrior we started the week off at a dismal 1461 rating.

We played about 30 matches on Saturday and gained about 110 points to finish at 1575. With 1600 within our reach we decided to play again on Sunday, reach 1600 and stop for the week. It didn't go so well.

We started off the day losing four in a row and then winning one which put us at around 1530. We obviously were not content to stop before we lost anymore points and we started to sound like two guys with a gambling problem on vent. "If we can just get back up to 1570 we can break even, maybe the next team won't have a warlock. See how much you can get for your watch". Long story short we went as low as 1470 and then finally called it quits when we got back up to 1530. Certainly a depressing finish to a very stressful weekend of arena play.

At the risk of sounding like a tear factory, I'm going to whine about some of the problems we faced. First off, my gear is a problem. Some fights are simply a gear check for me and I fail miserably. There's nothing I can really do about this except continue to gear and hope that I manage to close the gap on some of the damage dealing classes that we come across. Right now rogues in general pose a pretty serious problem. If a rogue is geared out I have a very tough time outhealing an Adrenaline Rush barrage especially once you throw mind numbing poison into the mix. There were several fights where it was either a double rogue or rogue/druid where I just got fucked up bad. Right now I'm sitting at a measly 129 resilience with about 8800 unbuffed hp and it simply isn't cutting it. Did I mention I only have 670 healing? Yea, it's that bad.

The second major problem was definitely the more infuriating of the two. I know how popular it is to bitch about warlocks, and I hate to blame my shortcomings on a particular class, but seriously, what the fuck is up with warlocks? I used to think that affliction warlocks were the more menacing of the two, but here's a little fun fact about affliction warlocks: You can kill them.
Playing 2v2 you expect to see a lot of warlocks. Since demonology/affliction locks are so hard to kill, especially with magical based DPS, we usually opt for the other opponent as our first target. This is usually either a shadow priest or mage, but we also faced some lock/hunter teams as well. In each of these situations the non-warlock team member (or NW as I will now call them) is the easier of the two to kill. On three separate occasions yesterday, we took the NW out which left us in a 2v1 situation against the warlock. In each of these situations both myself and my brother were in good positions mana-wise. Unfortunately, by this time my brother had already "blown his load" so to speak, and his dps was simply not enough to take the guy down. Between siphon life, drain life, drain mana, and the goddamned felhunter going chomp chomp chomp he just outlasted us. The lock runs me out of mana from dispelling siphon life so many times. I was even able to drink in one of the fights and it still wasn't enough. After my experience this week I will definitely be dropping my three points in Mental Strength into Absolution. Lock fights are our hardest ones by far and with the amount of dispelling I do in these fights I can't afford not to have that talent. Losing a 2v1 is a really demoralizing experience and after the losses my brother was saying things along the lines of "I don't want to play arena anymore" and I can't say that I blame him. I felt like I needed a hug or something. Even with those losses and the depressing performance this week we still managed to end it on relatively high spirits and will take another shot at it next week, so wish me luck.

I get to PUG ~20 AB matches.....great.

So next up on the list of honor pieces is Veteran's Mooncloth Belt. A sexy piece and definitely better than the green physician crap that I'm wearing right now. Due to some fortunate circumstances I've been able to play quite a bit lately and have been clocking around 4k honor a day. As I came up on the requisite 18k honor necessary for the belt, it occurred to me that I hadn't checked which marks are required for that piece. Lucky me, it's AB marks. I had 3 AB marks in the bank left over from when I got the honor shoulders and cloak and the damn belt requires 40 marks.

Next weekend is AB weekend, but I'm pretty close to getting the belt and don't really feel like waiting a week to get the marks. In my battlegroup last night, there were about 4-5 ABs going so I really didn't have much trouble getting in, but man, horde was sucking so bad. I think I played around 11 games, of which we won two. The best thing about getting honor from AV is that even though it can be soul-crushingly boring, at least you are pretty much guaranteed a certain amount of honor each match just for showing up. The same cannot be said for any of the other BGs. In addition to the weak honor, getting 1 mark every 15 minutes isn't exactly what I would call blazing progress. Before AV was changed into an honor pinata, I used to PUG AB all the time on my warrior. I wanted those damn shoulders so bad and I did finally get them about 6 months before the expansion came out. I'm starting to remember what made getting them so painful. Fifteen more to go as I write this, so probably another 8-10 matches. /sigh.