Patch 3.2 PTR: first thoughts

(For the full 3.2 patch notes, check this link on MMOChampion)

Somebody set up us the bomb! ... I mean, this is quite the controversial patch so far.

PvP
* Arenas
o The newest season of Arena gear can only be purchased if you meet the requirements with your 3 or 5 player team rating. Rating requirements from 2 player teams can still be used to purchase the previous season of gear.

I suppose this is because they believe that 2v2 is too hard to really balance... but I think it's a bad idea if they wanted more participation in arenas.

PvP
* Battlegrounds
o Battleground experience has arrived!
+ Players will now be awarded experience for completing objectives and actions that yield honor in Battlegrounds (honorable kills not included).
+ Players who do not wish to gain experience through PvP can visit Behsten in Stormwind or Slahtz in Orgrimmar - both located near the Battlemasters in either city - and turn off all experience accumulation for the cost of 10 gold.
+ Disabling experience gains will prevent a player from gaining experience through any means available in the game.
+ Players with experience gains turned off who compete in Battlegrounds will face off only against other players with experience gains turned off.
+ Behsten and Slahtz can reinstate experience gains for players, for a 10 gold fee of course. Any experience that would've been accumulated if experience gains were not turned off cannot be recovered.

So, one can now level purely by PvP (but I suspect the exp gain would be roughly the same as grinding mobs, e.g. questing will still be faster.) Pretty cool though. I've had times when I wanted to hop into a BG but didn't because I would lose out on leveling.

PvP
* Battlegrounds
o When standing at a capture point that you control, you will gain a buff called Honorable Defender. This buff grants +50% honor gained from kills. This currently affects Arathi Basin, Eye of the Storm and Isle of Conquest.

This fixes the problem where defenders gained less honor than the HK farming idiots. Okay, you'll still get less honor if nobody actually comes to the node you're defending, but if that is the case, you're probably defending the wrong node :P

PvP
* Battlegrounds
o Arathi Basin
+ The time it requires to capture a base has been reduced to 8 seconds, down from 10 seconds.
+ The game now ends when one team reaches 1600 victory points, down from 2000.
o Eye of the Storm
+ The time it requires to capture the center flag has been reduced to 8 seconds, down from 10 seconds
+ The game now ends when one team reaches 1600 victory points, down from 2000.
o Strand of the Ancients
+ The faction starting on attack/defense will now be randomized at the start of each match.
o Warsong Gulch
+ There is a now a 20 minute timer on this battleground. After that time, the team with the most flag captures wins. If this would result in a tie, the team that captured the first flag wins. If neither side has captured a flag, then the game ends in a tie.

No more endless WSGs, and some sped-up ABs and EOTS. I guess it'll be a bit more bearable to farm Justicar/Conqueror now?

Items: General
#Emblem system changes
* Both the 10 and 25 player instances of the Crusaders' Coliseum drop a new Emblem of Triumph.
* Any dungeons that previously dropped Emblems of Heroism or Valor, such as Naxxramas or Heroic Halls of Stone, will now drop Emblems of Conquest instead. Emblems of Conquest can still be converted to Valor or Heroism.
* The heroic dungeon daily quest will now reward 2 Emblems of Triumph and the normal daily dungeon quest will reward 1 Emblem of Triumph.

Whine topic of the day! Anyway, I guess it's nice - if the new dungeon coming with this patch is a step up from Ulduar, this'll get people geared a lot faster (including me - I'm behind a month and a half in gear).

i'll write up some more thoughts on other stuff in a later post.

Isle of Conquest: AV meets SOTA and Wintergrasp ?

Okay, I'm not gonna quote the wall of text full of info on the new battleground, Isle of Conquest, that is coming up in the next major content patch. You can just read the source. Go ahead and read it, I'll wait.

Noticed this ?

Taking this resource garners precious reinforcements and a continuous flow of honor to the side that controls it.

This is a bit like the mines in AV, but the honor part is new. That's a lot more of an incentive to hold the objectives, too.

Once onboard the airship, players will find it comes equipped with parachutes enabling a strike team to drop into the enemy keep from above.

Not really new as a mechanic, but nice to see it officially supported by Blizzard ;) If isle of Conquest should turn into a grindfest like AV, I know what I'll be doing.

It will be interesting to see how the vehicles fit into the battleground. If Isle of Conquest is to become a controlled (read: lag-free, more or less even numbers of players) Wintergrasp variant, this could be a lot of fun.

With Wintergrasp being so popular that they have to change daily quests into weekly quests, I see a chance for a very popular battleground that will usually be filled. And with the sides being even in numbers, it's a great alternative to Wintergrasp for those realms with an incredibly skewed Alliance to Horde ratio or low overall population, because a battlegroup should be able to provide plenty of players.

Off-topic: traffic
At the start of this month I noticed my google Analytics tracker wasn't installed properly and I had been tracking nothing at all since the start of this blog. I fixed it though, so I have two weeks of traffic reports now.
It reports 2541 visits and 3180 pageviews (a whopping 1633 of those were on my 'Gearing up for PvP' guide which Wow.com linked to in their Daily Quest column - that's the huge spike at the end). This was a lot more compared to the other time they linked to me (that was the post about having fun in PvP) which had about 93 pageviews. So yeah .. nice flow from there and I hope it helped a few people out :)

Gearing up for PvP

Note: thanks to my guildie Pharous for posting a similar post on the guild forums and inspiring me to write my own.

Now, this is not a chronological list, it just lists some options you can use to gear up, and how they rank compared to eachother. I'm assuming you have no arena rating or points.

Crafted Gear
The most basic gear here is the Eviscerator's Battlegear set. This is an eight-piece set with no sockets and a total of 350 resilience. However it's got a fair amount of stamina and it's not that expensive to get either. So buy the mats, find a leatherworker, give mats and tip, collect gear.

You can also supplement this set with some crafted jewelcrafting stuff (Emerald Choker, Scarlet Signet and Savage Titanium Ring or Titanium Impact Choker and Titanium Impact Band if you have more money to spend) and a crafted cape, the Frostguard Drape.

Regarding weapons, you can get a Titansteel Shanker crafted by a friendly blacksmith.

Emblems
You can trade Emblems of Heroism, Valor etc. for PvP gear. Emblems of Heroism give Savage Gladiator gear, which is a step up from the crafted set. I would recommend buying a Rolfsen's Ripper first, though.
Emblems of Valor get you Hateful Gladiator's Gear, which you can also buy for Honor. They are all the same iLvL as most of the Titan-forged gear from the Wintergrasp vendors.

Honor
Other than the Hateful set, you can also buy the Deadly non-set pieces for honor (that is, bracers, belt, boots, necklace and ring). The bracers and boots are better than the ones you can get through Wintergrasp, the belt is roughly the same.

You can also buy the Battlemaster's trinkets here (I chose Battlemaster's Conviction myself, but in retrospect I might've gone for the +crit one), and the Medallion of the Alliance/Horde, which you will definitly want unless you're Human.

Wintergrasp
Lots of PvP loot to be had here. The titan-forged helm and boots are on par with Hateful Gladiator gear, the belt and chest are on par with Deadly Gladiator gear. All of them are bought with Wintergrasp marks.

There is also an alternative to the medallion available, keeping the traditional trinket effect and replacing the resilience of the Medallion with another useful stat (crit/AP/haste/hit), a PvP version of the Mirror of Truth, and another trinket with passive resilience and an on-use AP or haste increase.

You can also buy some gems and enchants with Stone Keeper Shards. And a mammoth.

And last but not least, you can raid the Vault of Archavon for a chance at both PvE and PvP loot.

How to gear up
My guildie suggested this:

[STEP ONE]
(a) If you don't raid or you don't have any excess Emblems, get the crafted gear and go farm battlegrounds.
(b) If you do have Emblems to spend, do so. Just don't buy the chest.

[STEP TWO]
Grind honor and buy Hateful Glad pieces with them (but not the chest) until you have the 4 set bonus. Get the Belt and Boots from Wintergrasp Marks.

[STEP THREE]
Get the chest from Wintergrasp.

[STEP FOUR]
Get the bracers, two rings (Hateful and Deadly), necklace, cloak, and the Medallion for honor. Buy the cheapest things first.

Enjoy !

Unmercey 7 and other rogue videos

I watched Unmercey 7, which Rogue-Rogue linked to in their latest blog entry.

The subtitle of the video (Unmercey 7: Hana) confused me at first. I figured it referred to the flower in the description image, because 'hana' is 'flower' in Japanese. The problem with this is that Unmercey is a Chinese player, not Japanese, so it didn't make sense - it should have been 'huā' (I have no idea what tone it is in Modern Chinese - I just know it is this one in archaic Chinese .. go figure). Turns out it was reference to the last song in the movie, which was a JPop song. Ah well.

Anyway. The video featured some refreshing Shadow Dance spec footage. Assuming the players he duels have a decent amount of resilience, he is still getting 5K ambushes off, which I found fairly suprising. With the (justified) nerf to Overkill and our burst as Muti/Prep, perhaps the more burst-biased people might spec Shadow Dance.

This Sub spec also has shadowstep for increased mobility (though I do wonder if it weighs up against Fleetfooted). I must admit I preferred some of Unmercey's earlier videos: Unmercey 5 & 6 both showcased some very creative moves like FoK-Vanish-Sap to flush out stealthers.

This movie didn't showcase that many new moves, but it did prove that a subtlety build can be just as viable in the right hands (and with the right amount of keybinding, no doubt).

There's some other good rogue movies out there as well. Akrios from Rogue-rogue has some neat ones (though I think the only up to date ones are a few random arena footage ones) and Krymu is also a popular name in the rogue movie scene.

Meanwhile I am still stuck with exams. I passed my archaic Chinese exam yesterday, and the next one is friday: business economics. I'm doing some 'when I get back' planning for WoW, but I'm running out of ideas since my armory isn't up-to-date and I can't remember my PvE gear that well anymore (especially enchanting and gem choices are foggy)

EU PvP forums up in arms

There was a fairly important announcement last week for us EU PvPers: the long-awaited cross-language battlegroups were being implemented.

For those who are unaware of this feature, it basicly means that for example a group of Alliance consisting of French servers may be pitted against a group of Horde players from Spanish servers. A common misconception is that players from these servers with an other language will be mixed with the English servers, which is not the case.

Anyway, the goal of course is to decrease queues. There may not be enough English-speaking Alliance out there for you to smash, but perhaps there's a whole bunch of French Alliance queueing. So yeah, nice find.

Except not all battlegroups are being merged.

Battlegroups that will not be merged
English – Blackout, Misery and Vindication
German - Blutdurst
Russian - Шквал (Flurry) and Вихрь (Whirlwind)

In a suprising twist, six battlegroups are not being merged, for unknown reasons.
Blackout, Misery and Blutdurst are all big battlegroups. Vindication and the two Russian ones aren't.

Now, being from Vindication myself, I was quite suprised with this. The view I have of the battlegroup is a fairly low activity battlegroup, with an overrepresentation of Horde. I have instant queues, but I bet the Horde doesn't - from what I hear they can vary between 30 mins - an hour and a half.

A possible explanation for not merging the Russian battlegroups could be due to cyrillic characters posing a problem. Perhaps they don't want English/French/German/Spanish players to have to try and pronounce a Russian player's name over Vent, or something. Still sounds like a bit of a dumb excuse.

Others are bringing up technical limits due to the physical location of the battlegroup servers, but I don't buy that, and I hope we will get a proper answer soon.

Fun things to do in PvP

As a rogue, we are one of the two stealth classes, and this gives us a huge advantage in PvP - it allows us to pick our targets and go unseen where others cannot go. Here's some fun things you can try in PvP as a rogue (not all of them involve stealth).


Parachuting into Wintergrasp
Granted, everyone can do this, but none can do it as well as we can. Go to the southern part of Icecrown and fly into the mountains overlooking Wintergrasp Fortress. When the battle starts, fly in. As you know, Wintergrasp is a no-fly zone and you'll be automatically dismounted soon. An added bonus for us, rogues, is that we can stealth as soon as we are auto-dismounted. Unless people saw you fly over, they'll never know you're there. Now is a good time to go destroy some cannons on a more quiet side of the fortress, or you can lurk around and kill players trying to man them.

Defend a healer
You should always love your healers, especially in PvP. Defending one to the death can be a real pain for your opponents. An added bonus could be that the healer remembers you if you are both in battlegrounds on a regular basis. With many tricks up our sleeve and a bit of help from the healer, the two of you can wreck havoc on the other team.

Harass a healer
On the other hand, healers on the opposing team should be harassed and/or killed. A well-geared healer you may not be able to kill on your own, but that doesn't mean you can't keep him busy. Interrupt his heals, blind him if he's not being attacked, stun him, slow his movement and casts, ... If you can catch him out of combat, vanish and sap him. If you can't kill him but can do a fair amount of damage to him, keep pressuring him. If he's busy keeping himself alive, he's doing less healing to his group mates.

Make someone paranoid
Doesn't always work, but very fun if it does. Using distract and sap from maximum distance, you can make people try to locate you by spamming AoE or the likes. You can use this to stall people traveling to a nearby node or something, for example.
Just make sure they don't destealth you ! You can also do a 'fake' attack to keep them busy: after a few distracts and a sap or two, go in for the kill, apply some bleeds etc, and vanish (unless they're an easy kill, just kill them then). Wait until they try to heal up and attack again. This is mostly a tip for when there's opponents around that you can't kill 1v1, though.

Stalling the enemy in WSG
Your group managed to grab the enemy flag and is trying to bring it home? Bring some crippling poison and go to town with Fan of Knives on the enemy chasing your flag carrier. This is also nice when there's a group of defenders in the enemy flag room - just hop in and FoK a few times to slow most of them.
Of course, for the really persistent chasers out there, a stun or a blind will usually stop them dead in their tracks.

Is there anything you like to do in PvP that I might not have thought of ?

Shocking news

Aeltyra lets out a hacking cough.
Suprise! Yes, dear reader, I have a small confession to make.The picture you see on the right is an accurate depiction of my character. I had a sex change. Now, Out of Character this is easy to explain: I was tired of the male character animations and wanted something more visually appealing.

But In Character? (For the people unfamiliar with RP, imagine yourself being an actor. Your in-game avatar is the character you act out. Thus, In Character is things your character would do / think etc) I don't think Azerothian technology, or magic for that matter, is advanced enough to pull this off (besides blaming magic is way too cheesy). Even if it was easy to explain HOW I did it, explaining WHY I did it is still a riddle.

There are other options of course. You could just treat it as an entirely new character, which is probably what I'll do. The womanising behaviour of my character cannot be transfered to a female version of that character, or she'd be some kind of weird, obnoxious lesbian. I think I will explain that this is the twin sister of my male character, or something. Input on this is welcome however - make those brain cells work!

Remind me to change the header image to reflect these changes.


In other news I was taken into an Ulduar progression raid yesterday evening. Our target was XT-002 Deconstructor. I am horribly undergeared for this fight, but I guess they just wanted to do me a favor since I don't raid a lot anyway.

It's a pretty straightforward fight for us rogues: nuke the living daylights out of him. You can CloS both the Light Bomb and the Gravity Bomb, but since the last is more dangerous I prefer to save it for that one and just run when I have the Light Bomb. Other than that it's a good idea to keep an eye on your back, if a lot of scrapbots are coming dangerously close it might be a good idea to get in there and throw a Fan of Knives at them.

We lacked a bit of a punch to really down him, but we definitly improved over our attempts - while we could barely hit 30% on first attempt, the last few attempts were 10%, 8%, 12% ... etc depending on how many scrapbots he consumed before he faceplanted all of us.

DPS-wise I have no idea how I did, because I had disabled Recount for some reason and there is no option to take a WWS yet if I remember correctly. This was also the first fight in which I have exchanged Tricks of the Trade with another rogue, giving some very nice numbers on the Heart phases when combined with Heroism, Blade Flurry and Adrenaline Rush.


As a final note I've been doing more PvP now that I don't have to worry about respeccing costs, and one noteable thing is a Warsong Gulch match in which I was given the Iron Man achievement as a little present from my guildies (thanks guys!). I'll be happy to spend some time in there helping the others that were present to get the achievement as well.
The way we did it was pretty simple really. I stayed in defense in our flag room (a bit risky but I have a lot of 'oh sh-' options). I had to stay alive the entire match, so if a Horde attack didn't look safe, I stayed in stealth. Meanwhile my guildies bulldozered through the Horde as one block, and with a protection warrior and a bit of dedicated healing, they got the flag to our flag room and handed it over to me so I could cap it.
Let's just say it's pretty stressy when you have one flag left to cap and you have to stay alive no matter what :p

PS: If you have found this page because Google found the words 'sex change' and 'lesbian' and concluded this was some kind of obscure site: HAHAHAHAHA
Aeltyra points at you.
Aeltyra cackles maniacly at the situation.

A week of PvP

Aeltyr casts Blind.
Oh, sorry. Didn't see you there!

I recently said to myself: self, we don't want to grind money. We don't have the time to look for instance groups. Let's do something fun. Let's respec and do some PvP.

And since you can't argue with yourself (try it - you're always right) that's exactly what I did. I respecced Mut-Prep, got me some nice PvP oriented glyphs for a relatively cheap price, put on my super awesome Eviscerator's gear and hit the BGs.

And I'm doing well. I bought the Titan-forged Boots with Wintergrasp Marks (though no enchants or gems yet .. on any of my PvP gear) and after a few evenings of battleground switching I also bought the Hateful Gladiator's Belt.

I got some more achievements. Arathi Basin Perfection (not bad for PuGing), Storm Glory (again, not bad for a PuG), Damage Control (it didn't bug out for once), Stormy Assassin (rough and long game so I got to switch around a lot) and Take a Chill Pill (didn't even notice he was berserked)

But most of all, I had fun. I spent money and I'm thus further away from my epic flying mount again, but it was worth it. I'm gonna keep PvPing, perhaps until I can buy another Hateful piece, or until I get bored of that.

On another note, I will be guest-posting on Big Hit Box relatively soon. Like, when I can think of a subject to write on.
Big Hit Box is a melee blog, a source of information for those of us who like to be in the face of mobs (or .. in the backside actually. Don't DPS from the front.). So ret pallies, rogues, warriors, druids, shamans, melee hunters .. err perhaps not melee hunters.

So suggestions on topics other than melee hunters are always welcome - what would you like to hear about ?

Aeltyr casts Preparation.
Aeltyr casts Blind.

Not dead yet

No, I'm not dead yet. I just have been very busy, both in real life and in game.
Since this is a WoW blog, I'll concentrate on the in-game stuff, and I'll tell you my story using achievements I gained in these few weeks I've been playing WoW again.

PvP
I felt in the mood for PvP when I got back. As I had said in my previous post, I got me an Eviscerator's set, bought me two Traditional Flensing Knife, respecced Muti/Prep and hit the road.

I got Call to Arms.

The reason I didn't get this earlier is fairly simple: I always forget to pick up the daily.

I joined a raid with the people from Beyond Defeat and hit the Horde capitals, netting me three leaders - I sadly had to leave before we killed the Elf, so no bear for me yet.


After some mucking about in Wintergrasp for some honor and Stone Keeper Shards, I respecced again to a Muti raid spec, minus of course the two talent points I was missing because I was still 78.

PvE
I hit Storm Peaks to do the Sons of Hodir opening questline, because I was told it's pretty awesome, and also started questing in Icecrown a bit.
Both felt extremely slow on my little snowy gryphon (the bad part about switching your alt as your main I guess) but eventually I did hit the big 80.


So then the next task was doing normal instances to gear up for heroics to gear up for raids. I bought my Hateful Glad's Cloak as a filler cloak until I can get a decent one crafted or drop.

My guildies were kind enough (or desperate enough) to invite me to some heroics anyway, despite my DPS being barely that of the tank.

I also was invited to a casual 10-man Naxxramas run because the rogue that was supposed to come had some PC trouble and had been installing WoW for a few hours, but still wasn't there yet. We did Plague and Construct Quarter, and I got the T7.10 chest and some nice shoulders.



I bought a Librarian's Paper Cutter and got it enchanted with Mongoose (no funds for two of those sadly)

Some other day Alliance managed to drug Horde and conquer Wintergrasp somehow, and the guildies formed a PuG to VoA 25. I, of course, was there. Outrolled the only other rogue in the raid (he's better geared anyway) with a 96 and got me the T7.25 pants. (Yay set bonus !)


So yeah, it's been quite a productive week. I gotta get some stuff gemmed, and really gotta get my cooking up, other than that I think I'm good to go to ride along the weekly 25 man Naxx farm runs.

PS: One of the heroics I did was CoT Strat, and yes we did the timed run, and yes I won the drake. Let me tell you, it sucks having that thing in your bags and not being able to use it yet. But at least it'll be there when I quest my 5K epic flying together. No silly gryphons for me !