Griefing is contagious…

I don’t plan on making a habit of it, but last night I led a small griefing raid. It was the most fun I’ve had in WoW in months.

A little back story. Our server, like many others, used to have epic world PvP battles in the Hillsbrad Foothills, between the towns of South Shore and Tarren Mill. They were awesome. I remember being on my warrior, at level, questing around there, and seeing the massive amount of players fighting each other. We had a guild on alliance, Phalanx of Perdition, who were the only real pvp guild on our server. They would spend most of their days in South Shore, waiting for the Horde to attack. Or if the horde never did, they would attack TM and the Horde would sure enough come down and counter attack. I joined PoP for a short time, only to discover that the Horde guild they always battled ( I forget the name) was actually their alts. They would stage these battles between themselves, half on ally half on horde at a time. To me it was like a 10 year old catching Santa tucking present under the tree only to find out its Dad.

“Arenas were a mistake”

So, I spilled water on my laptop last week, and after giving it a few days rest, it seems to have recovered almost completely. Some of the keys are a bit stickier than usual.

Anyways, so, over the weekend Blizzard bigwig Jeff Kaplan (I think it was Kaplan) said during an interiew that the biggest mistake in WoW was the creation of Arenas. His reasoning was that the class balaning tango they have had to constantly change has been a constant headache for player and Dev alike. This I can understand.

One of the reasons that I have heard as to why class balance wasn’t as big of a headache back in vanilla was the fact that it’s alot easier to hide imbalances in a BG or world PvP where any number of outside forces can influence the outcome of a skirmish. This I believe.

And while I do enjoy the occasional Arena night ( except last night. It was horrible. We went 1-12), I do think that the way blizzard has been forced to balance classes not on how they do against raid bosses but rather by how the fare against other players is a disappointment. So, I guess I kind of agree that Arenas were certainly a HUGE mistake. I just can’t bring myself to condemn them as the BIGGEST mistake. Of course, nothing else comes to mind right now as being worse…but I’ll keep pondering and see if I think of anything.

How about you guys? Do you think Arenas were the single biggest mistake in WoW? Or do you think something esle is the bane of your existance?

PvE vs PvP

So, as I have said before, I am a very active raider (usually 4 nights a week for roughly 3 hours, depending on the content) and I really enjoy 3v3 arenas, even when we lose 9 out of 10 matches for the week. In both cases, on my paladin, I am a healer. Most people in my situation would use one spec for pve and one for pvp. I don’t. And you know what, I don’t think I need to. When we first started arena-ing I did make my offspec a pvp healadin bubble spec. It was ok, we did OK. Granted we had very little pvp gear seeing as we were jsut starting out. However, I decided that I wanted the option of doing something different on my paladin in those situations where I really want to run a 5man, but theres already a healer or if I’m too tired to heal and someone else is willing to. So I went back to Ret with my offspec. And you know what, my arena team has seen no slowing even though I use a pve heal spec. Beacon of light is nice, my heals are a bit faster and hit alot harder. So while I may get incapacitated for longer (if the opponents are smart/good) but my heals hit harder to make up for the burst. I don’t expect to ever hit 2500 rating, so I’m okay with using a PvE spec, and so are my teammates.

900 Arena

So last night, we had our obligatory 10 arena matches, and we got upto 900. It was a bit of a rough night, I think we went like 4-6. Not out best effort. We went up against a few teams who were just plain better than us, but mostly it was us just being dumb and not working together at all.

Anyways, our team is me(healadin), Sylvanta(lolcat), and Eirgor(arms warrior). Not a typical build at all, but it’s more to us about having fun than dominating on classes we don’t enjoy.

So, the best part of last night, was this one match in Lordearon Ruins, against a hunter/rogue/healadin group. Not sure who died first (or second, or third or fourth) although I do know the hunter killed me and I killed the rogue, but it came down to Syl vs. the Healadin. It was hilarious. Dude would pop a heal, Syl would bash/cyclone etc, bring him down to like 20-30% before he would pop a few more heals. Eventually the healabitch won, as his healing was > than feral heals, but just sitting there for 3-4 minutes watching these two go toe to toe was hilarious for me. Eirgor and I were howling at the end of it when the healer finally killed Syl. That made it a good night, right there.