PvP Practices

Let loose the dogs of war! Advice and guidance on how to keep you and your teammates alive.

WoW Resources for the Wyn

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tools
Image courtesy of woodsy

I’m a tremendous advocate of using all the tools available to evaluate and improve your toon, your gear, and your gameplay. (It’s how I first met Matt!) Hands-down, the most valuable resources for learning to play are other players willing to share their experiences. Even with access to some great minds, though, it helps to know what questions to ask to get the most bang for your buck. Besides that, I’m an information junkie. These are, in no particular order, some of the resources that have helped me the most in my quest for Priestly perfection.

Be.Imba.hu – The first online character auditor. Takes a look at your gear, the available gems, enchants, and add-ons and gives you a solid opinion of what stats are best for you, and what level of content is appropriate. I’ve found it a little cut-and-dry, but a very useful place to start.

GankBang – The armory, comparative. Wanna know how you stack up to the other Priests on your server? Wonder no more. Great tables, which you can organize by stat, show you how you compare. Be aware that you may need to manually update or add players.

warcrafter – The ultimate armory sandbox. Load your character, change enchants, gems, or see what your stats would be if you were in full T6. (Or T3!) Now you can REALLY find out if +6 stats or +15 spirit to chest is a better idea.

Arena Points Calculator – Arena points calculator. Plug in your rating, guesstimate your points. Hooray!

WoW Reputation Calculator – Tells you how much rep you need to hit the next level with any Burning Crusade faction. And tells you how many instance runs it’d take to earn it. This gem has helped that 21000 rep look much, much more manageable, and helped me make decisions of which instance to run for max. rep reward.

Warcraft Realms – Statistic crawler for all realms. If you feel like your faction is hopelessly outnumbered… it just might be. This sucker breaks down all kinds of information – and is especially helpful if you need to know when it’s time to start recruiting from off-server.

WoW Character Watch – Allows you to stalk anyone and everyone. Really great if you want to follow up with an applicant or a former guildie.

Edit: I dunno how I forgot this one, but Mapwow is Google-based maps for WoW. It shows herbalism nodes, mining nodes, and a million other VERY handy things.

WoW Web Stats – Upload your combat log for a bird’s eye-view of what really happened. Have a few different people from the same raid do it for extra well-rounded-ness and you have a hell of a tool for improving not just your own gameplay, but the synergy of the entire raid.

Love forums? Two you should check out are the official Blizzard Priest forums (No, Really!) and Elitist Jerks. (I have another favorite that Matt launched a while ago which you are no doubt already familiar with.)

Here are my favorite threads from the first two:

Lux et Umbra  – The greatest intro-to-priesting guide I’ve ever read. I have stolen so, so, so much from her….

Elitist Jerk’s Holy Raiding Compendium – Required reading for any Priest wanting to raid.

Another great guide written by DwarfPriest – it’s a work in progress, but holy cow, what a piece of work

I left off things like the Armory, WoWhead, Bosskillers, and WoWwiki. If you’re reading World of Matticus, and you DON’T know about those sites, you should’ve spent a little more time getting to know Google.

Luv,
Wyn

P.S. I gotta stop letting Matt write my headlines!

The Golden Rule of Invading Capital Cities

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The various factions in the World of Warcraft have their own respective Capital cities. Some of them are easier to breach than others. On some PvP servers, raids are organized almost weekly to storm into an opposing city and take out their leader.

Why would you do that?

Bolvar doesn’t drop any loot, gold or massive honor points. Killing Thrall doesn’t offer you a quest reward or access to Stormwind’s coffers.

So why do these raids happen? Because they just want to have some fun! Sometimes its nice to simply let yourself go and team up with other players to level towns and kill NPCs.

So what’s the golden rule?

When invading a capital city, don’t just bring a raid group. Bring a damn army. See below:

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Horde forces struck early in the evening. We had no warning at all. We returned to Stormwind after a successful win in Alterac Valley when the alarm sounded. The portals were activated and an advance group of Rogues and Druids went ahead to scout what we were up against.

We didn’t hear anything from them since because they lagged out. One by one, I watched their raid frames wink “offline”. An organized and well equipped AV premade should’ve been enough to rout these challengers since we had home field advantage.

Assuming it was only 1 Horde raid.

But there were 3.

When I emerged out from the Mystic Ward, it seemed we were too late. Skeletons littered the bank and the auction house. It seems an advance group came in and caught the city with their pants down and knocked out the 3 auctioneers without hesitation.

Figured that Horde forces would try to pick apart our economy first.

As our counter offensive streamed out of Ironforge, we looked down the road.

For the first time, I was shocked and awed.

Never had so many come to destroy so few.

I tried to throw what Lightning Bolts I could. But 7 second cast times made it impossible for me to do anything. Playing with that many characters around you in an open area was like trying to swim with your hands and feet bound. We could do nothing but watch as they strolled in and headed for the King’s Throne.

With that, the retreat was sounded and those of us with hearthstones available withdrew back to Darnassus. It didn’t take a Gnomish Rocket Scientist to figure out that once they were done with Ironforge, Stormwind would fall next. To even try and raise an army that could come close to challenging a unit of that size would have been inconceivable.

A Note on Joining Guilds on a PvP Server

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Join a Guild that loves to PvP even if their focus is raiding. It’s nice to know that when someone in in the guild is being ganked that fire support is but minutes away. It’s one heck of a sight to see 5 players on epic mounts streaking to your corpse and then fanning out around it. Once the culprit’s identified and located, massive firepower is brought to bear until the threat is neutralized.

…But it’s not over.

That’s when they call their friends and their backup. The domino effect continues until one side has had enough.

This is why I love this Guild. If you mess with one, you really mess with all. I guess you could say we’re a PvP Guild disguised as a raiding Guild.

Looking for PvP Elemental Shaman Videos

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With the summer here, I wanted to spend some extra time and get better at the Arenas. Last night I signed with a 3v3 team makeup consisting of a Hunter, Priest, and Elemental Shaman (me).

To further increase my chance of success, I respecced to snap up Instant Ghost Wolf an Nature’s Swiftness. This means I don’t get the extra damage nuke of Lightning Overload but my survivability and utility should increase (in theory).

The first 4 games were great. We started working together well and called the traps, the targets, and such. But after that, we dropped the next 5 decisions to bad luck and bad decisions. I know one thing I need to work on myself is to manage my totems better.

But I do want to get better and I learn best by observing and doing. So if anyone knows of any great PvP elemental shaman videos or names of players that I can watch, that would be terrific!