Free Candy For Everyone

I was playing WoW the other night and running battlegrounds as has been my wont. I’m finding playing on a PvP server isn’t that much of a different experience from playing on a PvE server, but the people are very different. People are just much more aware of how to maximize your gameplay - how to play your class, what stats you should have, what you should do if jumped in a dark corner by the evil Alliance.

This makes for much better battleground experiences as well. However, some things are the same everywhere. To recap for the uninitiated, Warsong Gulch is a game of capture the flag. 10 players on each side try to steal the other side’s flag and run it back to their own base where their own flag must remain. All to often each side grabs the flags and hides forever. Then we spend 45 minutes trying to take it back from each other.

Blizzard has a change live on the PTR for WSG -

• When both flags are held, the flag carriers will receive 50% increased damage done to them after approximately 10 minutes and 100% increased damage after approximately 15 minutes.
• Flag carriers can now be tracked 45 seconds after picking up the flag.

This is trying to address the turtling problem. I’m not sure how it will pan out, but maybe they should try implementing the bug I experienced this weekend as a feature instead.

I was helping guard the flag carrier and sitting inside our base. We were chatting to the raid for progress updates and calling out tips. We got bored of turtling, so the three of us decided to run out midfield and try to draw out the opposition. That’s when we noticed that everyone was dead and no one was respawning. No one answered our chat either. We continued on our way to the enemy base where their flag carrier was hiding with a few remaining guards. We took them down, though I died along the way. I then sat in the graveyard and could read chat but not talk back. The two left alive managed to capture our flag at which point we all respawned.

Sudden death was actually a fascinating mechanic. It really made you value your heals and smart play. Sometimes, in the current WSG, dying is actually a boon. You respawn in a position that can be tactically beneficial sometimes for recapturing a flag that is running out of your base. You respawn with full health and mana. At worst you have to wait 30 seconds to spawn. And in general, this is good. But wow, there was so much more tactical thinking and tension when I realized that if I died that was it. I went down healing our flag carrier and helped make sure we won the game.

Now that’s a solution I’d be curious to see them try.

Tonight I ran through Arathi Basin a few times with my mage, Aynaka. She’s at level 47 which is a good level for massive amount of Alliance killing. I went in with my buddies Fornjot, a 48 priest, and Dizcordia, a 49 mage. We were all on Ventrilo talking to each other for extra fun with coordination.

We ran through two times. The first time, we played it like you’re supposed to. There are 5 nodes in AB. Every few seconds, your team gets points for the nodes they control. To win, you need to control 3 of the 5 nodes for the duration. The usual strategy is to take three right at the start and leave people to defend each node. Just hold. It works, but it’s not all that exciting.

Our first time in we played it the right way. I ended up hanging out at the lumber mill node for most of the battle and getting a measly 14 kills in. It wasn’t very thrilling. There was very little actual combat going on where I was out. So we all agreed the second time that we’d just have fun. So the three of us grouped up and just went crazy. First, we took lumber mill. There was a good number of Alliance there. We had a little battle but managed to take everyone out. Then, instead of staying there like good like soldiers, we mounted up and stormed the Stables. This is not what you are supposed to be doing. The Stables is the closest node to the Alliance start location. If you assault it, they’ll keep coming and coming until they get it back. Well, we didn’t care. We wanted to KILL. We wanted to have FUN! So we assaulted it and held it. We held off waves and waves of allies. We held and until we noticed that we were losing. So, even though we had that node, we abandoned it and took the Mine. Which we took and then left for the Farm. We just jumped around and took nodes as needed. And we came back from a 200 point deficit to pull ahead and win. And we got an insane number of honor kills in the process.

A lot of the time I go into Arathi Basin I just don’t have fun. It’s too much like a job. You have to do this, you must stand here. I want to run around and reign destruction on my enemies. This was fun. We didn’t care about “shoulds” and played it like it was a game. Which, hey, it is!

I actually seem to have an internet connection today, so I logged on to WoW and immediately tried to hop into a battleground. I queued up for both Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch. There were many many BGs up and running, but the wait time was still at around 10 minutes. Maybe that was because I was playing on Alliance side. I haven’t tried Horde yet (since I just hit 40 with the alt I most like to BG with, I figured I should gain a few levels first).

To my surprise, Arathi Basin popped up first. I hit the button to go to the battleground and was brought to a loading screen. But then the progress bar made no progress. I was just sitting there staring at a static screen for about a minute. Then in the midst of it I heard the sound effect that plays when you can enter a battleground. Soon after that I got dropped out of the loading screen back into the game with just a text message in the chat box saying something like “Battleground instance could not be found.” But it seemed my Warsong Gulch has popped up and one of my addons auto-joined me for that while I was reading the message.

Played there for a bit, all was fine. Well. Except for the fact that I entered into a battle midstream and my side was getting creamed. But otherwise it was all normal. I was playing my priest, which can be hard without good teammates. Priests just go squish. So we quickly lost, I ended up in Stormwind which is not where I had queued myself. I queued in Darnassus. Strange, but I wanted to be in SW anyway, so ok. I immediately queued again. But take a look at this:

I was in Stormwind and the game seemed to think I was in AB. Of course, I never even managed to get into that BG at all.

A few minutes later I got into another WSG. This one was going much better. We captured a flag or two and I was doing some decent heals. It was good stuff. But then either I got booted from the battle or it went down or who knows what, because I ended up back in SW. With the deserter debuff. And it said I was still in WSG!

Definitely something strange going on here. I gave up at this point. I’ll give it a bit of time to get the kinks out. I love that you don’t have to spend the first few minutes yelling “Invite” when you enter the BG. That’s awesome. And they’ve appended the server name to everyone’s character names so you can see where everyone comes from. Very nifty. I think this will end up being a cool feature, it’s just a bit unstable for now.

I’ve been running a lot of WoW Battlegrounds recently. It’s sort of become my favorite part of the game. I have several characters at various levels who I use with interesting results. But the main thing I’ve realized is that my long ago post claiming there was no battlegrounds problem is very very wrong.

I used to only run BGs on the weekends, and that was part of my blindness. It’s during the week that the twinks come out. (Sidebar: Just looked up that term on Urban Dictionary and was surprised to see the original meaning of the word is “An attractive, boyish-looking, young gay man.” And keep reading to find out why. *sigh* Why is everything homophobic in the MMOs?) A twink (in the MMORPG context) is a character who has totally maxed out gear, the best of the best, probably afforded by sending money from a higher level character owned by the same player. In WoW specifically, there are a couple of obvious ways to twink. If you can afford it, by the best gear - blues all the way. But a much worse problem is enchanting.

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I made some strides with Aynaka, the undead mage I started last month (in World of Warcraft, of course). I got her to level 23. I posted some screenshots of her early on, when she wasn’t looking very mage-like. Here she is now, properly garbed in a robe.

As I’d mentioned in some earlier posts, I usually don’t like to go into the Battlegrounds when I’m at the low end of the level range. But I made an exception with Aynaka, because I figured she just rocks so much, she’d do ok. I played two matches of Warsong Gulch today with her at level 23. It was great. I love Mana Shield and Blink. For those who don’t play mages, Mana Shield absorbs physical damage and drains mana instead, and Blink pops you 20 yards straight ahead of where you are, also removing any ensnaring spells in the process. I had a couple of situations where four or five high levels were pounding me and I still managed to escape. Sheep one, Frost Nova the rest, Shield and Blink away. It was awesome.

I took on a druid one-on-one who was two or three levels above me and managed to take her down. She just kept healing herself. Haha. That’s not getting get me to stop!

Both matches were with a lot of the same people, and it was rather clear that the Alliance didn’t know what they were doing. We won the second match in about 10 minutes. They were not well organized. But in that second match, despite most of the players being higher level than me, I had the most honor kills. Yippee!

Still really loving playing the mage. Though I’m getting to that middle level where the first bloom comes off the rose and all. Here’s hoping this one sticks. (Not that I don’t like my other characters, but I’m having a lack of interest in playing on a PvP server, so Raelle is not getting as much attention as she might. But I did get some more PvP in with her this week. She’s at level 29, so I don’t quite want to level her yet, because I don’t think a level 30 priest will last long in the BGs).