My Chars

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Medallion of the Alliance and a Respec

After a weekend and 3 evenings of PvP on Supersolid I had enough honor to buy Medallion of the Alliance, which is essential for PvP. Before I used Bestial Wrath (coupled with The Beast Within) which is also good or even better. However I wanted to respec from BM to MM so as to increase my damage.

In the end I didn't respec to the build I originally thought of. I posted on the Blizzard Hunter forum and after reading (and answering to) several pieces of advise I decided to go to a 7/48/6 build. Of course this will change over time as I learn more about PvP and also as my gear improves but for now this works for me. Aimed Shot and Silencing Shot are very very nice :)

Right now I'm not really enjoying PvP. In AB and EOTS Alliance almost always get beaten and beaten badly. In WSG it changes but again mostly the Horde win. Sometimes I'll enter the BG only to find we have less than a full team while Horde have a full team. Best was when WSG started with 3 people on Alliance side, that was actually a bit comic... :)
The annoying thing is, I see how the Horde play and they play they way I think we should play. They rush bases/flags in large groups. They stick together and help each other. Horde healers actually heal! I can barely remember getting healed in EOTS or AB, for Alliance it is each player to him or her-self. I see people attacking a Horde DPS or Tank char while right next to him or a little behind are one or two Horde healing him, making it impossible to kill the healed char, but Alliance pays no mind and keep fighting blindly until they go down...
So it is not so much the consistent losing that upsets me (although I admit that is annoying) but more the reason for the losing and the fact that I know there is a better way but Alliance just (refuse?) to do it. I don't know, maybe I should look for a premade...

In AV Alliance almost always wins but the victory is hollow - there is almost no PvP involved or very little, since the horde only put up token resistance near Drak and really they can't put up more than token resistance since whenever they die they get ported to a GY that is quite far away I assume. In any case AV usually goes "ride out of gate in a wave, stop at boss in middle and kill him, ride down to where Drak is, kill the few opposing Horde, wait for towers to burn, kill Drak". The whole thing takes minimal effort from me as a player and doesn't make me feel as if I contributed a lot. There was one time when the Horde players put up a great resistance at the GY just before Drak, while it lasted the PvP there was intense :)

So why do I continue doing PvP? Mostly because I feel it's the least time-consuming activity I can do that at the same time lets me get good gear (eventually).
Questing will get me gold but not much more.
Instances require 1-3 hours per run just for the instance itself, not including time spent hanging around on the LFG channel hoping someone needs a hunter or DPS in general or travel time to the instance. Also it is much harder if not impossible to go AFK in an instance without hurting the other 4 people while in a BG usually people could care less if you're AFK for a minute or two.
I can't even dream of raiding, first I need to do the Kara attunment chain on Supersolid and that requires instances. Also raids can be quite long and usually start before I can login for serious play.

So right now, PvP is the way to go for me. But I do wish I could find a way to win more AB, EOTS and WSG matches...