Tuesday (1 Dec) - Hitting the PvP Wall
Don't get me wrong, Philly, EZ, JB, and even (shock!) Wild get a lot of fun out of pvp. Getting Philly teamed up with Red and then Myst for Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin really turned Wild's family on to pvp. Then we built a new level 19 bracket team of EZ, Ando and Lao and again won more battles than we lost week after week. Ultimately, DER and JB teamed up for level 80 pvp battlegrounds, starting with JB's fascination with Wintergrasp and growing to encompass level 80 brackets for Arathi Basin (AB), Alterac Valley (AV), Warsong Gulch (WSG), and the new ones, Isle of Conquest (IoC) and Strand of the Ancients (SoA).
Not only has pvp been a lot of fun, it offered great rewards as well. JB's current gear includes a pvp earned helm, bracers, belt, boots, ring, and trinket making up six of JB's 17 gear slots. Two heirloom items also came in part from pvp (and in part from leftover badges of heroism that Wild couldn't use) that helped EZ in pvp and is currently helping Philly level.
The problem is that at level 80 the pvp rewards suddenly appear nearly dry. There are still many items JB could buy, but very little (maybe nothing) that would be an upgrade to what JB now has. Battleground pvp gear rewards max out at ilevel 226, except for the pants (ilevel 232). JB "might" still get the pants, but she already has pve ilevel 226 pants that stat for stat are better than the pvp ones.
JB now has close to 70,000 honor and will soon reach the max of 75k if she doesn't spend some it. She has over 200 WG shards to spend, and will reach 40 WG marks of honor with one more battle as well. But the WG quartermaster can't offer her much to spend it on; nor can any of the various quartermasters located in the House of Honor in Orgrimmar.
So, JB was going to focus on heirloom gear - and ran into another roadblock. There are only five heirloom types (I just assumed that every gear slot had an corresponding heirloom - I was wrong). The Wild family already has two of them - shoulders and trinket. The chest piece can only be purchased using heroism badges, which Wild spent the last of for the trinket and which can't be earned anymore. The fourth heirloom item is a weapon, and as a ast resort JB might buy one, but it offers nothing special from a levelling perspective and it is easy enough to get better weapons while levelling. Getting a different heirloom shoulder for mail/plate might be worth doing. What I really want is the chest, and there is one other way to get it - earn the Crusader title in the Argent Tournament. The grind to get that, which requires winning titles for ALL of the major cities (Orgrimmar, Thunder Bluff, Undercity) would take months to accomplish. That's not a grind I'm interested in.
JB went so far as to look up the rewards for the other battlegrounds: AB, AV, and WSG. JB was shocked to learn that they only offer gear below ilevel 200! JB can't use any of that. So she figured that the new battlegrounds, SoA and IoC, would offer new and better rewards. No. They offer the very same rewards that all the other battlegrounds offer. And the only thing of interest there "might" be the special riding mounts. But you know what? They are level 60 ground mounts. No flying mounts.
Reading through the various posts in wowhead, the frustration among the dedicated pvpers was pretty evident. What good were the new battlegrounds if all that effort still got them the same old stuff available in any other battleground? Very disturbing decision by Blizzard.
So, JB is still going to be hitting the battlegrounds, just because it's fun. But Philly has started looking hard at doing pvp battlegrounds as another way to level and earn pvp gear that would be the equal or better of what she can get through questing, at least until level 80. In addition, Philly knows that there are a lot of jewelcrafting recipes purchasable with honor and pvp marks, so if she wants those she'd better start working on that now while it still has value.
Finally, there has been some discussion about levelling some characters entirely through pvp beginning at level 20. That sounds pretty cool to do, and if our pvp threesome decides to do that the Wild family already has a volunteer - level 13 paladin Jocelin. In that case, JB may purchase the mail/plate heirloom shoulders for her.
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To get the really good stuff we have to do arena. Let me know if you want to give that a try! YOu can get ilvl 258 stuff even from arena, but it requires some lofty numbers from your personnal ratings.
ReplyDeleteIf sheer grinding would work I'd give arenas a try. But since players have to be very, very good to get a rating high enough to get the gear - well, I know my limitations. I'm terrible at one on one pvp, and I would die fast and often in any 2v2 arena match. My reflexes just aren't there. I can see that just in the random battles in the BGs - once I'm targeted, particularly by melee, I'm dead meat in a hurry.
ReplyDeleteWith all that honor and those WG marks, buy a whole resil set. Then you can have two different sets; one for arena pvp and another just standard dps set. A whole resil set will give you a lot more survivability because of the resil and a ton of added stamina. Plus, I would be with you trying to peal targets off of you as much as possible. Really our goal together would be to just try to dps something down as fast as possible. We would succeed on occasion and would still get arena points which we can use to buy better gear then what is available with honor only. We just wouldn't be able to get the stuff that required the super high ratings. I don't think it would hurt to give it a try, though in order for me to kill anything I am going to need a new weapon! Time to start farming heroic ToC 5-man! ;) The weap I need drops off the first boss, so no need to go past that!
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