So. Wild is not much of the pvp type. Yes, some of the Wild Family has come around to the idea of murdering the opposing faction. And yes, Wild has sent JB and Philly out into battlegrounds and Wintergrasp primarily to earn heirlooms. When Cata hit Wild planned to get the shaman, JB, to 85, and she would be Wild's stand-in for pvp. But JB stills sits at level 84, and doesn't appear all that interested, at least for now.
Wild has virtually no pvp gear; ie, gear with resilience. Reading up on that a bit, it seems that a resto druid can get away with healing battlegrounds in pve gear, but why go to all that trouble to pvp if not for some cool pvp gear? Wild did have SOME pvp gear, enough for about 300 resilience. Well, it was start. Wild is also a tailor, and can craft two types of cloth pvp gear, each of which have a 2-piece set bonus that awards even more resilience. Well, that was no sooner thought of than Wild made and equipped the gear. Wild also poked around on the AH looking for bargains, and when all was said and done Wild had improved his resilience from 300 to 1588.
Wild wasn't sure how long it would take to get a BG on a Thursday morning, so he queued up and then started putting together enchants and such. None of his new gear had any modifications yet. Wild didn't get a chance to do any of that as a BG popped almost right away.
The BG was the Battle For Gilneas. This is a Cata battleground. I wondered when the last time Wild had been in a BG or Wintergrasp. I went back more than a year and still couldn't find a single reference to pvp involving Wild. That's a long time.
The Gilneas fight wasn't a lot of fun. The BG is very like Arathi Basin, but Wild never got to see anymore than the first base right outside the dock we departed from. The Alliance already had that base well defended, but a group of us assaulted it auld nauseam the whole time. We controlled it maybe 20% of the time; the rest of the time Wild was mostly dead once they figured out Wild was the only healer.
Wild also got into a Warsong Gulch match and that was a LOT of fun! Wild picked out the one hunter in the group and determined to be his pocket healer. There was a warrior in the group as well who led many of the assaults, and he got a lot of Wild's attention as well. The two sides fought each other to a standstill over maybe the first ten minutes of the fight, each of us holding the other's flag. We finally took back our flag, capping theirs for a 1-0 lead. We were able to hold them at their base for the most part, but there was a small but determined group of Allies after our flag, and precious few of us trying to stop them. Wild and his hunter friend tangled with one Allie hunter that I have to give great credit to. The guy just wouldn't die. He quickly figured out he couldn't drop the horde hunter with Wild around, and came after Wild with a vengeance. Wild's hunter partner did what he could, but even with Wild DoTing the allie up and hitting back with Stomp, Entangle, and Cyclone, he just kept coming. He couldn't kill Wild, though. I'm sure the new resilience gear helped tamp down the violence being directed at Wild, but I could out heal anything he could do to me. Still, we couldn't bring him down, either. The allie hunter fought his way into a hut (can you heal in there?) and expertly used LoS to frustrate the horde hunter. When he went to ground in the hut even Wild poured DPS on him as well as the hunter. We drove him down under 20% I don't know how many times, but he somehow was able to recover some of his health and keep fighting. I'd like to be able to say we finally finished him, but Wild was ambushed by an allie rogue that distracted Wild for a bit. The allie hunter killed my hunter, and then he and the rogue killed Wild. It was one heckova fight, though! Wild also tangled with an obsessed death knight who chased Wild long enough to use his Grab (or whatever it's called) some six times on Wild, plus a few Chains. Wild healed through everything and then got bored with him and catform/sprinted away. It was good practice, though, and I hope that death knight has his own nightmares about that un-killable druid he faced. We won the WSG 1-0.
Wild doesn't have any visions of glory in pvp. He knows that when he is successful it's only because the opposition sucks even worse than Wild does. But it was definitely fun, no pressure entertainment and Wild will be doing more of it.
The BoT raid on Thursday was a mixed blessing. We are slowly moving our focus toward the Firelands, but we also want to finish off Cho'gall. I was really hoping we would go after Cho'gall Thursday night, but the raid leader decided to make our first official Firelands raid. Wild has done any number of Firelands trash runs, so this was old hat. The raid leader was experienced as well, but we had a few raiders who were getting their first look. We had no problems with the mobs, though, doing a thorough clear on our first run through. The raid leader then gave us a choice - reset and farm more rep from the trash, or take some shots at a Firelands boss. Wild strongly advocated to go after a boss - we had a really solid group and I thought we had a chance at Shannox. Sigh, the majority needed rep to pick up the gear that was available at Friendly and Honored, so we farmed some more. We did go deeper into the area where the spider boss is than Wild had gone before. Matter of fact, we cleared all the way to the boss, Beth'tilac (I think that's how it's spelled). Wild wanted to go after him, but we trooped back out and farmed some more. There were no gear drops off of any of the trash, which disappointed a lot of folks. It was fun, but Wild had hoped for more.
The spider boss
The raid will go after Cho'gall Friday night. Wild won't be there, though. Those friends of ours aren't leaving until Saturday and we'll be out with them on Friday night. I'm very sure this group is capable of dropping Cho'gall, given they'll have the whole evening, and I doubt that once he's down the guild will bother with BoT anymore. I love our friends, but couldn't they have decided to go home on Friday instead of Saturday? Sigh.
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