Weekend (28 Aug) - Zerg Zerg Zerg Choo Choo!

Weekend (28 Aug) - Zerg Zerg Zerg Choo Choo!

A couple of notes from Friday ... I forgot to mention that the Firelands trash run on Thursday night included tackling some turtles. No Firelands raid that Wild has been on has attacked the turtles - until that run. When asked why, most raid leaders simply said that they were a huge pain and not worth the rep to kill them. Well, our raid group on Thursday seemed to become mesmerized by those turtles. Every time we'd pass by a clutch of them raiders would start chanting Turtles! Turtles! Turtles! Finally, the raid leader said - Ok, you want turtles, let's go get some turtles. Wild can now vouch for the statement that turtles are a real pain, for two reasons. One is that turtles can do a spinning move that hits anyone that gets in the way - kind of like a melee AoE. The other ability that causes trouble is that turtles can Shield, protecting itself from damage but also trapping any raiders next to it inside the shield where the turtle can still attack them but trapped raiders can't be healed. We lost a tank several times that way. We did end up killing a few turtles, but I think we got that idea out of our system.

The other note of significance is that there was a Bastion of Twilight raid on Friday night. Wild could not attend due to visiting friends. Wild did get in game about 8pm on Friday, and the raid was still in progress. What surprised me was that the raid leader, Bd, did not make the raid, either. The makeup of the raid didn't look much like Bd's raid, with most of the raiders coming from Mf's raid group. There had to be at least one of Bd's raiders in there, though, in order to be able to use the saved raid and go after Cho'gall. About a half hour after Wild logged in, the guild got our first Cho'gall kill, as I predicted would happen. Wish Wild had been there.

The "Call to Arms" battleground for the weekend was Alterac Valley (AV). Each weekend a BG gets singled out like AV and offered greater rewards/honor. AV is a 40 man per side contest that Wild remembers as a large scale battle that can take up a lot of time to win or lose. The AV battles that Wild was part of this particular weekend looked like nothing Wild had ever seen. Yes, it's been awhile.

The first set of AV's that Wild got in on used the "Zerg" strategy. Every time Wild zoned in to an AV that was the first and last thing that spilled out of BG chat - Zerg! It's a simple strategy, easily understand, and seductive because the battles are very quick. The basics are this. Each side has a home base, and each side has an enemy boss on the opposite side of Valley that wins the match when killed. Some towers and graveyards have to be destroyed/captured once to make the enemy boss kill easier, but even that part seemed somewhat arbitrary. There is a LOT of other things going on, but for the Zerg strategy 90% of those things are simply ignored. There is no defense of captured objectives, either. They are immediately abandoned as soon as taken.

When the battle started all forty pvpers burst from our base and scrambled to get to the opposite side of the valley. Occasionally, horde and alliance tangled with each other as we passed each other going in opposite directions, but mostly we just ignored each other. Graveyards/towers may or may not be taken on the way. Once we reached the enemy boss, Vann, and cleared away the hostile npcs around the area ... we waited. We wait to see if enough towers/graveyards are down, and we wait because the tanks and sometimes the healers that are supposed to lead us against Vann take their own sweet time getting there.

Meanwhile, the Alliance army is doing the same thing. Only, as was said in chat any number of times, the Alliance does not have to go quite as far to get to the horde boss, so they have a slight advantage over horde if both sides are using the Zerg strategy. The Alliance had one more thing going for them - they were less stupid than the horde. Want to know how stupid us horde were? Wild joined TEN AV's in his first set of BGs. We lost eight of them. Did we alter the strategy? No. Did we get any better at the strategy we were using? No. The Alliance did only one thing differently than the horde - after the horde abandoned objectives we had taken, they sent a couple of allies and retook it - it was easy, because there wasn't any horde there defending them. Did the horde start defending them? No. The horde bet EVERYTHING on getting to and killing Vann before those objectives started to fall back into alliance hands. It was a recipe for failure, but the horde was totally incapable of changing anything.

Now, there were some positives. The matches went very fast - 5-10 minutes max, which is fast for such a large scale BG. And, of course, even losing, there was a nice batch of honor points won since AV was the weekend special BG.

Wild did another set of ten AV's later on. There was virtually no waiting - within a minute a new one would pop after the completion of the previous one. The horde lost nine of them. Just imagine the Alliance players on the other side - these horde guys fall for the same trick EVERY SINGLE TIME! Wild got bored and wandered around trying different things and going places that I don't get to see when Zerging through. Sometimes Wild tried - unsuccessfully - to battle the Alliance at the horde base where OUR boss was being assaulted, or just slow them down, but there were never enough of us for that. Wild defended objectives sometimes, but mostly it was just Wild there, and there wasn't much Wild could do against a pair of allies beyond staying alive just long enough to irritate them a bit before I died. Once it was Wild and a feral druid defending, so we both stealthed. Three allies came to take it back, taking on the feral druid, and Wild gave them a start when I popped into view to heal the feral druid. All three allies piled on Wild, though, and Wild didn't stay alive long enough to know how the feral druid did. Not good, probably. I could have been miserable about the losses, but hey, the honor points were piling up, and that's what Wild was after.

Wild did one more set of AV's, 11 this time, and the horde lost ten of them. Final tally: 4 horde wins, 27 alliance wins. There must have been some really stupid alliance for them to have let us win four matches. Or maybe they were just too exhausted from all the victory dancing. I don't even want to think about how much honor the alliance racked up.

Anyway, Wild is trying to figure out what he plans to buy with the honor points. I wish I had figured out a long time ago how fast it was to farm honor (I know, erik, you've been telling me, I just don't listen). Wild will have to check around and see who still needs heirlooms.

Wild did his heirloom check. In fact, I reorganized it completely so that I could see what I had. We needed less than I thought. The only "important" needs were Bean's. She could use a Sharpened Scarlet Kris and the Exceptional Stormshroud Shoulders to fill out her gear. I may double up on the daggers so that both Bean and Shevils have a pair (of daggers, those two girls already have a "pair"). That will take some more pvping, though. Jocy is happy enough with her holy heirlooms, although they're more cloth and leather than anything else. I haven't decided on a whether she needs an heirloom weapon.

I had forgotten that 4,000 is the max honor I can have, so I'm spending what Wild has and will have to get some more. There's a few more hours to the weekend. :-)