Category Archives: PvP

How To Avoid Being Ganked

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So, you’re either on a PvP server, or you’re on a PvE server and you’ve just done a quest/activity (catching the towers in Terrokar, doing a battleground, etc.) and you’re flagged for PvP while out and about. Probably levelling, this is where you’ll have the most unfair disadvantage, though maybe dailies or catching up on a few quests. While you’re doing your thing, a big red name swoops down and stomps you into the floor, leaving nothing but a smoldering mess and your ghost standing over your corpse thinking, “Well, thanks, now I can’t do anything until you bugger off.” Or, “I’m relogging to my main!” Do you know what though? There are a couple of methods you can use to avoid being ganked.. to an extent.

I’ve been on a PvP server for most of my time playing WoW, and that’s about 3 or 4 years of being smooshed into a corpse. After that amount of time, you come to learn a few ways to avoid it. Now, this won’t always get rid of them, but occasionally you may be able to hide. You’re running around, you see a red name, probably higher level than you are and you run in the opposite direction hoping they haven’t seen you. They may be running past, in which case you dive into the nearest hedge (they have hedges in WoW, right?) and hope. Of course, if you’re able to, stealthing is always a great option for avoiding them. If you’re a Hunter, you can keep ‘Track Humanoids’ on, and keep an eye out for those red dots on your minimap, they’ll look a tiny bit different to regular hostile mobs. The best way is to just keep an eye out constantly and really pray that they don’t come near/bother you. Of course, sometimes they will leave you alone but a lot won’t. Avoiding places like Stranglethorn Vale which are not only places that both factions level/quest in a lot but are also renowned for much ganking is a great idea if your server is quite heavily populated and the ganking particularly annoys you, though it’s something you get used to. Basically, avoid being near the red names.

The “I’m logging my main” method, in my opinion, doesn’t often go well. I can log into my 80, go to the place where my alt’s corpse lies and find nothing, run around a little, and find nothing, and this seems to happen to me a lot so I gave up, but you never know, you might find them, and smooshing them into the dirt repeatedly MIGHT well be quite therapeutic!

“Well lol you shouldn’t roll on a pvp server noob lol” is not an answer. Yes, if you’re PvP flagged and an easy kill target, you will probably be ganked, this is inevitable. Remember though, there’s no harm in trying to fight back, even if they are a few levels higher, you never know how bad they are ;)

A Nice Surprise

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Since rerolling I have been doing Wintergrasp whenever I remember to. The great thing about our server, and also the curse of it, is that Horde way outnumber the Alliance, who rarely win even with tenacity. So basically, show up, try to take vehicles, destroy towers, and defend from the 50k hp incoming Allies, and win. Trying to go for the 100 wins achievement has never been so easy. Though I heard yesterday that it’s going to be evened out, if only 10 Alliance join, then only 10 Horde can join. This basically means that if that goes through, it will be very rare for a Horde player on this server to even be able to enter Wintergrasp during the battle. It is fairer than tenacity, but with those kinds of numbers, and I’m not kidding, it’s a bit shit, and does make you realise the beauty of cross-server battlegrounds. I guess this is one great reason to find a nicely balanced Horde/Alliance PvE server closer to Cataclysm.

Anyway, as PvP goes, I’m very much using the stand back, tab dot, and disperse if Warriors happen to come near my face method of face melting and it’s working just fine. I’m upto 6k honorable kills, so only 4k away from my goal for this year, and I’m having a bit of fun. Of course, if I started spam queuing for battlegrounds I would get bored because people are fairly stupid. I’m bad, and even I can work out the basics, i.e. if you’re trying to cap a flag, you will need a base to take it to.

While checking for upgrades for my PvP set, of which I had a few pieces from when I was playing before, I found that my best cloak before raids is in fact the Wrathful cloak for 52k honor. 100 spellpower and 60 haste? Yes please! So I traded in my Stone Keeper’s Shards for honor and got to it.

It happened to be the Warsong Gulch weekend/call to arms/whatever, so I queued up for that. The first couple I tried consisted of an Alliance premade and the moment they’d capped their first flag the Horde deciding, “Oh, let’s give up and let them win.” Trouble is, I didn’t want to keep bumping into this attitude so I dropped out and came back the next day. We had another case of the Alliance getting the first flag and the Horde being all defeatist, but in the next one, I got to the flag, okay, might as well grab it and see if I can get Capture the Flag, oh look, I did! Thank you Disc Priest following me around and the Alliance not even touching me. Head back and nobody there but me and the Disc Priest, the rest of the raid seemed to be having a midfield battle so what the hell I’ll go again. Got it. Wow.. I wonder.. So I head back and notice the Priest head off to help some other Hordies, oh crap I’m screwed but wait, a Warrior is following me. I ran in, grabbed the flag for the third time, had 2 or 3 Horde following me, plus the Disc Priest came back. One Alliance tried to attack but was pretty much pummeled into the ground, ran into the base, no more resistance from the other side and.. Ironman! Woah. Was not expecting that.

So I’m feeling pretty happy that I got that one which I expected to struggle with, I suppose with several cooldowns a Shadow Priest is a reasonably decent flag carrier, but I get pretty terrified pinning the attention to my head. Might as well just carry a big “KILL ME! KILL ME!” sign and be done with it. Either way I got my cloak today but I’m going to keep PvPing a bit on the side. It’s quite enjoyable as a Shadow Priest.

PvP & Me

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I guess it’s about time I did one of these. So hi, my name is Jaedia, and I hate PvP. Okay perhaps ‘hate’ isn’t the right word, but whenever I try to I get anxious over how much they’re thinking, “Ha! This hunter is shit! Free HKs!” Also, really frustrated. I avoid it most of the time because I don’t feel the need to torture myself. However, once in a blue moon I do get the urge to fling my pixels into a crowd of red names and shoot at them until I’m dead. Yes, this is how it usually goes unless a healer takes pity on me.

Back in TBC, I attempted to PvP as a shadow priest. I can remember being very squishy, and I can remember thinking “Ooh shadow priests, easy kills” but I can also remember how fun it was trying to master something which was supposedly not built for what I was doing. Flinging DoTs around, fearing, Mind Flay slowing melee classes, it was genuinely fun when I was in the right mood. Then in Wrath, they gave shadow priests the terror, I forget what its’ name is now, but running around disarming melee classes was, to me, funny.

I rerolled hunter for the first few months of Wrath, and then May onwards. My God I was terrible at it. Some PvP hunters make it look so simple, but I’ll pop my PvP trinket out of stuns, disengage away, shoot them to death, whether it’s their death or my death.

My being bad at PvP aside, shooting people in the face is fun, and I want to grab some achievements. I’m aiming to go for Wrecking Ball one day when I find a willing healer, I think I managed to get 17 killing blows without dying once and was then jumped by a rogue, a warrior, and a PvP trinket on cooldown. Cry.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’d like to get 10,000 honourable kills this year. It’s going to take a lot of PvP, I’m currently on about 2,300, but it’s an aim at least. As, there is no way I’ll ever PvP enough to get 100,000.

Personally, when it comes down to PvP, I’m not doing it to be serious. I will defend flags, I will attack towers, sacrificing my own PvP comfort zones for the benefit of whatever is going on, but I do appreciate a laugh while it happens.

Fae Ventures Into Alterac Valley

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Noticing how close I was to 25 tabards yesterday, I decided to queue for AV while I checked around for the last 3 rares I need for Frostbitten. I needed to farm 30 marks for the Frostwolf Tabard, and of course, most of the time was spent with the map looking a little like this.

map

I spent a lot of the time here.

dead again

And I made a new friend (yes that is a warlock in the background..)

Drek'thar

I spotted a familiar name though, something tells me it isn’t the real Shawn.

shawn

And of course, 1 mark away from the tabard.

all good things...

It’s safe to say I gave up at this point with AV, though Vyragosa finally popped up and I think I had a mini heart attack after farming her for several hours every day, she annoyingly has the same flight path as the Time-Lost Proto Drake. I found and killed many warlocks on this fine day, they were lovely and squishy and made for some lovely hats. I went for their imps first, as this is of course the ultimate torture. Sadly, I was too caught in the moment to get any screenshots, but I did find one called Baldric.