It's been a while!

Not only has this week been busy, hence the lack of posts, but this past weekend was also busy! In fact, it was so busy that I didn't really play at all. Nevertheless, I do have a PvP update!

About a week ago, I was waiting for my arena partner to hop on and decided to join an RBG group in the meantime. It took foreeeeever to get the last few members; so long, in fact, that my arena partner finally signed on by the time we got our third healer. He joined our group (shadow priests are OP in RBGs) and off we went!

I was really hoping to be able to crack 1800 and get to the next tier of groups in the LFG tool (generally they are restricted by your CR, so at 1800 I would have an easier time joining a group than at 1700). Our first match went really well! Not only did we win, and quite handily, but I led in healing and my SP partner led in damage!

Top 4 in damage are all DoT classes!

Druids usually also lead in over-healing

 This brought me to the familiar place of being one win away from breaking 1800. I've gotten to the 1790s 5-6 times this season, just to end up losing. This time actually turned out differently Not only did we win, but we also ended up leading in healing / damage again. We would go on to win five games in a row! It was pretty crazy. I've never been on a team that won that many games total, let alone in a row.

We ended up losing the last two we played, and people had started getting kind of antsy so everyone agreed it was a good idea to just stop there.

Alternative Arena

Last weekend we had some time to do Arenas and decided to start off with our alts first, and then go to our mains. I played my priest and my partner played his rogue; at first I started off shadow, with the idea that quicker games would be ideal.

Let me tell you, shadow priests with only a few pieces of PvP gear (and not even the 2 piece trinket bonus!) die really quickly. Heck, I didn't even have the CC breaking trinket at the beginning! I would get hit by a stun right away and be practically dead before it wore off.

After 4-5 games where I fell over dead just because the other team looked at me, I switched to Discipline. We did pretty well with that comp, even getting our MMR up into the 14-1500 range! We ended up cranking out 40+ games on our alts and never even switched to our mains. We went 27-17 overall, so probably won about 67% of our games as Disc/Rogue.

Boy is he ugly right now

Given our experience (one day!) and lack of gear, I was pretty impressed with the results. I did end up earning enough conquest by the end to purchase a trinket (2 piece bonus! - 15% reduced damage) and two pieces of armor to get the 4 piece bonus, but I still had a good 4-5 pieces that were just random blues from leveling up.

I actually sold the 2 armor pieces back at the end of the day (you have 2 hours after you purchase them) so that when I earn enough conquest overall I can buy the weapon right away (you can't buy the weapons until you've earned 7200 for the season). It's a neat little trick - help yourself out in the short term and the long term!

It was definitely a different experience, being on the other side of the dps/healer combo we usually run. I really felt the lack of CC though - all I have is fear which is on a cooldown. On my druid (both feral and resto), I have a stun which is on a similar length cd and also roots and cyclone, neither of which have a CD.

Once I get more used to the priest play-style, it will be interesting to see which healer pairs better with a rogue!

10 miler - check!

Saturday I ran a 10 mile race, the first time I'd ever done a race of that distance. Heading into it, I didn't feel like I had trained very well for it, so I didn't really have a goal. I figured I would just go, run, and be happy with whatever time I ended up with.

The night before the race, I actually stopped and thought about the training I had done. After the half marathon, I essentially took an entire week off, partially due to a long 5 day vacation and partially due to really sore legs. This left me with just about 3 weeks to train, and the first weekend I just did a nice easy 6 miles to get back into the swing of things. I followed that up with 10 and 8 mile long runs, with my two weekly runs somewhere in the 3-6 range. This was actually pretty similar to how I had trained for the half, the only difference was that I never really felt like I pushed myself on any of the runs leading up to the 10 miler.

I assumed there would be a station at some point during the race that would have gels, bananas, donuts, or something for the runner's to eat, so I didn't bring along any of my own. I did eat two gels right before the start of the race though. There weren't really any timers along the way, so I had no idea what my pace was for the vast majority of the race. Apparently there was a single table halfway through that had gels, but I completely missed it, so I didn't eat anything during the run.

Until the last couple miles, I didn't even feel like I was running that fast. I thought I was doing a nice easy pace, probably a little under 9 minutes. The last two miles I really tried to kick it up a notch, and as I crossed the finish line I saw the race time was 1:28 ... just under 9 minute miles! Couldn't complain about that, though then I started to wonder how late I had started. 5 minutes? 8 minutes!?

It took a while for the website to post results, and waiting for that was mildly agonizing:

Huh. Not bad! Not bad at all! 2 minutes shy of breaking an 8 minute pace for the entire run! Almost top 10% overall, and almost top 20% for the men. I passed 269 people in the last 5 miles! If I hadn't gotten stuck behind the 2 hour pace group, could I have easily saved 2 minutes by not having to weave around people? Hmmm.

Perhaps the best part was that I felt pretty good after the race. Worlds better than after the half. I have no idea what the difference was, either.

2 outta 3 aint bad ... I guess

I had 3 goals headed into this past weekend that I touched on here. I succeeded in getting Cres to 100, I not only finished off Gnomebane but also became a Manslayer ... but I tooooootally failed at pushing my RBG rating.

It had been several weeks since I had done RBGs. Being fully geared, the opportunity for an extra piece of conquest gear was unnecessary and getting into them can take some time. During my available time I'd been focused on Arena games. But back when I was doing them before, I had been very successful, winning what seems like 90% of my matches since I switched to Resto and only looking for groups intent on pushing rating.

I figured that success would continue this past weekend. Friday night I didn't see many groups in the queue, so I just focused on getting Gnomebane done. Saturday afternoon after hitting 100, I looked around for groups, and ... there weren't very many. I puttered around doing other things and finally found a group that was around my rating. We won our first game (quite handily!), putting me one win away 1800. There were warning signs though - our group comp was alllll over the place. People didn't sound confident in voice chat on strategy. We didn't have a target caller. Still, we had won and groups had been hard to come by, sooo ... I stayed for another!

We lost. I left the group because it didn't really seem like a situation that was going to be successful. It took me a while to find another group, but I finally did. We won our first! One win away from 1800 again! ... and then we lost two in a row. And then we won another! Again, one win away from 1800.

And then the leader and two other people who were from the server disconnected. They were still in voice chat, but apparently their server had crashed. It was midnight at this point, so after waiting 5 minutes they called it. Disappointing first night of attempts, but I still had all day Sunday!

Sunday afternoon, I hopped on, expecting there to be a good amount of groups. There was only 1! I waited in this group for two hours before we finally got a full 10. We lost, then won, then lost, and then the group broke up. It took me several hours to find another group, and we lost our first, won our second ... and then the leader said he was calling it because he "wasn't feeling it." Sigh. I ended right around where I had started.

I have no idea what the difference was. Maybe weekends are bad times to try and RBG? I know that the meta has shifted somewhat - the ideal healer composition is now two Monks and a Paladin, and DPS has taken a strong shift toward dot classes (2 shadowpriest and a warlock is pretty popular right now). It was very surprising to me how much trouble I had finding a group. It had never seemed that hard previously!

A fitness update!

Today marks the end of my 12 week competition to lose weight. I started off at ~191, and ended at ~180. I was surprised to see that I lost pretty close to a pound a week because I definitely felt like I was less successful in terms of keeping to my diet this time. I do, however, think that my initial weight of 191 could have been a little inflated - I spent the last few days of my bulk eating ridiculous amounts of food, just because I knew it would be a long time before I could do that again. So I may have ended up a little bloated and artificially increased the before weight.

The reason I felt like I was less successful in keeping to my diet was that it seemed like there were a lot more special occasions (Memorial Day weekend, 5 day vacation, Brew at the Zoo, etc) that it just wasn't feasible to count calories for.

I had hoped to judge the effectiveness of my bulk by the end of my cut (since at that point the amount of muscle gain would be more apparent both visually and in the end-weight), but since I didn't quite get back to how lean I was before the bulk it's hard to tell. One thing that probably hurt me in terms of retaining as much muscle as possible is that I basically stopped doing Squats and Deadlifts for most of my cut, so I probably lost some muscle because of that.

Now we just have to wait until June 20th to see whether my beard can win me a prize!


ps. and yes, I plan on stuffing my face tonight!

Nemesis Groups - the other half of Ashran

Ashran was the new PvP "battleground" this expansion. It tried to tie in PvE objectives and mass PvP like some old PvP maps - old Alterac Valley, Wintergrasp. Their success with Ashran might be called murky at best. They've made multiple changes to Ashran along the way in an effort to fix the problems it has. At first the queues were just unbearable. They fixed that, kind of, but there are still plenty of "does this make sense?" issues.

Basically, most of the rewards (honor and conquest) are gotten from doing the PvE Objectives, meaning that most people aren't interested in fighting in the middle of the map. This lends itself to feeling very anti-PvP, which is rather a shame given the fact that this was the only new PvP map introduced in WoD. Open the LFG tool and look under Ashran, and you'll see plenty of "Events group!" and "Winning events!" groups. These groups first and foremost try to win the events. The events pop up randomly and have a fixed cooldown in between them, and in between events, groups will try to meet in the middle of the map and "push the road" ... which is basically just a way to kill time until the next event pops up. Of course, there is also a second type of group you'll find in the LFG tool: Nemesis groups.

The PvP building in your garrison, the Gladiator's Sanctum, offers a number of quests that revolve around killing the opposite faction in open world PvP. Battlegrounds (whether rated or not) do not count toward these quests, but Ashran does. Basically there is one quest for each race, requires you to kill 500 of them, and once completed you get a cool title. You can accept one quest at a time and, in an odd quirk, while in an actual group (not just overall raid, you have to be in that person's group in that raid) anyone who also has that quest will earn you credit every time they kill someone. So, as an example, the first quest I selected was for Gnomes. If someone else in my group was also on that quest, then every time we killed a single Gnome, we would both get credit for 2 kills toward our quest. This is the basis for Nemesis groups - every group in a raid has a specified race, hoping to get credit for 5 kills each time you kill a single player.

Some races are easier to kill than others - the vast majority of Alliance are Human or Night Elf, and so those are quite easy. There are very few Pandaren overall, and they are split between Horde and Alliance, so that is the toughest one.

Nemesis groups are focused on one thing - killing the opposing faction. They sometimes even hop from server to server trying to find an Ashran that has a large amount of alliance/horde. Once they've found a group, they try to control the road, but let the opposite faction win all the events and then slaughter them afterward. This way the other players don't just leave; call it a perverse win-win. Here you can see my group waiting for the alliance to complete the racing event:

Waiting ...

If you look closely at the map, you can tell our raid is trying to block the two entrances to this event, and once the alliance gets 90% of the way to victory, we'd charge in and try to kill everyone. My goal on Friday night was to quickly knock out the rest of my Gnome quest ... and I was successful!

I am now known as Gnomebane Laktose. The titles are shared across all characters on your account, which is nice. Since humans would be pretty quick, I knocked that one out of the way this weekend, too:

I believe that title is Laktose the Manslayer. Completing all the Nemesis quests gives you the title of "Warlord of Draenor" which is pretty awesome.

Of course, Blizzard is changing Ashran again in the next patch. Some of the side objectives will no longer reward conquest, which doesn't seem like a huge deal ... but what will have a large impact is that they are no longer allowing raids to queue for Ashran. Event groups and Nemesis groups will cease to exist, you'll just be thrown into Ashran with a bunch of random people with different goals. To make things a little better though, they are dropping the amount of kills required from 500 to 100. This actually makes it easier, number-wise, to finish each quest, of course. In 6.1, in an ideal scenario (full group on the same quest), you'd need to kill 100 members of that race. In 6.2, worst case scenario you need to kill 100 ... but if you happen to find anyone else in your raid group on that quest, the number will go down. Of course, it might not be as easy to find a group willing to kill the opposing faction as opposed to just trying to win rewards, but we'll see.

Ding!

Saturday morning (well, I guess it was actually early afternoon, since I went running in the morning) I devoted to getting my priest to level 100. He was half-way through 96 when I started, but all of it was rested. I recently discovered that you can buy potions that increase your experience earned by 20% in your garrison for just 100 resources, too! And for some reason I hadn't replaced my heirloom weapon yet either, so that was another 10% to experience. In all, a lot of extra experience.

I started off by running the two daily quests I had from my inn. Queues went pretty quickly since I was queuing as a healer. I had read that the zone Spires of Arak also has an additional 20% bonus to experience, so I headed there. I made sure to do any challenges I came across (~80-90k exp from one!) and open any of the 'treasure' items (~20-30k exp from one!). Still, I should have done a bit more reading on how you get the additional buff.

There are two quest lines in Spires, one with the Arakoa in the north and one with the Goblins in the south. I started off doing the Arakoa line, got about halfway through, and then for some reason switched to do the Goblin quests in the south.

After I had finished the Goblin quests, I went back up north and the very next quest I did was the one that provided the bonus experience for the zone. Woops! It still went pretty quickly though:

Getting to 100 means doing the Harrison Jones quest line alllll over again which I am not looking forward to. Bleah. Hopefully at this point I remember them well enough that they should go pretty quickly.

I spent a little bit of time in Ashran on Sunday with Crescendo and within maybe 30 minutes had gotten 4 pieces of PvP gear! Of course, then a Nemesis group joined and our group mostly fell apart. What's a Nemesis group? I'll tell you tomorrow!