Weekend PvP Update!

Thursday night we decided to try some 3v3 with the new comp we want to run. Last season we did Jungle, which is basically Hunter (random), Feral Druid (me), and Healer. Given that my brother plays a priest, that worked out pretty well. We had some success with it, getting to around 1900 rating at our peak. I think both of us had varying degrees of frustration with the comp for different reasons.

For me, it was a combination of feeling like I wasn't as effective as the Hunter (basically any DPS class can perform decently when paired with a Hunter and a Healer because of how powerful hunters are), and feeling incredibly squishy when focused - which happened fairly often. For my brother, I think it was just the frustration of healing on what was considered one of the lower tier classes.

So this season we decided to switch it up and try out God Comp - Shadow Priest, Mage, and Resto Druid. This comp relies heavily coordinated CCs - between the sheeps, cyclones, roots, stuns, fears, horrifies, and two silences, there is an awful lot of CC! It is a top tier comp and has been for a while.

As you may have noticed though, this represents a role reversal from the last season. I've switched from melee dps to healing and my brother has switched from healing to DPSing. Both of us have performed these roles in Rated Battlegrounds before; in fact, they are the preferred spec for each of our class! Shadow, in particular, is very popular in RBGs now (and was toward the end of season 1 as well) - I actually think most teams prefer having 2!

But still, having played that spec in a 10v10 environment compared to a 3v3 environment is completely different. As a healer this is especially apparent to me. It starts with the basics of knowing when I need to use my cooldowns (in RBGs there are two other healers keeping people up, so it's very different than being the only healer), but extends to positioning as well. Positioning (to escape CCs or even DPS) is far more important in Arenas than it is in RBGs. If I get a sheeped in an RBG there are two other healers who can dispel me. If I get sheeped in an Arena? Uh oh.

So Thursday night we gave it a shot. We started off around 1500 mmr which seemed reasonable. And uhhh, we went 0-5. It was brutal. After the 5th game we all agreed to give up and we did some 2s to feel better about ourselves.

Sunday we decided to give it another shot. This time the mage that joined our group hopped in voice chat with us which was immensely helpful. The amount of communication and coordination was much better and we ended up going 10-6. There were certainly a number of games that we lost simply from lack of experience. "Ok, priest is at 75% health, I can sit in this stun ... oh he's down to 40% I should tri- oh. he's dead. Crap." There were at least two games that I can think of where one or more of us didn't use a defensive ability or a trinket or something that would have allowed us to survive ... and we simply died. Still, overall it was a very encouraging experience.

After doing 3s, we decided to try and raise our 2v2 rating high enough so that our weekly cap for Conquest will allow us to hit 7250 for the season - the number required to buy the weapon! Despite some internet issues that cost us a game (and close to half an hour?!?), we managed to go 9-5 and push our rating high enough. Epic weapons, here we come!

Tonight we dine on Turtle Soup

All he needs now are some claw-like fist weapons, and his Super Shredder Halloween costume will be complete!

Gold Update

Last month, I made sure to take note of my gold totals after buying July's token to see what sort of income I really have on a monthly basis. I was basically starting from 407k gold.

Backpacks from this month:

Cres

Piffle

Lak

Grand total around 546,000! Honestly, I am surprised. I was not expecting to have made that much; in fact, I had been planning to tell you why I had hardly made any money!

Three reasons I was expecting to not have made much money:

1) The Salvage Yard was nerfed. Basically, it was too good, so they decreased the likelihood of getting a crate and reduced what those crates contain. The Blue explanation is pretty awesome.

2) "Reduced the frequency of high-value gold missions appearing across multiple characters." Yup. They nerfed the gold generating missions for your garrison followers, too!

3) New crafting upgrades. So this one is interesting. 6.2 added two new levels up upgrades for the crafted gear. These recipes call for Felblight, easily obtainable if you kill Kazzak each week; 30 for the lower upgrade (Mighty), 60 for the highest (Savage). They also call for a similar number of [Particular Type] Essence. At ~400 per Felblight and ~40 for each essence, you're looking at about 13k and 26k in mats, respectively. This does not factor in the number of profession mats you need though (175 for the lower, 350 for the higher). At ~15 gold per mat, you're now looking at ~16k and ~32k ...

Which is to say, fairly expensive. And this is all before realizing that only 2-3 of those upgrades are ever in the AH (on my server, at least) so people are free to make crazy markups if they like. This leads to a big problem: nobody ever buys them.

I had more than enough mats lying around, so I made some. In fact, I made one Mighty of every profession I have and two Savages for my Jewelcrafting/Inscription. I've got over 100,000 gold tied up in upgrades that I can't sell. Yet the price of simply creating the gear itself has plummeted so far that not having at least one upgrade in the AH doesn't make sense.

So yea, if those upgrades ever sell I will be sitting pretty.

Are you killing Kazzak every week on every character? Because you should be.

And not just for the #selfie opportunities.

No, I'm not dead, just playing with filters!

Kazzak drops loot once a week for every character you have. He requires a raid to kill, but that's pretty easy to find with the LFG tool. There are usually 1-3 groups running every time I have checked. Submit your name for acceptance, get accepted, chill in your garrison spamming "1" for a summon (don't actually spam, ask nicely!), click the table some gracious stranger dropped for the food buff, and then DPS / heal until he's dead. It takes maybe 5 minutes total.

Why should you do this? Well, most of all it's kind of fun. But if you're the type of person who hates fun, here are two other reasons to do it:

So much chat spam from loot pinatas!

1) He drops ilvl 705 gear. This matters a lot if you raid or do PvE content. If you PvP, maybe it only matters for completeness or transmog's sake. It is the easiest/cheapest way to get gear of that ilvl. That trinket in the screenshot is pretty sweet!

2) He drops 5-15 Felblight. Felblight is the new crafting material in 6.2, replacing Savage Blood in the new recipes. The price has already dropped significantly, but is now holding steady around 3-400 gold each. Even at just 300 gold each, 10 Felblight is almost 12k gold a month for one character. Do it on two characters and you just paid for a WoW token in just 10 minutes a week!

Alright, alright ... I admit, it's really just about the #selfies:

He dead.

A couple minor PvP differences

Last season, your first 3 rated battleground wins of the week would either provide you with an extra 50 conquest points or a random piece of epic gear. It was possible to not get a piece of gear, which is what happened more often than not (it seemed like, at least).

This season, each week you get a quest to win 3 games. Once you've completed the quest, you get a box with a guaranteed piece of epic PvP gear.

Long live the champ!

Overall, it seems like an improvement to be guaranteed a piece every week.

Are they jeggings? I hope they're jeggings!

In addition to that, there is a new weekly quest in Ashran as well. It requires you to win 4 events and then kill the opposite faction's leader:

Down goes Tremblade!

Given how atrocious Ashran was in the week between the end of season 1 and the start of season 2 when it wasn't possible to earn conquest (Horde refused to do anything but farm NPCs for fragments; they didn't even bother to try and win events!), I thought this quest would be impossible to complete. Turns out it's actually pretty easy! It rewards you with 500 conquest and another box which also holds a guaranteed epic piece.

So not only are you earning 1700+ conquest points a week, but also 2 pieces of epic gear! Seems like it should be really easy to gear up this season, right? So what's the catch?

The catch is (and of course there's a catch!) that all the gear with Versatility on it (Versatility is a secondary stat, like Crit, Haste, etc, that increases the damage you do, decreases the damage you take, and increases the amount you heal for; in short, it's awesome!) has been removed from the vendor. You simply cannot buy them anymore. Where did they go? Apparently, they can only be gotten from those quests.

So on the one hand, it will be faster to gear up to a full set of epic gear this way. On the other hand, it will take longer to get the specific stats you want - heck, it's even possible you could go all season without getting what you want!

I've gotten 3 epics this way (didn't do RBGs the first week, because I figured I wouldn't win a piece from my first 3 wins anyway ... woops!) and none of them are set pieces. I am not sure if it's possible to get set pieces from these boxes; I don't think the set pieces come with Versatility, so it's possible that you can only get non-set pieces from them. Then again, none of the three pieces I have gotten have Versatility anyway, so who knows!

#alts #selfiestyle

I haven't really played around with the Selfie toy too much, but we did some Arena skirmishes on our alts so I figured why not.

Why skirmishes instead of the real deal? One of the new features in 6.2 is that every weekend there is an event that varies between PvE and PvP. This weekends event was a quest that gave 500 conquest points that did not count toward the cap if you won 10 skirmishes. This quest went really quickly on our mains and really slowly on our alts. Mostly the difference between having gear and not having gear, I think.

The main thing I'm taking away from this picture is how ugly my priest's gear is!

Easing back into it ...

I am nothing if not a creature of habit. Once I get into a routine for working out / dieting, I am pretty good at following it. Once my routine gets disrupted, everything kind of falls apart.


Apparently blogging is no different. It's not that I don't have anything to write about; on the contrary, there are actually quite a few things I had planned to detail here! But once I get out of the habit, it seems to be a tremendous chore to start back up again. No idea why.

At any rate, here goes nothing!

These were the titles I earned. Challenger is for 3v3 Arena and represents the top 35%. I believe we were roughly ~50 points away from getting Rival (top 10%); this is about 4 wins and would have been pretty easy to get had we actually just put the time in on the last weekend of the season. Oh well.

Soldier and Defender of the Horde are both for Rated Battlegrounds. Soldier is the top 35% and Defender is the top 10%. I've been using Defender of the Horde as my title for the time being.