The release of TESO is now just under a
month away (for people like myself who have pre-ordered the early
access edition) and with it my days as a rogue ganker on Illidan are
coming to an end. This series has just about run its course – I
don't think I have too much more to add about ganking as a topic in
WoW, but I do look forward to picking the topic up again in the world
of Tamriel. People who have slogged through my long winded posts will
know that I divide WoW PvP into two basic types – open world PvP
and ladder PvP. The former is meaningless and unbalanced due to the
lack of strategic objectives, PvE/PvP gear differential and massive
faction imbalances tolerated by Blizzard. The latter is very
competitive but is really just a MOBA (massive online battle arena)
separate from the MMO world it purportedly inhabits. Despite their
differences I enjoy both flavours, and as Season 14 has come to an
end, I thought this would be a good time to summarise my going-ons in
both formats of PvP.
Halfhill Shennanigans on Illidan
Last weekend, as per my desire to bring
a gank squad to the Horde dominated server of Illidan, my sister and
I managed to rope in two local rogues to go ganking with us in
Halfhill. Rather than write about it, I condensed an hour of gameplay
into a 15 minute ganking clip and linked it below. My sister brought
her restoration druid to the fray, and we were both on Skype so we
were able to coordinate our movements to some degree. In this video
you can see my messed-up control method, which consists of mouse
turning when not in combat, and then reverting back to keyboard
turning once in melee. To become a complete mouse turner I will have
to purchase a specialised gaming mouse which has buttons for my
abilities. What is happening is that I am mouse turning to look
around out of combat, but once I engage in combat my right hand
(which is my mouse hand) moves to the keypad where my abilities are
bound. If I had a Razor Naga I could move those abilities to the
mouse instead, and thus be able to maintain mouse turning while
having access to my keybinds at the same time. This is what the pros
do, and it is something I will have to do if I want to break the 2k
barrier in ladder PvP. Luckily I don't even need to be good to kill
someone in OWPvP. I can just bring friends, attack people when they
are AFK or busy, and we can rack up those kills without any problems.
I killed an Arena Master in the session I filmed – he was AFK at
the FP and I had two other rogues assisting me – but hey, a kill is
a kill, dammit. Right? Right?
Season 14 Wrap-Up
When I'm not ganking around Halfhill I
spend my time in WoW pushing rating in 3s, 5s and Rated BGs on my
holy paladin. My team mates and I are intermediate players, which
means we are above 1550 but below 2000. My 5s team consists of
myself, my sister, an affliction warlock named Coronaxtra, and an
unholy DK named Ratsac. Ratsac and Coronaxtra are long time team
mates. Corona was my 2s partner for the longest time, and we used to
play 2s together before the new 25 minute time limit was introduced.
The number of 45 minute games we played back in the day are
mind-boggling to think about now. Corona is a great player and a very
laid back guy - he achieved the rank of Duelist (top 0.5-3% of the
active player curve) back in BC but I always poke fun at him about it
because firstly, he did it before WoW started recording achievements
and so there is no record of him ever doing it; secondly, he did it
in 2s which is the most unbalanced out of all the brackets; and
finally, he did with a resto druid in an era when there were no such
things as diminishing returns. Can you imagine eating 6 second
Cyclones and 8 second Fears without any respite whatsoever? People
who complain about the game having too much CC nowadays have seem to
forgotten the era in BC where you could literally be CCed FOREVER.
For the uninitiated or non-PvPers diminishing returns halves the
duration of CCs if caught within 15-19 seconds of a similar CC until
the player is immune for a period of 15-19 seconds after the last CC
is cast. Managing the time between CCs and knowing when to use your
escapes is crucial, so much so that Gladius (a very common Arena
add-on) tracks not only current CCs and trinket availability, but
also diminishing returns (DR) in its display. Using your trinket to
escape a double DRed Cyclone (duration of 1.5 seconds) is just plain
silly and a waste of an ability which has a two minute CD.
My other team mate Ratsac is another
great player in both formats of the game. He used to be a Heroic
raider, but got introduced into PvP during Cataclysm and has never
looked back. I actually think that Ratsac is a 2k player - he just
hasn't found the right team to integrate into. In a sense, I think I
am holding him back, because I really believe that he could slot into
a 2k team and the team wouldn't lose a beat. People could say that he
is being carried in this scenario, but in the 3s format carrying
1/3rd of your entire team's effective strength is actually
harder than people make it out to be. Having two stronger players
will lift the weaker player's personal rating but each combination of
players has a cap they will eventually plateau at based on the
combined strength of the team, and the weaker the weakest link is,
the lower this cap will be. It's easier to carry someone in Rated BGs
where the team is only carrying 1/10th of their effective
strength. I know some players who could never be carried to 2k in 3s
– despite the best efforts of the other two players the handicap
imposed by the weak player would be insurmountable. Unkind, but true
for some, and perhaps applicable to myself. Ratsac, however, could
jump into a 2k team and acquit himself without any problems.
My sister Lelle (her main) makes up the
final part of our regular foursome, and I had previously considered
her the weak link of the team (I hope she never reads this, otherwise
she is going to kill me). Recently, however, she has hit form big
time on her warrior and her restoration druid, and the pressure is on
for me to keep up with my team mates and not be the weakest link. My
sister and I have similar temperaments, and some of our biggest
quarrels have occurred in the context of WoW PvP. It might be
laughable to say WoW can be a tool for personal growth, but after a
particularly vicious argument I took a long hard look at myself and
decided that I was an asshole. Since that incident I have never
argued with team mates ever again, and backed off from trying to
micro manage the whole team. It's funny thought how things which you
tolerate in strangers and casual acquaintances are magnified when it
comes to family. My sister and I have had nonsense arguments about
small things which I wouldn't have cared about with other people. I
have become aware of this peculiarity of human relations, and take
great care now to keep an even keel when playing with my sister. If I
do lose my rag (which is happily becoming a much rarer event
nowadays), I switch off my mike and vent, then get back on once the
moment passes. I drove away my sister's best friend Rykester (his old
main) from WoW by being a bastard Rated BG leader, and I am resolved
that this will never happen again. I am getting a second chance in
TESO (our old crew is reassembling to play that game) and regardless
of what happens in that game I am determined that people who group
with me will never have any cause to regret it. I have learned (or am
constantly trying to learn) to cultivate Zen by playing computer
games. It is a retarded thing to say, but there it is.
This season, however, has been a
particularly good one for our team ratings-wise. We established a
number of personal bests in both 3s and 5s, and broke through a
plateau we had been stuck on for a long time. The timing was quite
ironic as I had already pretty much lamented to my team mates that
this was as good I was going to get, and that I might as well call it
a day for ladder PvP. The very next session we got the 1750+
achievement in 3s, which was the personal best for our whole team in
that bracket. Ratsac, Lelle (on her warrior Qualar) and I ran a TSG
comp (DK, warrior and holy paladin) and in this session I did
everything I normally don't do – I abandoned cover in favour of
aggressive CCing, I didn't save my CDs, and most importantly, I put
my faith in Ratsac and Qualar to get the job done instead of trying
to control everything. Our plan was just to bum rush the enemy,
preferably a healer, and get a kill in less than two minutes because
I could guarantee that they could stay alive and completely
aggressive for that amount of time. If the game went on any longer
than two minutes we usually lost, but it was surprisingly effective
most of the time. I shut up, did my job, and the net result was that
we broke the plateau and got the achievement in 3s. I believe we
could have pushed further, but that session was our last 3s push for
the season.
The session after our 3s push we hit
our personal bests in 5s, and ended the season at approximately
1850+. I have unofficially pushed up to 1900+ in the past, but our
final rating of 1853 in 5s is a new official (meaning it is recorded
in the statistics page of our character's Armoury profiles) personal
best for all of us. It makes me really happy that we got it as a team
and not with people we don't regularly play with. Our biggest problem
has been finding a 5th, and we have tried various people
in the slot, with varying degrees of success. We tried bringing a
good friend and guildie in a role, but he was simply not good enough,
and our combo capped out at about 1600+. This is the problem with
ladder competition. Ladder PvP in WoW is structured in such a way
that the player base is splintered into small groups based on skill
level. This is a natural consequence of ladder competition – you
naturally group with people around your own skill level. Better
players than yourself generally want better team mates, and vice
versa – you don't want to play with players whom you consider worse
than you. This is fine if your primary goal is pushing rating, but
poses problems if you simply want to play with your friends due to
the spread of skill levels. The only possible way to play with
friends in a ladder competition is to play at the lowest level of the
group, and work your way from there. In TESO I am looking forward to
playing with friends of mine who love computer games but have woeful
hand-eye coordination which precluded them from playing Arenas and
Rated BGs. By the same token it will be good to play with other
friends of mine who I keep in touch with on Real ID but don't play
with because they have far eclipsed me in terms of PvP rating and
skill. In open world PvP numbers are a tangible advantage. Everyone
counts, and that is a wonderful thing for games. We can all
contribute, and this type of cooperation creates strong social bonds
and factional identity. Ladder competition is very stark in that it
illuminates exactly where you are on the bell curve. Furthermore the
small team sizes keep socialisation to a requisite minimum, and you
end up socialising with people based not on real life considerations
such as character, demeanour or attitude, but rather on how well they
can push buttons in a computer game.
To solve our 5s conundrum I tried
swapping to a DPS toon and finding another healer on OQueue, but that
only got us up to 1700+ and we hit another plateau there. On the last
weekend of Season 14, however, I fished around in OQueue for a good
warrior and was lucky enough to find one around our level. Like the
rest of us, Themerciless was an intermediate player who hadn't broken
2k. Unlike us however, he had come pretty bloody close (1995 in 3s
and 1879 in 5s), and he was the final piece of the puzzle. We kind of
stumbled into our composition (we all have a gazillion fully geared
alts we could use) and our tactics, but somehow the combination
worked, and we got better as the games progressed. Our overall game
plan became applying dot pressure on the whole enemy team with
Ratsac's diseases and Corona's DoTs, while Themerciless applied
single target pressure with his warrior. Lelle and I would also
attempt to CC enemy healers whenever we could while keeping our team
alive and offensive. Corona was our main CCer on paper, but in
practice he was the tank because he was always the primary target of
the enemy. Our big go-to combo (which again, was not pre-planned, but
evolved over the course of our games) was for Ratsac to use
Gorefiend's Grasp to grip the whole team to Themerciless, who would
then Bladestorm around him for huge AoE damage. Corona would try to
follow with an AoE stun on top of the clustered enemy, meaning that
they would have to sit in the Bladestorm for at least 3 seconds. It
was a vicious combo, and it served us well when it worked. I have
recorded some of our games and posted it below – you can see the
tactic evolve over the course of the games (i.e. watch the first and
last games).
Season 15 and Beyond
I was going to quit WoW after Season
14, but the lure of the 2k achievement remains very strong. I will
definitely play TESO because I have roped in friends and family to
come with me, but I may not unsubscribe from WoW just yet. This
season is significant because for the first time players are ranked
together by region instead of Battlegroups. This means rank one means
exactly that. Previously the top players in each group were ranked
first in their own respective Battlegroups, which meant that there
were plenty of “rank one” Gladiators in North America, who then
proceeded to talk smack about the relative strengths and perceived
weaknesses of the various groups. No longer. Rank one means rank one
in North America (and Oceania, since the two are merged), not rank
one in Vengeance or Bloodlust or whatever Battlegroup the player used
to belong to. Similarly PvP titles will now be region wide, so any
titles won will be a true reflection of one's standing in the region.
This is why the last weekend of Season 14 was such a hotbed of
frenetic activity on Twitch TV – all the rank one aspirants were
frenetically trying to get pole position before the season came to a
close. There are a lot of familiar names in the 3v3 leaderboard - 2012 World Champions Snutz and Venruki are placed first and second respectively, and I also recognise Chanimal at 7th, who was in the 2013 World Championship winning Skill Capped team.
 |
| Final standings in 3v3 (the tournament format) at the end of Season 14. |
On a personal level the 2k achievement
remains the Holy Grail of WoW PvP for me, and it has never seemed as
achievable as it has been recently. I would really like to get the
title of Rival, too. I have gotten Challenger consistently since
Season 6, which puts me squarely in the top 10-35% of the active PvP
player base, but getting Rival would make me one of the top 10%.
The information on Arenamate.net states that the cut-off for
Rival in Season 14 was 1829 in 3s (and 2156 in 5s) – this is
eminently achievable for our team given what we have done this season (we reached 1755 in our last push), and is
something to shoot for in the future if we keep playing ladder PvP. Realistically my best chance at getting a 2k rating will be in either the 5s or the Rated BG format, and the Rival title if I work on my 3s and push to the mid 1800s. In
terms of OWPvP, however, my days of ganking on Illidan are coming to
a close with the imminent release of TESO. It looks like I will have
two different games to scratch two different itches – WoW for the
ladder PvP, and TESO for meaningful open world PvP.
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