This means that most of the experienced players (at least in my battlegroup) are keeping to Wintergrasp and Arenas and don't even bother with battlegrounds anymore. Joining a battleground by yourself promises a frustrating loss and joining with a partial team doesn't guarantee victory. I went with my family group to an AB the other day and our pick-up players were so bad that though my group (3 dps, 2 healers) kept taking and defending the points the enemy attacked, we still lost the game.
So why would anyone in their right mind care about battlegrounds anymore, aside from those rare instances where you go in with your own premade?
Mount farming.
You need marks to buy the 6 available PVP mounts, and these mounts are straightforward to solo grind. After checking his hunter's battleground log, my husband found that he had a 50-50 ratio of wins and losses for everything but AV (alliance doesn't sign on our battlegroup). Taking that ratio into account, here are my statistics:
- 150 Warsong Gulch Mark of Honor (50 Wins; 150 Losses; 75 Average)
- 150 Arathi Basin Mark of Honor (50 Wins; 150 Losses; 75 Average)
- 200 Alterac Valley Mark of Honor (67 Wins; 200 Losses; 100 Average)
Why the extra 50 for AV? Your AV vendor has an extra mount for 50 marks of Alterac Valley.
While you're doing Alterac Valley, if you still don't have your city reps up, there are repeatable quests you can do only while the battleground is happening that give rep per turn-in. I encourage you to do all the quests for that city first because the rep isn't much, but at least it's something -- and a lot cheaper than runecloth turn-ins.
Other PVP Mounts
300 Stone Keeper Shards will get you the smaller War Mammoth in Wintergrasp. Archavon has the bigger one (with passenger seats) as a drop in the 10 and 25-man.
The 2 Halaa Dark Talbuks require that you kill 170 players in Halaa and farm 700 Oshu'gun powder (makes 35 tokens) from all the animals in Nagrand. Put together a raid in your faction, let the other faction know when you're doing it, and kill each other for a few hours. You share kills with raid members, so this shouldn't be a problem once you get around to it.
Posts
I helped my fiance farm the black battle mechanostrider.....never again. We went 4-18 in Warsong. It was a terrible grind.
ReplyDelete*shudders*
ReplyDeleteI have, and always will, hate Battlegrounds. Mages are big targets. We attract trouble, and we can't win any solo encounter in a BG without some help, unless you get lucky with a Blastwave near a cliff edge.
I still do not have PvP mounts. Which annoys me, because I like the black mounts.
I love battlegrounds with a passion. Those rare few epic moments I have had of defending Frostwolf Hold are stories of legend! I was bored of Holy Paladin so I went Protection spec in Alterac Valley. We fought well but the Alliance were just that little bit better, until we ended up with the Horde fiercly defending the last graveyard and towers.
ReplyDeleteI had healers backing me up and a tide of Alliance coming up that little slope by the hold, just kept consecrate down and spamming Hammer of the Righteous. Kept my Holy Shield up and was just parrying *ping*, block, dodge. It was way more fun, and more of a realistic battle, than any of the Wintergrasp fights I've been in.
We eventually got pushed back so far that we lost the slope so somebody rallied us inside the Hold so we could atleast get our achievement. Inside we had me one side, Tauren Warrior tank the other side, with DPS gathering around us and ranged keeping central. Soon as any Alliance entered bam we got em. They eventually zerg rushed us but that got Drek'Thar involved and with no tank on him he just went crazy on the clothies and started one-shotting the Alliance that entered.
It was a war of attrition and we were going to lose due to reinforcements but none of the stupid Alliance had any sense to just stay outside and let the timer tick down they kept coming in and coming in. We whittled them down until it was 100-80 (We had also taken some of their towers you see - God Bless Rogues!).
I remember it clearly because it was so memorable. Our healers were a perfect bunch. Couple of Holy Paladins, a disc priest, 3 resto druids and a resto shaman. We had 2 tanks each side that the healers could focus on. We kept the aggro of any minions and pets allowing the DPS to do their job. Needless to say we got our achievement but after that it was just a question of would we win?
It got to 50-40 and the Alliance were amassing outside. They had our graveyard and we had no graveyards nearby so we had only the 20-30 or so players inside the Hold and that was it, with little hope of fast reinforcements if they broke our defence.
They rushed us.
We won.
Thinking back about how we overcame the advantage I realise two things.
1) In warcraft pvp, teamwork is essential. Your little one-man army heroics aren't going to work. This creates a lot of rubbish BG's when people all go solo but when it all falls into place it can be amazing.
2) Experience is everything. We had some Flawless Victor's in the room with us. We had players who had spent their tokens on those little Horde banners you can put down and we had enough good players to have 3 of those flags up near the end which significantly helped us. We had players rebuffing, running from the GY straight back to us. We had healers who actually healed instead of trying to do DPS.
If you want to 'get into pvp' I think a good idea is to keep practicing, keep trying, the more you attend the more experience you'll get. Also, pvp and pve are separate parts of the game. Take off your hit rating gear and get some resilience and you'll live much much longer :)