WoW Journal - April 6

Posted by Stropp on April 6, 2008

With all the focus lately being on Age of Conan and Warhammer Online PvP, I started thinking about doing some PvP in World of Warcraft. So I loaded up WoW, got the patches up to date — not that they were that far out — and jumped in on Saturday evening.

I did several battlegrounds and a 2v2 arena.

Boy was I rusty. I didn’t realize it under afterward but it would be a good twelve months since I participated in any PvP. I didn’t play much World of Warcraft for most of last year, spending my time on LotRO, Tabula Rasa and some others. The other problem was that the patches messed up my UI fairly well. It took me a while to sort it all out.

The arena was the big surprise. I chose to do the practice version, and was effectively clobbered in about 3.27 seconds. I’m going to have to get familiar with the arena system. Fortunately, Big Red Kitty has been posting about Hunter PvP tactics recently. He has some decent videos up. I wasn’t really paying attention because I wasn’t PvPing.

I think it’s time for a refresher.

The Battlegrounds I attempted were Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin, and Eye of the Storm. WSG was on a low level character I had on another server, a level 13 Warrior. While the Horde was victorious, I didn’t do that well. The opposition were fairly heavily twinked out — as were our guys — so I was fairly repeatedly slammed.

Thinking that I might do better on my 62 Hunter, Stropp, I changed servers and headed to the Battlemaster. The next BG was Arathi Basin, which we lost, but not by all that much. I was fairly heavily targeted by the rogues and stealth druids, and didn’t really do all that much damage.

On to Eye of the Storm. I think I must have been getting my eye in by this stage since I was starting to do better here. I was still reasonably vulnerable, but for some reason I wasn’t being singled out this time. Horde won here, and I had a pretty good time.

The conclusion I came too was that I need to stack on a few more levels before I have another go at PvP.

So come Sunday morning, I headed back out to the Outlands and started doing quests in Zangarmarsh. I has pretty much just started when I got a invite from a guildie to run the Blood Furnace. I figured that instances are usually pretty good for XP so I accepted.

Unfortunately, we were in a PUG, and within a short amount of time has wiped twice. We had two Druids, a Warrior, a Rogue, and myself. One of the Druids was the tank and the other the healer. Unfortunately, the healer was under-geared and didn’t really know what to do. After a couple more bad pulls, my guildmate quit the group in frustration.

We managed to land a 70 Shaman, and the healing Druid feeling left out quit. That was fortunate, because the Shaman knew what he was doing and we were able to progress. We then managed to land a 69 Mage, and continued through the rest of the instance.

Overall, I think I got about 25 percent 62 to 63 here which is pretty good really. Instances can be good XP earners. The loot wasn’t anything to write home about. I picked up a blue ring which I can use, and some green cloth and a mace which I couldn’t.

Once the Blood Furnace was complete, I headed back into Zangarmarsh and hammered away on quests. Zangarmarsh and Hellfire Peninsula are the land of never ending quests. It seemed for every quest I finished, two more would open up. Blizzard really need to increase the size of the quest journal.

I finished up this evening about three quarters of the way to 63. I’d hoped to have dinged a couple of levels today. I’d forgotten how slow leveling was after 60. At this rate AoC will be out before I get to 70.

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