Engineering PvP

I had a thought today that Engineering may very well be the PvP profession. The gods know you don't do it for money, so that just leaves love... of the bloody mess variery, as a preference.

So.. here's a quick list of interesting Engineering offerings I've used to good effect in a Battleground:

• Nitro Boots: Great for running down anyone who realises they aren't going to be able to survive a little DK loving, and think that their crowd control + hasty exit will be enough to get clear of you. I've not thought to use this to run away yet, but I can imagine it's just as special as a defensive tactic.
• Flexiweave Underlay: If you're standing on some tall ledge and decide that you need to get to the bottom stylishly, leaving your gravity-bound new friends behind, this is simply a must-have. Arathi Basin is especially nice for those big drops from the lumber mill and to the mine.
  
• Frag Belt: Situationally very useful. Situation? Someone pounding on you (not likely to move errattically away, so we're probably only dealing with melee types) who you want to drop a 3 second stun on. It's an AoE thing with a small radius, so it can be hard to judge where the toon is going to be if you're at distance. The damage isn't special, but if you can trick them into blowing their cooldown on this, all the better. Further, you can still install a belt buckle alongside this tinkering, which I count as pure win.
• Goblin Beam Welder: Now, this allows a pretty goodly extra amount of life to seige engines, which might just be enough to see you get that wall down.
• Saronite Bombs: Seige damage. Nuff' said, except perhaps that they come out of a box of bombs.
• Gnomish Lightning Generator: I'll be retiring this at some stage, but until then, it's delivers a nice whallop if you're out of runic power, and just need to give that toon at a distance just a little more hot-blue loving.

No doubt there are ones I've missed, that I'm not as fond of, such as the poultryizer (I'd rather have a trinket that does damage, even if it's occasionally to me, than one which could get me all clucky instead of my new hordie friend).

Oh, and on a non-PvP note, has anyone else thought that parking Jeeves right next to the auctioneer bot in Dalaran is just a recipe for pure win?

Stormpiked

After a fortuitous extended afternoon nap by my favourite littke munchlin yesterday, I was able to crank out the last few Alterac Valley runs to cap exalted with Stormpike. I have my battle standard, and I have my trinket. For whatever reason an AV is popping every few minutes lately, so it's been wonderfully easy to just get in without a wait and grind the rep.

Interestingly, the XP in battleground changes have meant that I have also had the chance to make jam of many, many hordies. Here's to XP in battlegrounds making AV my prime "experiment with new UI changes" battleground.

A Bloody Mess on the Keyboard

In Von's School of Bloody Mess, peripheral setup is paramount.

Know your enemy; your enemy is NOT the opposing faction. Your enemy is your own sloppy reaction times, my crayon-munching babes. You are here today, my fluffly little campers of doom, to understand how you can make real gains on your reaction times.

First of all, study this tutorial video on keybinding. For the unobservant recruits, a link is supplied under the video to a forum posting on keybinding that is also worthy of your attention.

For the truly thick amongst you, and by Arthas' bald left testicle, this camp attracts them, here is a brief summary of interesting facts from these sources:

Turf your turning keybindings ('Q' and 'E' keys by default). If you just ABSOLUTELY have to have them, consider SHIFT modifiers to the strafing keys instead (turn left with 'SHIFT-A', if 'A' is your strafe-left key binding).

Turning via the keyboard is just plain bad in combat. Those of the opposing faction who've actually studied their warcraft will accurately spin on a dime and have time for a coffee before you finish turning the same distance with your keyboard. Of course they'd rather be drinking your salty tears instead of coffee, and you'll oblige them quite easily with keyboard turning.

From now on, you turn only with the mouse. Learn it. Live it. Love it. Turn the sensitivity up all the way to 11 . You got to spin on a dime as fast as they can. Now... go out into a battleground and get used to the mess I've just made of your keyboard and mouse. Mmm... your tears are salty gooodness.

Turn on Sticky Targetting. A slip with the mouse which sees you lose your target to a random piece of landscape could be fatal. Don't be THAT chump.

If you are turning with your mouse, that's your right hand (if you're right-handed) completely occupied. It won't have the luxury of going near the keyboard. That leaves you with your left hand for remaining movement and your various actions. The trick here is to minimise left-hand movement. In a perfect scenario, everything you want to do can be done just by moving your left-hand fingers. Cluster actions you use often around the movement keys. The more you use an action, the closer to a movement key the action should be.

Now, here at Von's School of Bloody Mess, we like to turn things up a notch. Git out yer crayons, skirts. This dope is psychadelic:

Always make the nameplates of the opposite faction visible. A few pixels of red in an otherwise perfect camoflague works well.

Modifier keys were NOT made equal. SHIFT is quite combat-ready. CTRL is servicable, but less so, given its greater distance from your movement keys. ALT is not a combat modifier key. It's just too damn inconvenient for you to get to. By all means, try the ALT modifier. It's YOUR Graveyard respawn.

Get those trinkets keymapped. If I see a trinket NOT on constant cooldown when we go out to drill, you'll be shitting those crayons for a month!!

There are a bunch of default keys for useless things like showing your character, talents and other malarkey directly under your typical movement keys. Free those keys up for combat actions. If you insist on having them keybound, consider sticking them way out in the unloved regions of of the double-digit function keys.

That's it for today's drill, skirts. I'm off to sink my club into something squishy.

WoW PvP Tutorial Video Series

Things started to take off once I found the WoW PvP tutorial series here:

http://www.pvptutorial.com/

I've been progressively working through the addon list presented in the tutorials, and adding the ones I like. So far that includes:

• Bartender4 (configured via /bt4)
• Power Auras (configured via /powa)
  
• Doom's Cooldown Pulse (configured via /dcp)
  
• OmniCC (no configuration necessary)

I'm using OmniCC for a second timer on the buttons, Bartender4 for a radically different button layout, Power Auras to give me visual queues for abilities that are available, and buffs that are applied, and Doom's Countdown Pulse for giving me a visual que once abilities come off cooldown.

Unfortunately, getting the UI just right is very much a work in progress. Here's my first "serious" attempt at a UI with the above mods:


Things have changed somewhat since that first attempt. Here's how it looks now:


It's worthwhile discussing the two images and why I've evolved the UI since then, but I think I'll leave that until another time. /yawn /sleep

Beginning a Talented Endgame

Greetings.

This blog is an effort to journalise my efforts in actually achieving the hallowed state of actually becoming "good" at battleground PvP in the World of Warcraft. I offer it as a blog on the off chance that it helps others in finding their own path to PvP p0wnage.

Some background info. I've PvPed on and off with my Balance Druid for a while. I really enjoyed leveling my Death Knight though, and have decided to give PvP a whirl with him instead, wondering what PvP in plate felt like. After a recently interesting session of "mockery" by a fellow Death Knight as we stood for way too long defending a bunker in Alterac Valley, I decided that I wanted to actually learn what it meant to do Battleground PvP well in WoW.

Note that I have no real interest in arenas. My personal life, involving a very energetic toddler means that my play times are just plain chaos. Also, the grander scale feel of the battlegrounds suits me more.

So let us begin with my first serious content contribution. The mockery by my unintentional benefactor was in terms of my talent build. It was a variant of blood, heavy on talents that return heals. Leveling, it was great. With PvP, however, I sacrifice way too much DPS for it. I've finally settled on the following talents (as at WoW 3.2):


Now.. I've learned that Unholy is THE tree for PvP arenas. BGs, however are not the place to expect healing from others. Be thankful yes, but expectation is a little like pissing into the wind. Also, I just like blood, even if it's isn't l33t (says the Moonkin junkie back when they really REALLY did suck)!

This talent spec is based on an interesting one listed out at arena junkies tweaked a little more to my liking. I've minimised healing out of the blood tree in favour of nice things mostly in frost, with just a smidgen of unholy. To get Dancing Rune Weapon, however, I've been forced to take up more blood healing than I'd have preferred. Again, for a pure BG focus, the extra healing is something I can live with.

Key aspects to the build choices are:

• Lichborne - For those times when I have lots of runic power, and finding I want a health bar topup via a self-casting of death coil
• Dancing Rune Weapon + Hysteria combo for brief, but huge DPS output.
• Icy Talons for loving the melee types
• Improved Icy Touch for slowing down incoming damage.
  
• Virulence to give my plagues sticking power, which makes for chunkier Blood Strikes all round.
• Improved Death Strike for the chunky DPS and returning heals. It's also a signature talent for Blood so I just gots ta haves it.
• Various talents that keep the Runic Power output up. I tend to rely heavily on it between rune cooldowns, and for doing range damage things when I can't get close otherwise.
  

Ok. That's it for this post. Later.