Holy Cow! Experimentation with PVP and Observations from the Other Side
Siha, from Banana Shoulders, most recently wrote a post detailing her pre-WotLK achievement goals. Sure, I’ve done that (mentally). I’ve also been busily piling gold into the Dread Lobster bank, farming honor, assembling trade goods, and deciding which toons will form the best leveling pairs. Additionally, I’ve been working toward leveling the unfinished alts on the sidebar, maxing their tradeskills, and making sure they each at least have some sort of decent weapon to plow into WotLK with. So what haven’t I done?
I have never played a deeply Balance-specced druid. As someone who constantly touts the versatility of druids and frequently states that a knowledgeable druid is one who can play any spec successfully, I never took Balance seriously. To be fair, I’m not sure Blizzard ever did either. Pre-Burning Crusade, moonkin were even stranger beasts to see in a competitive raiding environment than cats or bears, and up until recently, I hadn’t had the pleasure of playing with a boomkin that didn’t completely blow. So rather than forking over another 50 gold, turning in my unused T6 tokens and picking up yet another gearset for Runyarusco (that I pointedly have zero bank space for), I rerolled an alt—
Hordeside, on Mal’ganis, a PVP realm. What better way to reexperience the class than to do it some place completely new, where I have absolutely zero gold, and there are level 70 welfare Alliance bitches camping your corpse when you try to quest? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Awesome. Mal’ganis is a somewhat unique realm in that the apparent ratio of Horde to Alliance is 3 to 1, and is also home to raiding giants such as Elitist Jerks, Juggernaut II, and the ever infamous (and not quite so raiding giant) Goon Squad. Despite the udder ridiculousness of playing a cow and a few Alliance lamers, Mal’ganis has been a fantastic experience thus far. I have played on a number of PVE realms in my time, and never felt quite as connected to the WoW “community” as I have in the past week. Do the Horde possess some sort of crazy voodoo magic?
PVE versus PVP
Nothing brings people together like a quest to defeat a common foe. An astounding number of geared 70’s will miraculously show up to save your furry ass when the Alliance decides to corpse camp a low level zone, and General and Local Defense channels are frequently populated with conversations about finding and eliminating them. Total strangers feel compelled to offer buffs and warnings—DUDE THERE ARE LEIK A MILION ALLIANCE IN THE YETI CAVE—as they pass by, and there are seldom few (even at low levels) who wouldn’t stop to help you out if it looked like you were having trouble. This kind of environment seems to breed conscientious, (mostly) quick-thinking players, and it’s been a pleasure joining that (and lolz to all the same-level Alliance folks who thought it’d be a good idea to take on a boomkin and a warlock).
Level of Play
No matter where you go, you’ll always run into a surprising number of total retards. This is inescapable, and many of them will be blood elves (come on, people, look at your racials! You can make almost an entire raid full of orcs!). On the whole, however, most of my fellow Horde have been decent, competent players who can manage to type grammatically correct sentences. They are polite, they are helpful, and usually, wildly funny. Stupidity on a whole seems condemned as soon as it surfaces, the PVP environment means you learn what to do the hard way (or reroll elsewhere), and there’s an appreciation for people with cutting wit and pro-button mashing skills. From the super cool Level 70 fully S3 mage who offered to run Lycentia and I through SM Cathedral multiple times (as long as he could put his lowbie warlock on follow):
“hey guys,FYI, i suck at mage. no, seriously, but I’ve done cath like 30 times so i’m good at it. i have to AOE, and then i’m super oom lol”
Trade Chat
Trade chat is amazing. It’s always been ridiculous and predictable (i.e. Murlocs/Chuck Norris/Anal [Insert Class Skill Here]) on every realm I’ve ever played on, but trade chat in Mal’ganis has reached new heights of awesome. I attribute much of this to Goon Squad and Goon Squad’s fervent haters, and I can only hope that the usual antics don’t ever grate on me. It’s sort of like, I hope I never reach the “maturity” point where fart jokes aren’t funny. To be fair, I suppose I can understand why kiting Varedis to Shattrath would be annoying, especially after he wiped out the entire Aldor Bank population, but the accompanying “ILLIDAN IS IN SHATT, NO, SERIOUSLY, ILLIDAN. IS. IN. SHATT” conversation (and the following commentary) prompted more than a few lulz.
Durids must halp each other lol!
Especially boomkin. Nothing beats randomly running into another monstrosity and having him immediately drop all questing to start dancing with you—especially since I happened to do it at the same time.
But beyond that, I was reminded of how painful it is to level a druid to level 20, and then how ridiculously mana intensive it is to sustain caster DPS until about level 40. Couple the quick RAF leveling with having no gold, lagging professions and terrible gear? It’s been a little difficult and has required selling nearly everything that makes its way into my inventory and specifically taking time away from leveling to farm ore and herbs, but it’s provided a much more worthwhile experience than just having my 70 druid drop 200 gold in the mailbox for another alt. A few random observations:
- Crit is fabulous. Moonkin aura + destruction warlock? Hahahahaha.
- The term “panzerkin” has a lot more meaning; I hold aggro better than a lot of supposed low level tanks. Why do I end up tanking on all of my toons?
- Tauren moonkin look particularly awful.
- Moonkin threat generation is strange to me, and I’m remembering that I may need to pick up Subtlety later on.
I don’t anticipate adding a large amount of moonkin analysis to this blog, especially since it’s largely been done already, but the possibility of it occasionally popping up exists. Mal’ganis is an incredibly communicative and active realm, and I encourage anyone who hasn’t played in a PVP environment to try it out. You know, just somewhere else where the server queues aren’t 300 people deep.
Most successful PVP Boomkins wear the Resto set stuff (including healing gems and enchants). You could just wear what you normally wear on Runy and still pack a punch if it’s just to PVP.
But yah, one of my Arena buddies had an Orc Shaman who raided preTBC on Mal’ganis, it’s a popular PVP server.
Exceptionally popular; it’s ridiculously full at all times, and Blizzard has closed transfers there about four times since I started counting. Still, the community there is pretty rad, especially since I’ve been feeling lukewarm about the sense of activity on oh, every PVE realm I’ve played on.
I’m not entirely sure what direction I’ll be taking this toon once I reach 70, or if it will just be a learning experience. There’s an awful lot of opportunity on Mal’ganis, though, and even then, I wonder if my playstyle is wasted on a caster and if I should just go back to tanking. The PVP element can’t be ignored, however, and I’ll definitely keep the gear sets in mind once I actually get past 44.
I may be strange, but I think boomkin look awesome - although that may be the /dance animations, which are made of win.
My poor druid has been stuck at 38 for about two years. I really want to play her as balance, but it sucks pre-boomkin form and I loathe feral with a passion. I might have to bribe a friend for a few SM Cath runs to get me over that last hump.
You definitely can’t beat the dance, that’s for sure, but I think that the Night Elf moonkin look a little less terrifying.
I honestly wouldn’t have tried to level Balance specced by myself; I was leveling with Lycentia who rolled a warlock, so we essentially had some ridiculous ranged action going on. Roots + Nuke = win. But yeah, pre 40, it was absolutely stupid and incredibly mana inefficient. A regular RFD run saw me using 60 Moonberry Juices. Yeah.
Moonkin is kind of tough to level. All of the best moonkin talents are in fairly high in the tree and there isn’t much gear until you get to outland. However, I like it. I personally don’t want the stress of healing, and don’t have much of a clue about feral. So, I’m left with moonkin.
Anyway, If you have any questions feel free to ask.
I imagine it’d be a lot more frustrating solo than it is right now (since I’m leveling with a warlock). We often kill things in about two casts each, so there isn’t a lot of worry for mana anymore (especially with the lovely spell crit aura). It’s fun, or at least, it’s different. I never gravitated to casters, so I’m not sure I can see myself playing boomkin extensively at 70, but I wanted to make sure that I had the experience. Much of it’s pretty intuitive, at least, I think so, but we’ll see what happens when I try to move into Outland wearing level 40 gear.
I’ve been playing with the idea of leveling an enhancement shaman with my wife via RAF. I too worry about the mana. The only casters I’ve been able to level over 30 are a warlock with life tap and a priest via spirit tap. Not having a significant regen ability until 62 sort of scares me, but it should go fast.
As for PvP realms, I love it. I played on one for a while and my Druid was originally on a pvp realm before I transfered her where my friends are. I feel like the constant danger really heightens your senses and the constant pvp really forces you to learn to be a better player. I think everyone should level on a pvp server. I bet it would weed out a lot of retards who get by just hitting one button.
Click hard, go pro. Or so they say.
I’ve been having a lot of fun, though I have to restrain myself from nuking stray Alliance folks who wander into my questing area. Generally speaking, I just want to get my shit done and leave, so killing someone and then having to contend with their welfare 70 friends isn’t very conducive to leveling. There certainly ARE stupid people, but considerably fewer.
The downtime was extraordinary until I hit level 43 or so. I never would have bothered if I wasn’t leveling with a super-nuker that can keep going while I’m drinking. HOWEVER, if you want to try it, this is probably the best time to do it. Seriously. It’s so fast it’s stupid.
[...] any of this sounds familiar, you may want to refer to an earlier post (mostly about the R-A-F fad that swept the multi-boxing community by storm) that glosses over my [...]