PvP for Dummies

[Nebu]

I have to make an embarassing admission here.  Despite having played on a pvp server, I know nothing about getting into the PvP side of WoW.  Can any of you experts help me? 

I'm a fresh 80 in blue/green gear with no guild and no hope for doing dungeons.  What is the best way to get into the pvp game with the least amount of pain on a blue server? 

Links to sites spelling this out would be equally appreciated.

Thanks!

[Sheepherder]

Wintergrasp for honor and marks.  The trick is to stay alive at all costs for maximum honor.  This is your hunter your talking about, right?

[Drubear]

There are craftable BoE armor sets for all classes and many specs you can use to start out. RES and bonuses.

[Rendakor]

I agree with Drubear, pick up the crafted PVP set for your class for some entry level resilience. Buy the WG Legs, Ring, and Wrist first with your marks; spend your honor on filling out the rest of your slots with PVP-oriented pieces (another ring, neck, pvp trinket, etc). You're SOL on an epic weapon from PVP, so find one that drops in a heroic for your class (H UK has a crossbow, if you're a hunter as Sheepherder said) or grind the Argent Tournament.

For maximum honor, you have to do all the BGs for the For Great Honor! turn ins; always queue up for 3, that way if you get in one where you are outnumbered 15:10 or something, you can bail for greener pastures. Try and PUG premades if possible; just knowing that you have people who care about winning and can listen helps a lot, and usually someone will offer a vent server which makes winning a lot easier.

If you're going for your Hateful Gladiator set, you should try to find an arena team and just play 10 games a week for points; the Hateful doesn't require any rating, and costs much less honor if you use arena points as well.

[WindupAtheist]

Just get that level 78 crafted set people keep mentioning, dive right into battlegrounds and Wintergrasp, and learn by doing. If you don't know the specifics of how a particular battle works then just follow the zerg, attack any enemies you see, and you'll get the hang of it eventually. Sticking near teammates will keep you out of 1-on-1 fights against people with much better gear anyway. Go look at the honor vendor in Stormwind/Orgrimmar and the Wintergrasp Keep vendor when you control it, and look over what's available.

The nice thing about being a solo casual PVPer is that there's no repair costs associated with your hobby, and no guildies to worry about looking stupid in front of. Just go nuts. The game isn't going to punish you for doing it wrong.

[K9]

Bleh, had a long reply explaining everything but lost it by going back...

In a nutshell, run BGs for honour, and use that honour to buy PvP gear. Either from the apprentice Arena Vendor in Dalaran Sewers, or from the quartermasters in Stormwind on Orgrimmar. Ignore Arenas unless you have other people to run with as they require a team.

Hunter PvP Sets

Horde and Alliance quartermasters

The apprentice arena vendor

Crafted PvP set (for hunters and enhance shamen)

Wintergrasp quartermaster

The easiest route to good gear is Wintergrasp Marks of Honour, but it's not the quickest route. The quickets route is the crafted gear, but it's not the best. The best route to gear is whoring arenas for hours a day, but that's the least practical.

Whatever you do, you will never get PvP weapons unless you start putting your heart into arenas. So your best bet is to run the new heroic (Trial of the Crusader) for the rifle that drops there (ilvl219 epic). Or buy the crafted engineering rifle. The rest of your gear slots can be filled out with gear from honour and wintergrasp marks.

PvP gear is characterised by resilience, a stat which reduces your chance to be crit and damage taken from crits, DoTs and mana burns/drains. PvP gear typically also has higher stamina. You will do less damage in PvP gear, but your survivability will improve. WUA can give you a far better perspective on running BGs solo as a DPS. I play a semi-geared priest and as a healer I have to stack resilience to be competitive, otherwise I'm just a free kill to any DPS. DPS can generally do better without PvP gear, however in your situation PvP gear may well outstrip the quality of your PvP gear, so it won't be a consideration.

If you want to do BGs, start with Isle of Conquest, or Arathi basin (imo) as those are the most fun. Strand of the Ancients and Eye of the Storm are the worst. Get involved with Wintergrasp too; it only happens every two hours. You get one mark for a loss, and 1-3 marks for a win, depending on your in-battle rank, which rises as you are involved in combat and assist in kills.

[WindupAtheist]

I don't know anything about hunters, but the fact that they're neither melee nor outrageously squishy should make life easier on a relatively undergeared PVP newb. Just get in there, follow the zerg, and shoot people in the back who are engaged in melee with someone else. Shoot people with crappy gear and that one under-leveled guy who's always running around for some reason. Fight dirty and prey on low-hanging fruit because, fuck it, you're starting out at the bottom of the food chain.

As your gear improves along with your PVP skill and general understanding of what's going on, you'll just sort of naturally find yourself taking more of a hand in things, going after objectives and calling out incoming enemies. Basically just macro some cool taunts (I like /scoff and /facepalm personally) and pick the rest up as you go. There isn't much "pain" to be had.

There are weekly quests in Wintergrasp that give decent honor and some bonus shards, and in each capital's "war room" there's a "win (random battleground)" daily and an infinitely repeatable "bring me 1 mark from each of the oldschool BGs" quest that give some bonus honor. Those can be nice, although sometimes I just plain don't feel like doing Warsong Gulch or whatever.

[Rendakor]

The Wintergrasp quests actually reset every 3 days, and on Tuesday. So if you do them Tuesday, they'll reset Friday, and you can do them again Monday before they reset on tuesday. 

[Sjofn]

Isle of Conquest is dandy for a hunter that has no idea wtf she's doing in PvP anymore for what it's worth.

[Nebu]

For maximum honor, you have to do all the BGs for the For Great Honor! turn ins; always queue up for 3, that way if you get in one where you are outnumbered 15:10 or something, you can bail for greener pastures. Try and PUG premades if possible; just knowing that you have people who care about winning and can listen helps a lot, and usually someone will offer a vent server which makes winning a lot easier.

If you're going for your Hateful Gladiator set, you should try to find an arena team and just play 10 games a week for points; the Hateful doesn't require any rating, and costs much less honor if you use arena points as well.

Good stuff here.  Thanks!  I think I'm going to focus on Wintergrasp.  It may be slow, but I rather enjoy world-like pvp better anyway. 

In a nutshell, run BGs for honour, and use that honour to buy PvP gear. Either from the apprentice Arena Vendor in Dalaran Sewers, or from the quartermasters in Stormwind on Orgrimmar. Ignore Arenas unless you have other people to run with as they require a team.

Hunter PvP Sets

Horde and Alliance quartermasters

The apprentice arena vendor

Crafted PvP set (for hunters and enhance shamen)

Wintergrasp quartermaster

The easiest route to good gear is Wintergrasp Marks of Honour, but it's not the quickest route. The quickets route is the crafted gear, but it's not the best. The best route to gear is whoring arenas for hours a day, but that's the least practical.

WONDERFUL!  This is a great start.  Thank you!

Whatever you do, you will never get PvP weapons unless you start putting your heart into arenas. So your best bet is to run the new heroic (Trial of the Crusader) for the rifle that drops there (ilvl219 epic). Or buy the crafted engineering rifle. The rest of your gear slots can be filled out with gear from honour and wintergrasp marks.

PvP gear is characterised by resilience, a stat which reduces your chance to be crit and damage taken from crits, DoTs and mana burns/drains. PvP gear typically also has higher stamina. You will do less damage in PvP gear, but your survivability will improve. WUA can give you a far better perspective on running BGs solo as a DPS. I play a semi-geared priest and as a healer I have to stack resilience to be competitive, otherwise I'm just a free kill to any DPS. DPS can generally do better without PvP gear, however in your situation PvP gear may well outstrip the quality of your PvP gear, so it won't be a consideration.

If you want to do BGs, start with Isle of Conquest, or Arathi basin (imo) as those are the most fun. Strand of the Ancients and Eye of the Storm are the worst. Get involved with Wintergrasp too; it only happens every two hours. You get one mark for a loss, and 1-3 marks for a win, depending on your in-battle rank, which rises as you are involved in combat and assist in kills.

Excellent.  I won't have the opportunity top run instances, so I became an engineer.  My crafting skill is nearly capped, so I'll have that weapon with a decent scope at least.  

Thanks to everyone for the input.  I'm going to give this a shot on my hunter as soon as I can afford the pvp crafted gear set.  I'm set back a tad as I just bough my fast flier.  I have realistic expectations as gear seems to rule this game, so I'm just going to go in and have a little fun.  If it gets ugly, I'll just reroll another class and give that a try.  

[Rasix]

So that's where you've been.   

[Ingmar]

Also don't get discouraged when you get owned a lot to start with. You're joining fairly late in the gear race so people are going to have a very big head start on you in terms of resilience. Closing that resilience gap will make more of a difference, IMO, than changing classes, unless you're playing something very strange.

[Gobbeldygook]

If some class seems to be fucking you up and you're not sure how they're doing it, ask on your guild chat.  You can't be realistically expected to understand why that fucking warrior was taking less than 500 damage per hit from you while stunlocking you and what the christ WHY AM I FLYING OFF THIS CLIFF WHO IS RESPONSIBLE

[Fordel]

The Giant Laser Chicken is responsible.

[Merusk]

I don't get the hate for EOTS.. do folks just lose at that a lot?  All my BG hate is reserved for WSG and SOTA.  EOTS is one of my favorites.

[Zetor]

EOTS is about initial momentum more than any other BG (except SOTA... maybe). You can be 3-capped in AB and turn it around into a 4-cap for you if your team is good (even in a pug) and the other team messes up; but if EOTS starts off with a solid 3-cap for a side and they just assault the last base en masse, that's probably all she wrote. It's a combination of no flag ninjaing, at-the-node rezzing, etc.

I can understand people hating EOTS for that reason; starting 5v10 isn't pretty in any BG, but it's especially painful in EOTS (sure, it's also bad in AB, but at least it turns into a 5-cap and is over quickly).

[Fordel]

You can totally ninja a flag in EoTS, it just takes longer. 


A lot of people hate EoTS because it's the BG more then any other, that really is about which side can kill the other the best. The others, you can win with better tactics, or trickery, or even just a little dumb luck. EoTS is 90% decided by who can kill the other side better, the end.


I've been in AV's where we've won with a clever GY cap that sent the other side all the way back to nowhere.

I've been in AB's where I've essentially suicided myself every 30 seconds, but held the node for 10 damn minutes.

I've been in WSG's where I've seen the flag sneak across the field *inside* a enemy zerg. (that was lulz etc. A Gnome mage had like every "shrink" debuff in game on her and just ran inside Tauren feet)

I've been in Strands where we've won at the last minute because we just reversed sides catching the enemy off guard.


EoTS is almost always about which side has more DK's and Tree Druids. Can't kill them? You won't win, the end. No way around it.

[K9]

The bases have quite a large capture range and don't switch until everyone is dead, so they are very hard to turn against defensive minded players. EoTS would be better with an AB style of base capping, as then the druid ro paladin kiting around the edge of the base would have a harder tiem stopping 3 opponents from capping. As it stands I feel the base capping mechanic emphasizes gear disparities and encourages zerging; I think the narrow routes between each base also emphasize this. The relative lack of space also means that ocne you are on the bck foot it is ver very hard to get anywehre to make a difference.

Isle of Conquest is lots of fun now, and you can get involved in multiple ways. Sitting in a turret guarding your own base will see you rack up a ton of kills and your gear is irrelevant to your effectiveness. Alternatively you can drive a vehicle against the enemy base, or kill the enemies' vehicles on foot. It's a battleground with a lot of layers that do smooth out gear inequalities. Since they adjusted the length of time it takes to knock down the gates you see quite a bit of back and forth in games, at least in the ones I have been playing. It also has the least grindy set of achievements of any BG, so you will pick up several achievements of the course of your first 10-20 games; whereas in other BGs the achievements are all [Do X, Y times] where X is generally annoying and Y is large.

I also like ABm, because it provides the greatest amount of entertaining PvP action. In good games it's lots of small fights, as people tend to be spread out and mobile. However the need to cover bases tends to discourage too much zerging; although the importance of the Blacksmith as the most important node will probably never change.

[Jayce]

One thing that happened to me is that (in BC) when I reached max level, the gear slope got a LOT higher.  Vertical even.  This is because of the impact of the arena gear and stuff.

I have a lot more PvP fun during leveling up.  At least then, if someone is approximately your level, they are likely to have about the same gear as you.  At max level, the differences between a fresh 80 and someone that's been there a while are extreme.

[Hindenburg]

Which is why you should buy your pvp set at 78 and bask in your ridiculously overpowered awesomeness for those two levels, while also accruing a decent amount of honor.

[Nebu]

So that's where you've been.    

Soloing a priest made me crabby.  I'll come back to horde eventually.  For now, I'm enjoying the overpowered PvE joy of being a hunter.

[Paelos]

The funny thing I'm seeing now is that WSG has totally switched over to Alliance on my battlegroup. The Horde now dominate EoTS and the new BG, while AB, AV, and WSG have flipped to us. Strand of the Ancients seems to be totally dependent on who starts on D.

[Nebu]

What the hell is up with deathgrip?  Didn't Blizzard notice how much magus pulls sucked in WAR? 

Sorry... I'm still learning the post-DK pvp game. 

[Rasix]

What the hell is up with deathgrip?  Didn't Blizzard notice how much magus pulls sucked in WAR?  

I don't think Blizzard noticed WAR at all.

 

[WindupAtheist]

Yeah, I imagine deathgrip must be a lot more annoying as a hunter than as a pally. Occasionally I'd get yanked off clothies I was bashing, or into huge ganks, but the average DK who just reflexively death gripped me to start was just saving me a walk.

[Paelos]

I just immediately start whirlwinding. So far it's worked out for the better.

[Sjofn]

I seriously fought a DK on my hunter who never deathgripped me. I guess it's possible it missed but I didn't see the graphic. He also didn't root me or anything else, so I merrily kited him to death. It was totally  .

[K9]

Doesn't disengage put you back roughly the same distance? I may be way off since I don't play a hunter.

[Sheepherder]

Generally not.

But most people you meet in pvp are stupid anyways.

[Fordel]

DK's that use DG as an opener are just button mashing for the most part. You want to close with Chains of Ice, then when they use there "get out of jail" ability, you DG them.


Most classes are generally boned at that point, since they'll end up snared/stunned beside the DK.

[Arrrgh]

The arena season ends on the 25th, and the new honor items will go on sale shortly thereafter. You might want to hold off on shopping till then.

[Nevermore]

Doesn't disengage put you back roughly the same distance? I may be way off since I don't play a hunter.

That's why you wait until after they disengage (or blink) before using deathgrip.

[Der Helm]

I simply can't put out enough burst damage on my DK to kill anyone, am I doing it wrong ? 

[Gobbeldygook]

I simply can't put out enough burst damage on my DK to kill anyone, am I doing it wrong ? 

Well, let's start with the obvious causes.

Did you forget to spend your talent points?

Are you less than level 80?

Are you wearing greens?

Do you have downs?

[Nebu]

OK, played two Wintergrasp battles last night.  We lost both.  I'm still not sure what the hell is going on in there.  My initial impression is that it's a) noobs running around randomly and/or b) assholes using it as the opportunity to verbally abuse noobs.  I learned that gear matters more than skill and that paladins are a pain in the ass.  I also felt like my lone cc clearing trinket isn't going to be enough.  Soooooo much cc. 

Anyone have any suggestions on strategy in there?  Not for my class, more in terms of objectives. 

Also, I heard that there were dailies involved with the BG's.  Is there a circuit of BG's I should do nightly to maximize my honor?

Sorry for all the questions.  I've been looking at Thotbott, but I'm not even sure where to start.