New Era of PvP

The guild has witnessed an upsurge in PvP of late and I must admit, I’m one of the biggest culprits lol.

Actually my mind was so far out of raiding by Friday night that I started making glaring mistakes while tanking with Ironwall raid team. I must apologise and although I wasn’t the only one making errors, I freely admit I wasn’t really with it that night but I’m definitely preparing my mind to be focused come Thursday where I hope we have a strong team together and I fully expect us to blow the content away.

In the past few weeks I’ve geared up Bigticket(BM hunter), Pished(Resto shaman) and almost fully geared Snøøzz(Subtlety rogue) and I’m now onto gearing up Bearsden(Resto druid) which I gotta admit is hilarious fun!

Thing is, I know the hunter well and can do a lot of damage and also use the hunter’s considerable toolbox to avoid the majority of incoming attention so it really feels like a 1-man army at times. I can take on 2-3 people if they are not expecting my wrath to descent upon them. I fancied learning to play resto shaman in PvP because I have always known them to be an absolute nightmare to kill and I’ve always fancied being hard to kill again since the old days of healing PvP on my discipline priest Bunnyboiler and holy paladin Caledonia. I might return to them one day but having played random battlegrounds, taken help from Cryomaniac in 2v2 arenas and then rocked the healing in some glorious Dambusters rated battleground runs on Friday night I realised how incredibly powerful that restoration shaman can be. There were times when our team were simply untouchable and as we co-ordinated changing tactics on-the-fly to sucker punch our hapless opponent teams at the perfect moments I felt it click together. That gave me enormous satisfaction and I’m sure I’m not alone in that!

I realised how much I enjoy being the healer in a battleground where you are very much the fulcrum of the group who rely heavily on you staying relaxed, calmly pumping out the right heals at the right times, using your big cooldowns when they matter most to affect the outcome of a particular bout at a flag, base or choke-point.

Starting on the druid this week, she already feels powerful and ready to heal well and that’s with only a couple of pieces of actual PvP gear equipped. This is gonna be a lot of fun I can tell. The rogue is actually really difficult to get to grips with but as it nears full gear, I can feel my damaging blows becoming more effective and my ability to lock someone down is improving too. I think the guild has seen a shift towards people enjoying more PvP and I am happy about it. Anything the guys do together gets my vote and it’s something I’ve been searching for in the guild for some considerable time.

I do think finding a different night would be better otherwise it could just be a case of grabbing a team together whenever it suits. The more people get into it, the more players will become available for rated battlegrounds on an ad-hoc basis but ideally we need a better time than just whenever Ironwall raid team finish on a Friday night. That certainly took the edge off raiding for me and I’m now mindful of that so I expect to focus in. 25 man last Thursday was excellent but I was just healing on my monk who got some nice gear, however in the 10 man team as a tank the margin for error is a little finer and mistakes become more obvious.

I’m of the opinion that if neither raid team plans or expects to be able to kill heroic bosses on a Thursday evening then we really owe it to the guild to carry on running 25 man. 25 man gives more people chances at bigger leaps of gear upgrading and also allows us to include a few fringe raiders who would otherwise miss out on running with either of the 10-man teams. Flex is still the option for people to gear up on a Wednesday evening but a lot of us are getting beyond the flex to the extent that those 25-man normal runs are something really valuable to the guild overall.

All that said tho, the primary objectives of each of the 2 10-man teams must come first and if that means Stonewrought want to do some heroic progression then the rest of the guild must accept that. I would say that since we did start pulling these 25-man runs, we have proven that with the right hunger and attitudes in there, we CAN and likely WILL be doing mythic content come the next expansion, maybe even in the pre-expansion 6.0 patch!

People cannot be blamed for seeking additional enjoyment in a game they pay monthly for so a bit of PvP as the doctor has ordered seems like a perfectly viable distraction from the fact that we have been running predominantly normal mode farm content for the best part of 4 months and with no new raiding on the horizon and an as yet unclear indication on Warlords of Draenor’s impending beta test (let alone actual release) then it’s totally understandable that people can get bored in the meantime. I would personally rather see people take on new projects in-game than slope off to other IPs such as Titanfall, Elder Scrolls Online, Diablo 3 etc etc. Some guys even unsub which is their own choice but I’m just happy that I feel absolutely zero burnout with the game and am only too happy to venture into other areas of the game long before considering any boredom as a reason to put my feet up and await the next expansion.

For a start, I simply don’t have that option so I’m glad I don’t feel the need since without a dedicated guild leader, as with plenty other guilds, The Dambusters would be in deep trouble. Thankfully that ain’t happening.

To surmise, I’m delighted we can pull teams together to do the same things still after this long and although we may not always agree or approve of certain choices others in our guild might make, we are great for sticking together which we truly showed last Friday after a despondent feeling after some sub-par performances in our raid. We really did pick it up after a little bit of AFKing, maybe a little sulking and we soon realised that we have a strong enough bond to pull it together and by heck, we rocked some socks!

TARGET CALLING yeah baby!

/Salute