Friday, June 27, 2008

Intentionally loosing a BG

I started a thread on another forum site and man, did I get people angry! What got folks so rilled up?

I asked why you would continue to try winning a BG match that is basically unwinable?

For example in AB.. the horde control 4 nodes to 1, they have 1700 points to your 300. If you keep fighting you can prolong the match perhaps another 5-10 minutes. If you let them take the last node the fight is over in 1 minute.... Either way you still loose and get your 1 mark of honor.

Another example is WSG... the horde have capped 2 flags, your team has 0 and they've taken the last flag from your flag room. Sure you could fight them every step of the way, staying in the BG for another 5-10 minutes or longer. Or you could just stop and let them take the 3rd one, collect your 1 mark of honor and be cuing again in a minute.

"But Tom", it's just an extra 5-10 minutes, what's the big deal?

Sure, an extra 5 minutes.. but over the last few months I've probably played over 1,000 various BG's. If even 15% were these types of obvious loses that's an extra 12.5 hours of time spent in BG's for nothing.

Some people play for the fun of it, and sure it can be fun when you're winning. But the honor grind gets old. Unfortunately it's necessary to get better gear. So at some point it pays to be efficient with your time and get the most honor per hour.... You'll thank me for showing you how to be efficient oh about 70 hours into your BG grind :)

So, i proudly stop fighting when I see I'm in an unwinable match in both AB and WSG... the honor points are minimal, and if I spam the chat chanel with a request to stop there's usualy enough people that agree that we win sooner.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Dory's Embrace

Hey folks,

So last night I took a quick break from grinding the BG's to do a few quests. I've got to earn that $$$ (What I spend it on is for another post).

Also, as usual whenver I the daily SP heroic is up, I went looking for a group for it. Now I don't normally go looking for Heroic Dungeons, but I'm still in need of an upgrade from my Sargent's Heavy Cloak to Dory's Embrace

The Difference in stats is as follows:

+10 Armor
+7 Stamina
+1 Crit Rating
+1 Resilience Rating
+8 Attack Power
+112 Armour Penetration

Not a huge difference except for the armor Penetration. You can see the increase in damage at this site. There are some other pieces that stack armor penetration, like S3 sword and S4 ring. If you had all these you would get 262 armor penetration, which would be around 2% extra damage for a cloth wearer. 1% for a plate class.

That may not sound like much, but remember you 2% for a passive ability isn't anything to sneeze at. There are certain talents ou there that cost you 1 talent point per 1% dmg increase so yeah not shabby.

Remember, no single item will catepault you to greatness, but each upgraded piece ads that much more to you game.

Anyway, I'm 10 Badges away from being able to get the cloak, that's 2 daily heroics, or 3+ regular runs.....So close yet so far away.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Back from a long hiatus - S4 Here

Hey folks,

I havn't written in a long time, partially to other things going on, partially because I was out of advise to give.

But a new season (S4) is here, and with new minium rating requirements there's a new set of challenges for everone, and of course for me.

So, yesterday I picked up my new S2 weapon, S4 Gloves and S4 Belt, met up with my 2's partner and went to town! At the begining of last season we went 3-7. Of course back then our gear was worse and our play style wasn't as finely tunned as it is today.

So how did our first matches go? 9-6 overall. I clearly saw an iprovment in my DPS and a couple times we went up against teams in S3 weapons. We were able to either beat them or hold our own for a while, something we just couldn't do last season.

At one point we got up to 1550, so my partner went off to get his Arena Legs. I saved my points as I"m hoping someone will be "helping" me to 1700.

Dont' get me wrong, our combo of Holy/Ret is still gimped but with us being able to close the gap with S3 weapon/shoulder teams I'm expecting we'll be able to break 1650 at some point this season.