…for the flesh of her foes! First I got bored and rolled a new discipline priest– *Tovoketh waves hello*— and was smite-healing for great entertainment and success, but then I got bored AGAIN (I’m sure the 15 Hellfire Ramparts runs back-to-back had nothing to do with that) and decided to make Lacustrine into a pvp kitty. Because I was almost maybe in danger of using all that full set of healing gear I got last season.
I’m only about two days into this experiment. This means my thoughts are vague and short. Yes, that means a shorter post. You’re welcome.
1. But Where Do You Even BEGIN?!
Well, if you’re me, when you’re looking to take the plunge into a new class or spec you chase down a friend who might possibly have a clue and engage in a little wild mass questioning. So I managed to corner friend 1 (hereafter referred to as Murmur) and friend 2 (hereafter Kakapo) on voicechat and attempted to engage them in coversation. Murmur is a very competent feral druid, and Kakapo PvPs to the point where he’d good enough to buy gear gear with rating requirements. Surely, between the two of them, they’d have plenty of insight into the overlap of “being a druid” and “eating other players’ faces.”
I learned some very useful information from that rambling conversation:
- Cats were eating too many faces at the kickoff of Cata and needed that nerfbatting. Now that the nerf got backed up a smidgen they’re still doing pretty well, although they’re not the invincible juggernauts of destruction they were three patches back.
- Restoration is boring but healers are all in such a good spot for PvP right now that it’s not like they’re bad. Definitely not good enough to see any targeted nerfbatting anytime soon– hooray, spec stability!
- I should never ask either of these guys for suggestions about my PvP potential if I don’t want to listen to an extended argument about melee mobility, the obnoxious penalties druids still suffer from, and/or how pointless playing something besides a mage is.
So whatever, I always have a vague itch to play kittyvP, spec’s not bottom of the barrel right now, let’s roll. Except Murmur hasn’t actually done anything besides instances on his feral druid in… forever… and he has no inclination to keep up on the theorycraft of such. Similarly, Kakapo could probably help me reverse-engineer a couple tricks using the tried-and-true “someone did it to me and it made me want to reach through the internet and punch them; do that” technique, but I’m nowhere near the part where I start learning all specific strategies– I can’t even figure out what stats I want! He offered an “uhh… check arenajunkies?” but, well, last time I poked my head in it wasn’t completely worthless, but it definitely didn’t just put out the basics of “gear like this, this is your primarily toolkit, go forth and conquer”. I will be interested in the awesome tricks of the better kitties just as soon as I make it past the “BUHHH WUT DIS BUTTUN DO??” stage.
2. So I Should…?
Then I realized I still don’t know the melee hit cap off the top of my head, certainly not for PvP, ESPECIALLY not for cats (they’re set up to attack like a dual-wielding class! but they use a 2her! in cat form!) so off to the google. The wikis, last updated sometime during the Reagan administration, continued to be unhelpful; but what’s this? “XXL Guide to Feral PvP: Cataclysm Edition“? Maybe this will have hit caps!
You can check the link yourself, but in a word: yes. And more. Exactly what I’d been hoping for: gearing help (the hit cap is 600 rating, exactly 5%) with discussion about why you want one stat or another more– not a ton of math present, but enough of the logic behind it that I can probably work from here well enough for now. Discussions of How2Kill, with attention given to every class and spec. Amazingly, up to date for the current patch. This is what the most wondrous jackpot looks like, dear reader: all the info you were hoping for, neatly presented and explained and yet recent enough to be relevant for your purposes. So, having pored over it, my understanding has come about this far:
- Statwise: agility>>>hit/spell penetration>crit/mastery>>haste. Expertise varies between “mildly useful” and “total garbage”. Crit and mastery are both so good that it’s pretty much whether you want to do more while you’re parked on someone’s butt (crit) or whether you want more insurance for when people inevitably break melee range for a bit (mastery). “Spell penetration?!” Yeah, see, the best part about kitties are their “BOOM, headshot”-style Cyclones and Roots. Which can miss when jerks have on any nature resistance at all, which they usually do.
- Combatwise: bleeds, more bleeds, don’t forget cooldowns (yes even things like the humble Thorns) and make sure you USE all those 0-mana, 0-cast-time nature spell procs. Heals are your bread-and-butter for that, but a well-placed Cyclone (on the guy who just blew all his cooldowns to come eat your face, on the Soul Linked warlock’s pet, etc) is beautiful. Do not be above kiting the plate-wearers, Skull Bash anything with a cast bar. Did I mention bleeds? BLEEDS.
So I reforged my hobo clownsuit to get the hit cap and hit up some BGs.
3. Dear Random BG Partymembers: Please Don’t Inspect Me
I was expecting worse. Not just worse, WAY worse. I do not fondly remember my random BG grind as a healer: even with party members on voice chat to follow around and protect me, most BGs went something like this:
- Enter combat.
- Cast 4 spells.
- 2-5 enemy melee identify me as a healer.
- Spend the rest of the BG dead, running back to the fight, or getting paintrained by their entire team.
As I got more gear, it didn’t get much less miserable. Things have DEFINITELY evened out a bit since previous round of PvP “balance”: it’s very hard to roll up and 2-shot everyone, all the time, everywhere; similarly, a single healer can’t keep EVERYONE alive forever and ever and ever until the enemy team passes out from exhaustion. It seems to be balanced, right now, around one healer versus 2 DDs, assuming everything else is roughly even, being a dead even battle for supremacy (that is decided via their teammates helping/not helping). Unfortunately battleground teams vary between 10-40 wall-humping snotpickers and 10-40 manz rumbling around in formation on their absurdly hardcore mounts. At the start, it took about ONE enemy DDer deciding they had it in for me to keep me locked out of anything but crying in the graveyard for the rest of the game. By the time I finished the honor gear grind and was starting in on a couple of conquest pieces, it took about three. Normally I’d be suspicious of fatal incompetence on my part, but no, it was basically the same thing in an arena match where I had all the support I could hope for (and they couldn’t zerg me 10 by 10): one guy is a nuisance who keeps me from getting to hardcast spells. Two guys varies between “ow, ow, ow *cooldown*” and “MY FAAAAAAAAAAACE!!” Three? …we were doing 3v3 matches, and it’s pretty standard to have one healer, but when it came up: “ow ow ow ow *Nature’s Grasp, pillarhump* aaaah, I’m so glad they’re all melee without cheap CC breaks.”
Point is: I died all the time. Gear just meant I got to live long enough that I’d expend a cooldown before dying.
So going into a Battle for Gilneas (of Gilneans for the mother Gilneas who resides in Gilneas) I was expecting suffering. I was expecting to get blown up as soon as I popped my pretty kitty face out, and I didn’t like the prospect but I am not a quitter. I don’t show up to battlegrounds not to PLAY them, so I girded my loins, took a deep breath, whimpered a little and charged out the gates.
And then died HORRIBLY to an elemental shaman. Yep, there’s her Flame Shock going up, oh look she bought the Unleashed Lightning glyph, smart cookie, theeere’s the Thunderstorm knockback, the Earthbind totem… yup, yup, yup. Looks like everything’s in order here. Enjoy your honor fraction-of-a-point, you fat-bottomed hussy.
As I released and sat at the spirit healer’s feet, I thought about it. What’d I do wrong? She kited me. Ok, that seems like a thing I should not let people do to me. So I rezzed, buffed up, and charged off again. And again, and again, pretty much every time that hussy decided she felt like killing me, but there was a whole lot of other map for me to be on and during that time I realized something. First of all, our resto shammy ate all his Wheaties that morning– “he’s been at the Waterworks for five minutes now, how is he not dead?!“– and was worth following around. Second of all, the other 9 boobs on the Alliance team wouldn’t know how to kite me if I tied a piece of string to myself and put the other end in their hand. Rogues? Annoying, but (not?) stupid enough to try to kill me first, so they got to eat aaaaaaall of my bleeds and Faerie Fires. Their hunters were in prime S-Key All-Star form, I’m not sure they ever figured out how to Disengage away from me. The crowning jewel was the squid priest who liked to get EXTREMELY attached to a little 10×10 square of space. If she wasn’t just standing there while I gnawed on her butt, she was running forward a key tap, THEN standing there while I feasted. She wasn’t terrible enough to completely ignore, but as soon as I got on her I was richly rewarded for my trouble with plenty of time to try out my various finisher moves. And Shred. Lots and lots of Shred.
I’m not going to pretend that was a GOOD game, if the criteria are things like “no yawning gulfs between the skill/gear levels of the participants”. But I found it to be a helpful match. I got a bit of a confidence boost– ok, that ele shammy wrecked me, but I’m not so helpless that I can’t kill an incompetent healer. It gave me a chance to test out that yes, my bleeds make the bad Alliance hitpoints go away, and mobility is fun! Also I think I got an achievement out of it but that might have been a different Battle for GILNEAS (the place all good Gilneans who respect Gilneas hope to someday return to for Gilneas. Gilneas Gilneas). Even my most grisly deaths weren’t as instantaneous as I remembered from my last PvPing bout– and this was with a pathetic 450 resilience to my name!
4. Dear Blizzard: PLEASE CAP THE HEALERS PER TEAM.
Then I did a Twin Peaks (aka. “Warsong Gulch but worse”) today where the other team had three and a half healers and we had… one, maybe? Their healers were so lazy. They couldn’t even be bothered to put their back to a wall to stop my Shredding, possibly because they were keeping themselves entertained by flipping facing every couple of seconds just to watch us melee snap around to their other side. I spent MINUTES just sitting on their resto druid at the start of the game, biting her as viciously as possible, and she never even got low. I didn’t die until one of their team’s DDs, imported via freight train from Asia to judge by how long it took for him to show up, finally arrived and beat my face in. We lost horribly, and at no point did it feel like there was anything I could even hope to do to stop it. Their team had plentiful healing, DDs terrorizing anyone who got near the flag carrier, and flag carriers who were neither squishy nor show-stoppingly stupid. Our team? Squishy. Scattered to the four winds. Definitely lacking the “infinite healing” thing. Towards the end of it, at one point, I was gnawing the druid AGAIN and I nearly killed her twice, but then she just healed right back up to full and I ran off practically crying tears of frustration, because what am I supposed to do when they can be lazy and kind of terrible and just win anyways?!
Murmur and Kakapo had the “privilege” of getting to listen to me rage over Vent about this. After my howls of impotent rage died down a little bit, Murmur piped up. “So what kind of weapon are you using anyways?”
“My stupid tanking snake lollipop from Jin’do. What else would I be using?!”
Murmur started laughing. “It’s just SHOCKING that you can’t solo a healer in your fantastic gear.”
When I made it out of the BG I demanded Murmur do his stupid random daily for conquest points with me, so we grouped up and then he chased me down and inspected me.
“Wait, you have that thing reforged for dodge?”
“Well… yeah. This is the stuff I was tanking in.”
“Wait, wait, hold on. Come back. You have ALL your gear reforged for dodge?”
I know I can’t quite convey it via text, but I can assure you that his tone, as he came to the realization that I’d been raging over my inability to kill healers while decked out to the nines in heroic 5man bear tanking gear all reforged to dodge rating still, conveyed a mix of profound disbelief and astonishment that I had proved, once again, that I am stupider than a sack of dirt when left unattended for too long. (Little does he realize that I keep him around because his willingness to straight up go “How are you this dumb?” when I do things I shouldn’t saves me a lot of future headache. Also because he’s incredibly entertaining.)
I muttered something about “well I guess since I didn’t want to tank anyways I could go reforge it now” and skulked off to the Enchanter. Some wad of gold I don’t want to think about later, I’d boosted my crit and mastery, nuked my expertise and haste a bit, and nerfed my dodge to the ground.
I’d say I’ve noticed a difference, but I’d be lying. I’m sure there is one, though.
5. Dear Worgen Hunter In My Tol Bad Today,
Congratulations on taking Tol Bad! I’m sure it’ll afford you a welcome opportunity to do more exciting dailies. You might even get to kill a few croclisks, you scoundrel you!
That said, having mentally replayed our duel at the end of the game, wherein you attempted to wreck me then failed your “outrun the druid before they outrun you” check, despite you Kill Shotting me multiple times, leaving your bird on me, and refusing to let me go un-Hunter’s Marked as I desperately hovered under 15% HP for about 40 seconds? Thanks for letting me get Feral Charge off of cooldown again, after healing myself back up out of instagib range. Also, in the future you may wish to consider either healing yourself before we re-engage, or perhaps putting the Deterrence up BEFORE I have all my bleeds on you.
Thanks for the fraction-of-an-honor-point!
Lacustrine