Dear 70-79 AV players of Rampage,

If your healer is repeatedly faceplanting while trying to heal Balinda… I somehow don’t reckon the problem is the healing, you know?

I’m sure you guys feel totally awesome because you’re top of damage done, but yeah, Balinda still isn’t dead, and she won’t be dead for a looong while because in this bracket she’s impossible to get down without multiple healers. She outlevels all of you by at least four levels, and she hits like a truck.

Incidentally, so does her water elemental that no one cares about at level 80. I’m getting Frostbolted for 2k a pop, and I only have 11k health.

So it makes you look slightly bad at this game when you charge right in and furiously smash your damage dealing buttons, die after I die because none of you could be bothered to get the elemental off me, then yell in/bg “OMG, healer fail at Balinda AGAIN.”

In conclusion, L2P.

Love,
Baby!tree Starlet, who heals her little branches off every match, trying to keep all of you ungrateful DKs and rets happy.

So, I’ve been leveling enchanting on Elisse just to have one, because hell, I’ve never had a high level enchanter.

I’ve realised this was a bad decision.

No, not that enchanting doesn’t make any money.

It’s more the level of self-whoring involved in making said gold, and the amount of stupid people an enchanter has to put up with. I never knew there were such varying levels of stupid involving enchanting.

You get the “can you enchant my legs/shoulders/helm” people. This is the mildest stupid you can put up with, and they usually go away after I explain. Bonus points if I can link my tailoring and convince them to pay me mats + 10g for a leg patch.

You get the “come to whatever obscure city I’m in, do this enchant that no longer gives you any skill points, and don’t charge me for it” people.

No really. People invite you to groups, and expect you to leg it to whatever city they are. They don’t even say anything.

*group invite*
*5 minutes pass*
“Come on, hurry up, aren’t you coming?”

People seem to have it the wrong way. YOU go to crafters, not the other damn way around. If you make me come to you, I’ll charge you, skill point or not.

Do you ask the drugstore clerk to come to your house to bring you your stuff, and not charge you for it? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Then there’s the trend that some retarded crafter at one point of time has dreamt of starting, that has ruined the entire economy of crafting, but mostly enchanting.

Yes, it’s the “no fee with your mats” trend. And then there’s its doubly retarded sister, “I pay you if I skill up”.

What next? How about doing it with your mats for free? And pay the customer on top of that?

You roll professions to make gold from them, not to encourage the entitlement mentality of 12 year olds.

What this has accomplished is that now 90% of customers expect every enchanter to not charge, regardless of the enchant’s skill level. Yup, just have mats, expect the enchanter to come to you, and spam trade wondering why she isn’t trading on her end. It’s not at all like this profession cost any money to level.

A thankfully smaller percentage expect payment for themselves, because their mats that cost all of 20g on the auction house just made me get a skill-up.  A SKILL-UP, FOLKS. ALERT THE PRESSES.

On my second day of being above 350, I just paid a scribe to make me two stacks of Armor Vellum, and got a hold of a scribe friend for a stack of Weapon Vellum.

What I’ve learned is that you can sell scrolls of certain enchants on AH for twice the mats’ cost. That’s 30ish gold profit per scroll. Which happens to be triple what I charge per enchant.

Peddling self in trade for 10g per enchant, and the occasional skill point if I’m lucky?

What’s that?

I am not pleased at all with the Blizzard decision to not implement non-rated PvP weapons, because, to put it in Kalgan’s words, “most players are encouraged to get their weapon upgrade through PvE”.

Uh, well, what if you play this game to casually PvP, like if you’re on my low-populated server where getting groups = pulling teeth, and you actually don’t want to PvE to be halfway competitive in PvP? Or if you have terrible luck with droprate, a la Lumi and the staff from heroic VH (20+ runs and counting)? And you don’t want to fork over hundreds, no, scrap that, thousands of gold to get some craftables?

Well, then I guess you don’t need to be playing, either.

PvE rewards mediocrity. This has been well established. You can be bad and still get gear. The game design actually encourages this. You don’t need to be doing much to get kitted, just turning up for raids is enough. PvP doesn’t quite work that way, in fact, quite the opposite. PvP rewards only the good players (or well, currently, mostly only plate wearers who have access to Naxx25 gear) and rewards it well.

The trouble with that is, the people who PvP casually but like to be competitive, like me, ultimately end up having nothing to strive for except the enjoyment they derive from arena (and let’s face it, arena isn’t horribly enjoyable for most classes right now). This wasn’t the case during the first two seasons as the end result was the same for everyone, just that some people got there faster and some people got there slower. I got there on my own slow pace, learning a lot of things about my class on the way, and life was good. For S3, and especially S4, I was suddenly limited in how far I could “go” unless we, individually and as a team, raised our skillcap, AND started playing a FoTM team with few if any counters. Which, well, you know, isn’t going to happen.

So in S4, suddenly, the casual had less reasons to play arena, and the gear gap between the casual and the hardcore got bigger. S5 only feeds that, except with one catch – if you PvE, guess what, you have easy access to PvP gear through Vault and Emblems. But it doesn’t work the other way around. PvPers can’t buy the shiny badge gear or T7 with battleground marks.

Even Kalgan has agreed in a blue post that the current arena system leaves the casual little incentive to play. I really hope this is changed soon and casuals actually have a reason to participate in the arena system.

Hi, I’m an undead/night elf priest.

Leave my racials alone. I don’t want to be the same as any other priest, I don’t want a DoT that costs over nine thousand mana to cast at 70 and heals me back for 0.005 HP, I don’t want a racial that restores 0.005 mana. I’m even okay with Touch of Weakness that terribad excuse of a racial staying, just get your hands off everyone’s racials.

In fact, while you’re at it, start realising that balance does not mean every class becoming the same as another, and seeing how much your player base hates your absolutely idiotic changes.

Elysiane the undead priest, Kielle the nelfy baby priest.

P.S If you are a night elf and feel underpowered in PvP with Elune’s Grace (saving you from melee zergs since 2007), Starshards that costs no mana and has the biggest annoyance value in the game after Moonfire spam, and Shadowmeld drink, you are retarded, please reroll dwarf/undead and stop being bad thanks.

…has said Blizzard.

What does this mean? Upon Wrath hitting, all accumulated honor points and marks will be gone (yes, marks too my dears). What about that blue post made months ago saying “Removing accumulated honor is like removing gold, we’d never do that”? Forget it.

The reason given by Blizzard: “We don’t want to give some players an unfair advantage by allowing them to purchase honor gear as soon as they hit 80.”

Of course we know what the real reason is, nothing more than “Hey, thanks for keeping playing till the expansion to do nothing but grind honor, we really enjoyed that 3 months of money you gave us – but guess what? We want to keep your money for even longer, so I guess you have to do that again, good luck!”

Anyway, I’m more than upset with this change – and not in the slightest because my 70s will be affected. My 70s have maximum 5k of honor saved each. As for the marks, my heart will ache for the EOTS ones, but I don’t have many of them anyway, and they can be earned back. I will just blow them on mounts before they are gone.

I have a 19 twink rogue… who really wanted a trinket and battle standard, and was sure she would get it eventually, slowly earning the honor bit by bit. All the work I put towards that will be gone in a few weeks. With the kind of time you need to accumulate honor in the 10-19 bracket (an entire evening’s worth of grinding assuming mostly wins nets 300 to 500 honor), there is no way I can get the full amount I need before Wrath.

I have a baby night elf priest who really wanted a battle standard as well – she’s now 2k towards the required 15k. Again, Alliance in 30-39 Misery has about a 5% to 10% win rate, so even if I grinded my entire waking hours, the max honor I would be accumulating would be 750, maximum. That’s what, 20 days of required nonstop grinding? And since I obviously have neither the time nor patience to grind that, it’s doubtful Kielle will get her battle standard before Wrath.

And what about that black tiger she was saving marks towards so she could buy it as soon as she hit 51 and got the AV marks? Sorry, I guess you’ll have to regrind all them WSG and AB marks… if you don’t need them for gear, that is.

Or level superfast to 51, grind out the marks AND the honor for the battle standard, by which level the battle standard loses the edge it gives in lowbie battlegrounds, and get everything I want by afking in AV… oh wait, that’s what most people do at 70. How different.

An easy solution is, of course, to treat honor and marks like arena points – they are wiped upon leveling up to 71 and not right away at release. And stick a requirement on the new gear that says it can only be purchased at level 71+. Problem solved.

Another solution as suggested is to make every item require a lot more honor than the current system (perhaps five to ten more times), and ramp up the honor gains for level 71+ accordingly. Problem solved.

Yet another solution is for level 80 gear to require a different currency than Honor Points. Call it Grind Points, whatever, and make Grind Points achievable only by participating in level 71+ battlegrounds. Problem solved.

Except with Blizzard, it’s never easy, and those solutions remove the whole “We need you to give us your time and money” for the lowbies, so of course this solution will never, ever be implemented.

I also love every so-called “casual” troll coming out of their caves on the official forums to go “Thanks Blizz for sticking it to the hardcore, too bad you spent all that time farming honor to have an edge at 80, lol nerds”. So basically, people are being punished for having had the foresight to grind out honor, and not all of them are the so-called hardcore – how about the casual who slowly accumulated honor over 3-4 months, doing his dailies every day, who just got shafted?

Of course the 17 year old high school student and the 30 year old programmer with a toddler can’t devote the same amount of time to play every day. So, should a certain percentage of the player base be punished because the other part of the player base doesn’t have as much time as them to devote to the game? Why should a certain percentage of the player base even care if some guy in some other country has a job/kids/wife/elderly mom/other hobbies/all of the above and can’t spend as much time playing as them? As soon as “cater to the casual” turns into “punish the hardcore”, the system loses its meaning.

The honor system is better than the old system, because if people call the honor grinders hardcore now, I really wonder what they would call them under the old system. People quit jobs and school to make the push for High Warlord and Grand Marshal. The system certainly required a lot more time played than today’s system to see any kind of tangible reward. It wasn’t healthy, and when it got overhauled for TBC, it became a much better and much more casual-friendly system overall.

It was turned into a system which let everyone get rewards in their own time, except the hardcore still got rewarded in that they could obtain the rewards faster and stomp the still-undergeared casuals. The casuals still weren’t happy, so out came Arena gear purchasable with honor. Wait, they still weren’t happy, so out came the blue PvP set purchasable with less than a hundred gold at 70. If you hit 70, and did your quests and instances along the way, you could instantly have a set with 150-200 resilience.

…wait, once more, they still weren’t happy…

The game has, and always will, reward time spent. The more time you spend and the sooner you can spend the time, the greater the reward. In fact, that’s true for most things in the world (how many of you expect your part time job to make as much as a full time one?). So far, a system has not been invented that will reward something other than time spent in a MMORPG. Demanding that the game cater to you and just you, just because you can’t spend as much time on it as someone else does, to say the least, a bad idea – the game already caters to the casuals quite fairly with Badge gear and accumulation of honor. So why this hate-spewing for someone who put their time into the system, fair and square? Plain jealousy?

While we are at it, why don’t we also remove all accumulated gold and materials upon the expansion? After all, we don’t want to provide an unfair advantage to some of the player base by allowing them to get their epic walrus on wheels (thanks my dear GM for coining the term, always makes me laugh)/whatever item Blizz has designed as a gold-sink carrot at level 80, faster than the others, because they have had the foresight to save the gold. Let’s remove the herbs people have saved to level inscription too – again, we don’t want people who have lacked foresight to lag behind.

All in all, terrible decision made by Blizzard, no matter what all the casuals, who take delight in seeing the hardcore fall, say – Wrath will still reward the hardcore more than the casual, else there would be no reason for the hardcore to keep playing. The hardcore will still level to 80 and obtain their gear within the first couple of weeks, and the casuals who are maybe level 72 by that point will still be steamrolled. All this decision has done is enrage about 90% of the community, but sadly, I don’t expect it to be reverted.

Your classic lowbie BG, with all the twinks going “FFS if you are under 37 and not twinked you should be banned from battlegrounds”, demanding heals, demanding buffs, demanding that every support class should cater to them, and basically bickering in /bg about how terribly leet they are and how bad everyone else is.

BG ending:

(Link for the whole image here because it breaks the layout and won’t display.)

Kielle: 38 very untwinked Night Elf priest, all my gear is either AHed greens (to upgrade my terribad bracers and helm), PvP rewards, or instance/quest stuff. 10 flag returns, top of neither damage done, nor healing done, nor HKs, nor killing blows.

Souma: 32 untwinked hunter, owner of 2 of our 3 caps. No special stuff in damage/healing done or HKs.

Breaney: 35 untwinked rogue, owner of our last cap. Again, no special stuff in damage/healing done or HKs.

Conclusion: Twinks (and come to think of it, everyone else who thinks topping anything but Flags Capped/Flags Returned/Bases Assaulted/Bases Defended etc makes you awesome), you’re doing it wrong.

Please trade your leet enchants and gear for some L2P, and make some serious contribution towards wins instead of epeen stroking.

Thanks,

The untwinked mortals who can’t afford your gear but have just won a WSG for you.

How can a team have 1661 in team rating, while both team members who have 100% of all games played have 1646 rating?

No other people have played in this team since the start of the season, other than Rinny and me.

YET WE WERE DENIED OUR RINGS TONIGHT, BECAUSE PERSONAL RATINGS ARE %$#&ING %!^$ED UP.

/emo

Now that we’ve fallen back to sub-1600 again, battling many a full S3 druids, I bid you all goodnight.

At least we got a really sweet 25 point win off of a warrior/druid team. We love overarrogant teams. We really do.

I hate Perception. See, rogue/priest mirrors are usually a “If you get the opener, you win” deal. I play with a blood elf rogue. See the catch?

Rinny getting sapped means we lose. We just… lose. I get stunlocked while spamdispelled, then it’s over. And Rinny gets sapped rather a lot.

Or Hardiness. Oh Hardiness, how we love thee. Especially when the same warrior resists three full CP Kidneys and a dumb racial steals 18 points from a team that is just flat out better.

It’s awesome when your partner knows how important it is to lose the sodding pet, then you lose anyway because he decided the warlock is a better target. And to add insult to injury, you get emotespammed by a 12 year old retard.

It’s also awesome when you get a warrior to 30%, then he gets healed up because your partner decided Shadowstep was too much to use.

It’s even more awesome when you 1v2 4839843 matches because your partner DCd.

But the most awesome is to hear this against a mirror from your partner:

“Blinded, just trinketed that Fear, sorry!”

DISPEL IS AN APPARENTLY NEW CONCEPT.

Conversation with a friend who is a nice dude but is rather stupid:

“Who are you arena’ing with anyway?”
“Rinny.”
“Who is Rinny?”
“/who Rinny?”

ARMORY. IT IS AN AWESOME TOOL. UTILIZE IT.

Dearest of all our friends (Guess the game reference and win my heart), ex-Gladiator Kiyu, says that we need to win more. Thanks Kiyu. We love your wise advice.

Blizzard hates me for the past two seasons.

Season 2, we played RMP before RMP was cool.

Andersson got a Rival title out of it, I got fk all with 100% of all games played.

This season, Severian and Moonky get titles with ratings lower than mine. All of my characters? Still fk all.

I don’t care so much on Ely because Stone Guard is a rarer title now and I like how it sounds. But Starlet and Roch… still title-less. Ugh.

…Aggro on Priest, for we are that good, baby.

The warrior was in full S3, probably boosting the priest into weapon range or something. The priest was pretty failgeared, 250-ish resilience, sorta what you’d expect from a new 70.

And fail they did in spectacular fashion – if the warrior had gotten to Andersson he’d probably just own him in seconds, trouble was, he couldn’t. I popped stealth, racked up Cyclone DRs on the warrior, then racked up root DRs, then got bored and racked up Cyclone DRs again, meanwhile, he basically didn’t touch me at all. I was expecting at least an Intercept/Pummel in caster all the time and I was scared because I thought if he got on me, game over, don’t pass Go, don’t collect $200. But he just kept chasing, or trying to chase, Andersson in remarkable single-mindedness. And got a dead priest for his trouble, heh.

I think he was bad. Or arrogant. At any rate, we really enjoyed the 24 rating. Moral of the tale, don’t be bad, thanks, love, Andersson and Starlet.

EDIT: So I just learned that:

Two friends have logged on to my account.

Proceeded to invite themselves in my paladin’s 2v2.

And nuke the rating we built up from the 1300s with blood, sweat, and tears playing pretty much the most frustrating warrior/healer combo I ever ran across.

And they don’t see what’s so wrong with this, because “You weren’t playing your paladin anyway”.

I AM NOT FUCKING AMUSED AT FUCKING ALL. MAKE YOUR OWN TEAMS, KTHXBYE. Seriously wtf, who logs on to someone else’s account to actually STEAL THEIR ARENA TEAM? It’s not like 80g is a lot of money.

I swear, miserable fail doesn’t even begin to cover this one.