Posts with tag pvp

As a PvP player, I'm very aware of the constant complaints that one class or another is overpowered, or OP as the popular jargon calls it. One moment it's feral druids, the next it's rogues, then mages, then you throw a legendary staff into the mix and all of a sudden, out of nowhere it's balance druids and shadow priests!

But then, once you start to play one of those apparently OP classes, you suddenly realise what they're up against to achieve their OP state, and you might begin to realise how to counter their moves, and suddenly you're back on what feels like a far more level playing field with that class, but a whole bunch of other ones are OP.

And the notion of an overpowered class can translate into PvE as well, just as nicely. Some healers have it easier than others, some DPS might too, some tanks have more in their toolkits or different abilities that cater better to some situations than others.

So, that being said, what is the most overpowered class in the game? Are there genuine imbalances at this late stage of the expansion? Or are things just ticking along nicely? My nomination would probably be either mages or rogues from a PvP standpoint. Both have high burst DPS and a good amount of crowd control, which can be a pretty nasty combination to come up against. In battlegrounds, I might change my response to paladins, particularly healers. They have so, so many get-out-of-jail-free cards! And in PvE, hmm, much more tricky. I would say that Blood DKs are in a really good place right now. And perhaps arcane mages -- it feels like their relatively simple rotation ought not to yield such high DPS!

What about you? What do you think? And tell me, how many of you think that the class you play as a main or second character is completely overpowered. Is the grass truly always greener?

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So the Arena Pass is upon us! And here in the EU (well, it's "here" for me, OK?), another gladiatorial competition has kicked off.

Nakatoir announced on the EU PvP forums a few days ago that a Vengeful Gladiator Screenshot Competition had begun. What's that? Well, Blizzard is asking European PvPers to take some snaps of their characters duelling, doing Arenas or Battlegrounds, waiting for the aforementioned, or simply looking fierce. Captions, speech bubbles and the like in English are welcome, as is any editing of screenshots that you see fit to undertake.

Once you've taken and edited your screenshots, submit them to fanart-contest-eu@blizzard.com with the subject header "[Arena] Character Name, Arena Team Name, Guild name." Put any caption in the message, and attach your screenshot. You don't have to put in the information in the subject header, but you need to if you want credit for the image. Blizzard's unlikely to recognize your character from the photo. No offense.

The best screenshots selected by Blizzard will be proudly displayed on the Blizzard Facebook Page for everyone to enjoy. So get your Print Screen key warmed up and your creative minds buzzing, and send in some great screenshots. Fame and glory await you!

And if you're wondering why the competition's called Vengeful Gladiator rather than Cataclysmic Gladiator, that's for Blizzard to know ... and you to speculate about.

Let's hop in the wayback machine for a minute, because I enjoy doing that. Once upon a time in the days of vanilla WoW, players who had just purchased the game were faced with a choice upon logging in for the first time: What server would they call home? There were three different server types, each with their own flavor: PvP, for those that wanted to log in and have the opportunity to whale on the opposing faction at any given opportunity; PvE for those who would rather avoid fighting with other players and simply enjoy the content; and RP, for those who wanted to create character stories and roleplay with other characters. Later, the RP-PvP realm was introduced for roleplayers who really wanted to whale on the opposing faction as well as roleplay.

But the choice went beyond a simple matter of what type of game you wanted to play. Each server had its own cast of characters, and as the years went by, these players turned into friends and foes alike. Servers weren't just about how you wanted to play; they were a collection of people you interacted with on a daily basis. Guilds were composed of people with the same ideas in mind, but those guilds weren't the be all and end- all of your interaction with people in the game. Every server had that one guy who was always cracking jokes in trade chat. Every server always had a ninja or two. And of course, there was always the guy who didn't seem to get what social interaction was all about.

These days, we have cross-realm grouping via Real ID, the Raid Finder for those who don't want to bother with joining a raid guild, and now we've got the up-and-coming feature that will allow us to group with players cross-realm for raiding old content as well as the new stuff. So the big question is this: Do servers even have a purpose anymore?