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In Arenas — especially 2v2 — there is a lot of Paper, Rock, Scissors (with Warlocks being the atom bomb). There are certain combinations that seem custom-built to exploit your team’s weaknesses. In these situations, often your best hope is that the other team makes a mistake that you’re lucky enough to capitalize upon. For Ebene and I (Warrior/Druid), two such team combinations are Warrior/Shaman and Scorpid Hunter/Healer. I don’t think we’ve ever succesfully beaten the former, and the latter is a real pain in the butt.
The strength of a Scorpid Hunter is that his pet stacks a poison on you that prevents you from removing his master’s Viper Sting (mana draining poison). Prior to Patch 2.2, the Scorpid Poison also did a tremendous amount of damage. Against a Scorpid Hunter it’s very important to keep an Abolish Poison up as often as possible to try to keep yourself from getting poisons stacked up (and it seems a bit of a problem that a Hunter should be so necessarily described in terms of her pet). If you get into trouble, you can shift into Bear Form and use Frenzied Regeneration so that you can’t be affected by the mana drain component of the poison.
This morning we faced a Scorpid Hunter/Holy Priest combination named Viper Burn from the Firetree server. As you might have inferred from their team name, they rely upon a combination of Viper Sting and Mana Burn to effectively take the wind out of the sails of any team with a mana user. They are built to overcome the popular combination of Healer + DPS. Definitely tough competition, especially considering the ratings of some of their other teams (the Priest is 2100+ on his 3v3). And. They. Cheat.
I can understand the desire to win in competitive PvP. As Megan of Out of Mana writes:
You already know that so many people QQ about PVP. PVP is serious business. People get very emotional (me included) about PVP because of the human component—someone else just gave you a serving of pwncake and it didn’t taste very good. It’s fine if Prince screws you over, you can blame it on Infernals, AI, coding, and the alignment of the moon. But when someone kills half the raid during a Gruul Shatter? That pisses you off because it was the result of a human. PVP is like the latter 100%, all the time—you just gave someone honor or rating points, possibly bragging rights, and if they are Undead, they are eating your body. And that sucks.
And when they cheat? It’s 100 times worse. We fought Viper Burn twice, and they used two exploits (that we could see). The Priest, McNugget, found some area in the Nagrand arena where he could stand and, while remaining completely visible, was unchargable. In our second game, he exploited the “/sit” macro to continue drinking despite repeated attacks to put him into combat. After the second Moonfire, I had to switch to Cyclone to prevent him from continuing to drink. We won both games (thankfully), and I hope the pound of pwncake we served them had weevils in it.
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I don’t PvP (well, a little bit of world PvP if I’m in the area of Halaa and I’m in the mood, or if the Horde invades IF), but I can sympathize with you 100% (and empathize–which is a big part of why I don’t PvP).
That said, I hope you at least reported the exploits (I can understand the terrain exploit; dunno how /sit can be exploited–and I don’t want to know), if not the exploiters.
I can’t stand cheaters. At. All.
Hi, I’m a first timer to this blog, and I have to say it looks great!
Weirdest thing is I was setting up a blog myself (it would be my first) about restoration druids, and after writing the first post (“hi, this is me”) and looking for ideas in other WoW blogs to make some style changes, I found this!
I haven’t had time to read it through, but it looks like you’ve already talked about some topics I wanted to talk about, and quite a few more I didn’t even think of yet, so I’ll bother you instead, reading and adding brief comments, while saving me the trouble of writting the whole stuff myself
I hope you don’t mind!
Keep up the good work!
Ermengol, Shadowsong Europe, devoted tree.
@Kestrel: I could have reported the exploiters and have done so in the past with hunters who climb to the top of pillars in Nagrand to fire at you without repercussion, but the GMs’ responses have typically been to be very courteous and apologetic but to say that there isn’t a tremendous amount that could be done – that they would relay the potential exploit to the appropriate parties. As far as I’m aware, the drinking exploit is known to Blizzard (so why haven’t they fixed it??), and the LoS exploit would likely be difficult to duplicate. I guess I’ve just been discouraged from a seeming lack of action on Blizzard’s part.
@Ermengol: It’s great to have you as a new reader. I hope that you stay with me for a while. =) And don’t be put off by the presence of my blog – or anyone else’s for that matter. There’s no reason there isn’t more room for Druid bloggers out there! And if you do start a blog, I’d appreciate if you could let me know so that I can add it to my lists. =)
Makes you wonder if the GMs pass stuff on to the Devs. Sometimes, I wonder how much the GMs really understand of the game. Guess I could write a whole blog article on GMs…but I won’t.
What about bug reporting? Wonder if that might reach another audience.
I’m quite sorry that you had to deal with that in your PvP. I know you’ve had a lot of experience in that side of the game, and I hate to think of you two getting frustrated by cheaters… even though you won.
It’s that kind of ‘I don’t care if I am an honorless scumbag as long as I get a higher Arena ranking’ attitude that reduces PvP, to me, into a point scoring system to buy a piece of gear I want, and nothing more.