ABC.. It's easy as PvP

2 posts in a week about PvP, from a non-PvP player like me... I must be feeling particularly agressive at the moment.

As my post yesterday shows, I'm not at all against PvP content. I'm just not into the ranked matches etc... In my opinion, a good first person shooter shows off my leet skills much better than a turn-based combat system. And there's very little tactical challenge when you need to be within a certain range of any target, to do anything lethal.
Yep... you guessed it... I usually play a sniper in FPS games. And usually a pretty good one at that, patience and planning is my area of expertise.

But I digress.

I think more should be done to encourage World-PvP. Outside the confines of arenas, and battlegrounds. Let things take place in the real-world where random factors can come into play, and the tide of a battle can really be turned by calling in re-inforcements from an ally.

Who else remembers the undercity raid that never was? Or the times when capital cities have been under siege by NPC's? Those are fun times.

I've no idea if anyone from Blizz reads this blog. And they probably don't. But funnily enough they seemed to go along with almost every suggestion I made about the next expansion. So there's no harm in trying again.

I suggest World-PvP. I don't mean forcing everyone to join in if they don't want to. That's what PvP servers are for. But I think there should be more encouragement for kicking off fights with the opposing factions.

How about a daily / weekly quest to kill all the leaders of the opposing faction? Complete it all within the week, and you gain a decent stash of gold, maybe like 1k gold.
I know there's an achievement similar to this. But some of us prefer to spend our time doing more useful things.
If the reward for killing all the leaders was 5k, and could be repeated weekly, how many people do you think would farm that quest? There would be alot more confrontation, as capital cities were constantly raided, and leaders slain.
At the moment. If you complete this feat you get... jack shit. Maybe you get a title... I'm not sure.. and who cares. But what if by completing the quest, not only did you get your 1k. But for the rest of the week all your faction also got a buff, or a bonus?
Maybe access to an extra dungeon, like in Wintergrasp. Or to a Buff that simply provides a 10% Rep gain boost?

Here's how I'd see it working:

All faction leaders have a decent amount of difficulty - Say something equivalent to a raid boss.
If a team defeats a leader, then the leader is captured, and imprisoned in the throne room of an opposing faction.
While their leader is imprisoned, that faction has a small debuff applied. (Along the lines of -5% gold from vendors).
Those leaders can be freed by the Hordies defeating the leader holding them captive. This then returns that leader to their throne room, and imprisons our leader.
If all leaders are captured at the same time, then the conquering faction recieves the a buff for the rest of the week. (10% rep, or extra gold or whatever).

This could help promote a constant battle between the two sides, without affecting the overall lore of the game. No leaders are killed in the making of this lore, and no one has to take part iof they don't want to.

And keep in mind that by Cataclysm, there'll be 6 leaders for each side, that's a big mission for someone to take on. So maybe the rewards need to be higher.
I wouldn't suggest any DPS style buffs / debuffs as a reward though, as that could take alot of balancing.

The one big downside I can see to this is framerates. Some of the capital cities already struggle just to deal with the number of people they hold. Start an all out war inside them, and watch the servers meltdown.

Does my HP look big in this?

Managed to get some more questing done last night. As well as a normal Azjol-Nerub run with Bolle, DM, a PUG'd DPS, and my old freind Skullz (now known as Volkan).
Turns out that Bolle, and Volkan are now in the same raid guild together... Small world eh?

Random Violence must have a pretty decent raid team, since they left both Bolle, and Volkan out last night. But their loss is my gain. And AN went down without a hitch. Apart from a bugged boss that totally regen'd once he reached 20% HP. The fight lasted about 5 minutes, and we could have kept it up, but we realised it was definitely a no-go'er and a quick Divine Intervention on Bolles preist, meant a quick wipe, and a quick recover. The same boss went down within about 30 seconds on the next go... Pussy.

My Tanking felt a little smoother this time. At least to me.
Marking macros worked well. Remembered to keep Divine Plea up most of the time. And chain pulled whenever possible. Now that I've got my rotation set-up things don't seem quite as hectic during fights.

Since we couldn't find a big enough group to do any other runs, we broke the party up and went off to do our individual things. Personally I went back to the Grizzly Hills, and cleared every single quest in the zone. Giving me a Ding, and I'm already 60% of the way to the next level.

So Smythadin is now officially Level 76, and a half. At no point, in any of the quests in Grizzly hills, have I struggled. I don't think I've even seen a graveyard there. And that includes solo'ing all of the 'group' quests. Prot-Pallies are just too powerful.

The nearest I ever got to death was solo'ing an Elite with over 100k HP, plus 4 adds, plus the 8 worgen he summons during the fight. He got me down to about 10% HP, and he was only at 20%. But even then, all I had to do was click Lay-on-Hands and down he went.
After the fight I even realised that I'd forgotten to pop my trinkets and uber-buff. So more fool me, I could have saved myself the shame of using my 'oh shit' button.
The quest was 'Hour of the Worg', in case you're interested.

Then it was off to defeat Ursoc the bear-god. And luckily enough she was already lying there dead. The quest didn't require me to kill her, just to sprinkle some ashes on her corpse. So bingo, another quest done, and some nice blue plate legs, and a blue shield as a quest reward. Excellent.

I also made the nooby mistake of not reading quest text, so went to the area where you have to set fire to some trolls, and started killing them. Only thing is, they respawn very very fast. So I ended up in a continous fight for about 10 minutes. But at no point did my HP drop below 50% or my Mana below 90%. I was even able to re-read the quest text during the fight and /facepalm myself for being an idiot. Without focusing on the fight.

So I've now cleared Borean Tundra, Howling Fjord, DragonBlight, and Grizzly Hills. So next it's off to Zul'Drak, where the armies of the undead and demons have no idea what they're in for.
If bears and trolls stood no chance against the uber-pally, the ghosts and ghoulies had better take a few days off.

It's taking me about 5 hours per level, but that includes travelling time, and time spent at the AH, and waiting for groups etc.. I think the actually levelling time would be about 4 hours per level if I quested non-stop. So if I can get some time online tonight, then I'll ding 77, and should be looking to hit the level cap probably just after the weekend. Then it's rep grinding time.

I've also sussed why Blizz is only adding 5 levels to the next expansion... They don't need any more.
At level 76, for both my Prot and Holy specs, I'm now wondering where to place those last few talent points. In neither spec wil they actually add to my main jobs of tanking or healing. So they're getting placed into extra DPS, which is always a bit of a bonus.

With Blizz only adding 5 levels to the expansion, that means only 5 extra talent points to play with. And probably only 1 more link in each talent tree. The points are probably going to be pretty uneccesary though.
Unless Blizz change the whole dynamics of combat, my Paladin at level 85, will still be just as unkillable even if he didn't have the extra 5 points.

Damn... that turned into quite a long post. I was only planning to do a quick 2 minute update on my Pally's progress. I think I'll go for a lie-down now.