Brutal PvP: Back to Subtlety
Posted 1 month, 1 week ago at 8:31 am. 6 comments
I’ve been taking a break from raiding lately and I’ve been trying some battlegrounds and arena. At the same time, I switched to a Subtlety build of 20/0/41. Shadowstep is very cool. Cheat Death is as cheesy as it sounds though it usually only gives me a few more seconds of life. And Premeditation is fun, but I often either forget or don’t get a chance to use it. However, I miss Blade Flurry and Adrenaline Rush and the energy from Combat Potency.
First of all, I want to make no pretensions about my ability in PvP. I suck. I’ve joined a 3v3 team with a Arms Warrior and a Holy Paladin. My role is primarily CC and then DPS. One of our most challenging matchups at the moment is Mage/Shadowpriest/Rogue. We’ve come up with some strategies but are still struggling. But it’s definitely fun and I’m having a great time … except a few small things.
/QQtime
Also, we’ve run into the following situation and let me know how many of you are experiencing the same thing. We took it easy the first week waiting for some of the more established teams to move up in the ranking and away from the starting 1500-1600 rating. But now in week three, we are encountering teams that have already reached ratings high enough to buy their Season 4 weapons and are resetting to fight back at the 1500 range to gear their alts, friends, neighbors or those unscrupulous enough to pay someone for their rating. It’s incredibly frustrating to try to reach 1600 to get your chest while fighting against opponents with Season 4 weapons and shoulders from Season 3.
In addition, on several nights now, we’ve queued up only to find that the arena instance servers are down. This results in an automatic loss for our team. And there seems to be no way of determining if this will occur until after it happens. It’s not big enough to petition, but it is annoying enough to prevent us from playing that night and losing any chance to practice and improve our score.
Finally, I have to say something about arena team names. WTF. Srsly. Apparently the only thing worse than bad guild names are bad arena team names. If it’s not a crude sexual reference, it’s a gay or racist comment. I can’t and won’t repeat even one of them here, but every time after I finish playing arena, I’m appalled at the most immature portion of the WoW community. Blizzard needs to start filtering these by a human being.
And while I’m at it, RP servers should only be in battlegrounds with other RP servers. I joined a RP server to avoid people named Yourpwner, Xxstunzz and Nohealfou. So why should I have to experience them every time I play now?
Thank goodness someone else is also appalled at the disgusting arena names. I’ve reported multiple arena teams whose names are just inappropiate.
Brunnor
I used to forget premeditation all the time too. What I recommend is - until you’re comfortable playing sub - that you macro it onto both cheap shot and garotte.
Something like…
/cast premeditation
/cast cheap shot
…will use premed if it’s available, and just skip it if not. There’s a lot to think about as a rogue starting out in arenas, so my recommendation is to take it slow and automate a lot of this stuff even if it means sub-optimal play.
And hey, at least somebody else gets to share the pain of rolling a non-human rogue!
I started compiling a list of “tricks” for shadowstep pvp, some of which you might find useful: http://chron.ws/blog/blog/article/691
(totally agree about the PR reset vengeful gladiators and horrible team names, too)
It’s always a crap shoot the first few weeks of the season - either running into the “new” teams from one match to the “uber” teams in your next. Things should start to level out over the next few weeks so hang in there.
As far as going against RMP teams - my suggestion is to split your dps. Your job would be to jump that mage fast. Don’t burn your Shs on the opener because you’re going to need it to get back on top of them.
I agree with you on the naming convention of the teams - it really is appalling - best revenge is to beat them…
It seems like the internet is just a place for 10-14 year olds, and those older but have equivalent maturity, to act out even more than usual. WoW is no exception…
That said, I heard about your premed issue, and you should consider this macro off of arena junkies.
#show Preparation
/cast evasion
/stopcasting
/cast sprint
/stopcasting
/cast preparation
It will blow all of your cooldowns that will be refreshed with premed as you use it.
Even though I do not like the majority of the strategies on Arena Junkies, their macro section is very good, and worth repeating elsewhere…
The only thing to be aware of with that macro is if you mash it you might end up using both sets of cooldowns. Also note that as of a few patches ago the “/stopcasting” lines are unnecessary.
(also I think you may be confusing “premeditation” with “preparation”, but it’s still a good macro)
I made a huge mistake last night.
Short story long, I’m part of a re-rolled T5 guild from the alliance side that got fed up with raids and decided to have some fun pvp’ing. On our server that meant rolling horde, because alliance wins nothing except AV.
So I moved from huntard to rouge and at lvl 50 discovered the beauty of ShS.
Having PvP’d our way to a full set of S2 at lvl 60 we decided to get the final push over with, and that meant back into normal instances, the grind for rep and so on.
Realising that shadowstep rogues are a bit gimped on DPS, I tried to follow conventional wisdom and spec Swords - with drastic mistakes and consequences.
Bottom line, don’t do it. Not ever. I’ve seen the error of my ways and I’ll never respec out of Subtlety again.
I’ve been forced to re-purchase mats for my agility enchant on a new dagger, and I’m going to have to grind out rep for Sporregar or Consortium to replace the dagger I vendored in a moment of madness.
Let this be a warning to anyone who looks at Swords and considers it a worthwhile exercise. It may give you a bit of extra DPS, but in terms of pure fun, any Combat spec is the dullest tree to spec with.