Make No Mistake, *This* Is Epeening
“D@mn, we’re late.”
When you get pulled into Alterac Valley on the Alliance side, you want one of two things two happen. One, the gates are closed, everybody is getting ready to buff and make food trays, so you’re on-time and can choose if you want to go Offense or Defense. Two, the gates are wide open, Offense has reached Ice Blood Graveyard, and you know you can best help by going Defense. Defense is fun and very necessary, this is OK, too.
What one doesn’t want to see is Alliance down 300 resources and the game almost over. You waited twenty minutes to get in, maybe more, you want some fricking honor, goshdarnit.
But there is a sticky-wicket, and that’s this: one arrives in the tunnel, sees the gates are open, but the Alliance Offense has just reached Belinda. You can go Defense now, that’s fine. But you also have the option of trying to catch up to the Offense.
If you go Offense at this point, you’ll be passing Belinda at the exact moment the main mass of the Horde Offense dismounts to take Belinda down. And there you’ll be, a straggler waiting to be destroyed. Maybe you’ll make it through ignored, but more likely you’ll be easily killed and have to rez back on Defense, in which case you wasted a lot time and gave some hordies a free honor-kill.
Don’t delay on making the decision. If you’re going to try to go Offense, just Go. Don’t hesitate, don’t think about it, ride like the wind.
We rode.
We auto-equipped our Riding Crop and took every shortcut we know. We started to pass Belinda’s bunker and saw the Horde dismount. We have Track Humanoids on and were watching all the little red dots run inside her bunker. Except one. This little red dot was following us, matching our speed. He wants a free-honor kill, this guy does.
Now if we keep riding, he might have a stun that’ll dismount us. Or we can dismount on our own terms and attack him first. Of course, if we dismount beside Belinda’s bunker, any Horde that sees us in a fight are going to come wipe us out. There are no Alliance here, they’re all on Ice Blood or in with Drek. We’re on our own.
F-it. We dismount, drop a Frost Trap, and try to target our pursuer.
It was a Tauren warrior. Hunters versus warriors, if we can keep our distance, we will eventually win. Keeping our distance, of course, relies on the skill of the hunter to kite and strafe and keep Frost and Snake Traps down and our adversary affected by them. Bam! we got smacked by the warrior, but he was slowed by the trap. We sic’d Hobbes on the guy, Bestial Wrathed to get out of his charge/stun, and ran through the Frost Trap, jump-shot kiting him.
When he was just getting out of the trap AoE, we turned around and ran right at him. Yes, we’re going to give him a free shot at us, but in return we’re going to get a Wing Clip on him and kite him in the other direction as we wait for our traps to cooldown.
Spin, run, jump, Wing Clip and he didn’t even swing at us! We closed the distance too fast and he didn’t react in time. Sweet! Keep running, Jump Shot, Concussive, Serpent, Arcane, let Hobbes continue to chew on him, get another trap down, Snake Trap this time, and stand right behind it. Again, we’re going to let him get in one shot, but this time we’re going to make him come through the Snake Trap. Wham, he hits us, kinda hard too. But now he has a bunch of snake-debuffs and we can kite him around some more.
Intimidation, he’s stunned. Line up an Aimed Shot and pray to the Big Crit Gods! Cmoooonnnnnn…. Pow! About 2k, not bad against plate. Kite him some more, oh he’s so going down! Really smart decision you made chasing us down, wasn’t it big fella! Hahaha!!
/company arrives, it isn’t ours.
Horde paladin saw us fighting and came to the rescue. Two on one, lovely. He starts a heal on the warrior, we gotta get that guy down before the heal comes… dang it gonna be too late!
Warrior takes a 1300 heal. That’s it? Oh yeah, Aimed Shot debuff cut that Pally’s heal in half! OMG, cmon Arcane Shot crit!
Wham! Arcane Shot crits for 1600! Warrior is dead! You Maroon! Bed-wetter! You just got schooled, you 14 year old punk!
/stunned
What the… Oh. Hold on, we’ve still got a Paladin to deal with.
Target him, send Hobbes – good boy, what a good kitty!! – and Viper sting that guy, try to empty his mana. Gotta remember not to Serpent Sting during the kiting as that’ll remove the mana-draining, but otherwise it’s an easier kite than a warrior. The pally is a cockroach; he’s not going to kill us, but killing him is going to require patience and time, especially with our cooldowns all cooking. But as long as we’re not interrupted, we should be able to do this!
Keep the Viper Sting up, stay out of range of his Judgments, particularly the stuns. Try to pull him south so the Horde exiting Belinda’s don’t see us fighting. Yes, he’s following! The smart move for him would be to throw a heal on himself and ask in battleground-chat for help. He doesn’t; he keeps trying to fight. Snake Trap down, bring him towards it.
You know, Mr. Paladin, when we maneuver so as to make it easier for you to come get us, perhaps there’s a reason. Pop! Snake Trap, baby! Thank you so much for playing into our strategy, consolation prize available at the nearest Horde graveyard. Viper again, more Jump Shots, Hobbes chews him up, and he’s out of mana. No mana means soon to be dead pally. Wham, down he goes, we’re at 2/5ths health, but very much alive!
Feign Death, get on our Frostsaber, get the heck outta Dodge and onto Offense. No cooldowns and 2.5k health would be certain death against any class other than a healer, we gotta go and take the A-train to Ice Blood.
But you’re both dead and we’re not, fo-shizzle. /soaks it allllll in
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Good times. I consider Resto Druids to be almost as much of a cockroach myself too.
Resto druids are pathetically easy for hunters, or atleast in my experience. Last time I fought a reso druid, he hot’d himself off and ran. I intimidated him, viper sting and ran to him. Dropped a snake trap on him while he was stunned, and “Raptor Clipped” him. ( /cast Raptor Strike /cast Wing Clip = Raptor Strike + Wing Clip on the same swing since Raptor Strike procs on your next attack, while is the Wing Clip ) He shifts, I wing clip him again, pet is on his butt DPSing him. He shifts, I clip again, he shifts, I Raptor Clip him again. All the while he gets JUST enough ahead of me to re viper sting him. Finally oom’d couldn’t shift back and innervate, I stopped and arcane shot it off, tossed up a new viper to keep him empty and took him out.
Granted at this point I went from Belinda to Galv, but it’s possible, but no means QUICK, lol.
Haha, those guys will now be one the forums complaining Hunters are OP!
Haha nice work BRK, soon with your mounting resilience you wont mind tanking those warrior hits so much!
Ive only had that kinda feeling once when playing as a warlock with resto druid in arena back before it became flavour of the month. Frost mage + Lock take down my healer quicksharp after cc’ing me. Proceed to take them apart with pillar abuse and some fear spam.
<3<3
That fool. Warriors ain’t built fer soloing in the open, hunters is. Gotta catch’em when they’s trying to attack/defend a fixed position. Didn’t even get off a hamstring when he had the chance. I’s sitting here completely surrounded by no sympathy.
their big mistake was attacking you at all, and not because you won. more than killing them, taking up so much of their time gives your team an advantage by depriving the enemy of 2 players for such a large chunk of game time.
sometimes i’ll ride my mage right into that big ‘ol pack of allies as they come around bal and freeze as many as i can… usually 10-15. then i iceblock, and all 10-15 usually stick around to kill me. then, when the allies get to drek, they find that 10-15 of their drek-killers are lagging 2-3 minutes behind, and can’t kill drek until bal is long dead, even with her ridiculous HP buff.
20 mins to get in?!
That’s probably the biggest reason PvPer’s tend to choose Horde….instaqueues.
Paladins with no mana are crunchy on the outside but chewy on the inside.
Call me a noob, why the feign death before mounting up?
Thank You Kindly.
The FD was to end combat, as sometimes in PvP you’ll still be in combat for a bit even though you’ve killed everyone around you, and are no longer being attacked. And you can’t mount while in Combat.
Almost the exact same thing happened to me once, except it was a Druid in cat form and a pally. I trapped the kitty all the way to Galv while the slow Pally got left behind.
I am horde. We do NOT have instaques for AV. I dearly miss AV. If you are not on the stormstrike battlegroup you wont understand how pathetic this is. Alliance simply kept on losing AV, so what did they do? They literally boycotted it and now they never queue. My average wait time (and I seriously am not joking at all) is well over an hour.
Nice kills BRK! Gotta love how when a Warrior sees a Hunter all they think is “Squish!!” and not “He can so kite me…”
The only time I hate them is when they charge before I can dismount. Then they can be a problem until I get unstunned to pop BW. Then it’s just a matter of keeping Snakes and Concussives on them, and Intimidate every so often.
This my friend, is a PVP Pwnage of epic proportions. ;D
Seriously awesome
Ratshag, I got your back. As a paladin walking into that situation, I would forget the heal and drop blessing of Protection on the warrior. At this point a huntard usually keeps pounding away at the warrior, but if he’s BRK trained, he turns to start working on me. No big deal, bubble and continue to heal the warrior. As I drop out of bubble, a fully healed Warrior is now on the hunters back. Stun the pet unless he’s red, and watch the hunter feel the wrath of a pissed of warrior, healing whomever is getting the damage.
Congrats on the 2 on 1, BRK. Those Hordies need a tutor on how to play. The warrior should have hamstrung you right away, and the paladin needs to learn how to heal.
snake trap against a pally? if he didnt instaconsecrate that was a stupid pally. no points for you.
“I would forget the heal and drop blessing of Protection on the warrior”
Would expect as much from any competent Pally, but doesn’t it only cover physical damage? BRK did a nice Arcane Shot to the face and killed with it. BoP wouldn’t have helped anything there.
Unless of course I noobed myself up here and messed up my blessings.
And I still can’t get the hang of Warriors.
They are plain nasty. The Raptor-Clip is cool and all, but when we are equally slow it is not so cool. And those evil Mortal Strikes (followed by autoattack of course) tend to leave me at 50% health… Eventhough I’m full Vindicator and triple Glad. Not Arena survivability, but I tend to outlast anyone but Warriors in duels in BGs.
Well done, BRK. This serves as a shining example that a level-appropriately geared hunter can hold their own, even if their opponents are uber-geared [erm... were they?], if they know how to play the class. Which ye do, obviously… I’ve learnt a lot here.
Oh, and Blacknimbus… on Spinebreaker, us Horde have been seeing a 1 – 1.5 hr. queue time. Word around the campfire is the Ally got so upset we kept winning that they started boycotting AV. Which is childish, seeing as how that’s the only one they don’t premade-pwn….
~Qellym & Eddard
Classic… I love those encounters where you know… deep down you realize you shouldn’t have won, but because you rock at it… you do!!!
Yo BRK & other’s…I have some screenshots of some massive horde killing in AV. Two different games, we beat them 647 honor to 0. One game we still had 585 reinforcements
A beating! You used to have a email addy posted, shoot me a email and i’ll send it…you got to see these.
Glad I am not horde, 15 minute wait in queue, 30 minute game and no honor. If I were horde, I would punch my screen….
Yup same on my battle group, 45 min to 1.5 hours. makes me cry, sometimes….
Nice job BRK, I love doing something kinda similar with my pally. After getting up to, but not past prince, holy specced, I hit the instances and got enough quest gear to start tanking heroics… but not much use for a prot pally in bg’s so I usually threw on all my holy gear and healed. it wasn’t long before I realized that even with two rogues on me I could hold a flag room/node long enough for reinforcements to show up. Nothing better than watching a rogue take himself down to 50% just from stunlocking me…. hehe.
Judezz, it varies from battlegroup to battlegroup. I also have a screenshot of the horde winning 647-0. We’ve done it several times but I don’t often remember to SS it.
I feel for you guys.
Queue times are on average < 3mins.
I win more than I lose and can make about 15 ~ 17k honor on AV weekend.
I find warrs to be the easiest of my foes. Frost kiting with concuss, intimidate, and BW usually means a dead warr. I duel all the time with one of my arena buddies so have the tactic down cold.
I honestly hate fighting other competent hunters.
Just wait till you get more resil. I’m at 400ish right now and love when I can take 3 would be gankers at a time.
Good stuff.
Hooyah!
Nice job BRK, but you happened across a couple guys who just dinged 70 I think. Also, it is a rare Paladin who doesn’t do his gay AOE attack to destroy every snake from the trap the second it procs. Not that hunters have big probs with Paladins, but the snake trap is usually useless against them.
That place where you dismounted is among my favorite in AV though. I just love the free HK’s of the laggers riding by. Best done with me rogue because the majority of them don’t even dismount when stunned. With the hunter it is great fun too! With me lock fun too, till the rogues jump me, grrr.
BRK? Two things. One, despite you being stinkin’ Ally, gratz on the good fight.
Hunters rock.
Two, is there any way you can control what ads Google puts on your blog? Four out of five of the ones there today are for WoW cheat sites or gold sellers… not at all what I want to see basking in the glory of your reflected radiance. O_o;;
What no video? me = disappointed. BRK, not sure how easy it is to capture video with the MAC uberness, but i found this application that i have fallen in love with called WeGame from http://www.wegame.com. Not even sure if it works on a MAC or not, but might be worth a shot. Once you have it installed and running, you bind a key on the keyboard to wegame and when you know your gonna go in for gankage like this, hit the key, it starts the recording, when your done with the gankage, click the button again and it stops the recording.
Then when your done, if you like the end result, you upload it to their servers and then you can share the URL with anyone you like. (The version that gets pushed to the website is a lower quality flash version, but you can upload the high resolution version to your website for download as well if you like.)
Here was my first attempt of a video of me ganking a cockroach on my PVP server. (The volume is distorted and I couldn’t get the music volume non-distorted, but I don’t think its bad for a first try):
http://www.wegame.com/watch/Little_PVP_action_Sorry_for_the_volume/
I love how the mob caster is what actually finished him off. *giggle*
Even if he hits the consecration as he hits the trap, he’ll take some poison, slowing him etc.
The goal in pally fighting is to make him OOM. Once that’s done you are usually going to win.
just another fine example of how skill > any gear, class, or spec
I feel for you guys with hour or longer queues. I’m Zangrarmarsh, Retalitaion battlegroup, and I’ve never seen them that bad since the server hit medium pop. I think boycotting a BG is silly. Would be nice if blizzard would declare a horde “auto win” on those servers and give yall free AV tokens on the AV weekends till they stop acting like spoiled children. And its probably because people can’t premade auto win it, the fastest queue times on my group are whatever side has the premade team making their rampage of distruction and easymode wins. I say premades should be capped at 10 and only one premade per side per BG. That way friends can play together but you don’t have as much of an imbalance issue due to premade.
And grats on the moment of glory BRK, that’s why I love PvP as much as PvE. Victory never gets that sweet in PvE.
Oh and 5 man max premade in WSG. Forgot to add that.
On the other hand, might be better just to dump premades alltogether and force people to work together as a team with who they end up with.
@ Ralowae
Blizz is going the other way. Newest addition to PTR patch notes is AV ‘Join as group’
To those who say Blessing of Protection. I am uncertain whether or not that works against ranged. For most bosses, “ranged” is not considered physical. Example would be the Mech boss in Mechanar. When he does a physical reflect barrier, it does not work on ranged.
And if it did prevent ranged damage, the arcane shot would dispel it the next time he used it.
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve gotten for pvp as a hunter came from Shifttusk, GET A BOAR. do it, do it now. That extra stun is so fantastic, it’s mind blowing.
Our que for av is on avg 1hr. The boycotting deal sucks big time. Face 75% premade in the other BG’s in my battle group. In AV I have never been part of a premade and we do win 85% of AV’s. Maybe it is just my server but Ally’s seem like whining little babies to me. Of course maybe that is what the Ally’s think about us. Great website though….alliance scum.
we hordies let em win sometimes on our battlegroup so’s they keep playing.
jk actually my battlegroup is filled with incompetents, so horde actually loses a lot of AVs post-huge-HP-buffs-on-bal-and-vann
Wow, for Vindication Battle Group the wait times are less then 5 mins most of the time. Once in awhile it will be a little longer, but I do remember when it used to take upto and hour to que up for AV pre-patch 1.8. I used to do my laundry inbetween battles
, lol really. Now I cant even get up and get a drink or run for a bio without queing. Blizz always said it was because of the Horde to Alliance ratio, but that was when it was just server and not Battle Group.
I do have a thought that if your with the same qued grp and win and you keep on winning you want to stay with that grp. I have had waited (ie, lol bio or laundry) and come back, qued up and some how got in a losening grp. Dont know how or why but it sure does seems that way.
I get a pre-made about twice a weekend, I just grind thru the first one but if it happens again, right after the previous one, I just afk out and take the time out. I would still like to see Pre-made agaist Pre-made, but it’s was supposed to be based on your armour and equipment (at least for the lvl 70s). not sure what it is now
. gratz on the win
Galor, Maggie and Rex
Good hunter bg education blog!
( on our server the horde wait times are usually two minutes at most)
Your stories are hands down my favorite part of your site. All the logic and numbers are great, but your story telling abilities are what keeps me coming back. In reality, the stories are also a great learning tool. If I’m ever taking down a horde warrior with a pally interrupt I’ll know what to do.
I’s amazified by the queue time variations people experiences. On Horde-side Whirlwind the wait is almost always less than a minute for any BG these days. AV weekend is like a revolving door fer us. Me team has found that the 10-19 WSG Horde queues on Retaliation is nearly as fast, but 10-19 Alliance on Emberstorm (BRK’s neck of the woods) normalies is 15-30 minutes.
Anybody know a solid explanation as to why?
nice …. textbook stuff ….
Another hordie with 1 hour queue times, Alliance is boycotting Shadowburn battlegroup as well. I play on maelstrom, and have been hearing rumours as to the top alliance guilds on our battlegroup using a ui mod to all queue up for AV at the same time. Now, I have seen abnormally large amounts of Alliance from the same server in the same AV before, but I dont know how much stock I put into the ui mod and all that.
I’m still trying to master the kiting warriors pvp thing. Is there an easy way to judge when your still in shot range yet out of intercept range? I tend to wonder into intercept range trying to get a shot off.
Posts like this make want to get back on my lil’ hunter.
On the AV boycott: from what I’ve heard from friends it’s not just losing that makes them sit out AV but also:
*the imbalance of honor gained when Alliance loses now, as opposed to when Horde lost pre-2.3
*An influx of AFKers that Blizzard does nothing about
*Disgust at other players’ unwillingness to even try strategy.
Has the warrior in this tale never heard of Intercept or Hamstring? It’s usually very hard to kite a warrior as a BM hunter. We have 18 seconds of free movement but it takes a long time to kill a warrior while kiting and he’ll eventually be able to catch you, hamstring and rip your head off.
Also, snake traps are very risky against a warrior as the snakes give him a lot of rage. It’s usually better to use a frost or ice trap (although most people can trinket out of those nowadays).