WoW Insider covers the world of player vs. player action in Blood Sport for fans of battleground, world PvP and Arena play. Steering you to victory is Olivia Grace, who spends most of her time in Azeroth as a restoration shaman turning people into frogs.
With patch 4.3 imminent and Arena season 10 due to end Nov. 29, it seems reasonable to assume the patch will appear in early December. While you’re racing to get your team into title range, get that last piece of gear, or just running laps of your capital city, you might be thinking forward to the arrival of the patch and wondering what your fate will be in PvP as the nerf bat winds up for another swing. Firstly, let’s deal with some housekeeping.
Conquest points, the PvP equivalent of valor points, will now be far, far easier to earn from ordinary Battlegrounds. The first daily Battleground win will now award 100 conquest points, up from 25, and wins after that will award 50 conquest point, up from, well, none! The conquest cap will remain, so while it will still be far quicker to reach it through Arena, it will also be attainable via Battlegrounds of the non-rated variety. This makes it far easier for solo players to build up the resilience numbers people often demand (fairly or otherwise) for access to Arena and Rated Battleground teams or just to gear for Battlegrounds.
I was originally going to write this week’s Blood Sport on the myriad of PvP changes on the PTR. However, I found myself writing a large amount about one subject, so much that it deserves its own post. Warlocks are losing Drain Mana in Patch 4.0.6. I’ll get to the other changes some time soon (Blizzard is still not finished releasing changes at the moment). To summarize what is about to be a very long post, I don’t agree with this philosophy.
No sir, not one bit.
Ghostcrawler
We are probably going to remove Drain Mana from warlocks. It is incredibly situational in PvE but causes problems in PvP. This might mean we need to evaluate Mana Burn as well.
I’d like to know what kind of problems Ghostcrawler is referring to. I don’t know anyone who thinks Drain Mana is an incredibly powerful ability right now. Does it shorten games? Sure. That’s the intended effect — or so I thought, anyway.
My original title for this post was going to be “You got your pop culture in my roleplay!” “No, you got your roleplay in my pop culture!” But that doesn’t fit, and it isn’t a very descriptive title. Still, this issue of “how many cultural reference is okay in game” is an argument I see come up in roleplay alot. WoW, tabletop, and LARP all seem equally plagued by it.
My example is, of course, the above video. It’s not a WoW roleplay thing, but it’s still a pretty good illustration of my point. The LARPer is taking the part of Baron Samedi, who is attempting to convert some snake-worshipping vampires to his own religion. I don’t know enough about the game dynamic to evaluate it on anything except the obvious; the video’s creator is performng a parody of the Old Spice commercials in a very in-character manner. (Thanks to OWbN for the example.) In my opinion, the creator did a pretty good imitation of the vocals, and mirrored the Old Spice commercials pretty well.
With the technical evaluation out of the way, we’re left to wonder if it makes sense that an ancient vampire god really spends that much time cruising YouTube. But on the other hand, the video’s kind of funny, and probably some people had fun with it. Isn’t that kind of the point of roleplay?
Ghostcrawler