I just had my first ever MMO PvP experience tonight. I was happily toodling along, doing a long-distance courier quest in the Night Elf lands, when I was accosted on a dark and lonely stretch of road by an Orc Warrior.
I don’t know if he’d spied me from afar and had sized me up, as the very first moment I was aware of him he was attacking me at close range. I think, though, that by the angle he came at me, he must have seen me coming from the nearby woods, moused over me to check my level and then decided to battle-charge over and smack me around.
I guess he figured that even though I was five levels above him, he could slice me up if he got into melee range since I was merely a lightly-armored mage. Oh, how wrong he was. After a couple of seconds of taking damage while I tried to figure out what the hell was going on, I rooted his ass to the spot with a Frost Nova spell, then backed off and proceeded to nuke his ass from a leisurely distance with Mark 4 Fireballs. He was a corpse about four seconds later.
Welcome to the club. At one time I hated PvP, but now I can’t play on a server without it. It will get even better in WoW when they implement the battlefields.
Oh, and if you’re a mage, don’t forget that you can blink out of stuns. Also, polymorph is your buddy. If you poly and wait 5-6 seconds you can eat and drink to regain health and mana. This only works for PvP fights.
I quit playing the WoW beta over PVP issues. Nothing says “Fun!” like being level 30 and having about 5-6 level 60 guys come in and rape your entire town for 2 to 3 hours, while you do your best to deal upwards of 30 damage to them on each of your lives.
I’ve alway wondered why people enjoy PvP games when engagements can be entirely one-sided. Myself, I would never consider such games fun, especially since I’ve got to work, and don’t have as much time to spend on games as 12 year olds who travel in packs, thinking it’s mighty heroic to gangbang lower-level players.
Precisely why the guild I’m in - who are pretty well known to kick major ass in DAOC’s PvP areas - opted for the non-PvP sever in Wow. Once you hit about level 15, you really aren’t safe from being ganked by much higher level guys, bigger groups, whatever.
As beta pogressed, they added some nice beefy guards to most towns and cities that makes it hard for a group of 60s to terrorize a town that’s not theirs (in the non-PvP server).
Hopefully the official Battlegrounds with their quests and rewards will come in pretty soon, giving those high-level powergamers some PvP targets that have more tangible rewards than beating up on a bunch of lowbies.
FWIW - I’m level 21 now and nobody in my guild has had, or seen, a single issue of PvP abuse yet. The occasional confrontation like Whitta described, which may be appropriate for the location, but nothing like the town raids that happened earlier in beta before the guard situation was improved.
One thing that changed since the last time I played in Beta is that the home areas (Elwyn, Stormwind, Ironforge, Darnassus, Auberine, Dun Morogh, and Westfall for Alliance) are non-PVP for the home team, unless they explicitly attack the enemy or use /pvp. This allows you to get to lvl 20 or so in safe zones, before you have to face the free for all of the Contested Areas.
In beta and on the PvP server I was able to avoid any form of PvP till level 35. And this when all the rest of the population was at level 60.
The zones are built by levels. Even in the contested zones you’ll probably meet opponents around your level. This is what makes the “casual” PvP so fun. Just as a digression between a quest and the other. The various spots on the map where you go doing quests, potentially become a PvP arena. If you die you just need to get back your corpse and try again with your party.
It’s so fun that you’ll spend hours just returing to the spot even if you are done with the quest. Just because group vs group around a farm is wonderful.
The WORST thing that could happen is about having to leave a spot for an hour or so because it’s heavily camped. So?
The PvP is perfect, it just needs purposes and goals to add a flavor. The fun is already in, what is needed is a role within the structure of the game.
Death in WoW causes modest item degradation, forcing you to pay up some money after a few deaths to get it fixed. And you have to run back to your corpse. Unless you get stuck somewhere and can’t reach your body (rare, but possible) or you simply don’t want to deal with the hassle (less likely now that many zones have multiple graveyards), you don’t have to use the spirit healer which will cost you experience. So the death penalty is, in effect, trivial.
I happen to like it as it encourages exploration and heroics, unlike mainstream MMORPGs where you are scared shitless to go anywhere not thoroughly mapped out, annotated, and processed. Others think it takes the “edge” off and makes combat less exciting. YMMV.
Death at the hands of another player does not cause item degradation, to the best of my knowledge. It’s just a matter of running back to your corpse or getting resurrected, that’s it.
Well, who pays the spirit healer? Honestly. Everybody runs to the corpse or gets a rez. I’m level twenty and haven’t paid her yet.
Uh, ever tried sneaking through a level 50+ area to finish a long quest faster? =)
As for PvP, WoW’s PvP is pretty solid. Definitely not as pathetic as DAoC’s. “Dark Age of Don’t Bother Trying to Hit Another Player With a Melee Weapon.” Although, I must say, the limited death penalties and lack of looting does make it kind of pointless. I kept killing this mage the other day over in Stonetalon. Every time I popped him, he came back and tried again. I must have killed him five times before he finally realized he wasn’t going to get me and stopped coming around.
I used to do it all the time during the beta, particularly when I entered an area I was too wussy to be in and didn’t want to run to my corpse and get my ass kicked again, or if I wanted to sell off items in town, or just didn’t want to spend 20 minutes walking across the map to get to some other destination (particularly if it was in the opposite direction of my corpse).
I’d take the XP hit, because I could get that back. But I can’t get back the time I waste going from Point A to B.
That’s true, but I wasn’t obsessed with gaining levels, in the sense of worrying if I lost XP because my goal was simply to explore and complete quests. The leveling was the means to get more quests and see more areas.
It’s sort of an arbitrary distinction, but I feel like running across the map just to get my corpse so I could run back to the place I started is pointless and boring. Running across the map to a quest, or to explore a new place, is… less boring.
Unless it’s different on the PvP server, paying the spirit healer now costs 25% degradation on all items, which blows.
Nope, it’s the same. spirit healer costs you the exp plus the degradation At low levels it’s negligible, especially as a caster. At higher levels the costs do add up.
I used the spirit healer in beta several times to avoid long corpse runs, or when I died under the world or in the ocean due to bugs. So far in retail I haven’t had to.
Sometimes it’s just not worth the time to get your body, but usually it’s ok.
I’ve used the spirit healer once or twice and unless I’m mistaken there’s no longer an XP cost. Instead all your armor takes a 25% durability hit. So spirit healer rezzing is effectively now a cash-only cost.
