For The Children

Children's Week is upon us, which means that it's time for The School of Hard Knocks to rear it's ugly head again.

Hey... it's For The Children.

As usual when it's something PvP related, I recommend that you turn to Cynwise.  If you're going to be in the BGs trying for your achievement, take a look at his guide for the event.  If you're a regular BG participant, you might want to consider his Modest Proposal.

Me?  I'm thinking that I'll drop in on a BG or two, just to lend a hand.  Not on Aeth, though, tempting as that might be.  Perhaps I'll get some starter PvP gear on Laenshield or Aretae or even Aeven and see what PvP as a different class feels like.

Cynwise: the center of (PvP) wisdom

Cynwise has posted a number of good articles on the School of Hard Knocks achievements over the past couple of days. If you're like me - a WoW player who has managed to hit 80 without getting the battleground PvP bug - and you want advice on how to accomplish the various tasks, her blog is absolutely the place to go for advice.

Even before you head there, though, I'd suggest doing a bit more reading about the battlegrounds on wowwiki or wowhead. If you're unfamiliar with the battlegrounds, you might want to think about just diving in and playing them once or twice before trying for your achievement. If you get lucky and find yourself in a situation where the opposing team is cooperating (much more likely in AV or WG), then great - you'll get those out of the way quickly. If not, you'll at least have a chance to orient yourself so that you know where to go and what to do instead of wondering "Is this the stables? Do I click on something now?" (Not that I ever did that... more than once, at least.)

The sweet, sweet taste of victory

26 EotS battles... 6 won, 20 lost.

650+ honorable kills.

35,000+ honor earned.

One flag capture without my orphan out :-(

And one flag capture with :-)

Achievement Earned: School of Hard Knocks

Achievement Earned: For The Children

Title Earned: Matron

At the end of it all... yeah, I do have a sense of achievement. I generally run around on my mage lady with my Loremaster flag flying, but I think that I'll wear Matron for a while now. Because the flag that I got the achievement with?

I pried it from the cold, dead hands of the enemy flag carrier.

Yeah, you heard that right.

Oh, yeah, sure, there was a pally involved at some point - there generally is, in these sorts of affairs. He was quite a fine gentleman, too! Once we downed the flag carrier, he saw that I had my orphan out, and let me grab the flag. Then he and a few other teammates escorted me all the way back to the capture point. I picked up the flag about halfway to the Fel Reaver Ruins, and while I was running it back, we lost control of the Blood Elf Tower. So I ended up having to carry it all the way back to the Draenei Ruins to get the capture.

I was literally shaking the whole way. Popped Mana Shield immediately and kept it up the whole run. "Come on, come on... can't I run any faster? Who's behind me? Oh, they're on my team..." Fingers on my keys for Frost Nova and Every Man For Himself the whole way. Swiveling the camera around, wishing that I had thought to chow down on some Blackened Worg Steak so I could see exactly who was around me.

As I approached the Draenei Ruins, I spotted an Orc warrior standing just a few yard away from the flag capture point, and my heart skipped a beat. I just about screamed. So I gritted my teeth, made sure Mana Shield was up, popped Presence of Mind and got ready to break stun and hit him with an instant Polymorph, and ran for the capture point.

I don't know if Mr. Orc Killing Machine was distracted, or if he was less concerned with me and more so with the teammates behind me. Maybe he saw my orphan out and decided to be gracious. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, and presume the last. In any case, he left me alone, and a few seconds later, I captured my second (and probably last) EotS flag, got my achievement, and ...

... immediately turned and ran to defend the Fell Reaver Ruins. Because they needed reinforcements, and I've learned that holding towers is what you do in EotS, don't you know? Yeah, I wasn't about to abandon the battle just because I got what I wanted out of it. That would be... rude and inconsiderate. So instead of breaking away to celebrate immediately, I helped destroy a warlock, priest and hunter who thought they had the stones to try and take FRR back from us.

Less than a minute later, the battle was over, the Alliance had won the field 1600 to 1593, and most importantly of all, I had managed to capture my stinking lousy good-for-nothing flag. Doing it the right way, thank you. Sure, I had a more than a little help along the way, but... hey. Teamwork for the win.

Do I have a better feel for PvP on my mage lady now? You betcha. Do I find myself longing to get back into the battlegrounds and litter them with the bodies of my enemies? No, not really. Though I may head back to EotS this week to help some other poor souls capture their flags. Turns out dropping a mage bomb in front of pursuing enemies is just what the doctor ordered for letting a flag carrier get those precious few extra yards.

Teamwork FTW, doncha know :-)

Feeling like the Pirates

Well, maybe not that bad. I did manage to go 0 for 20 in Eye of the Storm last night over the course of about four hours or so, though. I was a spell-stealing, slow-tossing, polymorphing, blinking, ice-blocking and arcane barraging little fiend. All of that wasn't near enough to get me close to a flag except for one time, when I had possession for about 15 seconds before a belf pally decided that I looked like lunch.

EotS is actually pretty fun to play (see? I *do* like PvP! Really!) - it's the whole "capture the flag when your class isn't designed for capturing the flag" thing that particularly sucks right now. I had a nice pally who offered to bring back a flag for me to cap in one match, but that was towards the end of the game so she never actually had a chance to do so. Que sera, sera, I guess.

I did my best to clue people in at the start of the matches:

"Achievement folks: capture towers first, stay to guard"

"A, B - take Draenei Ruins (DR) to the east, stay to guard"

"X, Y - take Mage Tower (MT) to the west"

"Ret pallies - rush for the Fell Reaver Ruins (FRR) across bridge from MT"

"Everyone else, control the center"

"Tower guards: watch and warn of for incoming"

"Flag carriers: if you don't need the achievement, and can drop the flag at the tower for someone who does, please do so - we'll love you for it and sing your praises"

"Oh - and kill the Hordies while you're at it :-)"

Here's what really freaked me out: for about a third of the battles, this was enough leadership that someone passed me the battleground leader position.

Me.

I mean... aside from one time I was in E0tS last year because I think I clicked on the wrong button somewhere, this was really my first time in the battleground. I must sound like I know what I'm doing, for some reason. I really don't - we lost every time I was lead. Well, we pretty much lost every time I wasn't lead, too, but all our wins were when somebody else was in charge.

Once it was obvious in any given match that I wasn't going to get a chance at the flag, I just cut loose and made life miserable for any Horde spellcaster I came across. Polymorph, repeated Spellsteal to strip them of all their buffs... then Slow, Presence of Mind + Arcane Blast to start whittling them down, then keep Slow up while peppering them with Arcane Barrage and Arcane Missiles when Missile Barrage proc'ed.

Best event of the evening: my mage-lady and two other mages taking back the flag spawn point from the Horde. Not just one guard, but about 6-7 of them. No, I am not kidding - we were in the groove at that point. There were sheep, penguins, and rabbits running hither and yon; there were healers stripped of all their buffs, then burned down by fire, frost and arcane energies; there were boomkins silenced, counterspelled, and turned into chicken fricasee in a matter of moments. When we were done, when the Horde bodies littered the ground, we looked around, and saw a lone pally watching us form their end of the bridge... and when we started heading towards him, he backed off.

Boo yeah. Go team mage! We lost the spawn point a minute later, but man, that was cool. Archmage Pants would have been proud of us.

Aside from that, I did my best to play a good supporting role. Flag carrier being pursued? Blink, frost nova, slow, poly... and yeah, I generally died from that, but someone got to capture the flag. By the end of the evening, I had something like 30 assists, and had yet to capture the flag myself.

The very bet match we had, when we were controlling the flag spawn and three towers, there was one druid who kept on capturing the flag, and absolutely refused to give anyone else a chance to do so. So, here we see the wonderful nature of the PvP player: we give him all the support he needs to win the battle, and in return, he repeatedly shafts us. Stay classy, dude! Hmm. I'll have to see if a battleground leader can kick people from the raid or not...

So I'll be continuing my mage-based EotS flag capture attempts tonight. I'm seriously considering putting together a group and offering a 500 or even a 1k gold bounty to the first person who drops the flag for me at a tower so I can capture it. Barring that, I guess I'll do my best to enjoy myself, rack up another 25k honor and 500 honorable kills, and maybe play around a bit and see if BG leaders can kick those uncooperative gits or not.

Since there's not much going on...

Well, OK, there's a lot going on. You probably just don't want to hear me nerd rage about BGs any more than I actually want to think about them, so instead, let's just go off to a happy place...

She put her hand into mine again. “Where now? Me bored.”

It wasn’t quite in me to protest again. The little creature was obviously mentally deficient, bloodthirsty, soggy, supernaturally full of snot and as alone in the world as I was.

-- from "I Gerald, Chapter 3" at Righteous Orbs

See? It's not that hard...

Check out WoW.com for some happy stories about folks working on the School of Hard Knocks achievement. Really, go. It's sweet. It will fill you with a new feeling of unbounded hope an optimism for our wretched society. It will make you all misty-eyed, even.

Which is better than the tears of frustration you'll squeeze out when the rest of your team in Eye of the Storm lets the opposing side tear you apart without lifting a finger, and tells you "lol who care about your achieve".

Yeah. I guess I'll just continue with the EotS lottery this evening, until I get someone willing to take pity on me. New strategy: capture a tower, wait for the inevitable pally/druid flag carrier to show up, and ask them drop the flag so I can capture it for the achievement. Or hey, maybe I'll get really lucky and find a pair of teams cooperating. Stranger things have happened, and hey - it's for the children, don't chu know.

"The recipe calls for a full cup of PvP - is 3/4 cup OK?"

Well, no. For doing School of Hard Knocks, Blizzard insists that you really need a full cup of PvP. Whether you like it or not.

Now, I'll be honest - I do like PvP, or at least, like it as much as a primarily PvE player can. Just last night, I got my 1000 Honorable Kills achievement on my main, Ms. Arcane Mage. I've actually got a set of PvP gear; not the best, but it's gemmed and enchanted appropriately. I love nothing more than to spend some time in Wintergrasp, mining and farming. Wintergrasp is, in my mind, just the right thing for world PvP... a place where the rewards are a bit greater, the risks are a bit higher, and you get to dive into a bloody big brawl every couple of hours. Loads of fun.

In contrast, I absolutely despise battlegrounds.

Well, most battlegrounds. I haven't tried Strand of the Ancients yet, nor... um. Whatever the island battleground is in Wrath. That's how uninterested I am. While there's a decent chance that I'll drop what I'm doing and pop into Wintergrasp when a battle rolls around, it's an almost mathematical certainty that I will never bother to hit any battleground I don't actually have to be in for some reason.

The primary reason is the players.

I was in the Navy at one point. My first assignment, I was a junior officer in a very visible division. This was on board a ship commanded by a senior captain bucking for admiral. Nothing was ever done to his satisfaction, and he was sometimes... colorful... in letting you know that you were, in fact, made of fail. Repeatedly. I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure we had a least one psychiatric discharge as a result of his repeated verbal castigations.

Dealing with him was pleasant compared to your average chapeau-wearing posterior in a WoW battleground. Seriously. You guys complaining about bad PuGs? Hit a random battleground and follow something less than an optimal strategy. Even better - if there are two possible things you can be doing (capturing a flag, capturing a tower), pick one. You'll be told in detail, with explicit references to your sexual orientation and practices, why you're an idiot for doing A instead of B, and how you're doing A wrong in any case. Oh, and how, thanks to the fact that you didn't do B, your side is definitely going to loose the battle, and it's all your fault.

Unfortunately, I had to spend 3 hours in battlegrounds last night to get the first three parts of the achievement. Fortunately, that translated into only about 8 or 9 battlegrounds... and while the first experience in any particular battleground was less than stellar, I managed to get lucky and and find cooperating Horde/Alliance groups in subsequent runs.

Even then, though, there were the inevitable "lol don care 4 your achieve ima kill horde n00b" mouth breathers who tried to screw things up because... sheesh, I don't know. Because they're immature childish idiots who get off on griefing others? In any case, their idiocy gave me another achievement. It's not one you can see in game on the armory; so you'll have to trust me when I tell you that last night a few fellow achievement hounds and I all got the "Applaud An Undead Shadow Priest For Melting The Face Off Of A Complete And Utter Dirtwad Of A Teammate" achievement...

Hopefully I'll luck out and find some cooperative groups in the Eye of the Storm tonight, so I can say goodbye to battlegrounds for a good long while.

On the plus side: since I couldn't handle nine consecutive battlegrounds without actually killing someone with my bare hands IRL, I ended up taking breaks after each achievement to cool down and let Aeven run around Searing Gorge. By the end of the evening, I had not only picked up 3 out of 4 parts of the School of Hard Knocks, I had also managed to get Aevern a full level! Yep, she's 54 now, and pushing into the end of the vanilla WoW content.

Of course, since I wasn't paying attention, I'm going to have to assemble a group by hand to finish up Marudon. That should be interesting. Aside from that, though, I'm happy that Aeven is sailing right along at nice clip, headed for the Outland.