Hello everyone. It's been many years since I've played wow, but I was a regular pvper in the battlegroup Emberstorm. I fought on both sides with a few different characters, but I was primarily know through my Draenei Shaman, Istara, in the 39 bracket. I also played on the Drender server.
This thread will mostly be about me remembering the good 'ol days, when I battled against the best 39's Emberstorm had to offer, pve'ing in my pvp gear, and the first time I ever got hit with pryoblast. Why am I doing this, you ask? Because I miss it so damn much T.T I need an outlet. I am also posting this here in the pvp section, since this almost entirely battleground related.
Now to begin. I first started out as a Human Warlock. Hexenraven was the name of my character. The server was Shadowmoon, a pvp server. This was a time before battlegroups, when battlegrounds where fought against the opposing team on ones own server. Getting into a battleground the first time took forever. But once I got in, openings started happening much faster. My first few battlegrounds were a fight for survival. The trepidation of the opposing team coming at you. The rush of combat. The sweet taste of victory, and the bitterness of defeat. I was hooked. I wasn't terrible, but I still had a lot to learn.
At this time, Shamans were the top dogs. And jokes along the lines of "A bug where Shaman's occasionally die in combat" were common. Twinks were few, and far between. But a Shaman could still hit like one. Windfury was very powerful. It's hard to remember all the details, but as I got more into it, I began upgrading my gear, and working on making myself a better competitor, bit by bit. Doing things like not falling into tunnel vision, getting the right timing down with drain life, and using dots more effectively. I experimented with all sorts of different methods of fighting. And with this character, my biggest success, and biggest failure was going for pure shadow damage. If you're confused by this, I'll explain. My roommate played a Troll Mage, who's strategy I copied. He, himself was inspired by Faxmonkey. He went the route of gearing for pure spell/ice power, and could shoot insanely powerful ice bolts. This would later become to be known as a 'glass cannon'. Following this example, I ended up with super strong shadowbolts. This was a success, as no one could survive more then 4 hits from my character. The occasional twink included. Hexenraven was the hardest hitter in all her bg's. But she had zero survivability. Shamans, Rogues, and Hunters ate her alive. My character died often before being able to cast a single shadowbolt. I tried every method I could think of, or that was suggest to me in combating them, or avoiding them. But nothing worked. She could not fight, or evade them. For this reason, this was also my greatest failure.
Overtime it came to me that I was trying to play my Warlock like a Mage, when I should be playing it like a Warlock. This required major changes in my thinking, talent tree, and gear. Hexenraven did much better, but Rogues, and a good number of Hunters still could not be overcome. Around this time, Shaman's were no longer the top dogs. More on that later.
I mentioned earlier that Shadowmoon was a pvp server. I went to this server to play with a dear friend of mine. (She quit after awhile T.T) And I hated this place a lot. It was nearly impossible to do anything pve-wise, as I couldn't walk more then a few feet in any direction without getting ganked. Gankers were relentless, and were obsessive with corpse camping. Or tracking you down to begin anew if you chose to raise at the graveyard. The simplest of tasks took hours to do. There were a few threads that complained about this, but they were usually met with the standard phrase "PVP happened on a PVP server." A sound statement.
The rule of thumb was to not roll on a pvp server if you didn't want to put up with the headache. Perfectly sound advice, but I didn't have that choice. That's were my friend was, so that's where I had to go.
For world pvp proponents, the excitement was in the thrill of the constant danger. But no one I ever talked to found getting ganked for hours on end, either thrilling, or exciting. The true heart of the matter was the joy in killing players who couldn't fight back, and hounding them until they logged
out. On the rare occasions where gankers couldn't get to their intended targets, they'd get very offended. I never understood this, nor do I understand it now. Give me an adversary on equal footing, who knows his/her stuff. Now there's a fight worth having.
The only amusement I ever had out in the world on this server, was when I had to travel to Ratchet. (Is that the right name? It was the counterpart to Booty Bay) Would be gankers were so single mindedly throwing themselves at me, that they were constantly getting killed by the guards. In less then a minute, I was completely surrounded by corpses. To make it even more funny, it was the same people, getting themselves killed over, and over, and over again. Seeing things like this makes me think that sometimes natural selection really is the best way to go. Oh well.
I will paraphrase now, and say I made myself a Horde Warlock, and later- my Draenei Shaman. I didn't touch Hexenraven for awhile. It was very convenient being able to take care of pve stuff so I could dive back into battlegrounds. With no reason to endure Shadowmoon anymore, I eventually transfered Hexenraven to Drenden, where she could help fund Istara for twinking.
I believe this thread is now long enough, and will call it good here. If you made it this far, thanks for letting me indulge myself. And who knows, maybe one of the many, many players I fought with/against in the 39's still reads these forums, and will see this post.