MGD, Meet PvP

Don’t ask me why Archimonde, a PvE raid boss requires that raiders have in their possession a PvP trinket. I like peanut butter in my chocolate. Can’t say the same about PvP in my raiding. Nevertheless, raiders need that 2 minute trinket if they hope to beat Archie. This week’s Requiem sign-up board stated that if you didn’t have it, you wouldn’t be guaranteed a spot.

Emanee has the 5 minute trinket, but not the new-and-improved 2 minute one.

Some weeks back, Requiem made a similar call-to-arms for Rage Winterchill and the 5 minute trinket. I accidentally stumbled upon some guild PvP action, so getting the 6k reputation for the trinket turned out to be easy and fun. A pre-made, vent coordinated guild PvP session is hard to beat, especially when the peeps involved are used to raiding with each other. We racked win after win in AB. I don’t recall losing a single match. In fact, “losing” meant not zerging the Alliance stables fast enough.

Winning is fun.

I’m sure management requested everyone grind out their 2 minutes trinket weeks ago. I missed the memo. So now I find myself needing to grind 16k reputation in a week’s time. I’ve managed 5k in the past two days, but it’s been inefficient. After winning the daily, I switch to AV because the sessions tend to be quick and I want to get that frost wolf mount. Out of nine AV sessions I attended, Horde won three and lost six. For some reason, Horde struggles with AV. I can waltz into an AB or EotS and almost always win the very first session. But not AV. Inevitably upon logging in, someone says in PvP chat, “Can we PLEASE win this time?”

Losing is not fun.

I’m not sure why Horde sucks in AV. Is the map too big? In AB and EotS, the maps are fairly small. It’s easy to move from flag to flag in reaction to alliance zergs. But AV is a long, stretched out map. If a resurrection point is lost, it can take minutes to ride back to the action. But I don’t think it’s the map size because if it were, Alliance would struggle too, and they don’t.

So it comes down to strategy. My last few sessions of AV yesterday, a toon begged people to skip Bal and ride straight to AS. The one time everyone listened, we killed Van and won. The many, many times we lost, people fragmented. We never made a good push on AS and Van went virtually untouched. Alliance coordinates and focuses while Horde dithers and wanders.

After the fourth consecutive AV loss yesterday, I changed personal strategies and popped a frosty MGD. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Horde went on to win that session. Apparently, WoW PvP has driven me to drink. As long as I don’t ride my mount head-on into someone else, I should be ok.

Any designated PvP’ers out there?