Here's a part-rant, part-reality check...So I'm in AB the other day and we're trying to take GM. We're slightly ahead in points, but the balance has just switched to 3/2 for the horde. We have ST and BS. Calling anyone who's reached 70 a noob is pretty lame, but the lack of understanding of basic battleground strategy is astonishing sometimes. (On both sides, mind you.) If Alliance has ST and BS, then we try GM first. So naturally 10 of the team head for LM from BS, and get in a furball with the hordies rezzing out of farm. Sigh.
Read all about basic BG strategy before you enter a battleground. Seriously. You don't have to be an expert, well geared, or even fight particularly well. You just need to know where to go in a particular situation. In this AB, the horde had done an 8-man rush on LM. This is proper for them because all they had at the time was farm. They'd failed two valiant attempts to take BS.
The reason has to do with the crossroads and distance between the nodes. ST/GM/BS crossroads is more strategically important for the team that holds ST. The Farm/LM/BS crossroads is more strategically important for the team that holds Farm. You rez very close to that crossroads and the travel distance is much shorter than the opposite middle node. Which means you can get a larger group of fighters to a the contested node, or push through to a less defended node, or bring them into defense of node WAY faster.
So if everyone goes the opposite direction, you're fubar. The 10 of ours that went to LM wiped. GM, not being as important to the horde, had one Tauren Shammy defending.
So me and another warrior, after "/bg go GM" (which no one listened to), end up being the only two headed to GM. We come thundering in, see the Shammy with his rainbow of totems around the flag, and commence to wailing on him. And we keep hitting him. And we keep hitting him. And this goes of for, seriously, 2 full minutes.
Now the shammy was pretty much fully geared for PvP. Granted. The other warrior had his full set of S1 gear and two pieces of S3 gear. I'm about half way to full S1 gear. Over all though, two warriors, both spec'd Fury and Arms/Fury with plenty of dps. And we smack this guy around for a full 2 minutes!
We get him down to about 22%, we're both full of rage, and I know we both have our fingers hovering on the execute button. That this guy has that much stamina is frustrating, but we're getting there, right? So he stuns us with the Tauren special race ability. We both trinket, but it's too late... he's healed back to full strength almost instantly. WTF? is an appropriate response.
Right after that, the dots start hitting and the two Locks show up. We didn't last much longer, of course.
Okay, so Shammy's are way overpowered. And they have been for a long time. So are a lot of classes compared to your average warrior. You rarely hear anyone complaining that "warriors are over powered." :) So as a warrior, you kind of get use to the fact that in PvP your job is to do what you can. Most of the time that's soaking up damage, keeping enemies off the objective, tanking/melee dps'ing the bosses, eating dots, and delaying the enemy at strategic times.
On the other hand, a fully geared warrior (S1, S2 or S3) is a holy terror on the battlegrounds. As they should be, they earned it. And they probably spent a lot more time, effort and skill than any other class to get there. Oh the battle...
We won. It wasn't pretty but somehow we pulled it off with some good coordination (for a PUG) and some luck (read: bad moves by the hordies). The other warrior went back to GM with 7 others, including a healer, and kicked the crap out of the hordies there. Revenge is sweat. :) I responded to a small strike on BS with the Pally that was guarding, a druid and a rogue. The Pally and I then stayed at BS and called out positions. We held of three assaults as well. I have a love/hate relationship with Pallys sometimes. heh!
The other warrior took GM, then when I called out that a 5-man strike was heading for ST (which was just stupid, but maybe they figured we would try to defend it harder... which in my experience, is valid because we often do), he hit Farm hard with 6 others. He wisely left only one a GM. Then we funneled rezes from BS to ST and pressured farm and LM constantly. The poor hordies fell into disarray and we held them to 1 or 2 nodes for the rest of the game.
The overpowered debate is just something warriors have to live with and develop a thick skin over. If you do everything right and you still loose a fight, that's not bad playing, that's someone playing a class that has a built in advantage so that they Don't have to play well. Fair enough, I suppose. WoW isn't and shouldn't be a PvP game, as much as Blizzard seems to want to make it so. I doubt they'd ever release the statistics, but out of 10 million accounts, I'll bet a VERY small percentage engage in Arena combat, for example. Yet arena is one of Blizzard's biggest focus areas. PvP just can't and shouldn't be balanced.
Learn to play your class in a coordinated strategy is the best thing any player can do. Read the base strategies and follow them for each battleground. Quit milling around like sheep. (Unless, of course, that damn undead mage has sheeped you again, then it's okay.) Know where to go and when to go. Do it, and you'll win a lot more.
I can't do anything about the class balance in PvP, nor can I do anything about how much better geared/ or undergeared another player is. But I can know where to go and what to do so that my team has the best change to win. Like I said, the basic strategies aren't that difficult to learn and execute, and they make a HUGE difference. Go get 'em.
-Fri
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