Just so you don't forget

Taken from arenajunkies, all credit to Harrianlar of Ravenholdt EU

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wondering where i've been?

Well, i got a computer. Only problem is that it's (much) worse than my laptop. The BG grind on my hunter has almost stopped completely due to all the lag spikes, it feels like i can't kite for shit because of it. So in the meantime i've been doing small arena matches on my hunter and on my rogue, (who is dwarf now) both of which are with Blarr. If you'd like to see us in action I welcome you to do so. With great pleasure we present the "Ehff'n Garg" series

Ehff'n Garg 1


Ehff'n Garg 2: matching beards



please excuse Blarrs UI, he's fixed it for the next one.

Kordwars Trap Academy

I do a lot of battlegrounds, seeing as I'm working on my battlemaster title (not currently, dead computer and all (helped by the shameless donate button to the right, 40$ (thanks Blarr) out of 120$ towards the goal of a new motherboard) and be it on my hunter, rogue or baby shaman i see a lot of bad trapping/obvious trapping. plain and simple: THEY'RE FUCKING TRAPS. I would have liked to make a video for this, but you'll have to deal with my poorly drawn MS paint pictures.

Trap leading 101:

Leading:

You can either be the kiter, or the kitee. Whoever you're kiting is going to follow you out of necessity and normally in a straight line. This is why trap placement is important and why leading plays a large part as well. we'll start with the most important, freeze trap leading. let's look at the first example:

if the trap is laid by the hunter (SV tree icon) while kiting to try and LoS the target (blue square)The target is going to follow your kiting path and take the most direct route and follow to where you're going

where he'll bypass your poorly laid trap

You're going to the pillar/rock/wall anyway, so just keep going and concussive shot to get a little breathing room. Lay your trap around the back.bait your target with an arcane (MM,BM) or explosive (SV) shot and run back behind the LoS, you now have two means of trapping your target. Whichever way he goes around said LoS you have a chance to trap.

Now is your chance to gain some distance and continue the kiting process, if he trinkets the freeze trap you can now scatter shot to negate it and take off (my favorite: feign death and mount). Once you hit about 35 yards you can break your freezing trap and keep kiting.

We'll take a brief recess with some tips:

1. Jumping is a part of kiting, but it is also a part of trapping believe it or not. When you lay traps you perform the /kneel animation, most don't pick it up but many do. Lay your traps while jumping to mask that animation.


2. Do your damnedest to get rid of mark of the wild with tranquilizing shot, you're going to hit a lot of very annoying resists due to traps going off the spell hit table (hurp) and not being effected by spell penetration (durp)

Funneling:

In a way, the best trap is an obvious trap. Not to contridict myself from earlier though, obvious meaning "why the hell wouldn't i put a trap there". Funneling is taking away the option of not eating that trap. let me show you a part of my favorite area in the entire game

The doorway that leads to blackrock depths (big thanks to Shirco of RH for the screenshot), a trap here is like laying a trap in the center of the chain, you have no way to avoid it if you're chasing. When you run through a doorway in any battleground you can lay a freeze trap there and know that your eating/bandaging/drinking won't be interrupted while you sit out of LoS (barring rogue disarms, but you had a flare covering the entire outside of the door right?)

now get out there and make Admiral Ackbar not know what hit him!

questions, comments, you know where they go.

another small update

Uploaded my christmas video to warcraft movies, so feel free to comment and rate :D



http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=136211

new armory is win

Quick update, I'm not dead. My computer is though, so all video making and such is on hold for a bit :(

What bothers me the most is this: S8 was going to be my season! i have awesome partners, and a great team setup (hunter/lock/druid)

here's to hoping things start looking up on the computer front.

Merry christmas to all!

In the spirit of the holidays I decided to give a little something back to Ravenholdts community, so without further ado I present....Kordwar's Christmas Carol!

It's best viewed in fullscreen, but normal works in a pinch.



Merry Christmas!

Oh, for those wondering, here's the final scoreboard at the end of the 2nd Arathi Basin (where it starts at goldmine)

So you want to PvP eh?

One thing I like about my job is that I can zone out and still get everything accomplished and no one gets hurt >.> so spent most of my day and lunch break reflecting on everything I've learned from my time participating in player vs. player combat. This isn't just a post for hunters, it's for anyone really. In the broad spectrum of PvP the same basic ideas are universal, and I'd like to share my thoughts on them with you.

First things first: NEVER stop learning. This is the most important thing I can stress, the moment you approach every situation the same as you always have is the moment you have already lost.

Situational awareness is more than key to successful PvP, there's a reason people leave the combat log open. The moment you see words like "Mikkos gains steath" and "Mikkos gains overkill" you have learned two things before the fight even starts: it's a rogue, better yet it's an assassination rogue. You won't learn if he is full 51 point assassination, 41/5/25 mut/prep or 44/2/25 master poisoner/prep until the fight begins but you'll have a slight upper hand in knowing what you can do to make the fight easier on yourself. For a good example of situational awareness, take a look at the opening scene of Rifle lovin' 12 on IQD.

Prediction and Reaction are footholds of PvP. It's the fine line between being juked (fake casting) and interrupting a cast. reacting, such as a rogue interrupting with gouge when a kick was juked or a hunter feigning death to drop target from a hostile casting opponent when your viable sources of interrupt are on cooldown. Prediction is merely knowing when something will happen and doing something about it before it even happens. Example: while running feral/rogue with Blarr on his druid we faced priest/rogue, Blarr found the rogue while i sapped the priest. As the sap wore off i began to stunlock the priest through the normal cheapshot into 6 second kidney, the rogue was dying so the moment the kidney shot ended I kicked. As I kicked I interrupted penance before a single tick went off, locking out the holy school for four seconds and giving me time to gouge as the rogue died. In this example we'll find several things, the priest had a choice to:

• penance to save his partner

• psychic scream me off and let his partner potentially die

I predicted he would penance and reacted accordingly, I took a risk in kicking before I even saw a cast bar. Judgment like that will not always fly, i could have wasted my kick only to be psychic screamed off and be forced to waste my trinket.

Predicting where someone will go is a powerful tool in all aspects of PvP, shooting freezing arrows onto warlock portals and putting up enough pressure to force them to port into it, or to an awaiting teammate to finish the job.

Synergy and Communication are cornerstones of a successful team. If you play with someone who doesn't compliment you at all you're asking for trouble. Example: Hunters and mages don't seem to jive well due to all crowd control (CC) effects share a diminishing return (DR) making full control and the ability to take down someone in the duration of CC very hard to accomplish. The reason survival / destruction worked so well was the complete lack of overlapping CC (other than freeze traps/wyvern and banish). His curse of elements debuff aided in my burst and my mortal strike aided in his.

Communication was key as well, announcing durations, what you're going to do and DRs (full/half/quarter/immune) aids in the victory. If you plan on playing with someone, duel. ALOT. You pick up subtle nuances in gameplay, how they react to things and how they make decisions. You'll get to a point after playing with someone long enough that you begin to predict what they'll do next, it's happened with Blarr and with my former (and favorite) healer Togori.

Lastly, Take time to familiarize yourself with the other classes, their mechanics and how they effect you. I learned the hard way that warrior disarm now effects ranged awhile ago, after eating a ten second disarm and having my face handed to me on the end of an axe made me start reading more patch notes than just ones that pertain to my own class.

Here's to hoping this helps someone in some small way.