Naughy by Nature wants to know if you down with PvP?

<Downfall> has a long history as a fantastic community and a very good end game raiding guild. We are, as far as I know, the only Alliance-side guild on the server to have been an active participant in raiding during Vanilla and every expansion since. We killed Chromaggus on our first ever attempt and then came back the next night and killed Nefarian on our first ever pull too. We cleared AQ40 through Twin Emps pre-nerf while making a brief foray into Naxx 40. We killed Muru in the Sunwell. We killed heroic Lich King in two different independent raids. We did some stuff during Cata which I don’t remember since I was off doing other stuff. We have cut a mighty swath through Pandaland as the best raiding guild on our server cluster during this most recent expansion. This is a damn good PvE guild. However, my purpose for writing this was not to (justifiably) jerk off you dragon killing bad asses. No, I wrote this because I know something. I know that we are capable of being a great PvP guild too.

Now, our guild has had some success in PvP over the years. We’ve had multiple gladiators and many duelists throughout the history of WoW arenas and even had a very competitive RBG team during the first half of Cataclysm. However, I believe that we are capable of more. I firmly believe that good raiders have exactly the right sort of attitude to succeed in rated BGs and arenas too. Becoming a good PvPer requires several things of you…



1) The ability to acknowledge that until you play perfectly all the time in every facet of the game (ability use, communication, positioning, general offensive and defensive tactics, etc.) you still have things to learn. You don’t know everything. Nobody does. I recently watched a video where Rank 1 Gladiator mage Venruki was being interviewed and providing his thoughts on PvP stat priority, gemming, enchanting and reforging (lol!) for frost mages in 5.4. This is a guy
who is more knowledgeable, skilled and experienced at his part of the game than anybody in this guild is likely to ever be at any part of the game. He is the PvP equivalent of the most skilled raider in a Top 10 PvE guild. At the end of the video some less experienced players had an opportunity to float some questions by him. A couple of these questions dealt with rather unconventional stat builds which Venruki hadn’t considered and stumped him. He didn’t strike me as the least bit embarrassed or defensive about not knowing the correct answer right away. He just said that he wasn’t sure, but that he’d be happy to try and work out an answer for them later. That is the sort of lack of ego that you need to keep getting better even when you’ve reached the top and one of the biggest reasons why he is so good.

2) A willingness to seek out other players as well as online resources to learn what it is you could be doing better and practice those things until you are good at them. In short, you need to have work ethic. Gladiators aren’t born. They start out as shitty players and work hard to get that good. In addition to looking for new, improved tactics you need to be prepared to work hard to ditch whatever bad habits you’ve developed and develop positive ones in their place. This will certainly involve experimenting with many different builds for your character(s), but also rethinking things as fundamental to the way that you play as your UI and keybindings. You need to be the sort of person to say “I may have used these bindings for the past decade, but there’s a decent chance that this other set of bindings will be better once I get used to them so I’m going to work at learning them and adapting to them. Then, if they don’t work I am prepared to go back.” The best recent examples which I can think of in my personal experience are my friends Claydo and Hesterry. They are both incredibly focused and are always looking for ways they can become better, more efficient players. They’re also great about sharing knowledge. It’s important that we’re a group of players who share every new concept that has any merit and scrutinize it together. That’s how we’ll all get better together.

3) Patience. You will fail a lot on the road to becoming good. You will make mistakes and cost your team games. Your teammates will repeat mistakes and frustrate you. You must always be thinking about what you can do in the next game. You should be sharing your thoughts about what you and others could improve while remaining calm and respectful and listening carefully when your teammates bring up suggestions of their own. You will not get anywhere if you are too proud to recognize when you have made mistakes and you will be miserable and make others miserable if you are disrespectful and rude to them. The very best players are always patient, respectful teammates. My friends Disrupta and Idio are both players blessed with tremendous patience. They are both superb players. Two of the very best that I know. They have achieved that level of success with hard work, but even still they are patient with teammates, never rage, and always have good, constructive criticism to offer. They also are quick to consider any critiques which others might share with them.

In my opinion the presence of these three key personal qualities (Lack of Ego, Work Ethic, Patience) are the same things which make someone a good raider or, frankly, good at anything in life. You guys are good people and good raiders so you can be good PvPers too if you are willing to apply those wonderful qualities to this new environment. It will be frustrating at first. It will require developing an intimate understanding of not just your own abilities, but those of all of your teammates and opponents as well. It will take a lot of time to become a great player, but if you want to do it and have the time to invest then you will get there. I know this is true.

So the question I’m going to ask isn’t whether you are a great PvPer now, but rather whether you want to become one?

Wouldn’t it be awesome to be out in the world doing your farming or dailies and instead of getting ganked by that player who jumps you at half health you use your PvP skills to calmly dispatch them and their buddy you piles on a few seconds later? Wouldn’t it be great to achieve success not just in your raid, but also in the arena or Rated BGs as well, becoming a more complete player? If those sorts of things sound appealing to you then let it be known in this thread and Georgepatton, Aeolyn and myself will do our able best to connect you with the people and resources to help you reach your goals. We’re free on Mumble, we’re free on Skype, we’re free in game. Contact us whenever. If you don’t see Kognus online then look at the guild notes because there’s a good chance that I’ll be on one of my alts.

I am going to be editing this post and adding a list of online resources as well as my own thoughts on how everything PvP in WoD is looking. You can expect a bunch of updates over the course of this evening and over the next few weeks.