Suggestion Box

by Gimmlette

Is this a suggestion or a complaint? Maybe it's a little of both.

Recently, a few of us went into Alterac Valley battleground for a little PvP. We met a horde killing machine. They broke into groups and ran roughshod over the alliance. It became painfully clear, after they took a graveyard and refused to leave, they were honor farming.

If you don't PvP, you may not know what "honor farming" is. It's a reason PvP is loathed by a lot of people. Above is one of the alliance graveyards in Alterac Valley. A group of horde has taken over the graveyard and, every time someone rezzes, they are immediately set upon and killed. Until someone actually clicks on the flag for the graveyard, horde will just stand there and kill anyone who tries to rez and run away.

The problem is that resurrection in a battleground is controlled by the game. If you stand in or near the graveyard, even if you don't click on the "release" button, the game will release and resurrect you. You come back in the middle of 10 of the opposing faction and you stand no chance of running away or surviving. And every time someone of the opposing faction kills you, they get honor. The other faction is doing this on purpose and has very little intention of winning the battleground. They just want the easy honor kills.

We were stuck. If you left the battleground before it was completed, you were stuck with a deserter buff. This means you can't go into another battleground for 15 minutes. If you rezzed, you were immediately killed. If you didn't rez but stayed near the graveyard, the game rezzed you and you were killed. If you ran away, you discovered there were no alliance controlled graveyards on the map because alliance couldn't get past the knots of horde. The few who did make it past were not enough to overcome guards or horde that lingered at the back to keep graveyards horde controlled. Eventually, alliance ran out of resources and horde won by default.

This is beyond aggravating to me and, as I mentioned above, it's one of the reasons PvP has a negative image. This is no fun. I don't care to be honor farmed. I consider this an exploit. Minaithelan, Spectacular Death's PvP officer, points out that, once you die, you are worth zero honor for 20 seconds to the horde who killed you. That's not enough time. In graveyard camping, that horde can kill you over and over again, knowing he won't get honor for 20 seconds after killing you, but honor every other time. When you die repeatedly, he's going to get more honor even with a debuff. 20 seconds is a pittance of time.

I would like to see negative honor for graveyard camping. If you or your team decide to camp a graveyard, honor is taken away. Let people rez, get health back, buff up and then go back into combat, knowing they have a fighting chance. The boundaries of the graveyard should be 20 feet beyond the visual fence, too, so you can't just stand at the sides and wait. I think honor should be removed at double what you would get for killing me. I think it should be team wide, too, so the pressure of the group is brought to bear on people who find graveyard camping in battlegrounds "fun".

If this is too complicated to implement, then I'd like a "Get Out of PvP Free" ability. Once every 90 minutes, you have the ability to leave a battleground before it ends without the 15 minute debuff. My guild mates and I hung on in Alterac Valley, ultimately deciding to run away from the graveyards, out into the field where we couldn't be auto-rezzed. We wanted to continue to do battlegrounds without the deserter debuff because it's not our fault that we can't play as the event is designed. This is a classic case where an ability to get out would save sanity and make PvP more user friendly.

Suggestion Box

by Gimmlette

This one was suggested by Minaithelan.

Getting around with guild members or a party in general, can be tough. If someone in the party hasn't purchased fast riding or fast flying, your group has to wait for them to get where you're going. Both of those upgrades are fairly pricey, even in an age where making money is reasonably easy. If you have a stable of alts, buying fast movement speed is a cha-ching proposition. So, many people opt not to buy the faster mount speeds. It's a matter of economics.

There are, however, ways to get your slower guild mates to their destinations. Two-seater mounts, such as the Grand Black War Mammoth, whose speed is based on the driver, not the passenger, can get slower people across the ground fast. We use these when we raid Silvermoon City. For flying, hop on a Sandstone Drake, for instance. No one needs to be left behind, unless... you are traveling over the water.

Currently, there is no two-seater water mount. There is, perhaps, not a demand for one, but there's not really a demand for the mammoth or the drake. They just are, which means, there doesn't have to be a precedent for need to have a mount. The raft shown above you buy from Nat Pagle in Krasarang Wilds, once your reputation with The Anglers gets to revered. The raft works in every body of water and is a relatively fast mode of transport. If you have to cross water and then run up to something, you don't have to dismount since the raft disappears once you hit land. It lasts 10 minutes, so you do have to watch your time while using it. And once you attack something or get attacked by something, it despawns.

It would be way cool to have a two person raft. You could fish together but, more importantly, you would be able to ferry around someone who doesn't have fast riding or a water mount. It would be neat to be able to attack from the raft, but we'll take just being about to raft down the river like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.

Bug Report

by Gimmlette

Today's Bug Report comes courtesy of Mogu'shan Vaults. This is the Elegon encounter. If you've never been here or done this raid, the boss, which is a sparkly dragon, shows up under those discs hanging from the ceiling. A clear floor shows up under him.

During the encounter, you need to kill an add, kill some balls of light and then destroy pillars situated around the floor. The floor will despawn during the fight, too, so you have to be aware of any warnings you're getting. Spectacular Death has a policy of requiring a 50 gold donation to the guild bank if you don't get off the floor before it despawns. You do no healing, tanking or dps if you're somewhere at the bottom of the hole, so heed the warnings and get off.

We discovered that if you kill the boss too fast, which can happen when your raid is made up of level 100s, you break the encounter. This raid's mobs are level 90. We kind of killed Elegon really fast and when his loot chest spawned in the center of the circle, the floor did not. The toon to my right, Minaithelan, tried a few different ways to get to the chest but it was for naught.

What to do? Well, first of all, don't have everyone in your raid submit a ticket to notify the game masters that you've had an issue. We had over half the raid submit tickets and while that got us quick attention, the GM's were not happy. Designate someone, preferably your raid leader, to put in the ticket explaining what happened.

Secondly, you can wait 30 minutes for what's called a "hard reset". Everyone needs to leave the raid instance and they can leave the raid. Go pick herbs or pick on horde or another boss. At the end of 30 minutes, have the same person who started the raid, invite everyone back in. Under their portrait's drop down menu, click "Reset all instances". Supposedly, this restarts the raid from the point you left off. You should be able to get to this chest and finish up the raid. We simply disbanded and came in two days later to finish the raid. The GM's sent me all the loot which I couldn't hand out to people so I sold it and stuck the proceeds into the guild bank. Elegon drops a mount which looks just like him so people are running this raid frequently for that mount.

But, as we've discovered with the Mount Hyjal Burning Crusades raid, doing all of this is not a guarantee of getting the raid to work. As nice as it is to just blast through older content, you are probably going to have to go slower than you'd like just so you don't break it.

Ironically, while searching the former WOWInsider site for all the times Spectacular Death had been mentioned in their "Around Azeroth" column, I stumbled across this.

Guess we're not the only ones to have a floor issue.