I eat pieces of Druid like you for breakfast

Eewwwwww. You eat Druid for breakfast?

My recent discovery of a few pieces of PvP gear that are raiding upgrades for me has me BG'ing it up a bunch.

First off, a question to you folks. There's so many different vendors for BG and Arena gear. Where can I find a list of everything out there and where the vendor's are at? Right now, I really only know of an Arena vendor up in Area 52, and some BG vendors in Stormwind City. I'd hate to blow 17k honor on a pair of boots, only to discover that there's another pair with some different adjective slapped on the front and substantially nicer stats (such as Gladiators and Merciless Gladiators, wtf).

Currently I'm eyeballing the Vindicators Chain Sabatons, as they're an in-place upgrade over my current greenie boots, and the honor is reasonably farmable in 2 weeks, 1 week if I step on the gas a bit OR actually win the Daily Quest for its bonus honor. And these boots require no tradeoffs in other areas, besides a tiny decrease in AP, so they're a no-brainer for raiding or PvP.

So, back to BG. Eye of the Storm. In my limited experience, the matches are nearly always imbalanced. Its nearly always a landslide in favor of one side or the other. The few times its close, it really is fun as you've got to be nimble and quickly adjust to enemy troop concentrations. I love to see stuff like "forget DR, everybody go BE" in /bg chat. And when a few of us actually follow the instruction and show up at BE coordinated, much fun to be had, especially if Horde is bringing the flag over to BE as we speak. Then we take the flag, take the tower, and cap, FTW.

Ok, back to my breakfast....

Friday's daily was EotS. After farming a bit of gold, I decided to play one round before heading off to work.

Right off the bat, I could tell it was one of the balanced games, and therefore subject to perhaps some fun, and also earning a victory rather than just 4-capping in a boring azwhooping.

Immediately, I found my nemesis. You ever do that in BG? Nearly instantly, you just somehow find that one player who you just know you'll be going after all game.

In this case, a Tauren Druid. This guy was all over the place. He always seemed to be driving the action, never fighting in wasted space, always pushing towards a node or defending a node. Right in the thick of the fight. Switching forms, always moving.

He started healing the bo-jebus out of everything, and strongly influencing the battles around him. Something snapped, and I decided that he was my personal responsibility, like the coach had just switched us from a zone defense to a man-on-man.

Recall, if you will, I stink at PvP. Sure, I'm getting a bit better, but much more in knowing overall strategy of each BG, rather than getting good at these sort of individual battles. Rogues can still kiss my @ss. And prowling druids. Anybody who can initiate anysort of stun/incapacitation from an invisible starting point can just go to h3ll.

Either way, back to my healing nemesis.

This guy was brutal, just taking forever to burn him down. He was a monster, a giant among men. Sure, he's Tauren, so he's a giant anyways, but you get the idea. Everyone around him on either side is dying and his health is barely moving, and then his team's health is also growing.

Then I quit goat thinking and I remember he needs mana to heal. Viper Sting.

He then got a continuous stream of Vipers up his tail pipe. Still, his mana pool was deep, so this is going to take a while.

Next thing, I made him my focus. Using my Perl Classic Unit Frames, I can see my focus and the target of my focus.

I'd slap a Viper on him, then go about battle as normal.

Any time I saw him target one of his own players, presumably for a heal, I'd do one of two things. If i reacted fast enough, I'd Aimed Shot his target, to limit the effectiveness of the heal. And since lots of Druid heals involve HoT, I'm hoping the reduced heal debuff will reduce the effectiveness of the HoT even if the debuff wasn't active at the moment the HoT was initially started.

The other thing I'd do was to re-Viper the Druid and then slap an Aimed Shot on him, thus encouraging him to heal himself.

Using this technique, he was out of mana continuously. I love it.

Alliance won 2000/1850, which made me feel pretty good about basically removing one of their healers from the battle.

Watching him frustrated and useless with full health but no mana was so incredibly delicious. I recommend it for breakfast every morning.