Conquering PvP Realms

Good morning readers. Instead of sitting down with a cup of coffee and start up my WoW, decided to instead fire up my Live Writer and dedicate some thoughts down on a subject I came upon rather by accident. Credit goes to Tatiiana, a dear friend of mine who plays a mage of the same name on the Tarren Mill EU realm. The reason why this is significant is because I play on Neptulon EU, which places us both in pvp Realms. For those who do not know, this means that in pvp realms your pvp will flag on automatically in certain areas which makes world pvp so much more common and indeed, it is one of the reasons many choose to play on these servers.

However, in this article I decided I would delve into the misconceptions of playing on pvp servers because like myself actually, prior to moving here with my guild, many players who reservations, quite needlessly about the day-to-day routines on pvp realms and thus, in my opinion, miss out on a lot.

The main thing that a lot of people miss the quality of players, which is by average higher on pvp realms if you compare to pve realms. No, this does not mean that players on pve realms are not good or even better than many who play pvp realms. That is not what I am saying, but the fact is that people who get caught in pvp develop a certain level of awareness and skill that pure-pve’ers do not. Pvp encourages reaction, speed, and awareness. While it is perfectly possible to obtain this by just playing pve, it comes much more naturally to pvp players. This was our guild’s, The Increment, main reason for moving to Neptulon because we wanted to harvest on that potential of players, which we have.

Now, the main misconception people have about pvp realms is that people pvp all the time. That you, in fact, cannot go 100 yards from Ironforge without running into people pvp’ing and therefore, e.g. leveling a character is an utter nightmare to go through. This is an utter and complete load of bullocks.

First of all, your pvp will flag on only in contested areas. This means that major cities, starting zones and the immediate zone next to those are safe. This includes Elwynn Forest, Westfall, Dun Morogh, Loch Modan, etc. Areas where you should watch out are Southshore, Stranglethorn Vale, naturally all of Outland and so forth. But even in contested areas you will run into minimum trouble. I have personally tested this when I revitalized my warrior and leveled him from level 13 to 80, during which I got attacked total of two times. Most people you run across will want nothing to do with you. A good case of example happened just two days ago when I was exploring on my warrior and crossing the border of Southshore and Silverpine Forest. Just I went over the border, a level 80 blood elf mage rode past me. We both stopped about 60 yards of each other, most likely eyeing each other, checking what the gear looked like, the mount, titles, etc. Anything that would tell us if this was a fight we wanted to get into.

After only few short seconds, we both continued on our separate ways, figuring “no, screw it” and that’s how it usually goes. MAD
“Mutually Assured Destruction” is a powerful incentive and you never truly know how good someone is until you try. Many times the attacker actually gets killed himself, as happened between my death knight and a hunter when I was mining, couple of weeks ago. He landed and started shooting on the fly. However, I managed to beat him. Same case scenario when both me and a tauren shaman were farming the same rep in Outland; he actually attacked me while I was killing an elite mob and still I killed him and mind you, this was a guy in some pretty cool gear and with obvious skill. With that bare in mind that I am actually a total scrub in pvp and ofc these events were all very far in between.

Most of the time I got to run around, farm rep, doing dailies and gathering mats in total peace. Now, I am not saying that you will never get attacked, as shown by the examples above, but what I am saying is that it is a lot more rare than you think. I shall take a screenshot for you guys, the next time I go do my fishing daily in Sholazar Basin because almost every time I do, I complete it right next to horde players.

Naturally, you will die occasionally, it’s unavoidable but part of that just needs to be accepted as part of the realm and in fact, looked as part of the fun. One of the consistent world pvp events that I have seen happened in front of Icecrown Citadel entrance, where every raid night, we gather in mass to block the door and kill any horde who try to get in. It’s hilarious and naturally, they will occasionally do the same to us but none of it is done with menace or to be nasty. It’s all good fun; we kill few of them, they kill a few of us and always manage to laugh about it on vent.

So what am I actually trying to say here? That pvp realms are not evil, nor as chaotic and malevolent as many make them appear. Most of the time, you wouldn’t even notice the difference to a pve realm. There are indeed many benefits to playing on pvp servers and having experienced it myself, I definitely encourage everyone to give it a go.