PvP: It's No Bigs

I don't currently play on a PvP server, but I have for a while in the past, and I read a sad post yesterday (or maybe the day before) that I want to address at some minor length. A hunter who'd been looking for Sambas for a while finally lucked out and he was up in all his prettiness when she checked. Hooray! So she went to go to tame him, and an opposite-faction DK started messing with her. She's on a PvP server not because she's a big PvPer, but because she has friends and family on the server that she wants to play with.

I didn't quite have family on the server I played on, but I was there because I'd joined a guild on the server, so the situation was somewhat analogous. Like her, I've never really been big into PvP. I've done some battlegrounds, even did some arenas for points so I could get gear to use in PvE, as the arena season 3 hat was hilariously better than the T6 hat. But it's never been something I've been really excited about. So I get it! It's possible to be on a PvP server without really being into PvP.

However, this poor hunter's tale made me really sad because she did everything she could besides PvP. She actually trapped the DK in a freezing trap and tried to tame in the window of its duration. This says a couple things to me:

1. She's good enough at PvP to get a melee class into a freezing trap
2. The DK didn't have a PvP trinket equipped

And yet, when I suggested "just killing him" as an option when he started to mess with the tame, she said this:

"I'm absolutely terrible at PvP."

It makes me sad when people say this. Firstly because there's nothing all that special about PvP. When you get to high-level arena play, there's a lot of technical discussion about "countercomps" and stuff, but duels are really, really not a big deal. There's nothing magical, nothing deep and strategic about duels. You're trying to do enough damage to the other person to kill them before they do it back to you.

And the reality is that almost all of the basic dueling tools have an use in PvE as well. I use frost, explosive, and snake traps as well as scatter shot and wyvern sting on Cho'gall. I use disengage all the time! I glyph raptor strike and use it whenever it makes sense to! All while trying to do as much damage as possible to one target or another which, really, is all PvP is, right?

And the really nice thing about world PvP with a single asshole trying to deny you a cool tame is that there's no reason not to blow all your cooldowns the second someone so much as looks at you sideways. Especially as BM (and a lot of the hunters out taming prestige pets are BM) this would be awesome. Someone tries to mess with your tame, ok, sucks to be them! Call out a pet, intimidate, and Rapid Fire/Bestial Wrath/Call of the Wild: they'll be half-dead before the stun ends if, like the DK in question, they don't have a PvP trinket equipped. And you'll still have deterrence, all your traps, any other pet special abilities like pin, scatter shot, and master's call available. A hunter with all their cooldowns up is a dangerous thing.

Finally, maybe you do all this and the person turns out to be someone in arena gear who's actually pretty good and you die anyway. Oh well. If you died when you were trying to fight back, you'd've died when you weren't. At least trying to kill the person gave you a shot at getting the tame, while just trying to tame in spite of harassment is pretty much never going to work.

Fortunately, I don't think I've ever seen a really talented, geared PvPer do something lame and petty like messing with a prestige tame. No matter how bad you think you are at PvP, there are people that are as bad and worse. And the wonderful thing is that these are the people most likely to do griefy, trolly things because they're looking for easy targets to pick on. They get destroyed in battlegrounds and can't look at an arena without dying, so they think "I know! I'll look for easy kills so I can feel better about myself!" These are the easiest people to turn the tables on.

So stop worrying about how bad you are. It doesn't matter, I promise. Just start pushin' some buttons and see how it goes.