I know, I know, there may other people giving their two cents on plunderstorm, but as a friend of mine recently said about the BR genre as a whole “the appeal of a battle royale is that everyone thinks they’ve outsmarted other players and the system, and all yet none of them are right.”
A quick review: I did enjoy my time in Plunderstorm, because I set an attainable end to the tunnel and Blizz clearly (eventually) agreed that Renown 40 was meant to be attainable with a reasonable grind, which gets more reasonable every week. My dopamine hits came from “oh that run was so efficient,” not from PVP wins, or screwing other players. I am a gaming enthusiast, not a “great gamer,” so I am always looking at the most effort-economical ways to attain my goals. Plunderstorm rewarded this approach. I slowed down the last few days to milk the daily (again, “efficiency=fun!” to me) but I predictably let myself go on a tear toward the end to get 40 done! It was important to me that I be finished before Legion timewalking, as my main WoW playstyle is a shameless altoholic and I love timewalking for that.
That said, I do think that the secrecy experiment was a failure, and FOMO is bad.
Review out of the way, here are my tips for PVE-centric plunderstorm. Some are obvious, but I mostly focused on points I haven’t seen run into the ground elsewhere. There are many posts like this, but this one is mine.
-Once you’ve completed your allocated match quest, Don’t. Stop. Moving. Because of the telegraphing nature of the combat, most NPCs can’t kill or even harm a continuously moving target. Elites positioned to guard over the larger “chalice” piles of plunder can’t do anything about me just running through and grabbing that pile and moving on. If you’re targeted by a player, keep running until you fall over, targeting plunder piles. Maybe they’ll give up because they “hate wasting time on your coward carcass,” it happens more than you think!
-Ignore everyone saying “duos are better” unless you have a known partner that’s ok with a “do quest and die” strategy. Leaving a randomly assembled duos match once you’re dead will cost you plunder if your partner is still alive. That makes sense, but it’s worth mentioning because everyone and their mother is trying to push the “duos supremacy” narrative. That ONLY works if you’re trying to win matches.
-I would not have gotten to 40 using keyboard and mouse. Enabling controller support made all the difference. You can do a lot of settings stuff that you can otherwise do only in matches (and not in the lobby) in spectate mode after you die!
-Speaking of settings: TURN OFF CHAT! Your Plunderstorm chat settings are separate from your WoW chat settings, so if you whittle out all chat except, say, your plunder and reputation gains, you won’t see player harassment beyond speech bubbles (which I didn’t learn about until my last match when I was telling people “just hit 40, yay! Please kill me” haha)! There are people getting banned for being cheeky in chat while PVPing (which is great: the bans not the cheek), but you can pretty much avoid that scene altogether through chat filtering!
-Because you do not need to fight players, you do not need to concern yourself with skills that don’t impact your ability to move. Fire whirl (purely for movement), fae form, stealth abilities, the motorcycle and the barrel are your best friends!
-Unless you absolutely need the petty end of running into the storm to die (and I respect that, I did that a lot), the best way to seek death once you’ve completed your quest and most plunder has dried up is around the “Pieces of Hate:” one of the best sources of new plunder drops once the map’s static sources are hoovered up. He’ll erupt new plunder every few seconds, killing other NPCs in doing so (causing them to drop plunder), and also attract other players who will likely see your massive haul and try to kill you, which, if you’re seeking death and ending the match, helps you out.
-There are as many advantages to landing somewhere obscure as there are to targeting the kill of an elite with your crash landing, neither is a wrong answer. Cutting the “kill elites” quest in half is awesome, but you run the risk of not being the only person thinking that and running into a level 1 slapfight with a PVP obsessed chud with no respect for his own time.
-With the “collect items” quest nerfed from 2 to 1 (2 having made it the worst quest to complete by far), the most annoying quest to complete is chests, followed by 10 kills and elite kills, just because fighting NPCs (again, don’t stop moving) pins you down and makes you vulnerable. Once you can eyeball which chests open almost instantly, those are a good part of your strategy. Again, don’t stop moving, and that counts out most chests. If you die on one of these more annoying quests, don’t fret, just reset and get another one.
-Whether you’re using the controller or not, use the mousewheel to pan back your camera for max viewing distance every match! Tunnel vision hinders your awareness of your surroundings!
In my humble opinion, this event shouldn’t be around long enough to merit cultivating “PVP skills” that you don’t already have naturally as a “good gamer,” if you are one of those. I am a gaming enthusiast, so no, I’m not that good. These tips helped me find fun in the efficiency of time spent and just the effectiveness of the “don’t stop moving” strat.
Happy Plundering! My multiple pirate-concept alts are very pleased now!