~chron

Blizzard EU has a page up about the regionals, complete with videos (I think they’re adding more over time) and an image gallery. Even though it’s an EU page it seems to have NA vids as well.

If you didn’t catch the games at MLG Columbus they also have a VOD section uploaded now with all the games included.

Also I just noticed this Q&A from the faction change thread:

Q. Will we be able to switch between the races on our own faction?
A. No. Players will only be able to switch to a race of the opposite faction.

Q. Will I be able to choose the race on the opposite faction that I want to change to?
A. Yes, but you will only be able to switch to a race that has your class type available to it. So if you play a human paladin, you’d only be able to change to a blood elf paladin.

Q. Will I be able to switch back to my original faction but a different race?
A. No. You will only be able to switch back to your originally chosen race.

Sigh. So unless everyone wants to mass-reroll horde with me I guess I’m stuck with a Night Elf for now.

chronic Arena mlg, regionals

Did a Reckoning 2s graph again today, figured I’d share:

chronic Arena Arena, comps, gchart, graphs, reckoning

After the ‘death pie’ the other day I mentioned I wanted to do a graph showing damage taken in 3v3 arena. I settled on what you see below, a line graph with a seperate line for each character showing the total amount of damage taken in a single arena match along the X axis with the number of times that total occured (ie number of matches) along the Y axis. I know it’s not a perfect graph because the data we have access to is kind of limited (mostly because people keep fighting after a match is effectively over), but it’s still fairly interesting.

Notice the huge spike of games which ended after 20k damage (roughly a single health bar for each of us) where presumably some serious CC chain happened right off the bat or (more likely) the rogue got opened on out of LOS and died in two globals. Quite a lot of the games Azuba dies in are games like this, most often from hard-to-peel cleave teams like rogue/dk/healer that blow cooldowns to get a kill at the start.

Protip: don’t ask Ina about that one game where he took 220000 damage or you’re liable to be death coiled. Yes, it was double melee.

Here’s the same thing for wins instead of losses:

Note that we win a huge amount of games in which our warlock is left alone. I don’t think that will surprise anybody! Note also that there are games where our warlock gets ridiculously trained and we still win, like this – Same cleave as before, check the ret’s damage! Apparently we can also win games where I get crapped on all match, like this double caster priest on RoV.

You can’t see it from the graph, but there’s also wins where nobody takes any damage, usually when some 2k cleave champion warrior charges behind a Nagrand pillar, trinkets KS and dies in a dismantle duration to tricks conflag lava burst.

chronic Arena, Data Mining Arena, gchart, graphs, rls, World of Warcraft

Another MLG event played out over the weekend. By all accounts a fantastic tournament and huge grats to Realz’ SK-US team for pulling off a win. I caught a few of the Saturday matches (including the RLS mirror¹ between EG and fnatic, pretty interesting even if both teams played kinda flat) but I’m eagerly awaiting the VoDs being posted so I can see the whole thing. Vhell is still an awesome commentator.

There’s coverage of the various days all over the place including Gameriot (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), Gotfrag (Saturday, Sunday) and WowInsider (Saturday). As usual, Radikal has some entertaining opinions.

I’m not sure you can take anything meaningful from the results regarding class balance since it’s a really tiny sample size. Still: buff paladins. Payce is a total beast and their team did do pretty well, but I don’t want to have to play some horrible PHD team to be successful. It’s worse than cleave, really.

Unrelated: is Paladin/DK supposed to beat Shaman/Ret? That matchup makes me rage more than Rogue/Shaman vs Warrior/Druid.

¹ I’ve decided my favourite RLS mirror strat is go on the rogue, because then instead of the game being decided based on which rogue can kill a warlock faster, it’s mostly decided by how well your shaman can lock down (see what I did there) an opposing warlock and avoid CC as well as how quick your bloodlusted warlock can backdraft chaos bolt somebody into oblivion. And my shaman/warlock will crap all over yours :]

chronic Arena Arena, mlg, tournaments, World of Warcraft

Azuba and I had a rough few weeks hovering around 2300-2340 with several excruciating losses within striking distance of our goal. Possibly the most upsetting was this precious -17 at the hands of a fairly mediocre rogue/destro that we had just beaten twice; we went into the match at 2349. I had 2.5k damage out that game, holla for wotlk burst!

Our match history is a total rollercoaster of 18 minute ret/druid games and queueing into hard counters six games in a row. Still, we persisted, and these glowing pieces of (virtual) pointy metal represent the fruits of our labor:

That wasn’t the only milestone we hit last night, either. Inamorata took some time out of his busy schedule crushing rets in trade chat to carry our RLS to 2216, currently realm #1. It’s also already worth way more points per week than our 2v2 is, whee rating curve rebalancing.

Massive thanks to Azuba for being an absolutely fantastic teammate and rising above his troubled class and our somewhat questionable comp by basically outplaying the shit out of everybody. If this was a Steam game there’d be a series of achievements for HoJs grounded and you’d have all of them! <3

I don’t have a 5s at the moment, but Arena Master is looking more doable by the day. Fifty (oblig) whole nerd points, that’s hard to pass up.

PS: No, I’m not going to stop calling it BoP.

chronic Arena, Rogue, World of Warcraft Arena, rls, World of Warcraft