~chron

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

Azael has written a really comprehensive overview of the upcoming MLG Columbus event which is on this weekend. There’s a lot of big NA names there as well as everyone’s favourite Euro RMP. Should be a hell of a show.

chronic Arena Arena, mlg, tournaments, World of Warcraft

Since the armory data for my arena teams seemed to be relatively up-to-date today I decided to take a look at win ratios versus different compositions, in tabular form as I’ve done in the past. There’s not really any huge surprises, though I will say it never ceases to amaze me how incredibly rare hunters are in any bracket these days. Not that I’m complaining, mind you!

• Two Bads Make a Good, Holy/Prot Paladin + Unholy DK
• The Fact of Life, Resto Shaman + Mut/Prep Rogue
• Azuba is Uber, Resto Shaman + Mut/Prep Rogue + Destruction Warlock

Note the subtle omission of my paladin’s 3s, keep grindin’ that gear Milkduds. Anyway.

Some general comments:

• RoL is officially my worst map, though I’m certainly still not fond of RoV, especially with aggressive priests¹.
• My rogue does ~80% of the damage of a death knight these days, and isn’t too far off with rets and warriors either.
• Fact’s mage ratio is low because mages only ever play in double dps and double dps is horrible. Mostly because of glaring rogue and shaman survivability issues ;)
• The counter for shaman is apparently better shaman. Hi2u grounding fakecast metagame?
• Druids are the most annoying healer for all three teams, RoV mana burn notwithstanding.
• Warriors are the most difficult melee to peel in 3s.
• Our RLS is 80% win versus RMP. Some of those were probably at low ratings, I guess.
• 16k Chaos Bolts through Pain Suppression are balanced.

It’s harder to get a good sample size for 3s because of the enormous variety of compositions. And by variety, I mean “which healer would you like with your two melee?” Still, you can see some interesting trends.

If you’re an E’T armory stalker like me you might also enjoy reports for Stanso’s Rogue/Priest, Endarl’s Rogue/Priest (oh look, 70% win ratio on RoV), and Balandil’s Rogue/DK (not even kidding).

¹ Which is exactly all of them these days, thanks for nothing Hydra 5.

chronic Arena, Data Mining, World of Warcraft Arena, armory.rb, comps, World of Warcraft

I was inspired by our recent 3v3 games to write the following limerick:

There once was a death knight called Andy
Whose cleave team was going just dandy
and Inamorata
the warlock pinata
was quite clearly filled up with candy!

As a bonus, since we’re talking about warlocks:

The self-proclaimed warlock from hell
once tried to escape with a spell
but his portal was still
on a very steep hill
and so; cursing loudly, he fel.

Don’t get me wrong, RLS is ridiculously good fun. Just not as fun as limericks :]

chronic World of Warcraft Arena, limerick, warlock, World of Warcraft