22th October - A Thursday Of What The Fudge Is Wrong With You People?, Yiska On Arenacast!, ESL TV Murloc contest, Azael Interview Rehosted.

What's up y'all?  New day, new blog and yesterday has been a day of emotional ups and downs for me, **** - is - unreal. Let's start from the very beginning, shall we?

Yiska on Arenacast

7pm CET - JP calls as I agreed to be on this weeks Arenacast. I had a couple of topics in mind and I wanted to have at least a witty introduction. And as everything in life, things don't work out as planned and... one just acts absolutely retarded and has no clue went to shut is stuttering trap. First "show" I've ever been on and JP, Igoaf and Douja were all cool and laid back and I kinda wasn't. I orangemarmelade'd my introduction, aka awwwwwkkkkwwwwward like a boss. 

I'd ask you to skip about 20 seconds of the cast after I say my first sentence and we all pretend it's never happen but let's be honest here, you guys are here for the sole spiteful purpose of seeing me **** up and be all over me like Noktyn over a box of donuts, just like you were when I announced this which is still up and running by the way. (I just realized this in the in the goldmine <3).

Over the show I was stuttered and while some people of the younger generation might want to call it "rap" it really isn't. It's me being so excited that I had about seven apoplectic strokes. Nevertheless I really enjoyed it (even though after hearing the show twice now I have a shape of my palm in my face) and I think it was great fun. Be sure to check out the episode

>>>>>>>>>>>>>Here<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Winning a roll on Death Verdict

~ 10pm CET - After I made a fool out of myself and had a shower crying and screaming "You dirty dumb boy" I stepped into ToC. The group was made by a fellow guild member and it went horrible. We had to recreate the group about three times until we downed stuff. As we finally kill the Twins, what happens will be remembered as "THE DAY YISKA WON A ROLL" and I can promise you, history doesn't repeat itself in this case. Ten point eight million people roll on Death Verdict and out of nowhere, I roll a 97.

With the words of Veex, champion of WoW I screamed "I AM VICTORIOUS *****ES" without realizing that winning this trinket in a guild run is nothing to **** with. "PLEASE BRIY I GIVE YOU EVERYTHING I SUCK ON YOUR LEFT TOE" the first one goes in vent and of course a second group of players from my guild join in and want it for their 5s Warrior. There I am, a little Ret Paladin with a tough ass decision to make. Numbers are flying around in vent "I give you 15k", "Please please" and whispers fly in like I'm Lord Hydra.

Long story short, I haven't decided yet what to do. I have logged out and my paladin still has like 40 minutes to pass the trinket. To clarify, my druid partner since 3 seasons Noxx ( <3 ) just came back from inactivity but we are not sure how active he will be in the future. If he comes back, I will play Ret again for sure.

Therefore, I call out to you oh eternal wisdom of Gameriot. What should I do in this situation? I don't want to let down my guild members, but it's a really sweet trinket for a Ret Paladin. Leave me a comment.

The start of the great ninja clan wars

~ 1:20 am - I get an MSN message from Azael which is normally a good thing, but this time it really wasn't. Azael wants me to ask the complexitygaming.com staff if I can take down the interview from the site, since his manager wasn't aware that it's going to be posted there. No biggie? You have no idea bro. What followed was one of the great ninja clan wars, that I - the Kazekage of the European WoW community - wasn't able to prevent.

Azael and I "enjoyed" the battle in our respective intern channel and watched those amazing amounts of chakra clashing against eachother. Long story short, I was allowed to post the interview that was supposed to be on COMPLEXITYGAMING.COM *cough* here on Gameriot again and I promised to produce new content just to get over with it. Azael helped me finding another very interesting interview partner and I ended up being awake till 9 am, because these wars easily took an a couple of hours and I had to get new questions done.

Also my interviewing partner had to please his girlfriend for 30 minutes. What a beast. You will see the results soon. DieJule from turtle entertainment posted on her twitter that we didn't ask for permission for the pictures of Azael we included and I only provided the very new one which Azael made for me (keep in mind, still not gay) and my boss just edited the others in without giving it a second thought I think. The interview is down, still sorry though If you check her twitter here you can see that Bodi is yet again molesting a young women. Will he ever stop?

The bright side of my day

First off Bilingue, the guy who made the interview with me in which I douchebag it up has bought and relinked eurospective.com to this blog. Is this win? Thanks to him, you can now easily get to Eurospective just by typing the URL into your browser. Epic win if you ask me. Thanks mate!

ESL TV Murloc contest!

The second thing is definitely the murloc contest Matt "Zalmah" Rider summoned over at ESL TV. I'm looking forward to talking to you guys on Monday even though I'm already ****ting myself. Should be great fun. Matt included a clip of himself doing the murloc sound but he told me he cheated with water!

Rehosted interview with Azael

Hey Azael, could you briefly introduce yourself please?

Hi, my name is Isaac Cummings-Bentley, I'm from Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I recently turned 21 years old and I play a Warlock for Team EG.

In last weeks interview, Reckful referred to you not only as a good friend but also as a flawless Warlock. Do you agree and which Warlock impressed you in the past, both offline and online?

Reckful is a good friend of mine, but I'd definitely say I'm far from flawless!  I just do my best to improve on a day to day basis so that I can be the best player that I can be.  I like to think that I'm one of the top Warlocks for sure, but I don't think any player is flawless.  As far as which Warlock has impressed me the most, it's definitely Inflame for me, I am EXTREMELY critical of my own play and therefore I'm very critical of the play of other Warlocks as well, so there are very few people I enjoy watching play Warlock, but he's one of them for sure.

You’ve won the very first MLG tournament which founded a new era of WoW tournaments after the break down of WSVG. Ever since then, people have always counted your team to the top favorites whenever you attended a tournament but you never made it to the top again, granted you often finished with an ungrateful place like 3^rd at the North American regionals going 3-2 against TSG. Why do you think is that and can you turn that in the future?

Well, I like to think although we've only won one tournament we've been one of the most consistent teams as we're the only North American team to qualify for both Regional Tournaments, ESL Global Finals, etc.  The 3rd place 3-2 at Regionals to TSG was definitely heartbreaking, as being so close to playing at Blizzcon but not making it really hurt, because I've always wanted to get a chance to play there, and we were so close.

As far as why we haven't won again, it's hard to say, because I feel like if I had played WLD when it was extremely strong that I'd have won another tournament or two with the right teammates.  We've always been playing setups that weren't considered the strongest one, so with so many other good teams out there it's pretty tough to overcome and win the tournaments.

For example we started playing RLS at level 70 before anyone had run it, and used it to qualify for the ESL Global Finals, but no Destruction Warlock has ever won a major WoW tournament ever.

I think that moving into the future I'm not so concerned about winning tournaments as I am about being able to compete at the highest level, and just play well in general at every event.  As long as I am in the competition and giving everyone a run for their money I'll be happy.

A healthy attitude. Many people who has been around as long as you have stopped playing the game, at least competitively. It sounds like you will also be still around in 2010.

As long as I'm enjoying playing the game, keeping some balance in my life and especially enjoying the people who I'm playing it with then I will still be around.  I am in a great community of amazing players and friends, so I feel like as long as I have the motivation and desire to play competitively I will be able to do so.  I also have been extremely lucky to have a sponsor like EG, to stand behind me with every decision I make, and every event I go to.  I've been extremely blessed to have the opportunities that I have had in my life.

Some teams which will be attending MLG Anaheim are unofficially announced already. There is also a big question mark behind your team and not because you don’t know if you can attend but with whom you will be there. I reckon you can’t give us names here, but maybe you can tell us if your main class composition will be RLS?

Yes, it will be RLS!

How strong is RLS in the current tournament meta game? Many people argue it’s a second tier comp just like RMP and it’s hard to win it all with it. Are you in the same position as you described above, playing an inferior comp? Fnatic managed to pull of an impressive 4^th place at MLG Dallas. Is there more potential in RLS? One sentence we often heard from you before the North American regionals was “If we play our A-Game we can beat pretty much everybody”. Is this sentence still true?

Well, I still feel the same way as I did at the Regional Tournament.  We were able to beat setups which people considered counters there, and we're still able to do the same if we play to the best of our ability. It's difficult though, because a well played RMP is extremely difficult to deal with, especially now that the envenom change is in the game.  With that most RMPs just train your Shaman hardcore, and I've had games where you can completely lock out the Mage and have your Shaman die pretty much completely from the Rogues damage alone if the Priest is able to assist with a cast or two.

With 3 top tier RMPs at Anaheim it's definitely going to be difficult, and Beast Cleave / Shadow Cleave are no piece of cake either, so every single series will be very tough.

How confident are you with your new line-up? From what the community knows, your former team had some motivational issues so getting players who has never been to an offline event and are still hungry might be the way to go, but on the other hand you of course still have the issue of LAN jitters. What will we see; Azael the veteran team captain or Azael the motivational coach?

I'm quite confident if we play to the best of our ability, we've done well with our new line-up against everyone we've played online.  We have quite a favourable record against Twix's Beast Cleave and have done well in all our mirrors as well as against RMP.  We're a new team so we haven't had as much of a chance to iron out all our strats as I'd like, but we'll be ready.

Obviously LAN jitters are big, and were fighting the best teams in the world so it'll be extremely difficult, but I'm happy with my new teammates.  As far as what side of me you'll see, hopefully a bit of both, Azael the motivational coach to help get people over the initial jitters, and then back to the veteran team captain once that has passed.

Do you think the Destruction Warlock nerfs will in 3.3 eliminate RLS as a future tournament comp and do you see yourself going back to Affliction in the future? Which spec is more fun for you to play?

To be honest, I already play almost exclusively Affliction already.  I pretty much only played Affliction at the Regional Tournament, and you'll most likely see more of the same in Anaheim.  I'll be Destruction for some stuff because against some setups it's really a lot stronger, but for the most part Affliction.  I really enjoy Affliction more to be honest, I enjoyed played Destruction when

no one else did simply because it was something different, and it was more about being able to free yourself up for multiple casts instead of just getting a Chaos Bolt -> Conflag and hoping for crits.

At the moment I feel like the skill gap between a top tier Destruction Warlock, and a more average one isn't nearly as big as it should be.  Whereas with Affliction Warlocks there's a massive difference between a top tier player and your average Joe, because you have to be able to do a lot more to be effective with the spec.

When you're playing Destro against another Destruction Warlock, you can be outplaying them pretty badly, everything is going right, and then they crit their Chaos Bolt -> Conflag combo and instantly win the game.

As far as if it eliminates RLS as a tournament setup, I'd say that the Destro changes aren't that big of a deal as the DoT from Conflag is undispellable and very short.  Honestly I think if anything is going to eliminate Warlocks from tournament it'd more likely be changes to other classes than changes to Warlocks themselves."

Is switching classes like you did in TBC when you played Warrior at Cebit together with former fnatic's Hafu and Glick an option?

I was playing Warrior a ton at the time, so it was more of a second main than an alt, was the highest rated player in the world for a time on my Warrior, Brutal Glad etc.  Unless you really dedicate a ton of time to another class it's not likely to be worth it simply because at this point in the game everyone is so good at their classes and setups that they can overcome most counter comps unless they're played very well, and it wasn't like that when tournaments were starting.

There were far weaker teams attending tournaments and setup was more important in my opinion, although that doesn't mean it's not still a huge factor now.

Alright Azael, thanks for your time and we wish you the best for MLG Anaheim.

Thanks, a lot!

With this I leave you for today. Yiska out.

Tags:

World of Warcraft, ArenaCast, ESL, WoW Arena

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