Goodbye from Lacanoz

With Sascha gone, I don’t see a future for myself on WoWriot. He was patient with my inconsistencies, and was the man willing to give me a job in the first place. As such, I am indebted to him. He was fantastic to work with, and a lovely bloke all around.

Where will I go from here? In the next week, I’m going to get in touch with the gaming company that offered me a job last October – I’ll reveal which if/when I get the position; and see if they’re still interested. If so, I’ll let you all know.

As for Lyuze, I wish him the best of luck with his project. However, I somehow doubt it will compare in any significant way to Eurospective. He’s a nice chap, but:

• He’s a pretty average-to-bad player, and is unlikely to get much traffic on that end
• Doesn’t have huge amounts of contacts in the EU scene – Although his interview with Bloodx was okay
• He’s not the most talented writer, particularly when he lets his ego get the better of him – just thinking back to the first blog of his I read, when he said “I bet you were all wondering where I’d gone” or words to that effect. I didn’t have a clue of who he was
• His management style isn’t likely to work – he said he wants to run a “tighter” ship than Yiska – but Eurospective worked because we blogged when we had material, so we were producing blogs people (in theory) enjoyed to read without reusing stale content
• I don’t, and I imagine Gengar and the other guys will feel the same, want to work for him. I don’t think he was the most valuable member of Eurospective, and I don’t think he has a clear idea of what direction he’s going in

That said, I suppose we can just wait and see. But the amount of hate the bloke gets speaks for itself in my opinion. Starting over won’t be easy for him with the amount of flack he gets.

I had the material for a blog ready for a while, so I guess I’ll leave on a high: I hope you enjoy my last blog. I’ve really enjoyed writing here, so this is my treat to you:

Looking back over S7 – an interesting conclusion springs to mind

The biggest change in terms of HOW arena worked in S7 was the dropping of 2v2 as a competitive bracket so Blizzard could avoid balancing around it. That was the main justification they gave.

How’d that work out for them?

To me, it was a terrible idea. Ignoring my bias towards 2v2, I personally feel that S6 was more balanced and better paced than S7, particularly the latter half of S6. I’d argue that the change was counterintuitive – when they shifted balance away from 2v2, they narrowed the situations they were considering.

Ultimately, do you think S6 was more balanced than S7? I certainly do, hence I feel justified in saying – Dropping 2v2 actually made things worse.

3v3 Balance S6 -> S7

The classic way of analysing how well balanced a season has been from statistics has been looking at diversification of comps in brackets. This doesn’t always ring true – in 2v2, having huge comp diversity can sometimes highlight class imbalances that favour healers or non-MS classes, but in 3v3 people seem to say “The more comps that are viable, the better balanced the game is”.

Obviously, the statistics we have access to are extremely limited. I’m going back to SK-100 because they keep good records.

At the end of S6, RMP was miles ahead of the competition. However, these statistics aren’t weighted – RMP is a much more played comp than any other. Other than that, we see one comp at 6%, one at 5%, and many many at 4 and 3%.  That’s reasonably balanced, not ideal but not too bad.

Now, we have RMP still at the top at 14%. Fine, whatever. But THEN we have Ret/MM/RestoShaman at 10% - that’s a huge amount of popularity for a comp that only arose this season and one that isn’t even comparable in number of teams as RMP. The remaining comps all hover at 4-5% that are listed so there’s no huge problem there.

S7, then will be remembered for 3 things:

• Protection Warriors – Because BG9 America has cemented the hatred of them
• No more competitive 2v2 – Which I miss terribly
• Ret/MM/RestoShaman being hugely, hugely popular. I’ve mentioned it before and I’ll say it again – I hate this comp, because the burst it’s based around is hugely, hugely imbalanced.

S7 was certainly no more balanced than S6, and possibly less.

A Healer’s Perspective on the Resilience Change

When I joined Eurospective, I was hired because I played all the healing classes with degrees of prowess – being a very experienced Paladin and Druid, a decent enough Priest, and an average Shaman (because I don’t own one, and it’s a time-consuming class to master). It seems fitting then that in my last article; I should reprise this role.

How will the resilience change affect each class? Over on Hydramist.net not too long ago, Hydra wrote an entry about Holy Paladins, complaining about their anti-CC cooldowns. Effectively, the summary I drew from this was that Paladins were too good in short bursty games because they could keep healing till the end.
However, what Paladins lack as a class is enough aggressive tools for when the game’s speed becomes slower. It is the class that finished S7 with the highest representation (although a huge amount of that came from Rets running Ret/H/S), but I’m perfectly happy to see Holy Paladins become a little worse. Although

FIX THE HOLY SHOCK BUG ALREADY

As for priests, I can also see this becoming a slight nerf to them in comparison to other healers, although the survivability gain is a god-send. The nerf I refer to is simply because they have less lasting power than other healers and less intensive mana CDs. That said, their incredibly effective heals combined with a slower game should be great. I personally see it as a buff to RMP IF RMP can reset, but I do understand the other PoV.

Shaman I don’t see being too affected by the change. They have good burst healing, and good aggressive ability. Their representation shouldn’t change too much – they gain on survivability, but so does everyone else.

Which brings us to Druids. This change, assuming it has a net long-term effect, is exactly what Druids need – more time for HoTs to heal in. The main problem the class has seen throughout WotLK is a lack of healing power because of ramping-up time. That may well be solved now. Indeed, Druids are the big winners in the resilience change – although judging by representation, they were the healers that needed it the most.

Is it a good change? ABSOLUTELY. While I don’t expect TBC games, I have my fingers crossed for a move towards the middle point.

Good luck in the new season guys, and have a fantastic life.

Things are great for me at the moment – got my University Admissions test result (LNAT) yesterday – 24/30 (the average for the selective test was 16, and to get into the top university in the country they were requiring 17). It was something like the second highest mark obtained, so I’m utterly thrilled.

In game, I’m transferring my Druid with an IRL friend’s Hunter. We haven’t decided where yet, but we’re making the decision tonight. We’re both experienced at >2500, so if you’re a Good, English-Speaking WARLOCK then feel free to chuck me a PM and we’ll have a chat.

Finally, that leaves me to ask on behalf of Sascha, and indeed myself, for a final +1 if you’ve enjoyed reading Eurospective since he began the project so so long ago. You can always catch him over at Complexitygaming or Hydramist.net.

So long folks

Lacanoz out.

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