Rousing the Dreamers

It's a hard fact, but lately the World of Warcraft has seemed moribund, a decadent shrine to the glory of capitalism with little regard for its base demographic, teetering precariously on a precipice overlooking oblivion. The lull between the final content patch and the release of the forthcoming expansion is always a bleak affair. Season 4 has ended and the future of competitive Arena seems to float hazy on the horizon, an unattainable goal at the end of a desert road: a streak of dusty tarmac across the barren rocks.

Intel Extreme Masters has all but ended, and the content was juicy enough to cause indigestion - SKGaming taking the finals in a display of deft mastery, toppling Gravitas Gaming in an indescribably tight set of series. The unequivocal rage of Celex reared its leviathanic head and roared, filling the auditorium with a piercing shriek - not unlike that of a Nazgul. One can imagine that his heart has shattered into even more pieces than his Alienware laptop, the object representing his failure, the digital helm from which he navigated his ship - it was a rocky ride, and Gravitas broke and flounded upon the shoals. Swearing vengeance and howling with disdain for whatever callous gods damned him to the shadows of second place, he mightily obliterated his computer. It was delicious.

I won't go into details concerning the matches, one can easily find the dull, lifeless regurgitation of every minor technique on any number of blogs here; the sports-journalist approach has never been my forte. I am the herald for the small man, for the everyman, showering the feeble plebs with coins of gold in the form of words. It is for you I report, my gentle Gameriot readers, and I know you were all watching the tournament: what else is there to do on a Sunday afternoon? I was watching football, to be honest, and I only caught snippets of the stream during commercials; luckily I swiveled my gargantuan braincage just in time to catch the most impressive bout of nerdrage since Swarm and Serennia. The best part? I found it about a hundred fold more entertaining than the tournament itself, and I think most of you feel the same way.

Many of my entries have focused on the tourney bracket celebrities, and on our grotesque fascination with them. Partially it's envy, that much is clear; we'd all love to make bank playing World of Warcraft. Truthfully, the wages of the tournament players is blown incredibly out of proportion here on Gameriot, and I don't think one could support a family and live comfortably with being a Rogue as their primary source of income. Still, most of the players are around college age. Some of them are students, others have jobs, and the rest are just lazy, slacking gamers, and it's a fine thing to make money doing this. It's the American dream, isn't it? It must take some initial courage to shed the anonymity the internet offers and thrust yourself into the spotlight, to constant ridicule concerning your physical appearance (i.e. Noktyn) or your deranged mental state (i.e. Celex). And God forbid you're a girl - Gameriot is full of blogs almost entirely devoted to Hafu, who is really just your average-looking Mongol girl gamer. I suppose the yellow fever instantly boosts any Asian girl's sex appeal by at least two or three points, but it's still ridiculous.

In other news, the Bills beat the Chargers.

Now that one tournament has ended, what can we really do but wait for the next one? World of Warcraft is in a bad state right now; the latest patch was a travesty, and all of my guildmates who are constantly hounding achievements (while I painfully level my seventh character - and fifth warrior) boggle my mind. It's an opiate to divert attention from some serious problems looming on the horizon, namely class balance and the future of PvP in the Wrath of the Lich King. While people are running circles to explore Ashenvale and cook wolf gibblets, those who managed to secure a Beta spot are being curbstomped by Unholy Death Knights.

Some input from my old chum Desense, who currently has a level 80 Warrior on Beta: "Ret. Paladins are still OP. The upcoming changes won't make that big of a difference. Frost mages are simply insane, and Unholy Death Knights are the worst of them all. Those three classes are gods among the rest, and as a Warrior I'm lucky if I can beat anyone 1v1."

According to him, despite his 26,000 hitpoint pool his Warrior is still neutered without the aid of an omnipresent pocket healer. How many times has Blizzard grunted out fallacious statements concerning their desire to rid warriors of their need for a healer? Due to the mechanics of rage and gear scaling, endgame Warriors will always be inherently unbalanced. Until you reach the point in the game where your gear is perfect in every slot, you're lunchmeat. Regardless, to succeed in any facet you require the assistance of a devoted Druid or something along those lines. Right now I'm living in fear of leveling to 80 once WotLK is released. Over every rill and ridge I expect to see a Gnome frost mage lurking amidst the weeds and conjuring up an icy holocaust with which to freeze me into a solid Tauren cube and then shatter me into a thousand hairy fragments. The derisive, high-pitched Gnome cackle will forever haunt my dreams.

In all honesty, Blizzard deserves some credit in the balance department. When serious game-time rolls around (i.e. the next Arena season), I think they'll have a lot of things ironed out. People have already gone absolutely bat**** over Ret Paladins. The lasting problem, of course, is Death Knights. The amount of complaining will be far less, despite the fact that Unholy DKs are about 10x more OP than Ret Pallies. The reason: nearly everyone will be playing one, as an alt if not a new main. They will be an uncontained swarm. Once everyone and their mother is playing a Death Knight at level 80, Blizzard developers will strike the iron while it's hot: the inevitable nerf bat will fall. Then all but the most dedicated Death Knights will retreat to their former classes in defeat and disgrace, and gradually the class will be brought back up to par. That's how it was with Paladins and Shaman in the beginning of classic WoW; these things are all cyclical, people. The future is not so grim.