Blizzard Impacts Blizzcon, 3.2 Disappointments, Neilyo's Secondary Income & Serennia's Continued Struggles, EG displaced?

Blizzard throws a curveball weeks before Blizzcon

Despite the Blizzard eSports team specifically telling me and many other players in Germany otherwise, Blizzard has gone ahead and released patch 3.2, just weeks before the global finals at Blizzcon.

The whole "release a major patch right before a tournament is over or has occurred" seems to be a recurring theme for Blizzard. Who remembers the online qualifiers? The final week of the tournament Blizzard released a massive patch which dealt serious blows to DKs and warlocks and essentially negated the previous 6 weeks of the online qualifiers, which left a lot of teams angry, particularly those that did not qualify.

Putting that aside, the patch is definitely going to push the game in the right direction. Still, Blizzard should have given some courtesy by allowing the global finals to happen first since everybody has been practicing on patch 3.1 for months now.

But with patch 3.2 going live with a lot of major changes, what do we make of Blizzcon? My team and others have been analyzing their prospects at Blizzcon and looking at the type of comps they would be up against and beggining practice for the matches. Now with patch 3,2 out, though, the question needs to be begged: how will the matchups play out? Will people switch comps?

Just to give everybody an idea of what I thought the prospects for my own team was on patch 3.1, I photoshopped the matchups. This is what I felt would be our path to first place if we were to get there (keep in mind there is a little bit of wishful thinking/theorycrafting of the path of least resistance here):



As you can see, I felt that my team would be most successful if we managed to avoid all of the PMRs, as I feel they are always very random because every PMR plays completely differently. Furthermore, no team can really guarantee a win against PMR because right now there aren't too many solid comps against it. In the screenshot I gambled that SK Gaming would beat Woah in the first match but lose to Shipit because I assumed that the pally/dk/hunter teams of x6 and Shipit would make quick work of all of the PMRs they ran into as I have seen and heard very good things about their performance against high caliber PMRs. Then I assumed that SK Gaming would lose in the second as Woah would get an idea of their playstyle and how to handle them.

As I think Azael correctly pointed out, the best bet for my team would have been to get matched up against the pally/dk/hunter teams in the tournament as I feel more comfortable against it than I do against PMRs. So, in the best-case scenario, the PMRs would all get eliminated by other teams and my team would be able to get by without having to play them.

So why did I just spent all of that time talking about Blizzcon as if it were on patch 3.1? The reason is because I wanted to make the point that the tournament is going to be completely up in the air. Is PMR going to finally be able to outlast pally/dk/hunter burst? Likewise, is PMR going to have the burst to drop somebody? Is pally/dk/warrior going to have the burst power to take someone down? Nothing is for certain but there are high bets on Woah pulling off a first place finish with the massive buffs that WLD just got as a result of damage slowing down (not to mention 3 minute feldom and a variety of other things that will have a positive impact for their team).

Putting Blizzcon aside, I'm really curious to see how Fnatic's new lineup of RLS will perform at MLG Dallas as a result of patch 3.2. I don't want to seem too critical here but I'm gambling that their team gets hit ridiculously hard as the resilience change will force Yog to swap off of Destruction to UA. Could they pull a Serennia and go into a tournament with extremely high caliber players and flop? I'm betting my money on the tournament veterans Azael/Zyz/Kollektiv to perform exceptionally well even with the swap to UA as that is pretty much all Azael played at the regionals.

Biggest disappointments of patch 3.2

Seal of the Martyr

I'm really saddened that Blizzard allowed the removal of Seal of the Martyr to go through as it was a really creative and skill-based way for paladins to break polymorphs.  More upsetting is the fact that Blizzard allowed shadow word:death to stay as-is, which is really just a slap in the face to every holy paladin that arenas. Why allow priests to keep breaking polymorphs and not paladins? Breaking polymorphs with shadow wword:death and judgment of the martyr are both equally difficult to pull off and only the best priests and paladins can do it. In any case, it is just one sad example of Blizzard dumbing down the game.

Hungering Cold

I really thought this thing was going to get nerfed before the patch went live. I talked about it weeks ago as one of the things that Blizzard should definitely address before releasing patch 3.2. Unfortunately, they feel that an AOE 10 second CC on a 1 minute cooldown on a specc with ridiculous burst damage is balanced.

Paladin 4-piece Conqueror bonus

For those not aware, this thing makes sacred shield proc every 4 seconds instead of every 6 seconds. I mean, really? Every 4 seconds? It is even more noticeable in 2v2 where every paladin is protection specc (which adds like 400 spell power due to the talent Touched by the Light). The biggest problem for me is that the resilience change is not going to suddenly make these paladins wear full resilience. They are still going to be utilizing this unbalanced 4-piece bonus to the grave.

Divine Shield still not breaking cyclone

Ok, so this is still one of those pipe dreams for me but I'd really love to not have to trinket a cyclone and divine shield before another cyclone lands on me before I can start landing heals. Hopefully Blizzard gets working on this one!

New HoT for Paladin's Flash of Light

Although I will admit that I've tested it on the PTR and I will be the first to say that it is amazing for a passive HoT that pretty much has 100% uptime, I have to also say that they probably should have separated the HoT from flash of light just because it is too simple. Any paladin can keep the HoT up without even thinking about it, which in my opinion is not a good thing. My suggestion would be to make that HoT it's own ability that the paladin has to press to use (although the HoT would probably need to be buffed if this suggestion was to go through).

Oh, and for those wondering, with 2000 spell power it ticks for about 400 every second on someone if flash of light does not crit and 550 if flash of light does crit.

Mage mortal strike

I'm going to have to eat my hat on this one because I said really early on after the announcement of the 20% mage MS that it would not last. But, it did. If Ming's recommendation of all casters getting a 20% MS and all melee getting a 30% MS with melee/melee and caster/caster MS not stacking, then I would be very supportive of the mage MS. Until then, though, I will have to respectfully disagree with Blizzard's decision.

Unrelenting Assault

There is honestly no jusification for this. It is the king of draining healers while simultaneously being incredibly effective for any team with 2 DPS to take down the healer. This is simply one of those abilities that makes me say "WTF?". If warriors need help, fine, give them something. But not a 75% MS.

Dalaran Arena & Ruins of Lordaeron

Blizzard heavily oversold these two by making it look like their flaws would be fixed (ie: the small surface on the top layer of Dalaran arena and that terrible spawn hole in ruins of lordaeron)

I was just on the servers and the truth of the matter here is that ruins of lordaeron's spawn "hole" is still there, it's just not as big anymore. I also did not really see these new "LoS additions" that were supposed to be two more tombs on the map.

And, Dalaran arena's top surface is pretty much identical and the crates, although fixed some of the problems that they were causing with line of sight, are still pretty similar. What was this claim about "25% more space" on the arena? Here is your 25%:



Ring of Valor

Still in the game.

Neilyo's retirement plan revealed

As is with many things in life, Neilyo has not been happy with his minimum wage job at Dominos and has been trying to dig himself out of the hole that is downtown Chicago. Who wouldn't be, though? With open sewers and rats scavenging his apartment for food (not to mention heavy pollution that could choke an elephant), it was time for Neilyo to get a promotion as there aren't many people in his town that can deliver 5 pizzas to 5 different households in under an hour. Neilyo has done a lot for Dominos, so much so that Dominos founder Tom Monaghan almost considered reinstating his "30 minute guarantee" pizza delivery system just because of his  fantastic work.

Neilyo approached his boss a few weeks ago to ask him about getting a potential raise so that he could enjoy a better lifestyle and maybe do some traveling in the summer. Unfortunately, as with many bosses in the United States during these tough economic times, he was very resentful of increasing this vagabond's wage. In fact, Neilyo's request angered his boss so much that he almost got fired for it. It didn't help his case when he continued to hint to his boss that he might be kicked out of his apartment Serennia style unless he could find a way to increase his income.

Enter Yog and Douja, who had a scheme to keep their teammate in his apartment and on his computer. As Ming talked about a few days ago, Neilyo & Co have been playing on a team on BG Nightfall for a few weeks now. What you may not be aware of though, is that they are being paid to hit rank 1 on those characters. The word is that the figure is around $1000 apiece, and that is some serious dough for somebody living in their car 4 months out of the year. But how long until Blizzard's sympathy for Neilyo's predicament fades and they drop the hammer on him?

Serennia's continued struggles

As some of you are probably aware, Serennia transferred off of Stormreaver about 2 months ago and started raiding with his new guild on Hyjal. It looked like Serennia was going to stop playing arena entirely as his armory was pretty much teamless for a good deal of his current stay on that server. But, as became the case with the man who used to be #1 in all 3 brackets in TBC, Serennia just had to reclaim his front page throne. He then approached a druid named Snuggleme from Avant Garde to transfer to his server to do 3v3. Serennia's new team, which is druid/dk/lock, has done pretty well as they shot up to #1 in only a few short days. But, now it appears that the pressure on Snuggleme to continue arenaing to increase their 25 point gap over the rank 2 team is becoming too much for him and he is preparing to transfer back to his native server, Kil'Jaeden. The biggest complaint? Serennia bugging Snuggleme to play 1 point games vs a PMR team in their last 3v3 session.

"the fishhead just doesn't get it. we're first place and he still won't leave me alone. he just wants to keep playing 1 point games, even if they get really close to beating us and i just wish he would go back to the deep blue sea where he came from"

I played 5v5 with Serennia back in season 4 and although he can really get on your nerves when you lose, I never felt Serennia's reputation was nearly as bad as people made it out to be. He will say things that can make you angry, but it's not too different from playing with anybody that has a really competitive personality when it comes to WoW arena.
Hopefully Serennia will clean off his machete this time because it appears that when he gets to work, it gets messy. And let's face it, a lot of people are really squeemish.

Breaking news - EG displaced

It appears that MLG has decided to invite another American team over team EG, which is apparently not going to be Lafu's team that I was posting about earlier because they are not sponsored. I am still really disappointed that EG has been replaced though.

The other update is that Gravitas has also gotten an invite, despite having a "ringer" (a pickup rogue for the event). I don't want to bash teams, but they didn't even qualify for the regionals (keep in mind EG actually placed third at the regionals, which is still an accomplishment).

More on this soon as I am still getting conflicting reports.



Update: no more "kun", "sama", "ching chong", etc