Celex Seeks His Own Path Of Glory, Maintain Your Interest In WOW, Ensidia vs SK-EU Match Video Analysis

Gravitas's god awful performance in MLG marked the end of an era, as Celex left his Duelist Going For Gladiator and in just one week, his new RMP topped the Rampage BG, home to Minti/Sodah/Venruki's Complexity Gaming.  Like Sasuke-kun who had to leave the village of Konoha for greater power, Celex had to break the two-year plus bond he had with Ely/Emolol in order to reach the promised land.  A championship, after so many laptop I meant heart breakers, it is impossible to question this man's hunger for victory, and nothing less will fulfill his desire to reach the very top.

To be fair, in order to compete at the highest level you absolutely positively can not skimp on practice.  I still remember vividly at the start of 2008 season, when Jared "Noktyn" Fogle dismissed the online regional ladders as "pure RNG", and Kintt himself felt online play had little to do with offline performance.  Team Pandemic never finished top three ever again in a tournament, and more often than not, they were eliminated in the first round.  Emolol and Ely simply no longer have the same burning passion they once held for the great game of WOW, and it showed in their MLG performance.

Maintain Your Interest In WOW

I understand how difficult it is to maintain a high level of interest in a game that doesn't really change all that much on a day-to-day basis.  But if a sponsor is going to shell out travel expenses and send you half way across the country to compete, and a media site pays money to have you on their blog roll, you HAVE to maintain your interest in the game.  How did the hokage manage to keep his interest for so long?  Three tips:

1) Manage Your Own Expectations

If you are a married man working 60 hours a week, you probably should not be expecting sponsorships or deadly gladiator titles.  Likewise, don't expect to be part of a serious raid guild for server first's.  Over stretch yourself and you will be forced to make decisions, and usually RL takes precedence and you are forced to take a break from the game.  Look at Minti-sama's armory, still using S5 honor pieces, no longer raiding, gets top spots in his BG just fine even with a job in RL, because arena is all he plays.  I still think Venruki/Sodah can probably upgrade that spot with someone who plays a lot more, but it will probably have to wait until after the regionals.

2) Manage Your Teammate's Expectations

Like wise you need to manage your teammate's expectations, if their goal is to compete in LAN tournaments you should not be the one holding them back because of your RL responsibilities.  I understood 100% when my priest/druid teammates in S3 ended up going for vengeful gladiator with another rogue who was significantly better geared than me, and could play a lot more matches than me.  You really have to know your role and stick to it.

"Ninjas have to do dishes too." - Estel

3) Avoid Grinding At All Costs

Blizzard made the game extremely casual friendly if you just do your daily/weekly quests.  Take honor for example, if you just do your Wintergrasp / daily PVP quests and give it 6-8 weeks to pick up all the honor pieces, it is a very painless process.  Same with gold farming if you just stick to your dailies.  In fact dailies are great for stay in touch with your friends, you log on for 30 minutes or so everyday to do a couple of dailies, check your mail, it is a light gaming session and fun.  I been really digging the fishing dailies, I find it very relaxing to my soul after a long day.  Grinding on the other hand is the fastest way to lose interest, does it really matter if you get 20 stats today or a week later?  Not to mention min-max has heavy diminishing returns at higher gear levels when it comes to effort vs reward.

Ensidia vs SK-EU Match Video Analysis

SK-Gaming posted all 8 games of the grand finals (Another the DK's perspective) between Ensidia's RMP and SK-EU's DK/Rogue/Priest, and having played both comps at 2600+ I was very interested in the match-up.  SK defeated Ensidia in group play, but lost twice in the grand finals 2-3 and 0-3.  The 0-3 was most likely due to the emotional collapse after losing a very close fifth game, similar to how Orlando Magic just folded after choking away game 4 against the LA Lakers.  They had hesitation in their eyes going into the final series, not knowing what to do against an Ensidia team that found an answer to their priest zergs.

Serennia-sama said a well played DK/rogue/priest can not lose to a RMP.  Well we have heard similar stories about warrior/rogue/druid and rogue/rogue/druid back in TBC before, and we all know how that turned out at tournament level.  We saw Team Pandemic at MLG and it didn't exactly fly against the elite RMPs either.  While my team went 5-4 against Billian, the #1 player on SK-100's RMP, I knew had we played more games, they will have the better record for sure.

In my opinion, the only way for DK/rogue/priest to beat RMP, is training the priest non-stop.  Any smart RMP will open on your DK immediately to prevent him from getting to the priest right away.  What I do is CS -> disarm the rogue, blind him, do whatever I can to buy my DK time to grip the priest, from there unload all of our CDs and drop the priest first 30 seconds of the game.  It is called die-by-the-sword because win or lose, we force a conclusion fast and avoid going late game against RMP as cleave at all costs.

Serennia-sama claims that you can split DPS between rogue/priest and for me that is as silly as splitting DPS as rogue/rogue/druid against RMP.  You are trying to play control when you have very little usable CCs, when the RMP is the epitome of control.  Frost mage is the ultimate play maker and an elite mage like Pookz will have no problem whatsoever slowing down one of your DPS while nuking down the other.  Since he will be left open most of the times, all it takes is a couple of hard casts and a blanket counterspell and you are in kill range.  Sheep->blind the priest, nova->deep freeze the DK, and nuke the rogue, it is all text book.

Yes, you can try to focus fire the rogue but with cloak of shadow glyph + double evasion, and mage/priest free to do whatever they want, other than lucky bursts during stuns (which their rogue can trinket since you have disease on him to prevent blind, their priest can pain suppress, their mage can CC one of your melees if not both to stop the damage), they will kill your rogue quicker more often than not.  The correct play is to have your rogue peel their rogue, grip over the priest then unload everything on him to force a quick conclusion. 

Tournament play is all about taking the opponent out of their comfort zone.  After Ensidia went heavy on Another's DK and scored a couple of kills, SK-EU got out of their comfort zone and started training Kalimist the rogue.  Instead of peel just enough for his DK to get to the priest, Zom got suckered into rogue-on-rogue against Kalimist when the frost mage provides so much more control to the fight than DK.

And again, SK-EU played a dual comp against Ensidia's single comp, and a 85-90% team is not going to beat a 95-100% team.  Ensidia played so many games together as one team, one comp, and they made the little plays in that 3-2 victory.  From there, it was all smooth sailing.  I really believe they learned that from SK-US, win a couple of matches and suddenly your opponent (foolishly) stops believing in priest training, and they don't know how to play any other way.

SK-US > Ensidia > Europe?  We will find out at Blizzcon.