Exit PHD, Enter Shadow Cleave

It's amazing to see the differences between a live ladder where people have to play with what they have available on their server with everything ranging from gear, classes, races, and specs... compared to a tournament ladder where everyone can choose exactly what gear, racials, specs, comps, and everything in between that they want to run. With this now available to everyone participating on the TR, a new trend has come to light and this time it's not-so-surprisingly a new, magical form of "cleave." I call it shadow cleave.

Shadow cleave is basically the new bandwagon of paladin, death knight, warlock teams that are massively spreading on the TR right now. This comp isn't exactly the most successful on live because not every warlock has full deadly gear, optimal gemming, gear choices, and such and physical cleaves decked in KT25 weapons can really tear locks apart. However, given the circumstances of TR, as well as the fact that the counters to the shadow cleave comp (primarily PMR and rogue/feral comps) are less prevalent and kept at bay by PHD and similar comps, and you now can understand why the TR ladder is the way it is. If you missed the blue post, here are the current top 10 standings as of yesterday:

Rank | Team Name | Classes | Win – Loss | Team Rating ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. BARKSDALE CREW | Death Knight, Paladin, Warlock | 156 – 54 | 2501
2. monkey attack squad | Hunter, Mage, Shaman | 103 – 48 | 2450
3. well then | Death Knight, Paladin, Warlock | 54 – 8 | 2436
4. we r gud | Death Knight, Paladin, Warlock | 95 – 25 | 2414
5. we met on eHarmony | Death Knight, Paladin, Warlock | 81 – 34 | 2413
6. Nekos’ Team | Death Knight, Paladin, Warlock | 86 – 39 | 2410
7. NO LIGHTNING GEN BRAH | Death Knight, Paladin, Warlock | 135 – 48 | 2404
7. me you and pikachu | Death Knight, Paladin, Warlock | 138 – 40 | 2404
9. Team Name of the Whale | Hunter, Shaman, Warlock | 136 – 64 | 2396
10. met on xFire | Death Knight, Hunter, Paladin | 103 – 56 | 2378

This, to me, shows a few things:

-I kind of blame myself for the synergy that shadow cleave has due to the tremendous success that the shadowfrost spec has had for death knights

-Teams from horrible battlegroups are not-so-surprisingly horrible (NO LIGHTNING GEN BRAH started at #1 early on and tanked to mirrors when other teams started playing)

-Some teams try way too hard to get high standing right now when you only need to be top 1000 to advance to the next "invitational" phase; ranks beyond top 1000 don't mean anything right now.

That said, I'll admit I've been running the comp myself but I actually talked to Sck about this well before Germany and it's kind of humorous because he always told me that PMR would destroy this comp; and while I do feel that PMR does have an advantage, especially if played well, shadow cleave can still win due to the lack of skilled PMR's in the upper echelon of TR ratings right now; at least on the US TR's.  This is largely because the large amount of hunter teams keep all of the rogue teams at bay. I'm not exactly sure what's popular on the EU TR so if anyone from over there can give us some kind of update, it would be appreciated since the regions tend to be very different in what seems to be the popular comps.

So why exactly is shadow cleave so scrub-friendly and popular? It's fairly obvious: almost any noobs can spam fear and spam AoE damage and that's all it takes for this comp to be successful. Fear is a horribly broken mechanic and anyone that argues this is a downer, period. The problem with fear is two-fold: Firstly, fear taking you in completely random directions, added in with the fact of horrible geometry on certain maps (hello Dalaran Sewers), and you can see why many locks spam fear for the sole purpose of trying to get a good RNG pathing on it; secondly, the amount of damage able to be taken while feared before it breaks is ridiculous and needs to be set to a percentage of maximum health so we can stop seeing people feared with 9 DoT's on them for full duration and dying coming out of it.

Another huge reason why this comp is so strong is the amount of burst that the ShadowFrost spec that I made can deliver. It's pretty ridiculous even when you don't have the IT sigil, and the synergy with ebon plague makes the comp all that much stronger. Here's an example of the damage that usually results from our games that I screenshotted due to the hilarity of the numbers in relation to each other, but make no mistake, almost every game comes out similarly:



Yep, that's more damage than all other DPS classes in the game combined. Pretty cool, huh?

That said, there are some things to be noted about this new popular comp:

-ShadowFrost is taking a significant hit to its damage/burst in 3.1, possibly breaking the entire viability of the spec, and significantly hurting this comp in terms of the AoE damage it can deal.

-Paladins are getting hit hard in the way they can deal with healing multiple targets at once due to the Sacred Shield nerf. Warlocks will be a paladin's worst nightmare come 3.1.

-Warlocks not being able to use Demonic Portal unless it is in LoS come 3.1 will also hurt the survivability of warlocks in this comp when being trained.

-Even in its current state, there are a few notable counters to shadow cleave: PMR, double healer retribution paladin, and horde paladin/rogue/feral druid to name a few. I feel all 3 of these comps and possibly more (feel free to post your ideas on this) can easily win games vs. shadow cleave, some taking even less skill than SC does.

-Priests are becoming amazing in 3.1 which will affect all dynamics of arena and especially vs. warlock teams with their ability to handle spread damage.

I even recorded a short clip from TR when I was playing with a warlock I met and his live paladin on a team during the practice phase for fun and to see how the comp worked. We played several games against Ming's rogue hero, double Brutal Gladiator Reckful, with him running priest/warlock/rogue. You can download the video here:

http://files.filefront.com/ShadowCleavewmv/;13486496;/fileinfo.html

You'll notice, once again, that I outdamage all 3 other DPS classes in the match combined (balanced).

All in all, I really hope this is nothing more than an eye-opener to Blizzard and every idiot out there that thinks warlocks still need buffs to do well in arena. DK's have gotten nerfed (probably could use a few more in certain areas), SV hunters got raped, paladins got hit pretty hard, but Warlocks need buffs? Give me a break.