New System Better Than Old?; Interview with Ensidia PvE

Arena System
Back in the middle of Season 5, Blizzard felt it necessary to change how the arena system has been working for four previous seasons now, and more recently in season 6, inflated ratings to tremendous proportions that now also expand into the 3v3 and 5v5 brackets. It's been almost a full season since these changes were implemented now, but was it really a change for the better?

Overall, I think that the theory behind have a matchmaking rating is a good one, so that a freshly created team can climb to their "intended" ratings faster, but the other concepts with the system are very flawed. Take, for instance, someone wishing to try out a different comp or partner, and one of them has an extremely high MMR while the other has a low one. Every loss that the team incurs would drop the MMR of the high rated player by a large amount, so much so that if he wanted to go back to his old partner or a comp that they're more familiar with, that he's potentially gimped his MMR and ability to play the higher rated teams.

Moreover, the other reason why I see the current system as flawed is primarily because it is not a sum-zero based system. In the old system from seasons 1 through 4, any points won were equal to points lost by the opposing team and obviously vice versa. With that aspect of the system being removed, it seems to have diminished the risk:reward portion of arena. It's hardly a risk to spam games currently when you're in the top 10 of a battlegroup because as long as you break 60% win ratio or so, you'll usually come out positive in rating unless you're the #1-3 teams in the battlegroup. In previous seasons, almost every rank 1 team had an extremely high win ratio, particularly in 2v2, because you simply had to in order to be there. This season, it's not uncommon at all for a team to be rank 1 with 60-65% win rate.

This will also continue to be a problem in the future, particularly at the beginning of a season. With the way teams and MMR work, when everyone is spamming games to climb up from their original 0 team rating, at the beginning of a season, all the 2700+ kids that ran op comps or dodged for last-minute Gladiator will be matched up against the other "good" teams and farming to an end-of-season rank 1 title in the first week of arena is an entirely realistic possibility, as you can you see with Billian's 2v2 that hasn't queued in about 2 months.

Aside from super inflated ratings, there's also the real possibility of teams eventually hitting the 3000 rating cap rather easily now and obviously having multiple teams there would obviously pose problems. When I tried to get an official response on this, Kalgan stated the following:

There isn’t a higher cap, but it’s working as expected because having a high mmr makes it much easier to gain rating quickly than under the old elo system.  We’ll probably slow it down some next season though, I agree it’s a bit fast for high-rated players (although the new speed feels really good for everyone below 1800 or so).

This leaves a little hope, but not too much. I really wish they would just go back to the sum-zero system but I guess that would be too anti-casual for them at this point.





Interview with Ensidia PvE
I've done several interviews with top players and big names from Arena, but this time around I felt it was time for a change of pace and to chat it up with the masters of PvE. If you live on the other side of the world, they probably need no introduction, but I had a chance to speak with both Mackzter and Mek, co-leaders from Ensidia (both formerly from SK Gaming). So without further ado:



                                                  Mackzter                         Mek
                                         



I know you're both from SK Gaming originally, which was also more formerly known as Curse and Meet Your Makers. Could you both give us some backround about when you joined the guild and how long you've been together in leading SK Gaming and now, Ensidia?

Mackzter: I'm the one that has been around the longest from the Curse side, joined up at the start of BWL pretty much and been playing actively ever since. Took an officer role when AQ40 hit the liveservers when Fura was GM and since then i've been an active Officer and co-guildmaster. As mek says we've been playing and leading this guild together for quite a few years now I guess!

Mek: I was running a rival guild to Curse on the same server for about the first year of WoW's release. I started talking to Markus quite a lot when we were fighting over green dragon spawns. A few people left my guild and I really didn't feel it was the same anymore so I joined up with curse. A few month's later I become officer and from that point on Markus and I really lead the guild together. There were times with other officers and most notably a guy called Mysth who was a very long time founding member of Curse (he quit after Sunwell). Once we realised SK really wasn't going to work out we looked for a new project and came up with the whole Ensidia concept. We approached Kungen and Nessaj and since they were having similar issues with Mouz, they agreed to do it.



Also on the topic of Curse, Fura was quite the character back in the old vanilla WoW days. He had a big fanbase, mostly for his videos but there was a lot of controversy on how he was as a guild leader. What did both of you think of him as a raider, leader, and person?

Mek: He wasn't a bad guy and I got to know him pretty well. He wasn't a good player though and had tried to throw his weight around without having the respect of the players. I'm pretty sure he was made GM because of his movies. (this was before I joined).

Mackzter: Basically he was recruited by Net(founder of Curse.com) and was promoted to GM straight off the bat when he joined for PR purposes which was a mistake for sure since as Phil says he didn't have the respect from the players. His skill was below average pretty much and he was a slacker ingame aswell, using the guildbank for himself and stuff like that which we didn't really accept.



Fast forwarding to Sunwell, SK Gaming defeated the final two encounters in Sunwell Plateau first in the world: M'uru and Kil'jaeden. These kills were the first in many years that Nihilum was beaten to and many people thought SK Gaming would move into WotLK as the best raiding guild. The guild merger with Nihilum was rather surprising to some people when it happened shortly after. What exactly were the biggest reasons for the merge and do either of you regret it?


Mek:  Absolutely no regrets. The biggest problem was that all the "sponsors" want the huge PR from PvE but don't really want to give anything back to the guilds. This is where E-Sports and WoW just do not mix at all. So we wanted our own new site and a platform to really develop the guild name into a proper community site. Get some hardware rewards for our players and that kind of thing. Neither SK or Mouz delivered for the previous guilds and we decided that the only way we were going to get some real support was to be able to go to investors and say we have the best looking lineup you can. The concept behind Ensidia it much more than just a guild, we want to make a strong gaming community and that's why we've done stuff like add a PvP.

Mackzter: No regrets, It sucked a bit to lose some players that it didn't work out with but other that it has been really great so far.



A lot of people have been spreading the notion that Ensidia members get paid to raid in WoW and kill bosses first. Is that how the sponsorship works? If not, what exactly does it entail?

Mek: The concept behind Ensidia is much more than just a guild, we want to make a strong gaming community and that's why we've done stuff like add a PvP team, it's an organisation of its own. The members are not paid, each member received a few euros when we merged to cover stuff like transfer fees and just to show that they mattered to us. Myself, Mackzter, Kungen, Nessaj are all paid employees of the Ensidia organisation but this isn't for playing this is for out of game activities since we are the only paid staff actually running things on a day to day basis. It's not a huge salary but getting to be part of something new is really important to us and a dream if in the end we can actually make it work.

Mackzter: That being said we are just like any other hardcore guild ingame and I have to say that it is really stressful to try and stay number one! And yes, our members do go to school and they do have jobs!



Let's talk about Ulduar now. Has the instance as a whole lived up to your expectations of how difficult they made it out to be (hardmodes obviously)? You still have Alone in the Darkness to complete, but with everything else finished, were you satisfied overall or do you think that they could have done better?  And did you find Algalon to be more or less difficult than Firefighter?


Mackzter: I think the instance itself has been great, however I really think they ****** up majorly with the buffs on the watchers after a guild had already killed 3 of them. Something like that can completely change the outcome of a race which it also kind of did, I wish they would have had the watchers as they are now from the start. Mimiron is for sure the hardest and best boss in there and I have to say I am dissapointed in Algalon, the way they were hyping him pre-release and seeing a quite simple fight tactic wise was really dissapointing.

Mek: The biggest problem is that the instance wasn't linear in my opinion. You should have a clearly defined progression system. What I mean is that Hard-mode should not be available until you have completely normal on a boss. Mimiron hard-mode in the gear we did the world first in is a real challenge and definitely the hardest thing in the instance. In the gear you have 3-4 resets later it's significantly easier, we can now have 1 extra healer and still do a lot more overall raid dps making it no problem. Algalon was hard because of the time limit. Skill wise it's not hard but the level of gear makes it tight on dps and the timer just adds this extra pressure and element of desperation that you have just never had before. So while the concept is new and quite good, he was far too easy. He was also bugged for the weeks when it was only us at him so we couldn't do that much progress. Yogg 0 watchers is just untested and will be simple when they sort it out, I do not believe that is a big kill at all.



Speaking of healers, many people find restoration Shamans (Meka's class) to be the weakest PvE healer right now. How would you rank each healer, from worst to best, and why?

Mek: Druids and Priests are pretty equal, Paladins are a close third and Shamans a distant fourth unfortunately Druids and Priests just have soo many options, soo many instants and AoE healing power making them significantly better. Disc priests also have monstrous absorb power which is the best spec for a number of fights. Paladins are strong because of beacon and the added utility of shield+sacrifice, salv, that kind of thing. The other week we had a druid with over 9k effective hps on Iron Council hard mode, balanced indeed. If you use an elemental Shaman then a resto has almost no utility at all appart from being decent a few select fights (vezax and algalon). I mean compare Riptide to stuff like CoH and Wild Growth, or Chain heal vs any other AoE heal. The whole thing is just a complete mess. 

Mackzter: Druids and Priests are OP!



On the flip side now, let's discuss tanks. Many guilds find that encounters are completely trivial for a Death Knight to tank whereas any other class tanking it would be far more difficult, such as General Vezax. What do you think of the current state of the tank classes and the desirability of each?

Mackzter: Since DK's are a Hero class and all we use him for most encounters, we call Kungen the glass tank on most fights. Jokes aside it's getting a lot more balanced with every change they make but we mainly use a DK and a warrior, we never used 2 dk's I don't think.

Mek: Yeah DK's are the best and up until some recent changes they were the best my FAR. Now the gap is closing but DK's are still the best due to their amazing timers, I actually rate druids the second best now with their 30 second last stand   Well I dont think there are any single tank fights really in 25 man except Hodir where Kungen does tank. All other fights Zkygge plays a major tanking role. The main reason for using a warrior tank right now is because you want your Ferals dps'ing because they are soo sick



On the topic of your sick DPS, a lot of people have noticed that you regularly raid with 3 shadow priests, when most guilds only use one or so. Is there a particular reason for this?

Mek: On any fight with more than 1 target they are extremely good, especially before your DK's have access to the 239 Ulduar weapons. The gap has closed a bit now however and we really piled gear onto our 2 main dps DK's and they are putting out great numbers. All around though the survivablity and multi target aspect of Shadow Priests while also being ranged makes them amazingly good.



What are both your most favorite and least favorite hard modes in Ulduar and why?

Mackzter: Mimiron is a definate favourite because it's the hardest and the most well tuned. I think I'd say that Yogg is the most boring one, it's such a long fight and you can wipe to a lot of RNG and you'll have to go back to doing

Mek: Mimiron is the best because there's soo much variety, soo much to think about and it has great intensity. Wonderfully designed encounter. Hodir is the most stupid, what's the point of having a hardmode that's purely based on stacking or level of gear.



Since you mentioned Hodir hardmode, be honest with me here guys. How many bosses did you "flower power?" :P

Mackzter: Only Hodir, haven't exploited any boss ever. We would never even think about using it on any other boss.

Mek: We only did Hodir with it, we killed Mimiron after it was fixed and didn't even know about it when we did Freya. You can see from all our videos that we didn't use it on any other boss. Flower Power was just a means to an end. If we hadn't done it they wouldn't have fixed Hodir or the buff, ultimately it worked out for the best with Hodir.



And since you also both mentioned Mimiron hard mode, what does "sa javla gott fitt spel" mean?

Mackzter: "so f ucking nice c unt game" roughly translated :P

Mek: That was Calippo, it means "Soo f ucking nice, c unt game."jonas gets a bit excited sometimes on the kills. well, we all do really ! 

Mackzter: victor goes crazy

Mek: yeah we have this french guy Aryu (victor). Quietest guy ever on vent and normally but when you kill something he goes nuts. its awesome.



In the same video, we also heard a female voice laughing at the end. On the topic of females, what is your guild's stance on them? A lot of US guilds strictly do not recruit any females at all due to various drama reasons. Does your guild recruit any and have you had problems with them?

Mek: Yeah we would recruit girls but we just have a really strict policy on trying to control any drama. We have two girls at the moment and they are really dedicated players with no interest in that kind of thing so it makes them entirely equal to the male players. As a side note I should say they are both core players who have been on pretty much every Ulduar world first. 

Mackzter: I have to say I'm a bit surprised that our 2 female players are as good as they are, we never really had many in Curse/SK though but I'm really happy with Poptisse and Tjani! Drama starting female players are the worst!



Do you think the concept behind Algalon the Observer with a 1-hour timer is a good idea? How do you feel about this as a natural block to progression?

Mek: I mean I guess it all started with Vael. I think 1 hour per day is probably a bit better than 1 hour per lockout. The problem is that it makes them soo hard to tune it because they don't want it to take 40 weeks to kill it but when it takes 6 weeks people say it's too easy. They can't really win in the eyes of the public with such an encounter. From a personal perspective I really dislike it though  

Mackzter: I think it could be a good idea but next time they need to make sure everything works properly when a guild reaches the boss, I think 1-hour is a bit short though...2hours would be good imo! Yeah I definatly wouldn't want it on several bosses in an instance, one boss max!

Mek: Yeah working properly is a big deal, he was soooo bugged in 25 man when we reached him, we lost most of our first 3 lockouts to it. And I mean a boss if bugged out when he has a 1 hour timer it's just completely depressing. 



I see you're both Deadly Gladiators. What bracket and comp did you both earn the title in? Do a lot of other members participate in arena from the guild or just a select few?

Mek: we both got it in 5on5, it wasn't a huge achievement our BG is not that strong at all. I had like 3rd in 2on2 though and markus had I think 3rd also in 3on3. we played, hunter,dk,pala,shaman,warrior in 5's.

Mackzter: Haven't really played THAT actively the last seasons and for this one I just find it insanely boring to play Holy so I'm just messing around a bit for now. There are a lot of people in the guild that is interested in PvP though and we had many teams that got gladiator last season.



How do your damage meters for a typical fight usually go? Who carries Ensidia's DPS? Rogues, ferals, mages, or who? Didn't you bring 1 rogue to Algalon?

Mek: I guess algalon meter would be a pretty good way to compare. Feral 7.4k, Blood DK's, Rogues, Hunters about 6.8k, then it goes steadily down. Shadow priests are not that good on this fight since u talked about them earlier, they really need multi target to compete with the others. yeah only 1 rogue, it was mainly because he had 10 man algalon experience and the others didnt. enhancement shamans are just garbage though imo.

Mackzter: our feral is for sure the highest single target dps, then it's dk's, hunters, rogues, warlocks I think. shadow priests and mages do well aswell, if I wouldnt mention mages I would get raped by our french mage Ekye so.



Which hard mode took you the most total hours to learn and defeat?

Mek:  Mimiron, i dont know how many hours but apparently it was 204 tries according to wws.



Question for Mackzter: Ghostcrawler has talked a lot about Paladin healing recently on the US forums, stating that they don't like the way holy paladins are in raids right now with non-stop holy light spamming and have considered nerfing either Illumination, Replenishment, or something in between. How do you feel about this and what do you think should be done?

Mackzter: I gotta say I really don't like the way they were speaking about Illumination being based on Spirit or MP5. Some blue poster posted something recently about mixing up paladin healing a bit aswell, I really do think they need to try and do something about our healing spells without making it overpowered in arena. Their statements is correct though, it's getting a bit boring spamming the same thing. and to end up with so much overhealing, compared to priests/druids.



How do you feel about the growing trend of most healer classes purely stacking intellect for raiding and nothing else?

Mek: im actually removing a lot of int for spell power now.  cause you wanna lower until you are like dry on a 10 min fight basically. int is like only worth stacking if you need the mana. otherwise spell power is better. hps man! keeps ppl alive. no point in finishing a fight with 15k mana left.  its the same for paladins. common misconception to mindlessly stack int. spell power keeps people alive, not int. 

Mackzter: don't zerg stack int just because you saw it in a spreadsheet kids!  That Protec guy from Method, 30k mana and like, 2k spell power, NICE brah. using the blue JC trinket, good choice.

Mek:  Flaming Method gets us through the day.



This one is from aNNa from Glamour, you know her I think. She wants to know how Goza and Spritzor are doing, the 2 merciless gladiators from Cyclone. PvP'ers don't always work out in PvE so she and others were curious.

Mek:  That's not a bad question actually! I think people think that recruitment is really easy for us. In reality it is soo soo difficult because you need to find people who are on "that" level or it just annoys the current members. In truth it's quite hard to tell because their gear isn't amazing yet but Spritzor at least today performed pretty well on Firefighter.

Mackzter: So far they I'd say they are doing pretty well, with progress still being on up until this week and since they were rerollers we haven't been able to use them much in main raids until now. If they will continue to be motivated I'm sure they will do good in the long run.



Is your Algalon kill video going to be your best of WotLK so far?

Mek: I think it will be a good video but the fight just isn't as epic as Mimiron in all honesty. I think our Mimiron video will remain as one of the best PvE movies ever for a long time. That being said I am really looking forward to what Sbe(stu) comes out with for this one since I think he had some cool stuff planned.

Mackzter: Sbe is definatly trying to make it as good as the Mimiron one on short notice, I'm pretty sure that we'll be the second one to release it this time around though. The #2 guild that kills the boss always tends to rush and release a subpar movie.

Mek: there is Kungen going "ooooh, shield" and me going, "man that was a terrible try."

Mackzter: The nerdscreams are pretty weak on this kill, as I said we were pretty dissapointed in the boss fight compared to Mimiron :P



Thanks a lot to you both for your time to do this interview. I appreciate it a great deal. Any shout outs or mentions that you'd both like to make?

Mek: Well first of all a big shout out the community we have going on Ensidia.com. We are building a great bunch of people there. You should go checkout the site! We have a hardware giveaway about to go live and loads of great blogs and other content. Check my new blog out about Algalon progress for example. Kungen's blog also has a monstrous following. Apart from that just much <3 to everyone in the guild, it's such a great atmosphere to play in. The hardware giveaway will be really awesome though, I'm really excited about that because we got some great prizes and some funky ideas for the actual competition.

Mackzter: Shoutout to everybody in the guild for the huge amount of effort they've put into clearing Ulduar, much love to frenchies, poptisse and munken! And of course the swedes! (Baotn GL with Annika).