Rating Decay, Why Healing Should Be Nerfed, Stars Overcomes the "Mathematically Impossible"

Rating Decay
There's been a lot of discussion as of late, particularly in this arena season due to the MMR carryovers from season 5 where previously OP comps got destroyed in the first week of s6 and skyrocketed certain teams to astronomical ratings where they have been sitting ever since (see Billian's 2v2). This will always continue to be a problem as each new season begins as well as the inherent problem of "rating squatters" that earn a high rating early on in the season by getting a string of wins off against another high rated team and essentially sitting on the rating for the rest of the season to try to camp it for the rank #1 title.

Although perfectly viable in the current system, almost anyone that plays competitively would object to this type of play and a solution I have been thinking of is implementing a simple rating decay system. Although the numbers could be fine tuned any which way, a good example I came up with is for a team's team rating to decay at a rate of 1% of it's total rating per week of inactivity and in order to prevent inactivity, the team would have to participate in at least 10 games that week. This example would result in an inactive 2800 rated team a loss of 28 points on the first week of inactivity and slightly decreasing each week thereafter.

I think that this would be a good implementation to prevent rating squatting as it's not punitive enough to cripple teams that miss a week or so from people being out of town or anything, but also gives enough incentive for high rated teams to defend their rating rather than just sit on it waiting for someone to approach, and it's probably the best compromise for hardcores and casuals alike to make both ends of the spectrum happy.





Why Healing Should be Nerfed
Pretty much everyone saw in the latest patch notes the recent additions to the 3.2 PTR of two new healing reductions given to both frost mages and shadow priests. Aside from the frost mage version being absolutely ridiculous (20% ms on every chill, really?), it was Blizzard continuing their very unimaginative trend of giving more classes a healing reduction rather than nerfing the true problem: healing.

If anyone has participated in 2v2 this season as healer/dps and fought any half-decent team with a resto druid, you probably noticed that the druid is almost impossible to take down unless: A) you have a healing reduction and a good burst setup, B) they're completely out of mana, or C) they're absolutely terrible. The same can be said for prot paladins (particularly those with 4pc t, and priests/shamans to an extent but those two classes are much more limited by their finite mana pool than druids and paladins.

As it stands now, unless you have a healing reduction, even as a Death Knight in BiS (best in slot) gear, it's virtually impossible to drop a very good pvp healer unless they're out of mana or unless they make a mistake. This trend will only get worse as gear improves and as the resilience changes go through. Thus, rather than their current approach, I feel one or more of the following solutions would be more approriate:

-Reduce all healing coefficients by 25% when participating in arena
-Remove Guarded by the Light permanent plea effect
-Reduce healing effectiveness by 50% when shadowfiend, mana tide, or innervate are active

I'm sure Blizzard could use their imagination here, as well, but these ideas would be a good start I think. After all, no one really wants to see mages AoE MS'ing people with cone of cold now, do we?





Taiwan Accomplishes the "Mathematically Impossible"
Probably old news to most, but the Taiwanese guild Stars once again impressed the masses of the WoW raiding world by accomplishing what almost every theorycrafter thought to be "mathematically impossible" by defeating Yogg-Saron with no keepers helping for the true world first. Although the entire fight and almost every possible strategy was debunked on the R/D (raid and dungeons) and Elitist Jerks forums, they seemingly missed the brilliant one that Stars used to accomplish the incredible feat.

I had personally felt that Affliction warlocks were absolutely godly for phase 3 of this fight due to the combination of Death's Embrace and Drain Soul, but I never thought it would be possible to burn him from 30% to dead (which is around 2-3%) in under 3 minutes without the help of any Keepers. It's truly an impressive feat and I find it mildly humorous that Ensidia continually makes subtle jabs at how they haven't done it because their guildmates find it boring and how Stars put hundreds of attempts in on it... like Ensidia hasn't done that before (Freya +3 anyone?).

It really puts things in perspective though: Considering Taiwan gets patched weeks later than US/EU, and Stars has managed faster kills on the same content in less time spent learning it, and the world first kill on what has been commonly agreed upon as the hardest hard-mode to date, is Stars the newly crowned best PvE guild in the world? Or is it only because, in Ensidia's words, "they spent every raid night for a month straight doing Alone in the Darkness?"