TR Round 2 CGS Qualification Updates

In preparation for season 4 this upcoming Tuesday, I brought my Priest out of retirement a couple of days ago in an attempt to shake the dust off equipped with  my gimpy season 2 shadow gear. Knowing that there really wasn't anything left for me on Ner'zhul minus small things with my horde hunter when I have enough time, I decided to transfer to another server in search of new teammates (since pretty much everyone I used to play with doesn't play anymore) and a simple, yet significant for my overall enjoyment of WoW, change of pace. Naturally, I decided to hop over to Tichondrius.

Yes, Tichondrius is well beyond it's prime glory times, but after doing so many interviews and forming countless numbers of relationships, there are just way too many potential players to team up with. As it stands now, Isolee and I might make a late run for Gladiator in 2's, but we both really don't care about the title anymore so with my busy schedule it might not happen. Hopefully I'll enjoy the game quite a bit again once season 4 starts and I'll find a lot more options here.

CGS Qualification Update
After speaking to a number of teams competing as I write this, it seems like the current rating that the top 2 positions are fighting around is 1950. It's somewhat difficult to tell who is really in competition based on the current, somewhat infrequently updated TR Armory , but there are a couple of obvious hints. Almost all of the teams that participated and did well in MLG last weekend are doing quite well. The Champions, Azael, Zyz and Spoh, Duelists Going for Glad, and Greenranger's team, all have the potential to jump up in the last remaining hour and a half (although I believe Greenranger's team is already up around the 1950 range) as well as Shadow Play. Considering the fact that SP was able to take first place in the initial round of the competition, I'd expect them to do equally as strong the second time around.

Even those who didn't do as well as expected at MLG - mainly Pandemic and SK-Gaming, are hovering around the 1900 range fighting to make it before the allotted time expires. Of course, that's if it actually does end around the initally stated time this time around, otherwise it will be a repeat of round 1 and the real winners will be uknown for weeks after the qualification period ends.

Then of course there is still the same underlying problems that plagued round 1 running rampant in round 2. At this point, unless one of the 1900~ teams get's lucky enough to find enough someone that bombed hard from 1950, they will struggle to actually make it up to that point simply because the top 2 positioned teams right now are probably being incredibly cautious when it comes to queuing so as to not lose their position at the last minute. I'm sure there will be a rush of games right near the end once one team breaks the ice and scouts report the news.

From what I've heard, the 1900~ rating queue's are averaging about 20 minutes right now and some of the top teams are playing incredibly dirty. Basically, they're running two teams in order to defend their current throne at all costs. They'll put together an enhancement shaman cleave team and **** on anyone that might potentially be competition just by countering them in whatever way possible without any fear of consequence. After hearing this, there's just no questioning how absolutely pathetic and broken the current online tournament system is. At least during MLG counter-comping was accomplished through speculation and research. If you made a bad call and tried to counter too hard or play a class you weren't quite familiar with, you were punished for it due to the rules not permitting swapping comps before a certain number of rounds had passed. Running a second team to knock out competition wasn't even possible, and you weren't able to hide behind or abuse a badly fabricated matching system like on the TR.

There's also still quite a bit of qq'ing and debating going around about PVE gear and it's impact in the arena. I've been a long standing protestrr of allowing any PVE gear whatsoever inside the arena walls, but I've come to the point where I fully support it for classes that just aren't able to be nearly or even successful at all without it. Resto Shamans, Paladins etc. This is a huge reason that Shadow Play has been so successful on the TR and access to the PVE gear allows pretty good players to overcome certain balancing issues and shortcomings until they're fixed.

On the other hand, I have and still think that all the PVE geared Rogues out there are entirely broken. The Cheat Death nerf is huge, and it's completely coincidental that I suggested a similar change right before it happened (nothing but luck) and I'm actually quite surprised that they'll be adding it into 2.4.3 as opposed to just waiting for WoTLK. Good thing they're handling some of the more major issues at least. It seems as if Blizzard was waiting for the TR phase 2 to finish so not to make such a drastic change mid qualification. There's no doubt that a lot of results probably would have been different had this change been there from the beginning.

Regardless, I will find out the final results of the second TR phase at 12AM PST and report when able (assuming I can remedy this bug not allowing my to edit any of my posts right now)

In terms of winners, I forsee Duelists Going for Glad and Shadow Gaming having the top 2 positions.

WoW Rap: Part 2
Isolee originally referred me to the rap he helped to create a couple of days ago, but I wasn't able to really post anything about it now. To my knowledge, tt's by the same person, ShaunKonnery, who did the "Ming Rap" months ago and it's remotely entertaining if you're looking for something to help cure your boredom.

You can find the clip here:http://waxdj.com/djs/6026/ titled "Iso feat. ShaunKonnery - Archimonde 30min Recap". Obviously it's about their guild's experience with Archimonde one evening.