The Inevitable Conflag Nerf, On To Blackrock! Job Hunt Success, Zilea Part 2

The inevitable conflagrate nerf

For anyone who has been keeping up with the recent trends in arena (I definitely have been), a lot of people should, or at the very least will, start noticing how prevalent RLS has become, and with good reason. As you will see in Zilea part 2 at the bottom of this article, destruction warlocks are no joke. Conflagrate, coupled with a chaos bolt, can easily clear the 14K damage marker, which can be more than enough to take somebody out if they aren't completely topped off. And, with the damage it deals, is anybody at Blizzard HQ planning on toning down conflagrate?

I'm sure most of you are familiar with the type of rotation that destruction warlocks apply in arena, which goes something like the following:

1. Immolate gets casted
2. Blanket silence used by the warlock with immolate mid-cast
3. Immolate lands, Conflagrate follows 1 GCD later.
4. Chaos Bolt

The end result is usually pretty gruesome for the team against the RLS. Factor in fear somewhere in that damage rotation and the outlook of surviving RLS burst as any healer other than priest is pretty grim.

I realize that this is a complete rant, but blanket silence and conflag both drive me equally bananas as I feel they are both abilities that can not be countered and should probably be looked into. My fun recommendation? Remove conflag. My serious recommendation: cut Conflagrate's cooldown from 10 to 5 seconds but also reduce the damage by 50%. This would do a lot for the burst of that comp which, like most of the game right now, is still out of control. If I had to make a realistic projection though, I think Blizzard will pass over all of the major quirks and problems with the game (like burst) because Cataclysm is on the horizon.

I guess my complaints are mostly due to the fact that this patch has so far been the patch of casters/wizardcleave lineups, which spells bad news for most melee cleaves.

All aboard! Train route directly to Blackrock!

Until tonight I was on Kil'Jaeden, my native server since 2005 just playing with old friends and not really taking the game too seriously. After playing with Hoodrych for the last several weeks though, we were both starting to get back into arena and slowly realizing that the talent pool on the server was really limited. After playing with a really badly geared DK as our third in 3v3, it was the last straw. Lots of deadly gear, a 222 dps 2 hander... you get the picture. There's only so much you can take before you start to realize that all of those games where you got somebody to 5-10% hp would have been a kill with the proper gear.

I think it's safe to say that there is only a certain point you can get to before it becomes blatantly obvious that gear is indeed starting to decide matches, even if that disrupts our perception that gear doesn't decide games.

Hoodrych got really tired of having nobody to play with and has been bugging the crap out of me to transfer somewhere. What other server could I go to other than Blackrock? It has like 80% of the top arena population on the server, with the exception of the massive dodgers who want to get rank 1 titles on their ****ty BG and stomp noobs all day (hello Billian). Which really makes me ponder why anybody would sit on a BG where there is no competition and you are stomping people that are 1800 caliber at the 2600+ level. Where is the fun in that? Furthermore, it is pretty lonesome just beating bad teams all day and never even getting recognized because of it.

So with that being said, I am looking forward to logging on to Blackrock tonight and getting tons of insults from all of the people I pissed off in the past.



How laggy is Blackrock during primetime?

The job hunt: a success

Let me preface by saying that I separate WOM from a "real job" because one takes only a few hours to do a week and is not enough to sustain me while the other is one where you go somewhere for 5+ hours a day and are able to (hopefully) pay your rent.

As I chronicled a couple weeks ago, being unemployed is not what you should be if you want to stay happy. I will be the first to say that I blame this economy for me not being able to get a job, even if I was a bum. I had been trying to get a job for several months now simply because I graduate college at the end of the semester with a degree in Political Science and have been just sitting around doing nothing.

After snooping around for a while and sending my resume to a variety of different places (a lot through craigslist), I finally got an interview for a data entry position. Much of this has to do with Hoodrych, who spent a lot of time cleaning up my resume and making it look nice.

When I went in for my job interview, I'm pretty sure what clinched the job for me right out of the gate was the fact that my resume said I typed 65-70 WPM when I ended up typing 113 WPM with 99% accuracy. My employer was shocked and told me the highest she saw was 85 WPM from an applicant. After that it was cruising and I started my $11.50/hr job this past Monday.

Sure, the pay isn't the best and the 8 hours I'm sitting in a cubicle are pretty brutal, but it is keeping me off the streets.

With all of that being said, I could have easily turned into Serennia junior and I am glad I finally have some stable income.

Zilea part 2

As promised, part 2 is here. There is a fairly long 3v3 match that came down to a 2v2, but I left it in there because you can see the absurdity of destruction warlock burst.

I hope everybody enjoys it and please leave your feedback. Next week I plan on putting up part 3.