Tonight I've got a couple of videos I think are worthy of watching. Both have their respective pluses and minuses, but you should find at least one of them to be entertaining/interesting. With the overwhelming amount of Wotlk videos as of late, it's a nice change of pace to see some decent players on the current live realms even with season 4 pushing the level of balance even further away from the ideal level.

Menismyforte 2

The first video is Meinismyforte's latest release, which is mostly comprised of Spriest/Rogue 2v2. One of the more interesting aspects of this video often not as common in a Spriest/Rogue duo, is that every Rogue portrayed is actually HARP instead of ShS. While HARP was effective before, I wouldn't consider it to be a completely superior spec for the combo anymore.

As is usual with any decent Spriest/Rogue team, they absolutely murder the vast majority of the Warrior/Druid teams plaguing the 2v2 bracket, and for any they don't, they at the very least beat them pretty badly. There are a large number of clips against Warrior/Druid, but according to Menismyforte, the number of W/D comps in the 2v2 bracket of Ruin are completely overwhelming and running into any other duo's besides this and Rogue/Druid is relatively uncommon.

One of the best aspects of any video created by Menismyforte is the editing. It is rare to see any long, unnecessary clips in any of his videos, and this second release is no different. Any slow point in any match is cut or fastforwarded, and he tastefully highlights any moments within the video that might be missed otherwise save for those who view it multiple times. In addition, there is an additional touch of humor throughout the entire video, and the PVE scene at the end is good for many lols.

The highlight of the movie is easily the clips against Noxn's team. Although the second match isn't as close as the first, Spriest/Rogue mirrors are so heavily weighted on who gets the opener it really does nothing to discredit the talent of Noxn's team. The second match is a good clip of the perfect execution that Menismyforte's team has though, but it's sad to see that all it takes is a CS > KS > Silence and it's gg.

The only downside to this movie is some of the opponents are rather dumb at times. In one of the Warlock/Rogue matches the Rogue blinds when dots are ticing away - but then again a silence to dispel on a fel dom is good regardless of who you're doing it against. Regardless, overall the video is excellent and this is probably some of the last footage you will see of Noxn playing, so watch it while you can.

Zilea's 3v3
 
The second video is a recent release on behalf of Zilea. This release is another small teaser of his upcoming full length feature. The video itself is rather long, and cab be boring at times, but it's not necessarily the gameplay or talent that is boring, rather the comp makeup that the team is running due to the fact that it's a drain comp. However, the team makeup they play, Paladin/Priest/Rogue, was able to go 3-0 against Gumbot's Druid/lock/war team, 1-0 vs atara/mesmerized's team, as well as well as a decent 5-4 against Greenranger/Azael and their Rogue teammate. The Priest on Zilea's team also happens to be a female, giving hope to all other WoW female players (even though her role in the comp is basically spamming mana burn, and uses fear on CD.)

If you're a Paladin, and if and only if, you might find this to be interesting - but there's still some entertainment value to it regardless of what you play, but consider yourself warned. Zilea also had some comments on the clip:

First , those 2 matches were near the end of our 9 series games where we went 5-4 and we learned a lot against them due to adaptation of playing so many times. I learned quickly that either azazael is obscenely bad with his silence because it was so difficult to actually fake him (no kidding, with 4 second holy lights), or he was just sneaky as hell and was waiting till the very last second. Because of that strat, I learned that faking against them was worthless. I almost cost us games by trying to fake 4 second heals where he wouldn't even use his CS. These games were all at the 2250 rating.

The comp we run is amazingly cheesy because of it's drain capabilities, but we learned that it's a horrific team against any druid+shaman+X variant. doesn't even matter what spec the druid and shaman are, as long as they're both in the team, we're ****** We also learned it's pretty decent against PMR because since our rogue is wearing like 200 resilience and lots of pve gear, we just train the mage and flood cleanses on kazel and offensive dispels on the mage. We can usually bait an iceblock within 10 seconds if everything goes according to plan.

Also, the skill level of the rogue has a huge impact on the match. We won a few of the 5 out of 9 games because kazel knew when to switch to the druid, often times making the switch when i was completely unaware of it being a good idea.

ESL Gives a Low Blow to MLG?

ESL went ahead and decided to host their "World Second Global Challenge" in LA on the exact same dates as the MLG Dallas. This is obviously going to piss off a lot of players, which is understandable since all of these tournaments are a substantial income for any of the teams likely to make it to the top, and removing one extremely large chunk of that is quite a huge blow (although rumor has it, some of the top players are making thousands off of selling PR and have gone as far as to develop "clientele". However, I suppose both companies are businesses after all and it is to be expected that they compete.