Blog Posts from "Sazblog"

Prot > Fury for season 3 arena!

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 08:56:58 -0500

Since the beginning, 35/23/3 specced warriors have ruled arenas. Minor differences can be seen in warrior specs but none so drastic as 21 in prot. Arena is a completely different game now in season 3 than it was in season 1, when we all had our warriors spec out of parry and into heroic strike with the logic that parrying will result in less rage thus less dmg. Now with warriors rarely being the main damage dealer in a team and them being such a viable target for any team to switch to, is it really that far out of left field to suggest they spec 21 points into prot?

Rathorse came up with this spec which our warriors have been playing with over the past few weeks:

It has become apparent to many high end arena teams that stuns win games. Mid season 2 we saw warlocks begin transitioning to felgaurd spec and hunters to Imp Conc over RWS. The benefits of stunning someone in an awkward position and landing either mass burns or heavy burst are far greater than the benefits of 5% extra ranged dmg or spell locks on the paladin.

So why then do we have our warriors still spec so far into fury to get enrage? Ultimately enrage is barely up unless your warrior is getting focused, and if thats the case hes most likely in D stance or atleast soon to be.

Now obviously no one spec's into fury purely for enrage, if that were the case my arguement would be far too easy. The most notable difference is the loss of piercing howl, it is something that is frustrating to do without, but gaining Conc blow, Last Stand and an extra 10% armor from Toughness is just too good to pass up, given the state of 5's at the moment.

The only other minor difference is the lengthy disarms you cop from some of the smarter warriors who adjust to the fact you have no Weapon Mastery. This is semi-countered by the fact you yourself gain 3 seconds on your disarms so ultimately you can disarm warriors for similar durations as they are disarming you. But it does hurt to get disarmed for 10 seconds. That said, replacing executioner with a weapon chain wouldn't hurt your damage too much.

After playing some top teams with our warrior speced both fury and prot in 5's our team would never go back to 23 in fury. 21 in prot is just so much more clutch. Conc blow notably lands kills that would have otherwise been near misses, and Last Stand clutch heals what would have otherwise been a dead warrior.

New 1-70 record? PvP alts!

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 07:54:25 -0500

The other day I was visiting Arena Junkies and I noticed an advertisement for a 1-70 leveling guide. I'm not normally the type to click on random ads, but for some reason I did that day. Anyway these guys made a mod that tells you every step and provides map notes for every quest to get to level 70. Apparently (im not sure how true this is) they hold the fastest 1-70 time that has ever been recorded. To quote them:

"Hexium" of Team iDemise, currently has the fastest 1-70 time that has ever been recorded. At a /played time of 6 Days and 5 Hours, Thats DAYS faster than the previous record holder.

A couple of days before reading that site I had just dinged 70 on my new shaman. Now if their information is correct then I must have the new record, without even trying?

http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/8351/60playeduj5.jpg
http://img264.imageshack.us/img264/4426/70in5dayplayedzc3.jpg

(notice ive been @ level 70 for 2 days in that screenshot)

Now I'm not normally the type to try and get good /played times, nor was this a factor in my mind when leveling the char. I didn't even screenshot my /played when I dinged 70. I spent probably half a day leveling my enchanting when I hit 60 and still managed to ding 70 in around 5 days. This was anything but an attempt to get a record. Another member of good mens klankster) has done it in just over 4 days /played I believe.

Onto my point, PvP alts. Me and my team have been playing together since release, if ever we want to play a new lineup or play a new class, we reroll. Recruiting a new member just isn't an option. Leveling and gearing pvp alts is definately not foreign to us. We each have about 3-5 pvp gear chars on both horde tich and alliance korgath. We lacked an alliance ele shaman and we wanted to play 2346. So on the 9th of jan I started a shaman.

I dinged 70 one week later on the 17th of jan (a day before av weekend began). I started raking in about 35k honor a day from then until maintenance:

http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/7325/35khonorwm3.jpg

This landed me enough honor to buy all the vindicator pieces and 3 piece gladiator plus the gladiators 1h. The only thing stopping me from completing my set of honor gear is the AB, WSG and EOTS marks.

It has now been 2 weeks since I created the shaman, and I have a lvl 70 geared to the point he can compete @ 2k rating. Now alot of people say the re-leveling / gearing process takes far too long, I disagree.

@Jasi's CLC interviews

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 12:27:36 -0500

This blog mainly stems from my dislike towards Jasi fanboy's saying he is getting really good at interviewing. Just a note to you idiot's it's only a "good read" because hes interviewing intelligent individuals who know how to play this game better than you, if just one question provokes thought in CLC's mind then it's going to be a good read for most, that doesnt mean Jasi has done the interview justice when the other 19 questions fail. Let me elaborate.

His Hammura interview contained 90% questions, that could have have been answered by an 1800 rated hunter. The only thing worse than the bad questions was his complete disregard for hammura's opinion on hunter changes, we have to read half a page of alternative changes that he himself admitted weren't necassary in the first place as hunters were always fine. This provokes a bunch of scrubs in the comments calling him a huntard for suggesting them, because they are too clueless to realise he didn't even see the need for them and is just suggesting them because a bad interviewer asked him to.

Atleast Jasi understands his interviews are getting a bit repetitive as he makes reference to previous interviews and asks them to elaborate, which is good but he couldn't have picked a worse piece of information to do it with:

Hammy: The only thing that used to give us trouble with the hunter comp was a rogue 4dps team, but we figured out how to beat that so we have a good chance to beat any setup out there for the time being.

I presume this is what you were refering to when you asked:

Jasi: I remember in a past interview, there was mentioning of finding 4dps Rogue teams to be more difficult. What about them is difficult, and how did you learn to fight against them?

To summarize their answer, they subbed in their shaman. Grats jasi, you really delved into CLC's pit of 5v5 knowledge with that one. As if we havent heard enough times how CLC deal with 4dps teams.

Inactive: You kite a lot and have hunter/warrior go in and out to keep up healing debuff.

(sorry inactive its not my fault you have to repeat yourself it's the community's fault for asking stupid questions that you have already answered in previous interviews).

Anyway back to how Jasi chose the worst possible cross-reference to the hammura interview. In that interview Hammura gave some of the best advice a 5's team could get and alot of readers were probably unable to comprehend it because it was slightly vague.

Hammy: People ask me all the time, "what do you do against this setup, or what should we kill first", and responding can be really difficult. The key to being successful in arena is knowing that anyone at anytime can be killed, you just have to know when to make that swap, or when to zerg/push up on them to get that kill. Don't let yourself get beat because you think you have to do this certain thing, or attack this certian target everytime to win.

If jasi cross-referenced this instead, and really nit picked it apart in the CLC interview he could have got some interesting insight.

At what point do they decide its time to zerg up? I'd be interested in what aspects effect when they decide to push up. Is it soley based on their opponents big cooldowns (water/ele/hero/feldom) or does it often come down to them just landing enough burns to be confident of winning the mana war? Do they get bored by the this meta game that has developed in 5's (teams sitting back ping ponging bursts at each other until 1 either lands enough burns, waits out enough cooldowns, or lands a pet/player kill to gain the advantage and push up) or do they enjoy it and are just bored with the lack of competition?

Alot of people (im not sure if this includes jasi or not) are out of the loop when it comes to what Hammura is talking about, and it would be interesting if you dug further into it to show them, but instead you did the exact opposite and gave us another page of "how do you play x lineup with x lineup" whether they were Jasi's questions or not is irrelevent, he chose to put them in the interview after hammura had already politely implied in a previous interview that such questions are pointless to even ask. I almost forgot to mention Jasi including the mandatory "how do you think mages compare to warlocks in 5's" question, as if that dead horse hasn't been beaten enough.

Jasi did ask some decent questions that brought up points we hadn't heard before, and the idea of interviewing them all at once had its merits. But ultimately it was a another piece of repetitive dribble that could have been so much more.

Personally I haven't played competitively on bg9 since midway through season 2, (I just get my 10 games on about 10 different alts now and call it a week) and I want to eventually play clc again because I always enjoyed our matches. But until then it would be nice to read an interesting interview or maybe even watch a clc movie. When can we expect either?

Dont be a scrub. Play to win!

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 05:12:41 -0500

I recently found myself being labeled an "exploiter" on korgath realm forums (a video was posted of me /sit /stand macroing in season 1). The thread in summary eventuated in me putting forward a bunch of arguements for the "playing to win" mentality and a bunch of repetitive arguements about cheating kept coming back. I felt my points were being wasted on a bunch of forums trolls who simply couldn't comprehend the logic behind playing to win.

I know alot of bg9'ers share the "play to win" attitude. This blog goes slightly deeper than serennia's blog regarding playing to win and goes more into into the mindset of wow players and why they dont share the beliefs competitive gamers from other games do. To those who dont play to win, I ask that whilst you might not agree with the logic, atleast do your best to understand it before posting a reply, thats if anyone even reads this.

E-sports vs Real sport.

Every competitive game has a set of rules, and similar to regular sports players must abide by them in order to win. There are 2 types of rules in both real sports and e-sports, the rules that define how the tournament is played out, and the rules that define how the matches in the tournament is played out.

Lets start with real sports since they are simple, Basketball for example. If a team loses a match, they lose a certain number of ladder points, and at the end of a season, X number of teams progress to the finals, this is a "tournament rule". A "game rule" is along the lines of when you take more than 2 steps without dribbling the ball its a foul called travel and the opposing team gets a side ball. There may be anywhere between 50-1000 total game rules in the official rule books of most sports.

Competitive esports on the other hand are slightly more advanced. Unfortunately the complexity of competitive games is what stems the "play to win" attitude in expert gamers. The key difference being that computer games unlike real sports have thousands upon thousands of programming rules that define how we can and can't play the game. Having such a large ruleset means it becomes harder to stop just one of these rules from slightly contradicting another, or opening up a window for a new style of play that might be "overpowered" and bring imbalance to the game. These contradictions and programming oversights ultimately lead to the discovery of bugs and design flaws.

Getting back to tournament rules and how they tie in with game rules in an e-sport. In wow for example, some simple tournament rules for dreamhack were that teams were allowed to bring 3 team members play any class and any composition provided they write it down on a piece of paper before every match and stick to what they wrote down. At this point they enter the arena and the rules they must abide by are now limited only by the rules programmed into the game its self. Any expert player will then use anything within the realms of the game to win.

The "play to win" mentality is common sense to most e-sport professionals. CS teams mastered the money system in early cs to the point it could almost be considered exploiting. SK most notably were able to manipulate the money system so perfectly that they would deliberately lose rounds in certain ways as to prevent their opponents from being able to afford weapons. This was later fixed in a patch, but it didnt change the fact that they won because they knew about it. and doing or knowing something your opponent can't do or doesnt know about is theoretically what exploiting is all about.

What is a bug? A design flaw? They are both very similar, they are ultimately a just set of programming rules that eventuate to play style that differs from the play style the developers had in mind when they wrote the code. Should professional gamers exploit these bugs or design flaws? Ofcourse, if they didnt delve into the deepest parts of the game they would never be perfecting their play style. Generally anything that doesnt degenerate the skill aspect of the game or remove the competitive aspect completely is considered "fair game" for pro gamers. IE abusing a bug that d/c's your opponents would be considered unacceptable even by the non-scrub community, as it completely removing the competitive aspect.

Wow scrubs vs esports professionals

Why is it agreed apon in wow that wall jumping or heal drinking is "wrong", when it literally takes a written rule in counterstrike leagues to stop players from abusing bugs like crouch bobbing is (moving faster than walk speed without making a sound) If it isn't written in either the league rules or the games programming, then pro cs players will crouch bob at any given opportunity as you see in alot of the european leagues that still havent outlawed it. What is it that encourages wow scrubs to take the moral highground that no other competitive gamers seem to care about?

This brings us to the general attitude of a "scrub". Your average scrub whether he realises it or not is never going to be a competitive gamer, he is destined to lose as he is bound by a mental ruleset that either he himself creates, or in wow's case, the general public create, which stop him from doing everything within the realms of the game to win. For more on "scrubs" read this.

So where did this scrub attitude come from? Wow was never intended to be a competitive esport. Blizzard on release day impliminented a vague undefined moral ruleset that is non existant in almost every other esport. They did this through the "Game policies". It is this ruleset that contradict the rules of the game itself that trap wow players into being scrubs forever. Let me explain in more detail.

Abuse of Game Mechanics
Bug Exploitation

What the rules in these sections are effectively saying is, we forbid you to use all the programming rules in the game to your advantage. We forbid you from delving into aspects of the game that create meta games and play styles which we never initially fathomed. We forbid you from figuring out things we overlooked and using them as part of the game itself despite the fact they are infact part of our game. We forbid you from playing the game as a competitive esport.

Who draws the line between right and wrong? Is it "wrong" to jump 4 hops up a wall in nagrand? Effectively all you are doing is using a terrain design flaw to make it harder and take longer for melee to hit you, how is that any different to a druid kiting you around a pole? The game doesnt know of right or wrong only true or false. Unless every aspect of the game has been completely explored no 1 developer can make a moral judgement on each aspect and either allow or disallow it. All they can simply fix it as they go.

When it comes to balance blizzard has the experts to thank for abusing overpowered skills, exploiting terrain design, discovering bugs and using bugs with complete disregard for these policies. The "play to win" mentality is effectively pushing wow into the esports scene. Wow is a far more complex game than any of the current esports and thus it's going to take alot longer before it is ready to really take off as a competitive esport.

Wow, the game for scrubs.

All competitive games have tournament rules and game rules. In any competitive game besides wow, there is no 3rd ruleset that asks you to use your better judgement to determine whether a play style is "right" or "wrong". Whats unfortunate is that this ruleset is trapping even the top wow players in the "scrub" state of mind. No game will succeed competitively living under these vague loosely enforced policies about functions of the game that the rule makers themselves dont even know exist. Until people start realising that in order to stop being a "scrub" in wow you have to literally ignore these guidelines (not rules) and let nothing but well defined written rules and rules of the game itself limit how you play the game. Doing so might help refine probably the most complex game on the shelves from its current messy imbalanced state to a game that could succeed in a competitive environment.