Barburas Interview

This was an interview done with Barburas, conducted around August 2010.

Hello friends, today I have an interview for you with James "Barburas" Goodhead, the multiple rank 1 warrior of SK Sanisbar's warrior/warlock/paladin team with Draintrain and Fraki that finished 3rd at the European Blizzcon Regionals.

Hello Barburas, could you tell us a bit more about yourself -

Hi, my name is James and I'm a 20 year old studying to become a vet at a university in England.

Many people would not consider warrior/warlock/paladin to be a viable live setup let alone capable of qualifying for regionals and placing respectively at them, what led to you playing with Draintrain/Fraki on the TR?

Originally draintrain asked me to play with him as his warrior (Blade, who is another excellent warrior) wasn't going to go to LAN events. We started off trying WLD but struggled to find a good druid which I feel is essential for WLD, eventually out of desperation we played with a paladin (Demun) who drain played 5s with on live. It ended up working better than any of us expected and we were able to take R1 during practice phase. However for whatever reason it started going badly, so we tried out Fraki and were able to retake R1 during the practice. Fraki was initially tied down to his old TSG, but struggling to find a pally as good as him - we basically asked him to play with both his TSG and us and if his TSG qualified then he'd go with that. Fortunately (for me and drain) his TSG didn't come top 8 and instead we got third with WLP on the european arena pass.

As said above WWLP isn't a very common setup, compared to some of the standard ladder comps such as wizard cleaves/wld/rmp what would you say are the strengths of the comp when played by top tier players and what would you be playing if you weren't playing this comp at the moment?

It's a strong all round comp and can overcome most hard setups by outplaying without as much rish of stupid gib losses that can occur for example if you're playing RMP and meet an ATC due to cooldowns like HoP, Bubble, Portal, etc. If I wasn't playing this I would probably be playing Warrior Mage Priest, not as it's exceptionally strong but because it's a fun comp to play and I have friends playing Mage/Priest

When in matches, how does your team go about calling the plays, is everyone calling stuff or is there one player that speaks out and makes the main calls of when to switch/peel etc.?

I probably do the most offensive calling (like who to go on/swap to, etc); although drain does a fair bit too. Fraki usually calls how things are for him, whether we're safe to go offensive, whether he can freedom and so on and we just try react to each other's calls to play as best we can.

In your first series against Inflame's team you showcased the best warrior play coming out of Europe in a long time in many peoples opinions, the amount of pressure you were able to put out against them causing Inflame to exclaim "warrior's are pretty fucking overpowered". What went wrong in the second series?

I think the second series was more a case of Inflame's team replicating aAa's play more than us playing worse, though we did have some bad luck. The first game was Dalaran arena where we effectively have 0 chance due to how thunderstorm works on that arena. The second game when Inflame had no pet, was on 20% hp with full dots, I had freedom and taunka proc up and was about to die, floated up to a pillar in RoV due to a bug with how fear/horror effects sometimes interact with RoV (he was death coiled) and that saved him and ended up costing us that game (which would have put us at 1-1 instead of 2-0 down). We won the next game extremely quickly when I pummeled inflame on shadow into a bladestorm he couldn't portal into a HoJ + full dots + spell lock/fears on the druid. The final game was extremely close but eventually we lost; draintrain hadn't realised he hadn't got soul link up as he fel domed and was cycloned at the same time and I think he thought he'd cast it - he got killed as daylie was extremely close to dying too, but mistakes happen - especially at a LAN event. WLP really struggles with LSD if they know how to play vs us and while we may have been able to win it was definately stacked against us.

You're being compared a lot to Hoodrych who's playing a similar comp overseas lately. How do you like this comparison?

Well it's always nice to be compared to a good player like Hoodrych, I like to consider myself a decent warrior - i'm far from perfect but I feel I'm reasonably good so yeah it's a compliment to be compared to Hoodrych.

You gem a lot more defensively than most warriors, could you explain the heavy resilience gemming and how it relates to the way you play your setup?

I don't really feel it's especially to do with the setup, it's just my playstyle - for example Blade who also plays with Drain and Fraki on live plays with a lot less resi and it works well for him - I just like having enough of a resilience/stamina buffer to survive certain setups like wizard cleaves (LSD, shatterplay, etc) or teams such as RLS or RPS which may go extremely hard on the warrior - particularly to be able to survive cc chains on my healer. It does I guess relate a bit to the setup, as I gemmed a bit more offensively when I used to play warrior mage priest - as in that setup I'm something like 70-80% if not more of the damage, whereas playing WLP an affliction lock can put out a very respectable amount of damage so I can sometimes afford to wear a bit more defensive gear as I'm not the only one doing a lot of damage in the setup.

There has been a flaming debate about whether or not LSD is the new power-house as far as WoW comps go. Now that you've witnessed them at Regionals, what is your opinion on the line up in the broad picture? Can Europe hope for top spots at Blizzcon?

I feel LSD is an extremely powerful setup which can beat nearly every setup if played well. I don't feel it's impossible to beat like a lot of people believe, but only a few setups really have a chance vs it and I feel it has a lot less setups that would be considered hard or fair matches than most setups do. I feel europe, particularly aAa has a good chance at top spots at blizzcon - the only teams that I expect to be possible contenders would be complexity red and loaded black.

LSD's or Shadowmournes, which would you rather see removed from the arena (or makes you rage more. I can't decide myself)?

Shadowmournes, if there's anything I hate about arena on live it's the imbalance between the gear of people who purely PvP and those who PvE for better gear. That's why I liked the TR as everyone had equal gear. Not that I like LSD by any measure, but LSD is an overpowered comp of which there are many others, both now and in the future. PvE vs PvP gear is a problem that's been in the game for ages and probably won't really ever be changed.

What does the future hold for SK Sansibar, any possibility of seeing you guys at an MLG anytime soon?

I'm not really sure, it's too late to go to MLG raleigh but we may end up going to a later MLG event. I believe there's going to be an online tournament sometime soon in europe so we may take place in that too.

How does Cyclone currently compare to Misery when you played on it?

It's just a more active BG with better teams (particularly at the top of the ladder), although it's become increasingly inactive lately but I imagine that's the case across the board.

Back in Misery you played the WindowsMediaPlayer setup, would you recommend this to other warriors and provide any pointers for the warrior in this setup?

It's a fun setup but it's harder than most setups you could play as a warrior (such as double healer, or prot warrior setups). It's just important to coordinate well with your mage (who acts mostly as a CCer to allow you the warrior to do as much damage as possible) and your priest to make sure everyone is safe and to keep people alive. Some games I've done more than 10 times the damage of my mage, just because he's had to play defensive all game and when he's playing offensively it's more about hitting the right CC to allow me to do as much damage as possible.

Any Shoutouts?

Would like to thank my sponsor SK Sansibar, my teammates Drain and Fraki (and Blade) and some friends: Blowi, Kelz, Kubus, Rezie, Bmx.