WOTLK'd S7/8

This blog reflects back upon WOTLK s7/8 and the stupidity that was seen in these seasons.

To be WOTLK’d – to be outskilled by mechanics blizzard have put into the game leaving you with nothing you could of done to a reasonable degree to prevent a loss.

Season 7 was arguabley the most fun season to date within the period of WOTLK, whilst it had a few broken things and did lead into what's now known as Harry Potter and the order of the Haste Trinkets it was still much better than what we're presented with today in terms of damage and resilience. * Bestial Wrath: The duration of this talent has been reduced to 10 seconds.

* Earthen Power: No longer causes Earthbind to pulse a persistent snare immunity aura. It does still remove snares from allies as an instant pulse, but there is no lingering immunity.

Season 7 - is it beast cleave or zoo cleave?

Season 7 presented us with a look into the the fire on ROV and the size of Dalaran arena, with both of them being fixed/removed (although I think most people preferred it when neither of these arenas were playable). It also came around the same time Twixz/Flexx and Kintt made a trip to Dallas under the eMg tag playing a comp which nobody had really seen or heard of at the time, hunter/enhancement shaman/priest. In a couple of matches vs x6 they did choose to swap the priest to a paladin but little did they know of the pain train that was soon to erupt from this cheesiest of cheese comps.

With season 5 gear, earthbind totem granting freedom, 18 seconds of Bestial Wrath many people did not expect the insane amounts of damage coming out of them leading them to easily claim the top spot at MLG Dallas. Shortly after this Kintt retired from the game leading to them picking up Toes and landing a third place finish at Anaheim behind SK.EU and Button Bashers running Shadowcleave and RMP.

1. Bestial Wrath: The duration of this talent has been reduced to 10 seconds.

Earthen Power: No longer causes Earthbind to pulse a persistent snare immunity aura. It does still remove snares from allies as an instant pulse, but there is no lingering immunity. Earthen Power now also brings Earth Shock's melee attack speed reduction up to -15%/-20% (with 1 or 2 points in it, respectively).

Neither of these changes really changed much however as coming back under the Complexity Black name that we know them as today fresh from a first place victory at ESL Edmonton they decimated the competition at MLG Orlando and put another first place under their belts, as you can see in the match point http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q5pb-fEQhs for Orlando, Beast Cleave really was the the cheesiest of all cheese at the time (and a stark contrast to what we saw at the regionals http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/rf10/ub_r3_1-na.xml in S8 gear).

2. Season 7 however was not all about the beast cleave, whilst protholy paladins were on their way out due to the touched by the light nerf.
3. Touched by the Light: This talent now provides 20/40/60% of the paladin's strength as spell power instead of 10/20/30% of the paladin's stamina.

Blizzard had an idea, a vision, that all 30 specs will be viable in pvp, the solution if something wasn't viable? Give it some more damage/stuns/silences, what this led to was that protret paladins and prot warriors were ripe to make their big splash onto the scene. Protret producing burst unrivalled by anything else melee at this point made it a common partner for hunter/healer and warrior/healer as it still provided a lot of the utility of rets without the vulnerabilities to being trained quite so hard as wizards were not quite so common at this point. Most of this http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=136263 video being in sub300 resilience yet still having no issue survivng switches just left them with a stupid amount of survivability for the damage they were able to produce.

The first incarnation of protection warriors with charge/intercept both removing snares made them an incredibly mobile class capable of a huge amount of utility and burst. The birth of comps such as the African Turtle cleave which went as far to take rank one on BG9 with a prot warrior that has since not been seen since and forcing teams such as Complexity Red to transfer off bg9 because facing the mighty protection warriors was clearly not a feasable endeavor for the Relentless Gladiator Title. Another well known ret-dancing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-g2Kn7rRR8 warrior was Draek http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=129267, holding rank 1 until the end of the season where he tanked, quite literally, into obscurity despite having the best PVE gear available.

Further stupidity came when the ICC patch was released giving prot warriors access to their 2 pieces of tier 10, the benefit of this? 20% increased damage on shield slam/shockwave. The result of tanks entering into the arena was not an influx of PVE tanks being happy they can finally PVP, it was an influx of people speccing prot to abuse broken game mechanics and procure immense amounts of rage out of people. Such comps being born as MANCLEAVE http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=142211 were also a result of the protection influx and led to broken keyboards, bursting blood vessels and whispers from people frothing at the mouth about the power of the protection warrior that just led to them losing control of their character for 95% of the last arena game they played.

http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/274/montage00.jpg

Although protection warriors/paladins were some of the dumbest things in S7 it was hard to ignore the power of arms warriors with the PVE gear that was becoming available, due to the lack of wizards this was arguable the season where dispel cleave was at it's strongest with dual solace available for human healers and dual DV available for the warrior, however this was not quite as over the top until the end of the season at which point blizzard decided to release the first wing of ICC before ending the season. Whilst this came with the disarm nerf to bladestorm, who needed bladestorm when the damage from a DBW procced warr http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/613/bushidou.jpg with a Shadow's edge was enough to destroy things in a season which should of been limited to normal toc gear, as season 7 did not officially end until access to ICC HC and the Lich king was added the emergence of retarded PVE gear led to the end of the season being drastically worse than how it began, although it was only a small taster of what lied ahead in far more orange pastures.

This season was not all about melee though, Complexity Red/SK.EU had already been messing around with MLD for a while and MLS/Shatterplay was not an uncommon comp to meet in the later stages of the season with the ability to global stuff in a shadowfury/deathcoil/psychic horror being a common occurance although it was not until haste became easily available in huge quantities in S8 that it became a bit ridiculous. Elemental shamans also had a stage in S7 where their 4P T9 bonus gave them a 20% damage bonus to Lava Burst, this led to numbers which were as high as the ones we've seen today and whilst it was nerfed I don't think many people will forget being instantly killed by an elemental shaman chain critting and dropping 25k damage before you can react.

Along with bringing in a bunch of broken trinkets the ICC patch also brought DK's a super rng double dipping scourge strike for a short while capable of 1 shotting cloth and critting paladins for about 800, this got nerfed shortly after leaving scourge strike in it's current state in which with BIS gear+shadowmourne it crits plate for maybe 1000 (1200 if you're lucky).

Season 8 - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Haste

Ever smelt the stench of a Taunka http://www.wowhead.com/spell=71561 spinning towards you, purple beams swirling around him whilst the nearby shaman has a surge of power http://www.wowhead.com/spell=71644 sending a tempest hurtling towards you as any damage you inflict upon him is healed by his paladins release of light? http://www.wowhead.com/spell=71607 Then you've probably played a few games of arena in season 8.

http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/1232/vhellthegrey.jpg

Heading into season 8, most people knew a legendary was on the way, most people knew that as the season went on more people would get access to the trinkets with huge amounts of haste/arp, what people didn't know is quite how bad this would be for arenas. With the current incarnation of S8, how many people can honestly say they can queue for a few hours without meeting xx shadowmournes/dfos/dbws/bauble? Having been crit for 11k by an elemental shaman, chain crit for 5~6k by a shadowmourne warrior and missed kills due to bauble through a holy tree lockout I think a lot of people can share these experiences with the current arena season.

Whilst the season started out very much the same as S7 ended, this also saw the beginning of ICC HC of which many guilds had most of the bosses on farm within a month of the season started, giving casters and warriors access to the 277 PVE gear which currently plagues the arena due to pugs being able to do 11/12 HC. With the readily availability of haste, wizards began to saturate the high ratings of every bg. Whilst in S7 it took some coordination to land kills bar ridiculous crits, the addition of haste made it a viable tactic to spam damage into random targets that were in LOS all the way to 2500+ (although coordinated wizard cleaves like http://warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=152593 Vilerose's and Xmo's http://warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=161135 show how it should be played making it a truely top tier comp capable of insane win percentages).

Most players at this point were finding that nearly any combination of 2 wizards+a healer was viable, none of them however were quite as potent as LSD. Whilst LSD is not a trend that has particually caught on in the high end arena scene of the US with only Whiteshadowz+Cirranis's team being of note (and let's face it, it's not due to a lack of quality locks/druids as there's loads) it's a rampant comp in the EU with most BG's currently having LSD's holding the top spot (Misery for example is dominated by a few well known players from another BG playing LSD on someone elses characters and I'm sure that's far from the only BG). Combing the burst of the elemental shaman, the pressure of the warlock, the cc of the all 3 and you have pretty much the perfect wizard setup that can't be zerged down easily at all (TSG actually been one of the few comps that fairs ok against it if played correctly). LSD even has a backup healer without suffering from the problem that Talbadar's triple healer setup faces of having to rely on a 30s cd fear for kill windows where the spammable fear of warlocks allows LSD to play far more offensively without the 45 min triple healer matches we saw at regionals/MLG. This 30s kill window of course being assumed that the shaman doesn't just randomly kill something, which also happens, far too often (wotlk'd cy@). The other issue of the healing hybrids being that they practically have infinite mana which leaves them with literally no downside to pumping out heals when needed to relieve pressure unless heavily mana burnt (due to the fact that SP/shamans/druids don't have huge issues getting their mana back they have to be consistantly dealt with if you want to keep them anywhere near an empty blue bar).

Season 8 also saw the return of the TR with an update to S8 gear, this is what has led to the current regionals practically being a Harry Potter convention as with the addition of DFO/Bauble being available to every member of the team, what can comps such as RMP which have a finite source of mana on their healer (this is assuming something doesn't get gibbed before this point) do vs a triple bauble LSD that's stacking resilience? The ability to stack things such as Baubles on the TR have made it a completely different playing field to live (as whilst bauble alone is common, triple bauble wizard cleaves are not exactly something you'll meet often), a simple bauble rotation is sometimes enough to nullify every single kill window possible leading to not only much longer games than what should really ever happen but the worst thing of all is that it's usable whilst silenced which nullifies a huge amount of opportunites for teams which rely on that blanket silence/school lockout to land kills (TSG/PHD are much less effective when bauble can make strangulate a lot easier to live through). This is mostly an issue with the TR system though and the fact that every class can use anything (it should only really be healer specced healers that can use bauble).

Although I could whine about wizards for about another 20000 words they're not the only thing which is broken in S8. http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/9585/wotlkd.jpg Glaives in S4 were bad, but are still nowhere near the level of retardedness that Shadowmourne is, when you take a class that already does a lot of damage with a S8 weapon and then add the Legendary to that? You get complete and utter carnage http://warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=159069 . Anyone who has played against teams with access to the legendaries (and most likely a bunch of other PVE gear that comes with it) can testify that warriors alone with it are harder to heal through than 2 dps from most other teams. With comps such as double Shadowmourne TSG's instantly forcing a bunch of defensive cooldowns as soon as they both connect, it's not a fun time to be playing a priest. The only thing which these juggernauts are hugely vulnerable to are RLS and Heroic RLS (shadowpriest version) which can tunnel the warrior forcing him defensive all day long due to hasted dots being another great component of the wizard-haste-shadowmourne metagame.

This pretty much leaves where we are today, in an arena scene where taking half of the shit that you come up against on live seriously will result in immense amounts of rage and fustration as with the gear available through PVE the current levels of damage and burst healing are completely out of wack. Apparently way back in season 5 it was said that "resilience will fix it", has it fixed it? I think not.