Shockadins

While it didn't turn out so great this is a fun little retrospective at how things were in WOTLK with the Cataclysn patch.

By now, most people have encountered a 1600 resilience immortal healer. But they have they met one that can DPS? The way holy paladins currently work is that they're able to keep themselves topped up against multiple people with very little effort due to the Blessed Life talent (100% chance to gain a charge of holy power when hit by direct damage) and word of glory spam. This leaves them in a situation where they can effectively spam a lot of damage due to the now cooldown-void Exorcism.

Back in the days of TBC there was an often mocked spec known as the "Shockadin", the shockadin would run around shocking and judging people for what could sometimes take 20% off their HP. Now the shockadin was still able to heal but often had half the actual healing power (remember, offensive spell power and healing power were two seperate stats back then) of a full holy paladin. Bring this aspect of the paladin forward to today when they have a spammable nuke and are able to gear fully towards healing without losing any DPS potential and you have what could well be a monster when we come into Cataclysm. At the moment it feels like a far stronger disc priest in terms of damage. What follows is a montage of my paladin in the confines of WSG with mere Relentless gear and 1000~ resilience, if I had closer to 1400~1500 then I would be practically immortal while pumping out ridiculous damage for a healer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31THYNdBz6Y

Due in the next patch is a change which will add even more damage to what you saw above.

Exorcism now scales from 34.4% of SpellPower or AP, up from 15%. Base damage increased by 15% from 2343 to 2741.

This would add 1100~ damage to the Exorcism hits which is a 25-50% increase on most targets. With the current way holy paladin plays it could easily be compared to a disc priest with even more damage potential, my exorcisms are hitting for as much/more than smites did. Holy paladins however do not have the weaknesses of disc priests in the fact that they're vulnerable to being trained by melee, run out of mana and get destroyed by dispel spam. Blizzard have also gifted paladins with several incredible talents to promote this playstyle which make Exorcism cost practically no mana (Denounce) and +50% damage to holy shock/20% damage to Exorcism (Crusade+Blazing Light). To add to this, at level 81 paladins gain a new skill which increases their holy damage done by 30% for 12 seconds (4 seconds per holy power charge) called Inquisition. In a comp where not much healing is needed due to ridiculous amounts of control (e.g rogue/mage/holypaladin or a wizard cleave of some kind) you could quite happily use 3 holy power on this in a burst attempt and pump out some very respectable damage, especially when combined with wings/divine favor and a heroism of some kind for <1 second cast Exorcisms.

4.0 has seen the paladin go from the class with the least offensive ability to possibly the best out of the 4 healers, while it may lack a spammable CC or offensive dispel of some kind it now has the damage potential to make up for it. Also due to the lack of choices with other healers on whether to dps/cc/offensive dispel etc. it's also a lot simpler to play when it's effectively heal/hammer/dps. What we may see in Cataclysm is the rise of holy paladins in offensive comps and teaming up with classes they would normally never be seen with such as rogues.

Diablo 2 & DK predictions for BGs

So with the elemental invasion making me rage whenever I login and there being a plain lack of things to do on WoW with the current state of the game me & my cousin decided to take a look back at the game that really defined who we are as gamers today. Note that this has very little to do with WoW it's more of a retrospective so if you want something about WoW then scroll past this wall of text, as I know a lot of people played Diablo 2 religiously though I know some will find it interesting.

Lessons learnt in Diablo 2 and how they could be applied to WoW

It was maybe 8 years ago now that we stumbled upon this 'battle.net' function in the first Diablo, a few days later we were sitting high and mighty with our Armageddon Staff and Godly Plate of the Whale thinking we were the shit. A few weeks later we discovered Diablo 2 existed, shortly after convincing our parents to shell out on a copy of a Diablo 2 Battle Chest for us we headed on into Sanctuary for the birth of a 5 year of what I suppose could be classed as an addiction to the game. We only had one PC though between the two of us, so hourly shifts it was with many arguments over who took an extra 10 minutes because hey, when you're 12 that 10 minutes is a lot of time.

Many things come to mind looking back over the years spent on that game and how much fun it really was due to the sheer amount of customisation and build options that were available. There was no standard gear/stat/skill choice for PVP, everybody built slightly differently. A few of the more memorable things to me were -

1. Cow runs, leveling to 99 over a few days in the 1.09 patch was awesome.
2. Swe ping lamers, Blizzard servers were located in Telia giving the Swedish among us 5ms. Me? Well me & my cousin spent our time with 300-400ms being shouted at because his Dad didn't have a telephone anymore due to dial-up internet. UK broadband saturation was in it's infancy at this point.
3. The bugged items, US servers had retarded 99999999999 stat charms with +7 skills which created a completely different metagame for them. EU just had bugged items which made characters incredibly strong. I had a full bugged Amazon myself for a brief period and being able to easily 1v7 duel games without dropping below half hp was amusing.
4. Guided arrow piercing people 5~6 times in 1.09, shame the Burizazon died with the 1.10 patch.
5. 1.10 adding teleport to everything, even though it was banned in Euro-PVP (shout out to anyone who played in that, post your nick in comments!) it added a new dynamic which was seen in the American leagues and public duel games.
6. The ability to 1v7 duel games, this is the thing that I miss the most in WoW. No matter how good you are, whether you're the world champion or not, you're not going to win when outnumbered to that extent. Compared to Diablo 2 where the skill cap with an ability like teleport is so high; if you were good, numbers were never an opponent.

One of the things that I did in my years spent playing Diablo 2 was being a part of the rule making for the private European PVP community (Euro-PVP). This involved adding restrictions to the game to make it balanced for 1v1/2v2/3v3/4v4 and for the most part succeeded incredibly well even when the new patch came that changed literally everything. Sadly the community died out a bit when WoW was released although the admins that ran it are still playing today in the guild Sunday Union on Zenedar. There was very rarely times when one class was clearly overpowered and never ever was it left for an entire season, glaring imbalances in the rules would often be fixed within days if the reasoning behind the changes was good. This is quite a stark contrast to the current balancing system that Blizzard have employed. What surprises me the most though on this topic is that the players have not taken Blizzards game into their own hands yet again and imposed their own restrictions to add a semblance of balance.

If players were to take the game into their own hands again, what would actually be possible? Arenas would be a bit of a logistical nightmare outside of TRs due to people not all being on the same server/bg. But the main thing that does come to mind is duelling. Duelling has always been something that a lot of people have enjoyed, to the point where big money even exchanges hands from it. What if there were a ruleset in place that actually made 1v1 competitive? Limits on certain stats/items as were imposed in Diablo 2 worked incredibly well while still keeping the heart of the game intact and in some cases actually made the game even more playable. To put that in perspective, 4v4 with everyone able to teleport was a nightmare, 4v4 with map control mattering and laying down invisible hammers/blizzards while your barbian blocked the enemy amazon turned the game into a tactical masterpiece.

What I propose from this is really as follows; when pvp is more established in Cataclysm, people sit down and look at duelling and what could be changed to make some of the match-ups more balanced. A proper duelling tournament could be great fun with the right restrictions imposed as obviously you don't want druids killing people with thorns and nor do you want mages Ice Lance spamming people to death and using nothing else. While some may argue duelling is somewhat 'balanced' as it is, it's often an uphill battle for one side in the hope that they can win rather than playing right so that they know they can win, see the current state of mage vs rogue from the rogue's perspective. In any game built like WoW and Diablo 2, player enforced restrictions can change the metagame and enhance it greatly. I hope that in Cataclysm we see something similar to Euro-PVP crop up and change the face of duelling as it would certainly be a worthwhile pursuit!

Deaths Knights in Cataclysm - Part 2

Lets face it, with the current state of our beloved "Knights of Daeth" every team will want at least one, most would like two, maybe three. Death Grip will be one of the biggest and most influential cooldowns of all of the BGs due to the logistical commitments required to win and often because singling out key players with it can sway a team fight greatly in your favour. Being able to coordinate double grips will give the teams that do so a large advantage especially in CTF bgs, this would instantly take their flag carrier 65+ yards away (can be even further if gripped into a knockback).

Other than grip being the premier utility skill of bgs, DKs also bring AMZ to the table of which the uses are fairly obvious. They also prove to be an interesting and probably the most viable flag carrier, lets take a look at the cooldowns available -

7. IBF - 3 min cooldown - 50% less damage taken, stun immunity, 12 second duration; this is obviously 'the big one' that you want to use when being opened on, even more so when the other team has a rogue/warrior.
8. Vampiric Blood - 1 min cooldown - +15% hp +25% healing taken - 10 second duration; great when under huge pressure that you can't escape, glyphed it gives an extra 40% healing taken but is very situational as to when the glyph will be more useful than the base ability.
9. Bone Shield - 1 min cooldown - 20% less damage taken, +2% more damage done; This has a minimum of 6 seconds duration and can be precast before entering any big fights, the fact that it reduces magical damage makes it a very valuable cooldown to have when you know a big burst is inc.
10. Rune Tap - 1 min cooldown - 10% of HP healed; Not much to be said here, another free heal.
11. Dancing Rune Weapon - 1 min cooldown - 20% parry - 12 second duration; 20% parry vs melee is never a bad thing with DKs having an innately high parry chance to begin with.
12. Will of the Necropolis - 45 second cooldown - 25% less damage taken, refreshes Rune Tap cooldown - 8 second duration; This procs automatically at <30% HP and is one of the best cooldowns in the game as far as survivability goes, a straight 25% less damage taken and a free rune tap when combined with any other cooldown is very likely to see you living through most things.
13. AMS - 45 second cooldown - up to 75% of hp in magic damage absorbed - 7 second duration; No DK will run without this being glyphed, I can see it being used both to stop big wizard cleaving destroying you and for avoiding debuffs such as roots that will destroy your mobility. Either way the best thing about this is it's an ability unique to Death Knights and one of that main things that makes them a far superior flag carrier to other classes.
14. Death Strike - The UF strike for tanks still remains and while the rune cost is outdated, the new design is great. The Mastery for Blood DKs is based upon how much your Death Strike heals, your Death Strike heals for up to 25% of the damage taken in the last 5 seconds or a minimum of 7% of your maximum health. Now with mastery stacking each Death Strike can provide you with a shield for over 100% of the healing done. To put this in perspective here's a Death Strike heal from Heroic Lich King - Capitalism Death Strike Capitalism +0 (O: 81912) - 82k overheal is still an 82k+ shield with a good amount of mastery. Mastery will easily be the primary stat for any DKs that are aspiring to carry flags within the BGs because of the ridiculous shields that are possible due to this.
15. Death Pact - 2 (3) minute cooldown - 40% of HP healed; I say 2(3) because Raise Dead is on a 3 min CD whereas Army Ghouls can also be sacrificed. Similar uses to Rune Tap as I don't see teams killing your Risen Ghoul anytime soon and Blood has very few ways to effectively spend RP.

Personally I think that when the carrier is under pressure nothing will come close to Blood DKs. while druids may be able to run circles around lesser teams, when it comes to playing good teams you're going to want something meaty. Another great thing is that they can still provide utility with grip/strangulate/DS/NS and the damage is far from bad with a quick gear swap to DPS items. The ridiculous amount of cooldowns will also let them run far less resilience and still be a target that you won't want to touch in a fight and even if they do take a bit of a battering the Vengeance makes Necrotic Strike scale to ridiculous numbers, we're looking at an extra 7.5k healing reduction per strike although the limited amount of Unholy Runes for Blood limits this a little.

Another thing that could be overlooked is the 20% mount speed talent that DKs have, a built in Crusader Aura is always going to be amazing for making it back into combat. Something that has changed a lot though from the previous incarnation of DK is their spread damage, before 4.0.x came diseases were something to be feared (ok maybe not feared but they did a lot more damage). With the current state of diseases they tick for 500~600 at level 85, this makes the Contagion talent to offset the pestilence nerf not even worth taking as whether your diseases are ticking for 300 or 600 on the entire enemy team, who actually cares when you have 150k HP. Only big use for diseases other than their synergy with skills will be antirogue as they have such a huge duration now, rather than the spread pressure that you could achieve before.

I do feel that the rest of the DKs uses in BGs crosses over very heavily with the arena part that I wrote last week so check that out if you missed it as they will also be able to play the same very disruptive/class that sets up swaps in BGs. So with that I'll leave you to ponder over these thoughts, until next time - Karuki

Philosophy of Balance

This blog is basically a look at how balance has changed over the seasons and IMO got ruined with Cataclysm taking it a few steps too far, bare in mind this was written back in late WOTLK.

In any competitive game, we've come to expect a degree of balance. Throughout E-sports there has always been little imbalances between things, an example being the map layout for DotA/HON slightly favouring the Scourge/Hellbourne for bottom rune spawns for a while, or ZVX on a close posistion spawn on Metalopolis. In TBC we had druids being the superior healer for nearly every comp due to moblity and lifebloom being fairly broken, in WOTLK we had the same situation where druids became incredibly tanky towards the end, In Cataclysm it looks like we're heading the same way when resilience increases and HoTs become more effective (think about, druids were okish/bad in s1/5, good in s2/6 and progressively better from there, having them being good in the first season doesn't look great for the later ones). The issue with this is that the philosophy of balance has headed in a completely different direction with the introduction of 'all 30 classes/specs must be balanced'.

Disclaimer: This is ignoring obvious things like druids/pve gear/WLD being over the top in S4 as it's more meta-game related and none of these things were that ridiculous other than glaives in S3, funny how the last season of every expac is ruined by PVE gear.

One of the biggest ways to balance things is via assumptions. In TBC you could fairly accurately assume some things for the high tier comps -

1) It will have a hunter/warrior/rogue for MS debuff

2) It will have either a shaman+paladin of some spec or solo priest/druid or double healer of some kind

3) Every class has 1, maybe 2 viable specs so there's little variation here to be taken into account for (arms/sub/affl/frost/mm/resto/resto/holy/disc/shadow/muti/demo/ele and maybe enh, anything else was rare).

Now how did these contribute to the balancing?

1) Allowed blizzard to balance healing around the presence of the 50% MS debuff and balance caster damage around this, this is a key factor in why wizard cleaves were not half as bad to deal with as while people did run MLD, it was more of a pressure comp than a 'lol u globaled m8' comp. This also made CC'ing the MS user far more effective as it would allow the debuff to drop off and then big heals could land.

2) I don't remember any top tier comp that had a solo paladin healing, many were either double healer or with an ele/enh shaman because of how much warlocks would destroy them if they didn't run some kind of cleave with tremor totem (curse of tongues being 60% contributed a lot to this). What this allowed the balance team to do was to assume a high end comp would have either a druid or a priest as the solo healer with both classes having very different roles/playstyles within the teams.

3) Simple one here, less variables and synergy means less possible comps, having more possibility with 30 classes/specs makes balancing a nightmare, could anyone see a 30 race RTS working?

Because of the ability to work off of assumptions it made balancing the viable stuff far easier and with a few changes it could of been very close to balanced. Now in WOTLK we had the first taste of 'everything must be viable'. This spawned abominations such as prot healing paladins and even DKs of which were far less fun to play against than the immortal druids of S4. The MS assumption still remained though but damage started to be looked at as if there was no MS, giving birth to the ridiculous caster cleaves of late WOTLK.

Now entering Cataclysm, none of these assumptions apply anymore. MS makes so little a difference that not only is it not required, CCing the MS user is practically pointless. This leaves healing in a bursty state and means that every class has now been balanced around having stupid damage rather than a 50% healing debuff that can be negated with good play. Looking at it like this I'm fairly sure that removing MS was not exactly the best of ideas as it was also one of the biggest mana drainers when it was 50% (and good teams played around the 50% debuff to conserve mana, this isn't possible now). I don't know about you but I'd rather see healing doubled in effectiveness in arena and the MS changes reverted, yes people won't be able to run random comps like feral/ret/priest but being able to run random comps like that and do ok is part of the problem because it's nearly impossible to balance when you have the best part of 200+ semi-viable comps to take into account for with very little assumptions being able to be made other than 'they have a healer'.

Just a little finishing point, many games with large amounts of characters (e.g Street Fighter, Smash Brothers, MVC etc.) opperate by a tier system. The tier system pretty much puts those 'feral druids' (i.e. Sakura in SF4) http://www.eventhubs.com/guides/2008/oct/17/street-fighter-4-tiers-character-rankings/ into a lower band of characters and leaves it at that, not to say that they don't get used because they do by the people that like them, just not often in high end competitive play which is far from a bad thing. As long as every class has at least one viable PVP spec not only would it be better for the game, it would be far better for balancing the game and putting it back in the realms of being competitive again.

PVE vs PVP

This blog was an early look at PVP vs PVE near to the end of WOTLK.

PVE and PVP players have long been at each others throats in a battle for supremecy, a constant argument over 'which requires more skill' with the general (there are lots of exceptions so this will all be very generalised) attitude of both sides looking a bit like this;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3xwDDLuLcY

How much truth is there behind the argument though? From my own experiences whilst most PVE'ers that aren't very good in PVP are fairly happy to admit it, the ego of PVP'ers that are raiding often consumes them when it comes to 'invalidating' any mistakes they make because 'pve is easy'. This leads to a permanent headache for any raid leader when it comes to raiding with these individuals as despite being 2.6~2.8k rated in the arenas they are pretty much without a clue as to what's going on in this so much 'easier' environment. To take an example, a certain beast cleaving paladin that was rank 1 on the prestigious cyclone battlegroup for a few months in season 8 must of had a ui that looked somewhat like one gigantic flash of light button combined with the attention span of a 4 year old made him an incredibly unreliable paladin to raid with despite being at the 'top of his game' according to his ratings. See if you can guess who the pvp focused players are in http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-t84x7nd5psvfkgle/sum/damageDone/?s=11837&e=12114 this raid.

Ignoring the lower end of the scales where teams are struggling to break 2400 and guilds that still haven't killed HC LK, the mistakes both sides make are fairly similar and despite common sense dictating that arena players would have superior awareness this is very much not the case when the random 2.6k rated wizard cleave heroes in my pug die to a number of things including;

1. Sindragosa Debuff - completely unaware of a stacking debuff on instant death
2. Defile - don't expect them to move from this
3. Putricide Oozes - or this
4. Festergut Vile Gas - or spread out for this as that would be 'too easy'
5. Deathwhisper Ghosts - ghosts that do huge amounts of aoe damage? wat?

Obviously team PVE also dies to these things, but they're not the ones claiming everything is easy and are suposedly meant to have far superior awareness to their surroundings. This pretty much describes the issues of the large majority of PVP'ers that I have raided with in PUGs with the above attitude issues being combined with a lack of class knowledge leading to substandard dps.

Another difference between the two sides is playstyles, people that aren't doing both often have problems transistioning between the two. Arenas requiring quick adaptation, reacting to what's going on and quickly thinking of ways to deal with it often leads to problems when they have to follow a set pattern or listen to instructions in PVE. A common example being again related to Paladins that I've played with which will either spam cooldowns aimlessly in PVE/not use them at all when required and sometimes focus a bit too much on using a HOJ on something resulting in a dead tank when really the playstyle should be just turretting heals. The same can be said about PVE players entering into the arena, due to not having a good idea of what's going to happen nor a predictable amount of damage incoming it's very hard for players new to arena to deal with the amount of pressure some teams can put out which leaves them struggling against heavy dps teams and doing a lot better in slower drawn out matches giving them time to work things out. Conclusion of this being that the PVE-centric players often have problems dealing with unexpected situations and the PVP players that deviate from the plan can often cause confusion which leads to wipes brought on by the fact that the PVE players have trouble adapting to suddenly having to cover a different role.

The argument that PVE is just against a script is very often brought up however most of the actions put out by the scripts are reactionary, what's the difference between sidestepping after seeing a flying ooze coming towards you vs seeing the right spell pop up on your focus cast bar at the right time and counterspelling it? - there isn't any, both are pre-determined reactions to an event, whether it's a player or a script producing the event there is no difference, the only part that really should come into this is that PVP'ers are often having to make far more of these decisions at a far quicker rate.

This isn't to say that PVP'ers are bad at PVE though, look at previous projects such as PVE is Hard http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/World-of-Ming/PVP-PVE which took BT/Hyjal down in mostly season 3 gear and to look at a more recent example Vicious Cycle. From what I know, both of these guilds started to have problems with players showing up to raids once the easy content was down, VC stalling at HC modes in ICC and PVE is Hard failing at the first real test of a raid group (bare in mind that S3 gear was not at all bad in BT, the weapons were>the non Illidan/Archimonde PVE stuff so it was not as big a gear issue as many made out at the time); Brutallus. Was PVE so easy once the content became more demanding? not quite, but it does fit in with the general experiences a lot of guildmasters have had with recruiting high end pvpers, they have the tendancy to guild hop and get bored rather fast. This does not apply to everyone however as there are some excellent PVP'ers that have been/are in world class guilds. Take Deus Vox for example http://www.wowarmory.com/team-info.xml?r=Laughing+Skull&ts=5&t=hella+many+points&select=hella+many+points whilst only Kollektiv has been active on the tournament scene recently both him and the ex-Pandemic guys are not only claiming top tournament posistions and R1 titles they're also getting top 10 US PVE kills and top WOL http://worldoflogs.com/rankings/players/Icecrown_Citadel/Festergut/25H/Combat_Rogue/ posistions as well, players that excel in both areas though are a true rarity as not many are able to achieve that (no matter how much they like to claim that it's 'easy').

To take a quote on PVP'ers in top end PVE guilds -

"My personal feeling is that people who come from a long history of mainly pvp focussed play are difficult to control, they tend to have a greater feeling of entitlement and individualism, because they are used to a far greater level of self determinism. That said, they also have a far higher level of patience and focus than many pure pve players." - Log - GM of Infamous in Vanilla http://www.realmhistory.net/outland/106/guild/infamous/973.html

At the end of the day both areas can be condensed down to a few simple steps of analysis -

1. Identify Target

2. Know strategy to kill said target

3. Avoid/Prevent abilities said target can use to kill you

4. Execute strategy and kill target before they kill you

This is also why when something new comes up in PVP it takes a while before effective strategies and counters are found to it (e.g. Beast Cleave) in the same way it takes a while before there's full strategy guides available on the interwebs for claiming your next lot of epics. A player who focuses solely on one area of the game is unlikely to really excel in the other without putting some serious effort in no matter how 'easy' the welfare modes are (in general if it's puggable then it doesn't matter, so 95% of the current content); to put it into context, avoiding wiping the raid with a defile on HC LK requires the same reactions that it does to spell reflect sheeps/cyclones, you have to pre-emptively react to both abilities (good luck spell reflecting hasted sheeps/cyclones without <50ms if you don't have your shield out before they cast), whether you can achieve either comes down to the level of experience of the player of expecting that particular 'script' to happen and reacting to it.

Title sharing on Sturmangriff / Charge Battlegroup

Can someone go help Barburas take rank one in 5s as well?

http://eu.wowarmory.com/arena-ladder.xml?b=Sturmangriff+%2F+Charge&r=Shattrath&ts=3&t=sharing+is+wrong&ff=realm&fv=Shattrath&select=sharing+is+wrong

http://eu.wowarmory.com/arena-ladder.xml?ts=5&b=Sturmangriff+%2F+Charge

His team has done a great job screwing up the 7 way tie in the 3s Ladder but there's still a bunch of teams left in 5s that are sharing rank one at 2434 rating wth a 1900 team on the first page, having more R1 slots than Gladiator slots is kinda dumb especially since this could of easily been over 60 Wrathful Gladiator's from one battlegroup. Hopefully Blizzard decide on some way to differentiate tied teams from titles in Cataclysm or change the system so it's harder to tie as the rampant win trading and title sharing is putting a smear on what was once a fairly prestigious title to get; this is just one of many BG's though which has a huge amount of teams sharing with many of the worst battlegroups producing nearly as many Wrathful Gladiator's as normal Gladiator's.

Initial 4.0 Death Knight Thoughts

These are my current thoughts on the biggest DK changes for Unholy coming in 4.0 at level 80 as they're looking more finalised now.

- AMS off the GCD should of done ages ago, no more ams'd while sheeped/feared now.

- Not having to use PS/IT to reapply diseases constantly due to Festering Strike is going to increase our damage a fair amount, resilient infection will also make cleanse wars with DK's a battle that healers aren't going to win.

- Runic Empowerment is a really really dumb mechanic, runic corruption should be how it functions by default (have fun if you're playing frost and being spammed with useless runes).

- Dots being able to crit is going to make the aoe damage insane in PVE for Unholy DK's although I don't think it was really such a great idea to nerf pestilience and then rebuff it with a talent, feels a bit filler-ish.

- New rune system will make them play somewhat similar to rogues in the sense that using every rune as soon as it comes up won't be a requirement anymore to avoid a dps loss.

- COI Change should of been done in S5.

- Dark Transformation is going to raise the skill cap hugely as pet control is going to be vital now rather than just as a tool to blow shit up and stop people drinking that can be suicided without thinking.

DK's benefitting more from strength than arp is also going to be great when the patch comes as warriors/ferals are doing very very little damage now with the loss of it. Karuki "knight of daeth" out.

As far as I can recall I've only had good experiences with PvP players swapping to PvE. However I believe that they have a bit of a harder time taking orders and might be a bit more arrogant generally than players who has played mostly PvE, this ofcourse varies from person to person though but that's the overall picture that I've gotten. I also think that they have better focus from the start and have an easier time to adapt in stressful si

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.

WOTLK'd S5/6

This blog is about WOTLK S5/6 and the broken polava that was a constant in the arenas of the World of Warcraft.

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.

The spirit of being WOTLK'd has been strong since S5 and looks like it's very much set to continue to the end of the expansion, but what exactly has been WOTLK'ing us throughout the seasons and breaking numerous headsets and keyboards (most likely ones owned by rogues). From the never to be seen above 2k again Deadly Gladiator's to the super skilled protection heroes (10k shockwave outplayed m8) back pedalling their way to the tip top of the arena, let's take a look at what's happened over the course of the expansion.

Season 5 - Enter the Hero Class

Enter the WOTLK, the start of season 5 was a fairly ludicrious affair, when everyone started off in blues/pve gear with a few lucky people having some voa/badge items nothing was safe from dying within the space of a cheap shot. RMP mirrors came down to luck with the spirit of redemption glyph more often than not, who could forget having SOR up for 30s+ with good RNG? Holy was the spec to be early season because any other spec would leave you eating dirt within the first 10 seconds of the match unable to heal anything. The amount of damage that could come out of an arcane/muti RMP in the opener back then was obscene even on todays standards. Divine hymning through the ROV barriers was also a great way to abuse lazy coding, also who could forget the fire that popped up and broke cc/did stupid amounts of damage.

Slappywag's video shows the early stages of S5 in a rather accurate way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9lfD27DbuE

All sorts of comps came out in early s5 but there was a staple in any top tier comp in the early weeks of the season, rogue/ret/arcane, the 3 super high burst classes which had enough cooldowns to spam to survive for more than 10 seconds. Mages also had the lovely mirror images spamming sheeps which weren't on any kind of DR, this combined with the arcane burst seen here led for some amazingly competitive games where the enemy healer could end up sheeped for 20s+ without anything they could do about it. WOTLK also saw the introduction of mage armour , which to this day carries on being a bane to warlocks adding another rng factor to the warlock vs mage meta game of devour/spell lock lottery. These 3 classes and the death knight zoo were fairly prevelent throughout the early period of season 5. What's the death knight zoo you ask? Who could forget the dk coming back to life as a ghoul, with his dead ally coming back with him as a ghoul, with his ghoul pet, and a gargoyle, and maybe a hunter pet, and some wolves from the future. Another issue with death knights was the fact that standing in death and decay resulted in what looked like rolling your face across WASD whilst they're bound to a /cower macro due to one of the best glyphs in the game. Blood was also an option with DRW doing 100% of the DK's damage making it pretty much unhealable on cloth. The S key was no obstacle for this DK achieving the highest of ratings.

As the season started to progress hunters/dks/paladins started to gather pvp gear, thus was born Shadowcleave & PHD. "Lets remove all rng proc stuns, but give one to hunters" said blizzard, thus was born something even more annoying/retarded than mace stuns off hamstrings/whirlwinds, the triple stun tnt explosive shots that were the bane of everything that got caught by it. They also had to option to spec Readiness+The Beast Within and have back to back immunity whilst their pet killed everything. One of the other top tier combos was a triple engineering RMP (engineering was good for everyone but a triple engineering team would make all the difference more often than not). The combination of GLG/Pyro rocket/bandits insignia/DMC:D allowed for a huge amount of on demand/rng burst that could come out of nowhere, engineering was at it's peak in this season before the rocket glove/glg nerf that put them on a shared cooldown.

DK's however were something else all together, DND glyph having an AOE cower added to it whilst being incredibly funny to use as a DK nearly cost me a keyboard playing a rogue vs it. This was nothing before Serennia found that DKs could do more damage spamming Icy Touch than meleeing, leading to a retarded caster hybrid that could do 6*back to back Icy Touches with the potential to crit for 5-6k each. What made this even better was that DK's could go on to dual weild Silent Fang and have 2*Strangulate proc sword, who needs weapon damage when you can icy touch, right? Plague strike was pretty much turned into a glorified druid counter at this point as every unholy rune could safely be burnt on it without a second thought (could we have the part where it removes 3 stacks of lifeblooms back without the druid getting any mana or health, please, it was balanced, I might be able to solo kill a druid on my dk again after that).

The trends after this pretty much went to PHD's in 3s and DK/Pala+DK/Hunter in 2s, paladins had a place in all of this as well with their holy/ret spec. Shadowcleaves also made an appearance playing on the strength of DK's combined with warlock dots/cc's to create insane amounts of pressure (with chains for peeling so the warlock could survive). The ability to get infusion of light and judgements of the wise and repentance led to paladins probably being in the most interesting state they've ever been (they could still die to being outskilled by icy touch spam/tnt stuns at this point). By having a low CD CC, Freedom breaking stuns and infinite mana it put them at a new level of offensive utility which hasn't really been seen since (holy is a very boring spec these days compared to the bullshit versions of it in s5/6 imo). Another huge issue was the ability to put sacred shields on multiple targets, think of how the current arena scene would be if that had stayed in the game pretty much nullifying most swaps.

Druids were also far from the tanking gods they are today, plague strike spam removing (note, not dispelling, no heal from those removed blooms) all their hots and a lack of armour led to an extremely squishy healer even for s5 standards. This combined with the huge amounts of burst able to easily out damage the hots from a 1.8k spell power druid made them pretty much a rarity to see as resto in 3.0.x. This led to many druids adopting a 0/34/37 spec for survival instincts and feral charge to play a similar style to S4 druids. Another nonfactor early in the season were warriors, defenseless without resilience and forced into fury spec to be able to create any pressure. The trend of warriors going from piss poor to great(ly overpowered with enough pve gear) within the space of an expansion has continued.

Season 6 - Prot paladins and warriors and arparparp oh my.

The first things to note with the Ulduar patch are the huge nerfs to DK's, Black Ice being changed to a small shadow/frost bonus rather than a large frost bonus and improved icy touch being changed to less +% damage to spell the death of the shadowfrost spec. They also decided that removal of RNG stun talents would be a bit better for the game as taking one step back after removing mace stun by adding TNT stun to irritate players even more might of been a slightly terrible idea and many DEADLY GLADIATOR Legolas's faded into obscurity shortly after. There was also the arcane power/pom shared cd nerf (this was actually done in 3.09 or so just before the end of s5). Holy Paladin's also had their trees swapped around so Infusion of light would no longer be accessable to ret specced paladins, not that this was needed with what was to come. This was the beginning of the rise of the resto druid with buffs from every angle.

* Improved Barkskin: This talent now also grants 80/160% additional armor while in Travel Form or not shapeshifted.

* Improved Tree of Life: The armor bonus to Tree of Life Form from this talent has been reduced to 67/133/200% bonus armor.

This and plague strike being toned down to normality led to a sudden influx of druid heroes plaguing the arena favouring the newly 'nerfed' dks as partners and becoming the dominant setup of mid S6. The first weeks of S6 however was dictated by one simple change that led to the mighty Furious Gladiator Billian claiming his title within the first 2 weeks of the season.

Penance: Damage increased approximately 30%. This spell can now be cast on yourself.

Shortly after this, Blind and Fear ended up on the same DR and rogue/priest was back to normality which is when the druid/dk's started farming their way back up after the pala/dk's of S5 skey'd their way back down. Mid season 6 also saw a boost in the average MMR of everyone resulting in a rating inflation that boosted most teams MMR by 200~300.

Once DK's had began to raid Ulduar and discovered that Scourge Strike can now crit for 8~10k depending on their procs the knights of daeth came back in full swing with a choice of this or back to back 9k frost strike crits with the XT Sigil. Combining this with the new found survivability of druids led to a very stable comp for both out lasting and gibbing people with the pure shadow damage scourge strikes of which do more damage than my dk with full 277 gear+shadowmourne does these days. The stability of dk/druid's survivability combined with the overall setting for S6 led to a fairly overpowered comp which had very few weaknesses for most of the season. Innervate also being changed mid season led to the pretty much near infinite mana situation that we have today. A 6 min cooldown innervate being dispelled would mean the druid would be oom long before the next one came up, with a 3 min one it was often easy enough to turtle until the second one came up. They also created an interesting bug which allowed dk's to sit there spamming the blood boil button until a rogue was nearby at which point it would cast the spell and instantly destealth them. What was interesting was that they nerfed scourge strike before the season ended practically halving the damage 3~4 weeks before the end which was the turning point for the dominance of DK's and pushing them towards the death coil centric playstyle that we have now.

Retribution paladins were also not half bad for most of the season, the ability to global anything with chain crits as seen in this was quite hard to beat until they nerfed vindication and gutted (and later removed) seal of blood/the martyr. Protection paladins however, were on the rise. Not just the PROT BEATZ dps paladins, the PROT BEATZ holydins which were soon to become the plague of the 2v2 bracket. Simply take a paladin specced into prot for the stamina conversion to spell power talent, equip full holy gear and go to town on the stamina gems and what do you get?

A nearly unkillable holy paladin with a ridiculous amount of spell power and defensive talents. The only weakness of the prot paladin was the fact that they HAD to cast to heal, they had no instant cast heals but their flash of lights crit for ridiculous amount due to the protection talents and this combined the sacred shield gave them huge hps when they were free to cast. This wasn't even the worst part of it though, the fact that they had a 20 second cooldown hammer of justice and avenger's shield that crit for 7~8k AND silences for 3 seconds let the prot paladin not only heal but provide a huge amount of offensive utility. Oh and divine plea? yeah that was undispellable with this spec and refreshed itself on a melee hit, who needs int gems. Another problem with prot paladins was that the ones that had access to 4P T8 had a sacred shield that procced every 4 seconds, with the ridiculous amount of sp prot paladins had (3.2k+, very close to what paladins have now a full 2 tiers of gear later) this made them even harder to kill despite dropping a bunch of resilience for the bonus.

* Resilience: No longer reduces the amount of damage done by damage-over-time spells, but instead reduces the amount of all damage done by players by the same proportion. In addition, the amount of resilience needed to reduce critical strike chance, critical strike damage and overall damage has been increased by 15%.

* Armor Penetration Rating: The amount of armor penetration gained per point of this rating has been reduced by 12%.

Both of these were huge buffs to warriors combined with the bladestorm/juggernaut buffs with the Ulduar patch and some talent refinements. This led to the rise of warriors and the top tier comps that came with this for them of TSG and pala/warrior in 2s (note how paladins have been in a good 80% of the top tier comps so far this expansion). No longer was 2s a DK fest with arp soft capped warriors destroying stuff in blade storms with a Mjolnir/GT proc up (hi tankz) whilst their 30k hp healer chained hammer into an avenger's shield only for it to happen all over again 30 seconds later if you didn't die to the first assault.

A faint glimpse of the future lied ahead of people with the destruction buffs to come with the Ulduar patch, destruction locks were quite comfortably globaling people until the resilience buff came and whilst there was not really any fotm comps for them at this point pretty much any combo of healer/destro/rogue was working ok vs most teams and later led to RLS going mainstream (and healer/destro in 2s was arguably better than affliction vs a lot of setups).

Closer to the end of the season blizzard released the TOC patch. This gave warriors and the now gutted on damage dk's access to ilvl245 2h weapons with a nice amount of strength/arp on them and made facing the [Dual Blade Butcher] heroes for the last few weeks of the season a rather painful experience (with death's verdict also being available very late on). Along with this patch was not the nerfs that prot paladins needed, instead blizzard attempted to fix the full holy specs for 2s and indirectly gave prot paladins a huge buff with the FOL hot which now made them even tougher to kill with that ticking away for 600+/tick.

Sacred Shield: When a paladin casts Flash of Light on a target with this buff, they also now place a heal over time effect on the target, healing that target for 100% of the Flash of Light amount over 12 seconds.

This patch also came with a huge amount of buffs for shadow priests and was the start of them returning to viability within S7 and becoming the powerhouse that they are today. What lied ahead of the brave followers of the arena system was a land of wizards and tanks entering into the arena claiming rewards from more deserving players with absurdly broken game mechanics, but that'll have to wait until next time.

Vurtne Interview

This was an interview with Vurtne that was done in January 2011.

http://www.warcraftmovies.com/pv.php?l=vurtne

Hello Vurtne, as there might be a few newer players who do not know of you, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, what you're up to these days and what you've achieved with the community.

Disclaimer: I'm not currently playing WoW so if you expect to learn about gameplay and stuff this is probably not the right place to read it.

I'm 22, from Swe. Busy with real life atm and I haven't had any time for WoW in years. Playing SC2 really casually atm. I've made some WoW pvp movies before and had plans to make more movies later cause the previous ones were fun to make, but WoWgaming started to take up too much time even as a casual player so I gradually gave it up completly. Besides lack of time I didn't like it when Blizzard began to treat their subscribers like junkies. Of course it's not easy to be a game developer, especially when the subscribers range from the ages of 12 to 45, casual or non casual, pve or pvp. It was the pattern that they followed each patch that bored me: buff-one-patch-nerf-the-next (healers tanking 5 scrubs one patch and then gibbed instantly 1v1 the next). Game changes can definetley be interesting but the ones involving pvp was nothing but frustrating. Also, the endless grinding even as a casual pvper took most of the fun out of the game for me. If I wanna work I will go to my job and get real money.

What's your opinion on the current expansion for the potential of entertainment value in videos compared to Vanilla/TBC?

It'll not be easy considering some of the changes that have occurred since level 60. Movie standard is really high on a low standard gameplay. The best gameplay doesn't look very inviting so most good players will probably not even bother to record, knowing they will be bashed for using the "wrong" gameplay. Flying mounts, more instant spells, more HP, BG/Dungeonfinder will make it hard to find anything but indoor pvp. Spaming icelance for the third expansion in a row in a several year old battle ground is getting zZzZ.

All of the changes are very convenient both for pve and pvp and sure most people probably love it. But the dungeon system combined with flying mounts probably makes some gamers wonder if it would more convenient if Blizzard removed the world almost completly and added one flat texture instead. Players will only fly over or idle in auctionhouse anyway. It would prevent lag and save everyone some disc space.

It's been rumoured that you may return in Cataclysm, any comment?

Cata looks awesome so far (looks) but so did Wotlk/TBC on the previews. But does anyone remember the world-pvp content Blizzard introduced @ level60 in Silithus and EPL? TBC W-pvp content in Zangarmarsh, Hellfire and Terrokar? Previews looked stunning but in "reality" they sucked so bad it's hard to imagine they would ever be able to outdo themselves again. Wintergrasp again was about as much about PVP as flying mounts, but leveling and pvping in a new WoW expansion is always extremely fun. I might try a month or two as usual and see if the patches follow the same pattern as they use to.

When you played you didn't really touch arena more than to pick up a bit of gear, any reason you didn't play it or was it just the lack of time/people to play with?

I wasn't a fan of the consept of blizzard handing out charity gear for 10 games a week forcing people to do stuff they didn't really want to do. You shouldn't be forced to wear epic gear in the first place, then there's something wrong with the gamedesign. Pvp wise it was too class restricted and even if people became extreamly skilled in arena it was still embarrassing to watch "pro gaming" matches being casted when the game was tied because "WoW shoudn't be balanced around 1v1". Would be fun with some creativity in there.

When you played how did you cope with the immense amount of whispers and followers that you had, all it took was a trip to Durotar on the realm you were on to see countless amounts of Warbarbie/Vurtne clones fighting it out and begging for an invite to Total War.

It was a lot of fun and the more annoying to other people they were the funnier it was. Only ones that annoyed and still do are the Spanish ones, asking me to prove I'm me. They're persistent, so if you block one it'll be back again and again with online lexicon English.

You're heralded as a "champion of your class" in China and you were approached by Ming a few years back about writing, do you have any intention to begin writing at any point in the future?

oh the gossip.. well neh I can't write about a game that I'm not even playing. It'll waste my time and others who're expecting to read good stuff when I don't even have content. Maybe later someday but no plans right now.

One of the things that is very noticable in your videos and has not been achieved to such a degree since is the use of the camera both ingame and Vegas to shift the point of view and transistion between scenes. Having made a lot of tutorial videos yourself would you recommend future video makers to think about camera work more often and how effective it can be?

Sure. That kind of playstyle can be important but it's better to focus on actually being a good and fun player. But it's hard to be serious about pvp and have fun when many fights end with Clos+Vanish or Shadowmeld+Flightform. you just wonder WTF were the WoWdevelopers thinking?

On a similar note, we've seen some of your editing in recent productions, anything else pending?

Nothing newer than DD9. But I can give a link to my first pvp movie from 2006. The shammie I later on used in my third movie. It's so bad it's good. I was like 16 years old and you can even find spelling failures in the vid. It's a good idea to watch all of it or nothing at all cause there's a little bit of a plot going on. Quality is bad but I don't have the original file anymore.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4709270922081056473#

On Vurtne.net it was fairly common knowledge that you had an absolutely awful PC which led to you doing the Isle of Quel'danas dailies for a bit to level because even entering Borean Tundra would crash your PC, any improvement on that?

I use money to travel and not on new computer parts whether people expect new movies or not. The unfortunate thing was that I hosted a pretty big website with my poor computer and couldn't provide content. But I think people were more bothered by my computer than I was. Next time I host something I'll make sure it pays for itself.