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.

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.

Trolling

lol u mad bro?

"In The Art of Trolling, published on the web, it is suggested that in Usenet usage, a "troll" is not a grumpy monster that lives beneath a bridge accosting passers by, but rather a provocative posting to a news group intended to produce a large volume of frivolous responses. The content of a "troll" posting generally falls into several areas. It may consist of an apparently foolish contradiction of common knowledge, a deliberately offensive insult to the readers of the news group or a broad request for trivial follow-up postings"

Trolling, whether we like it or not has become an integrel part of nearly any internet community. Most people including myself will quite happily admit that they've taken huge amounts of joy in spending hours, and hours, and hours (etc.) winding people up by enforcing opinions that may not be our own, but are damn sure to piss someone else off. Nearly every guild in the world of warcraft has at least one person which makes it their mission to irritate anyone stupid enough to take them seriously. The best trolls however, are the ones that make you wonder "is this guy serious or just retarded", bordering on that fine line is a huge success for any troll.

Different types of trolls

The "RUS??" guy -

This guy will usually write in broken english but you can never be quite sure whether he's from a third world country with 12kb net or just fucking with you, when someone takes the bait from this kind of troll they're usually just trying to help but end up being made to look a fool as no matter what you say they'll always come back with a nonsensical response designed to raise more questions.

e.g: attackyou from the d2.net forums that some of you may remember http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=501786 http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/showthread.php?p=4700370#post4700370 ,your local russian/polish/middle east guy which may be a troll, but who knows, jeffk (sadly most of it is gone these days but you can find it in the google cache).

The "is this guy serious or just stupid" guy -

A lot of wow players fall under this category, when comments such as 'but lsd requires coordination to land kills' are being thrown around the forum is quite hard to tell if they're actually serious or just trolling as many players do actually believe that wizard cleaves are hard comps to play elemental damage is fine and destro locks need more defenses vs melee.

e.g markwin, we still don't know if he's trolling, slappywags videos, my own videos, wcm comments for these are are full of people who are being completely trolled and taking it seriously.

The 'i fucked your mum' guy -

Whilst many cliques will chuck such insults around in jest, some trolls do attempt to offend people with comments about their mothers while telling them to kill themselves. As seen in the lovely gameriot comments, many people will go out of their way to call you ugly/shit/bad/tits or gtfo and to kill yourself for the aformentioned reasons. Why do they this? Well in many opinions it's not funny and a lot do actually take offense to these things, whilst it can have humerous reprocussions this is most likely the worst type and least effective of troll as anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes on the internet is fairly desensitised to what these trolls can throw at you.

The "newbie baiter" guy -

This guy goes out of his way to lure newbies into doing stupid things and generally telling them the wrong information for humerous results, as long as it's not taken too far it's often one of the funnier and more harmless forms of trolling. Although people who take everything seriously may end up like this guy with a true belief that strength http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Chromaggus&cn=Mahoi IS a good warlock stat because your pet will scale with it and do insane dips.

The "lol wat happen" guy -

Most commonly present in raids, he's there to wipe you, get people killed and fuck with as many people as he can in the short period that you'll be raiding with him. Wonder where that misdirect/tricks came from on trash? probably this guy, that bop when you're about to set a new wol record? again probably this guy, 'ops I di'd the tank' and various other situations are also fairly common. This is most effective when used on slow/unattentive people who most likely won't notice that they're being tricksed/md'd on every single trash pack and will just eat the repair costs wondering why they keep ripping agro, possibly blaming it on the tanks and shouting on vent WHY CANT I ATTACK GUYS I THINK SOMETHING IS BUGGED when they're bopped. Could also be the guy that feeds/takes retarded item builds/steals your kills/farms deep into lanes when the entire enemy team is missing in HoN/DoTa.

e.g

The blatent ninja

Every server has one, the king of discussion in the trade channel 'omg blabla has ninja'd x' being said time and time again yet he never fails to make a full group which lets him take what he wants and disenchant/sell it in front of rightfully deserving raiders. Not once do people think to listen to the warnings being spammed on the realm forums. It is however very much worth joining his raids to get a first hand experience of the drama that comes out of them.

e.g. 

Hosties - a lesser known CSS mod ripe for trolling

For those who don't know what Hosties is, it's a counterstrike mod in which the Ts must do what the CTs say. Failure to do this is met with death. This creates an amusing sub-game of killing random Ts and watching them rage the server down, whilst most of this is done over voice com, it also happens in the chat window. The act of freekilling is an art which has many methods, from just shooting the same guy every single round to avoid suspicion and a ban to just killing everyone which is usually met with a swift ban or a lot of shouting about how everyone 'must' voteban you. Bonus points are awarded when you make someone who you can tell is blatently prepubescent

upset/angry (this is not uncommon in the world of hosties).

To add to the insult, remember to take a name which involves them insulting themselves, as seen in the picture above, people have no problems proclaiming themselves balless or gay when they're trying to get you banned. For bonus points throw a gun at them before you shoot them, then you can claim they had a gun which is enough of a reason to shoot them, which results in more angry ranting about how you threw it at them. Anyone with CSS should check Hosties out as it's provided me with hours of entertainment at the expense of other peoples keyboards.

Welcome

Hello,

A few years back I blogged for hydramist/worldofming/sixjax gaming, this will be dedicated to reuploading the blogs that are still relevent/nostalgic!