There are a few things I would like to address in this post. First, why the hell do we only face counter-comps!? It makes no sense. Okay, both our teams are bubbling around 1700 right now, the warrior+druid is a little higher, the warlock+spriest is a little lower. However, we have faced teams who are around our rating with the same delta... so we should be facing the same pool of teams. MAIS NO, we face nothing but healer+rogue and druid+warlock on the warlock+spriest team, and nothing but better-geared warrior+healer on the druid+warrior team.

Disc+rogue is the absolute counter-comp to our destro+shadow team, unless the disc priest is terribad and gets gibbed before realizing that I am destro... and the rogue has to help by attacking guntir instead of me. Also, Prayer of Mending is PROBABLY the killer of our team, it forces us to pile our damage instead of spreading it. Don't get me wrong, we can pile on the damage, but if I cannot throw dots on the rogue as well, then there is really no reason why the priest has to be in line of sight, so he is not in line of sight if he is not terrible... as I said before. Also, sl/sl+druid is just unkillable. Soul link just keeps the warlock from taking any meaningful damage, so we cannot drop a gib on him, additionally, druids are so hard to keep in LoS that even if we DO get him down to 20%, we don't usually have enough to knock out that last 20% before ns-ht OR swiftmend take him back to 60% and the hots top him off.

Similarly, warrior+healer is not impossible on our druid+warrior team, but the other teams all have their s3 weapon, and we do not. So, in terms of attrition, they are likely to do better. I can survive against a warrior, that really is not the crux of the problem. I can kite them all day and night, but the good ones will bounce between us, so I will have to non-stop heal and never get a moment to drink. Again, this would be fine if the other team did not grossly out-gear us. The matches usually boil down to "I'm out of mana, their druid has 1000 left, both warriors are at 50%," which we inevitably lose because of the gear discrepancy. I am truly convinced that we can beat most of the warrior+healer teams we face, if only we were comparably geared.

I don't have a problem with counter-comps... it makes the game work. Rock-scissors-paper (or as close as Blizz can manage) is a fair system. My only problem is that we did 13 games on the destro+shadow team, and we we went 6-7. So, we ended up facing a different warlock+druid team 7 times. That's not entirely true, actually, we also faced disc+sl/sl, which is a MUCH harder counter-comp than druid+sl/sl because the priest has PRoM, as I stated before. We ended up taking 6 wins, mostly against the comp that we counter hard. We absolutely destroy warrior+healer on this team, and we only merely beat warrior+healer when they are both good. We had two matches against a pally+warrior in full s4 with s3 weapon and shoulders, one which we won because the warrior got cocky and decided to stick on me a little too long out of LoS. The other was on Lord, and they were playing tight the entire match, spell reflecting at amazing times, switching targets, breaking LoS, etc etc. Eventually it came down to the warrior at 50%, me at 25%, and we dropped a gib on him, the last sbolt of which was spell-reflected... and fizzled or something because I don't think it did damage to me... I will have to watch that video again.

We also stole a win from a terrible warlock+druid because the druid was standing out in the open in the beginning, so we got full dots, a blackout proc, shadowfury, deathcoil, spell lock, silence, gib (MB:D + SBB... new lingo for our gib which is "mind-blast+shadow word:death" and "shadowbolt+shadowburn"... I need to get that good 100-0 1 second gib video posted so I can refer to it in my posts with an onHover event to show off the gib in action). Also, we stole a win from a full s3 restoshamang+warlock which ended the same way... we put the long-lock on the shamang and gibbed him before he could ns-hw.


/takes a break


I just did some math for the new destro build and talents... you know what is going to be a spell that people won't see coming? Immolate. That's right, that base spell from level 2 is going to be a monster. Why?!? Well, with CoE up, and my Nightfall/Chaosbolt spec, Immolate will HIT for 2k, and Chaosbolt will hit for about the same. Wait... what... I am going to have to spells on 1.5 second casts that HIT for 2k on a crit-build?!?! It's bonkers right? So here's what I'm seeing: start the match with a mini-gib to get the opponents on the defensive. Essentially, toss up CoE, corruption, then Immolate into IMMEDIATE conflag for good damage output (should be about 3.5k without a crit... and has a 26% chance to stun and increases my casting speed by 30% for 3 casts), immolate again, chaosbolt, shadowbolt. Those three casts will come in the order of 1.05, 1.05, 1.75 seconds for a total of 3.85 seconds of casting. THEN, I can drop shadowfury for another 3 second stun (of course this will be pending on whether pyroclasm shares diminishing returns with Shadowfury... if not then it might be gg at this point), cast shadowbolt followed by a spell-lock on the healer and a deathcoil in the same animation, which should be followed by the gib (mb:d, SBB). Against teams who don't know about the gib... this will do something like 20k damage in 5 seconds (with guntir's help, of course). Also, if he lives through this part of the gib, conflag is back up, and under 5 seconds, so it has an additional 20% crit chance.

Awesome.

I'm working on getting the video ready, we have a lot of ideas, and a lot of good footage. I have a rough draft ready to go out, but I don't have it here or on the net yet, so it will be a bit before I post it.