I like him. When he fights the trolls, he does it in the way that I do, except his posts are in blue, so they hold a little more weight.

During the beta, I told the active posters that I got 1 gold every time people dragged out certain tired catchphrases or arguments.

Among them were "broken promises" and "slap to the face" of course. But a big one is "It's clear nobody at Blizzard plays or understands my class." That one is making a comeback in recent days.

Aside from being both untrue and irrelevant, it is a logical fallacy. You subvert the process of trying to disprove the argument when you attack the person making the argument instead of the argument itself.

If your thesis is that mana needs to be unlimited in order for the game to be balanced, positing that Blizzard doesn't understand the issue is not a particularly strong way to prove your point.

Later in the thread, he post this gem:

Saying "Logical Fallacy" is a redundancy.

I actually have a philosophy degree (and a mage). I took logic courses.

I just like the way this guy thinks. He is trying to get everyone to shut up and think about the game before complaining, and while I feel this is likely an exercise in futility, he keeps up the fight on a day-to-day basis. In fact, he has gotten into threads that I have started and given me very clear and concise reasons as to why I am an idiot for suggesting such nonsense. For the most part, I tend to agree with his claims (as he often backs them up with numbers, and those are hard to refute), but I keep conversations rolling to try and keep the feral druids at the top of the list for buffs. However, I have been trying to keep feral concerns on the low-down while fueling the fires about Maim. It really does seem like no one is aware of 1) how much damage ferals are putting out on the ptr, 2) how much utility druids have been given on the ptr, and 3) how much survivability druids have been given.

Arena Junkies have posted their data on the various Arena title cutoffs. They claim that Duelist will be between ~75 and ~450. While this definitely illustrates a smaller sample size for 2s (as Duelist cutoff was at basically 850 in s4), it also demonstrates a HUGE rating bubble, as to get into the 450 bracket you need to be at least 2050 team rated. This rating is probably unattainable at our team's current amount of play and our luck. This week we faced 8/10 counter-comps, all of them were pretty bad, so we ended up beating three of them and dusting the regular teams. Most noticeably absent this week was holy+dk, which has been (and currently still is) the flavor of the month, and one against which we excel. If we started playing more than ten matches per week, we might be able to pump our team up enough to break 2k, but getting into the Duelist group will be no small task, it seems (and it really has never been... it just seems that way because I have done it... I would be very sad to lose my Duelist title). Also, we will need to get a little lucky in terms of our opponents. I worry that the new rating system is going to assume that our skill level lives around 1850 and so it will not be giving us any more 2k rated teams (which is where the dk+holy teams live). Instead, we will continually get priest+hunter and other counter-comps which have a LOT of trouble with dk+holy, but mop the floor with our team.

In other news, the Armory has been updated to keep track of arena match statistics and rating changes. It is really neat, it shows you the names (with links) of all your opponents ever faced on your team, who won each encounter, how much damage/healing was done, and how much rating changed. The only thing missing is a layout of how well your team preforms against your opposition's composition. This is something that can easily be done, but unless they do it in the armory, I will probably end up making a little tool to make requests to the armory to pull all pertinent team information, including opposing teams, and show a graph/stats pane illustrating who are your counter-comps and who are your bread-n-butter comps. This is really helpful, as a lot of the time we know the big ones (our team does well against pally+dk, but very very poorly against hunter+healer), but ignore the smaller ones.

Also, Blizzard has implemented an Arena unit frame, which acts similarly to Proximo. This is pretty nice since Proximo is basically a hack that abuses mouseovers and nameplates whereas the Blizzard unit frame is actually updated as one would expect the game to update it. Additionally, and I need to test this further as it may have just been my imagination but it seemed that it would tell you your opponents even if they were stealthed, but have them greyed out to indicate that they are stealthed. This is pretty handy against double-stealth teams, and it also is nice knowing that the unit frame is updated independently of user mouse actions and targeting.

Taking these two facts together, I might be able to make an application which will download your opponent history from the armory, parse it to see who you counter and who counters you, let's the user assign strategy notes to certain compositions, then output a data file that can be read by a WoW addon which will, once the arena unit frame loads both opponents, displays the strategy in party chat (or raid warning, or w/e). That would be pretty neat...