So here's a picture of my ban... for funsies:



I sent an appeal in and got this reply today (interestingly... I heard no one ever replies to these emails):

Hello,

After reviewing your account's forum record, we have determined that the appropriate action was taken and will not be repealed. While the Code of Conduct does list penalties for certain categories each incident is reviewed on a case by case basis as stated in the Code of Conduct:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/policy/forum-coc.html

"Blizzard Entertainment reserves the right to suspend your access to these forums at any time for reasons that include, but are not necessarily limited to, your failure to abide by these guidelines.

We reserve the right to evaluate each incident on a case by case basis. The action we take may be more lenient or more severe than those listed under each category."

It's important for us to provide a civil and friendly environment on the forums, where all players can feel comfortable sharing their thoughts with each other. Your support in helping us maintain this goal is appreciated.

- The World of Warcraft Community Team

Admittedly, my comment was not very friendly... but come on... this Shammy is in Hateful gear and complaining that his HP is lower than a warrior who is in full Relentless. DUH...

OKAY, so we tried out this random mage who was walking around Orgrimmar while I was talking to a friend yesterday. We were using /s for our discussion which went something like this:

Me: "You know any good mages who would want to slum with a good disc+feral instead of facerolling with disc+rogue?"
Him: "Nah, I only know 2600+ mages, and they don't want to slum with you >_<"
Random Mage: "Hey, I ran RMP to 2200 and got most of the gear... if you don't want to run every single minute of every single day, I'll roll with you."
Me: "... want to try out some skirms right now?"
Mage: "Sure"

So we skirmed... it was hilariously simple... Guntir was surprised at how much damage he was dealing, given that no one was actually taking damage and necessitating heals. I really like this comp when played effectively... we had some pretty impressive CC-combos that went like this:

Psychic Scream, Cyclone, Poly, Poly, Poly, Counter Spell, Cyclone, Psychic Scream...

We are going to hopefully run some games tonight with the mage and see how it works out in practice... keep in mind that skirmishes are easy for a reason... we'll see how 2k makes this team look (I'm hoping it still looks strong).

An aspect of this team that was HILARIOUSLY apparent in skirmishes (and will likely be less apparent in real matches) is that the opposition viewed our team and always made the decision that either Guntir or the Mage were the best target. Let me clue some in on a secret: Ferals cannot be ignored. If you ignore a good Feral, he is going to kill you... and kill you HARD. We had match-up screens at the end which resulted in something like 20k damage done by the mage, 15k damage done by Guntir, 120k damage done by me, and these were the teams who WEREN'T hilarious jokes. The teams that had healers, for instance, would not get raped out the gate and ended up taking 3 minutes (and actually required the use of Berserk... lawl).

It is a really interesting dynamic, having tons of CC. The mage can basically keep all melees off of himself and Guntir, and what I bring to the table as a Feral (as opposed to a Rogue, for instance) is the fact that I can get away from melees AND I'm almost impossible to CC/snare/root. So, while a PMR would have trouble against TSG (Warrior/DK/HPally) in certain circumstances (cooldowns blown, Rogue gets DG'd+CoI'd, Bladestorm), I will be able to D-up (not cooldown-dependent) or actually make a break away from the fray.

I will have the stream going tonight and we will see how it plays out.

Eating yet another 24h ban from the WoW Forums. I swear, I don't do anything! They implemented a new system which allows you to log in and see your characters when you are banned now, but if you try and do a restricted action (post a reply, start a new thread, report someone, etc), you will get this prompt explaining 1) that you are banned, 2) how long you are banned for, 3) which thread/reply you were banned for, and 4) the official ruling on the ban (were you trolling, posting CP, etc?).

It's pretty nice... at least now I know that the CMs banned me for telling a Shammy that the reason he thought he had the lowest hp in the arenas was because he wasn't wearing the latest season's PvP gear, and thus was down a few thousand hit points. Oh well...

I really do HATE 3v3s... it's hard to find competent players. I've rolled with Guntir for 7 seasons now, so we have a vague understanding of one another. That and we have a synergy (anyone watching the 2s matches can see that). The problem is that whenever we go looking for a 3rd, we either find short-bus rejects or we find people who consider US to be short-bus rejects.

Maybe that speaks more toward the problem... if Guntir and I had ever hit 2400, we could post in the Arena Junkies forum and would be sought as teammates by basically everyone else on our server... but we never gave it that much attention. I am really thinking that we are going to be forced to hit 2400 this season to find a replacement for our warrior for next season.

Don't get me wrong. I love Seere, he's a VERY good warrior, and once we have a strat for a comp down, he can execute it as well as anyone. The problem I have is that there simply isn't enough synergy between Warrior and Priest to make the comp viable at high-end play. Priests are considered the third DPS slot in 3v3 teams... they have to be able to turn around and toss out 3-5k damage from Holy Fire, MB, and SW:D as well as keep DoTs rolling. Unfortunately, Warriors don't put out enough front-end pressure for this to work effectively.

Here's an example: you run PMR, one of the opponents gets CC'd somehow (either via sap or blind or poly or w/e). Now, the rogue opens on a target, the Mage starts nuking a target... the priest doesn't really have to heal anyone because the Rogue has cooldowns to live through ANYTHING the opposition can dish out for 15 seconds while the Priest is nuking. PMR plays this way... make it a 3v2 for a few seconds, unload the pain.

Warrior+Feral... both of us are on melee and really I'm the ONLY one who provides offensive utility in the way of CC. Warriors are simply blunt instruments of destruction who happen to provide a 50% healing debuff. If they target me, I don't really have any cooldowns to survive without heals, and if they target Seere, he's in the same boat. Either one of us can D-up and survive for a bit without heals, but our offensive output goes straight into the crapper.

On the other hand, you replace that warrior with a Mage and you lose a little bit in the way of damage output and control, and you also lose a bit of healing reduction (20% instead of 50%... ouch), but you gain AMAZING CC against everything but druids, you gain Counter Spell, which is one of the most hilariously OP spells in the game, and you gain the ability to root opponents in place, making it easier for a Feral to get behind the target and apply Shred damage.

Oh well, I'll keep looking for good players... Seere's not bad, and we can definitely hit 2k with him... but I am always thinking about more. I strive for bigger and better things.

Arena Team

Resto Shammy
Disc Priest
Feral Druid

... wat!?

Double-healer USUALLY only works when you can get up an MS... or apparently not.

Anyway, I still haven't managed to get the streaming OLD stuff working cleanly... not really sure why. I'm not going to announce when I'll be running PvP as often, but suffice it to say that we USUALLY run Arenas on:

Monday/Wednesday 3-6pm PST.

USUALLY... if you can't make those times to view live, you can always load the video player, click "On Demand" and find the longer clips, they usually have arena coverage.

Side-tracking for moment...

We run Warrior+Feral+Disc at the moment around 2k... I just don't like the comp a lot. It's strong, don't get me wrong, but it is too blunt an instrument for my liking. I REALLY want to find a Hunter (a good hunter) and run Hunter+Disc+Feral... this is a 2400 team waiting to happen... just need to find the right hunter >_<

In case you missed our 2v2 exploits, I have set up the channel so that when we are not broadcasting live, our old streams are up on a continuous loop.

Couple things worth mentioning:

1) Guntir's voice isn't getting captured... not sure why, I'll look into it.
2) There's not 100% arena footage, some of it is WG or other BG pwnage because I forgot to turn off the broadcast.

Hope you all enjoyed listening/watching our games, if you have any questions about a certain match or strats we employed (or just a question in general), leave a message here or in the built-in chat and I'll get it answered asap.

EDIT:

Not sure why, but it's a little bit choppy... could just be my connection here at work. One way or the other, there's still some neat stuff there.

You can also go to "On Demand" and view clips directly.

EDIT2:

I love how we get lax when we know we've won... we get it to a 2v1 and we're all near topped off. So at about 1h21m into the main arena vid, we kill an affliction warlock while his Resto Druid is running off feared and I throw out an instant-HT on myself to top myself off, and Guntir dispels UA... which crits him for 12k lmao.

Okay, I commented out the streaming service for the moment... I was having HORRIBLE Firefox-crashing lag after leaving the browser open with the streaming link (down) open as well... eventually it ate up my resources at work and took ~99% of one of my CPUs over and was consuming something like 1GB of RAM... not good.

Anyway, as I said, I just commented it out, so it ought to be back up later when we run 2v2s (~3-3:30PM PST).

Just got streaming working (as you might notice at the top). If anyone was checking the site between 4:00 and 4:30 PST, you probably saw me whacking on target dummies for a bit (or just standing around writing this post).

Anyway, I'll try and see if I can't tweak the quality a little bit to make it look better (widescreen being shrunk to 4:3 ftl) without destroying my ping. So far it only really knocked my ping up to 100ms, which I basically play with most the time anyway (about 75 usually). SOOOOOOO, I may do some 2s broadcasting later (post to notify) just to test it out... may wait till Monday... we shall see.

EDIT:

I'm also going to be looking into whether it will be simple to put a chat-widget on the side-bar. That way, when I'm streaming I can answer questions directly and interact with all of you!

EDIT2:

Booyatica! Got a chat feature working too!

EDIT3:

Okay, it's the next morning, just wanted to mention that I switched from Justin.TV to LiveStream (what XFire uses to stream). I think the quality is a little better and I don't have to mash up as much data choking my latency. We'll see how it works, I can switch back relatively easily.

What I wanted to mention was that it has live chat built into the player, so if you see me doing arenas or whatever and I'm broadcasting, I'll try and look at the chat window every now and then to answer questions, talk strats, etc.

Man... I hate Destro locks and Elemental shammies. I'll be glad if they get some well-deserved nerfs next patch. Seems unlikely that Destros will be eating any real nerfs... at the very least we won't be seeing Shammies dropped 10k LB crits on us anymore (losing the 20% damage reduction PvE 4-set bonus is pretty key).

Anyway, just a couple of updates:

We went 7-8 yesterday and finished 9 rating under where we started, but we decided to call it this week because we wanted to finish above 1990 so Guntir and I could pick up the chest on Tuesday. So, no more arenas this week.

However, I found a solution, perhaps, to my want to stream some arena play. There is an app for Mac called CamTwist which allows the capture of an app, seemless resampling/sizing, and streaming to a source, and Justin.TV has the capacity (supposedly) to accept and stream this for free. So, while I won't be doing any more arena matches this week, I will be testing this out and seeing if it's possible to stream it (if I get it working, might do some 2v2 with it) next week.

Okay, finally hit 2k and got my shoulders. They look awesome, btw. I really am posting less and less, but with damned near 500 games played this season alone (for our first real 3v3 experience), it's getting difficult to find the time.

I was thinking about it; looking at the high-rated 3v3 teams who have roughly the same win-percentage as us... doesn't it seem odd that Blizz rewards teams who have hit 2900 in the past by making that their MMR and as long as they can maintain 50-50 they're guaranteed to get to 2500+? I mean, 47 point wins and 0 point losses until at least 2200, so they're guaranteed T2 weapons and full Relentless gear... just seems broken to me.

Oh well, if nothing else, we are getting our MMR above 2000 (hopefully above 2200) so that our climb next season will be less painful. Remember, our MMR is basically our TR because we have never participated in 3v3s at 80 before, so our 47 wins stopped around 1000... we had to grind that remaining 1000 rating at 10 a win and 10 a loss... definitely puts us at a disadvantage.

We had some AMAZING wins to hit that 2k mark, btw. The last two matches we played were VERY rough... got a RLS at 2400 MMR... we tried out our strat of "kill the lock and pet at the same time, hope for the best" and basically I died the same time the lock did. Then Seere and Guntir (who have NEVER run 2s in that comp, or together for that matter) proceeded to NARROWLY scrape a win out with a CLUTCH Tremor-kill-fear bomb and the most amazing lag-love ever with Seere Intercepting the Rogue who had CloS, no bleeds, and hit vanish mid-rush, so he got knocked out of stealth and stunned for 3 seconds, hit with Hammy, then Bladestorm... EVERYONE is at ~10% hp at this point, but Guntir got a full Innervate right as I died and he fired the Fearbomb (hence no dispel), so the Rogue just died while guntir pumped up Seere. Then they just had to kill the shammy... still tough.

The very last match was WrDkS, or as I like to call it, Work-Dicks. It takes soooo much RNG to win this match just because of how amazing DKs' damage output is in every position. We have to, basically, keep the warrior in D-stance with a Sword-n-Board up long enough to get the kill on the DK... which is no small feat. Okay, I lag or something to start the match, get knocked from stealth without an opener... sweet! Then they start laying into Seere and we realize the shammy is actually Elemental, not resto (fuck us, right?). Okay, so Seere Ds-up and keeps MS up on both melees while I'm trying, fervently, to keep the DK off him with Cyclone/Roots/Bash/etc... once DR hit the wall I was even throwing out instant-HTs to keep him up a second or two longer (we were absolutely wrecking the DK).

Okay, Seere goes down RIGHT as I cyclone the DK at 5% hp. I start winding up a cyclone which forced the shammy to ground, and fire a second on him before the DK's breaks. Meanwhile, Guntir jumps off to get away from the warrior who has switched to him. I kill the DK even with his OP self-heal nonsense... got the most amazing Shred-TF-Shred-FB during the Shammy's cyclone that ended up doing ~20k damage all crits. I see that the shammy has Tremor down above Guntir on the bridge, so I'm going to go give him a peel and I kill the totem on the way and I use my instant-cast on Roots on the shammy who's out of LoS stuck on the bridge with no trinket... finally a bit of love. I get down below and peel with Feral Charge (Bear), Bash, Cyclone, Tranquility and Guntir gets back to full... and I have Berserk up again... GG.

It was the most epic win AND it knocked us above 2k... so I'm happy.

I'm thinking of recording some of our matches and just throwing them up unedited to a quick-n-dirty sound-track for fun... I've been promising video for a long time and have never got enough footage during 1 season to do it... so maybe I'll just start throwing up some videos (I have a mac, so I can't use XFire streams, maybe there's something LIKE that I can use...)

Anyway, just wanted to update... posts will LIKELY be a little more frequent now that I'm not grinding so hard... but we'll see.