I meant to get this post up yesterday, but Valentine's Day had me run ragged. Anyway, here is the video I promised you:



These guys started the night as a 2k-rated SPriest+Rogue combo, but unfortunately they ran into us a bunch of times and we farmed them down to 1900. Here is some things that I find funny:

1) They don't really ever blind me...
2) They don't really train me unmercifully (which they should)
3) They don't use half their control
4) They were 2k-rated

I guess it just speaks leagues about the sad state of PvP now-a-days when anyone can hit 2k. It used to mean something, but now it is just "do you have overpowered control and damage if your front-load your cooldowns? Insta-2k!" It really detracts from the good players who simply do not play often (we do 10 matches a week in 2s, for instance, while we are gearing up and we tend to go 80% or better against 2200ish mmr).

Maybe that is the point, however - if you really are good, you should have to grind your rating up to play people at your level. I mean, we occassionally get matched against a 2400 team, and we love beating them simply because it forces people to go to the boards and complain, but lately we have been getting nothing but 5-pt wins against 2k scrubs who had overpowered comps prior to 4.0.6 and are just kind of weak now.

Here's a great "for instance". If you watch last week's video again, you will see it is a mash-up of matches against double-dps (primarily mage comps) which all play decently and have rather strong "out the gate" damage output. Once we force them into the long game we tend to gain a distinct advantage, though we were largely on our heels in a few of them. Since 4.0.6, however, these teams were pretty substantially nerfed in terms of their up-front pressure (and our resilience has MAYBE increased by 100 between those matches and these matches) and they simply cannot compete with a healer over the short-game.

This is, in my opinion, a good thing. If you go back and look at my posts from years past, you will notice that I have NEVER been a fan of the existence of double-dps comps. I feel that they are the reason that Blizzard removed the 2s bracket from competitive play. I want my matches to go a little bit longer and require some "dig up, stupid" moments or flawless CC-work to excel, and I feel that 4.0.6 did a lot in that direction for 2s. 3s is another story entirely...

We have been running Dispelclaw for a while now and are pretty fantastic, though we did face a comp twice that we simply could not touch: ARogue+ALock+Disc. To be fair, we had them on Sewers and Blade's Edge... two maps that are HEAVILY in favor of Lock mobility and removing him as a kill-target in many cases. Essentially, it was a case of "whether your healer is here or not, both DPS classes can self-heal until he returns" and unfortunately, the healer was smart enough to know that he never really was in any danger of letting anyone die, so he only used his efficient heals to get pressure back up on us. Additionally, the Rogue+Lock combo knew the trick: train the Feral until he dead.

Aside from that unhappiness, we are hoping to never face that comp again, but we will try training the Rogue unmercifully next time and see what happens. Another problem we had with that team was that the Priest would pull us into the open (because I'm trying to train the lock) and land mana burn after mana burn on my healers. Blizzard spoke briefly when discussing the removal of Drain Mana from the game and suggested that they MIGHT remove Mana Burn as well. For our part, Guntir and I are hoping that they do just that. Mana Burn has always been somewhat of a cheesy effect and in situations where you could effectively control an opposing healer, it would mean a win in the long run (anyone recalling my Wrath videos against War+RDruid can attest to this). We can only wait and see at this point, but with the amount of QQ in the Arena boards over Mana Burn coupled with the amount of QQ from Warlocks in general feeling jaded about losing Mana Drain while Mana Burn is still in the game makes me think that it will eventually be removed as well.

At some point, and it MIGHT be this week but do not hold me to it, I want to get some video of our 3s play and show off our amazing CC rotations. Full Cyclone->Psychic Scream->Hammer of Justice is just a mean combo, and since none of these effects share DR and none were hit by the "great CC reclamation" of 4.0.6, it feels more powerful than pre-patch. We are, by no means, amazing... but we play rather well together (emphasis on "together") and have a lot of fun doing it (though we did have a tiff over that RLP we lost to that forced us to end early in a hurumph). I would LOVE to get some skype recordings, but I have been unsuccessful up to this point in redirecting my sound appropriately and getting it to record. If I do, I will definitely overlay it with the videos and get some out that way because I think it is definitely interesting to hear the sounds of the game as they happen (by that I mean me and guntir yelling about what we are doing). Also, our Pally is French-Canadian and speaks rather interestingly good/bad English, so we often say things like "no idea what you said; Cycloning Druid" etc.

EDIT:

I almost forgot - we were running this and came across some of our Pally's guildmates, which we heard were comprised of prior Gladiators. Anyway, here is a screenshot of us defeating one of those guild teams:



This was a triple-dps team at 2400 MMR after the patch (that's right, we beat this team with me sitting in Frost Novas all day). They immediately started talking in GChat (from what Lev told us) and calling him a noob for running this comp and everything else you would expect. We ended up beating another of his guild's 2350 teams running a Shadowcleave variant (UnholyDK+Afflic+RShammy) and they hopped on the bandwagon as well. Another match or two later we ended up beating some random team from another BG that was 2450 rated and Lev got his 3v3 2200 achievement and that essentially started a tirade in his guild with comments like "2200 running double-healer Feral = noob!"

We decided that we MIGHT end up calling the team "Haters Gunna Hate Cleave"... for obvious reasons.