Hi there, I’m the team leader of SK Gaming’s WoW team. Tomorrow we head down to Hamburg for the European finals in Blizzard’s WoW Arena Tournament. We have been preparing for this moment a long time and I really hope it pays off now.
When we qualified for the finals we used a melee Shaman but as you know if you read my first blog entry we later on respected to an elemental Shaman instead. This was pretty much against our will as we feel that using a melee Shaman is much more fun to play with and way more original. But as our Battlegroup became flooded with Hunter teams and our rating dropped and dropped we felt forced to give elemental a try. And we did. And it was great. We rose above 2400 rating and stayed in the Top 5 of the best Battlegroup in Europe for long periods of time. This is in my opinion quite an achievement, when using no addons at all.
However it seems like Blizzard will use the character copy from Phase 2, when our Shaman had no elemental gear, so in the finals we will be back to using melee Shaman again. At first this felt somewhat depressing but after playing with melee Shaman yesterday and tonight we’re feeling quite good about this. We had almost forgotten how much more fun melee is and in Hamburg we will tear peoples cloth to pieces, in game (mostly). As far as I know we are the only team that use melee Shaman, in any of the regional finals. Hurray for being original again and death to flavour of the month teams!
Since switching back to melee Shaman we have 41-6 in stats and are, as the new season started yesterday, at 1890 rating. I think that places us as #1 at the moment. So yes, we feel quite decent about our setup in the finals anyway. However our match ups are very bad for us as we have our 3 worst opponents in the same “bracket” as us and the 4 teams we would love to play against in the other. But if we manage to get trough the first two rounds I would almost be surprised if we do not manage to get Top 3 and qualify for the world finals.
You can watch and read an overview www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basics/arena/season01/index.html]here[/url].
And the brackets are found here.
We should win our first game, the one vs. Millenium. But the second game will be very hard, facing either Art of War or Nashwan. Both those teams have very good setups and will probably be our main foes in this tournament. If we lose our first game there is high risk that the tournament is over early for us though, let’s just hope that doesn’t happen. It’s tricky because we have never played against the setup Millenium is using. We are however very well prepared in other ways and for example I doubt that any team has played more than us with default UI.
The schedule can be found here.
And the games will be streamed by [url=www.giga.de/2/.
Be sure to check some of the action out as it will be WoW at its best. Forget about those US teams some of you surely have seen before; it’s time for Europe to show how the game is really played. Like always. OK, I’m just trying to stir up some heat so never mind about that. But anyways, we will do our best to bring this tournament home and if enough people wishes us luck we might just do that.
Write you later.