ESL Germany

There's a lot to cover on this; more than I probably have the time to write, but there are a lot of misconceptions, confusion, and other points that I felt were worth discussing or clarifying.

First and foremost, the success (or lackthereof) of our team (SK-USA). I'll be quite frank when I will say straight up that I felt both myself and Dave (Sck) played exceptionally well at this tournament. To this day, I very rarely question anything he does in a game because there's always a good reason for it. He did everything he could given the circumstances at Germany, and the few mistakes he made (such as dying without using DS vs. complexity) were simply communication errors (he didn't know we were both going on rogue that game). The only thing he could have primarily done different was to spec Holy/Prot with Stoicism and Blessed Hands vs. SK EU and he thinks we would have won the series if he had made that change instead of playing as Divine Purpose (49/0/22).

As mentioned, I also felt I played to the best of my ability almost every game. One of the few regrets I have is not having the state of mind to run as a 53/18/0 Blood spec against the PMR teams and absolutely trouncing the priest with full CC immunity when lichborne, hysteria, icebound fortitude, and hand of freedom are all active with a 36-second duration dancing rune weapon is raping the priest along with my own damage. It's flat-out unhealable and it was a strategic oversight that I'll admit to. I just never thought of it previously because we've never had issues with PMR during practice previously (more on this later). Aside from this, I felt that I did everything within my ability to swing games in our favor and control the flow of damage intake/output as much as possible. The VOD's of our 2 series on stage can be found here if you want to check it out for yourself.

And finally, that leaves Ryan (Realz). And while I'm sure everyone is expecting me to tear into him and blame the entire thing on him, I'll have to disappoint if that's what you were looking for from this. While it was disappointing that I felt Dave and I put our best foot forward going into and coming out of this tournament and not entirely the same could be said for Ryan (Realz), I can't entirely blame the results on him. I'm being frank when I say I like Ryan; he's a cool and chill guy that's easy to get along with, knows how almost everything should go on paper, and is usually smart with strategical design. I've also said on numerous occasions during practice that I would have LOVED for him to improve and become a great hunter because of these reasons; because let's face it: I can count the good hunters in America on probably less than three fingers. It was simply a rather difficult task to get him enough practice personally on the class due to his work schedule. Although Dave and I were free to practice most nights leading up to the tournament, we often had to schedule around Ryan, which made the process less satisfying than we would have liked going into Germany.

On a similar topic of class comps, people often question why I "forced" Realz into playing Hunter instead of playing Rogue or something else. I think I can speak for our entire team when I never ever forced class comps at any point during practice or the Germany tournament itself. None of us at any point felt the need to change up the comp, and I don't think I'd be too eager to send in a rogue on a no-cc cleave comp vs. the amazing PMR's that were playing at Hanover. Yes, we had a couple other lineups prepared in the event we needed to counter certain comps, however, we never felt out-comped in the tournament, thus no changes were ever made.

So what does this leave for the future of the team? Well we're certainly not giving up. I've already talked to SK management personally and they completely understand the results given the new roster and first tournament together given the limited time span to practice and "gel" in. Sck and I were stuck in the same "house" (every team stayed in rented out houses at Germany due to every hotel being booked for Cebit) and had plenty of time there as well as our 8-hour wait at the airport to discuss matters. As stated previously, I feel he's an invaluable asset to the team and I obviously feel capable of playing multiple classes at tournament level, and it's the logical decision to build off of that solid foundation (given it's arguably the best you can work with), especially given the potential for warriors to make a resounding comeback after 3.1. Whether these plans include Realz or not are largely dependant on him. I'm certainly open to giving him sufficient time for improvement and see if we see more changes in the months before the first MLG tournament in June at Columbus, Ohio. I really don't have any intentions of making any rushed decisions or picking up someone that happens to be rank #1 on BGbad, so we'll have to see how it all pans out, I suppose.

On a final note regarding Germany, I did feel it necessary to apologize to both Ryan and SK for the remarks mentioned in the previous blog where I pointed out Realz's mistakes and sub-par performance at Germany. Although I never really meant for it to be a big flame toward Realz or anything, it was just a really frustrating time for us to lose a mirror to a team that literally dismounts with a Wyvern Sting on our paladin when the seemingly obvious actions taken would be to avoid damage to put your team far ahead in the fight with them wasting important cooldowns and your team not having to counter with any. Regardless, frustrations or not, it could have been handled better (and in private for that matter), and taking things like that to the public just makes us all look stupid. Shouldn't be an issue ever again.

The US/EU Difference

Alright, once again, we get into the old US vs. EU debate. Xom this, Neilyo that, Inflame here, Glick there, bla bla. Don't care about any of that. I'll try to basically explain the differences that made ESL Germany a US debacle to the best of my understanding and opinion.

Firstly, US PMR is still obsessed with mutilate. I'm being completely honest when I say that I have never once run into a single PMR on either the live battlegroups I've played on or the tournament realm where the rogue has EVER been shadow dance. Arcane was also almost entirely phased out in US PMR following the 3.0.9 nerfs with every mage shifting to frost. Thus, when you go up against teams such as H O N running both an arcane mage AND shadow dance rogue in the same comp, you can understand how it really catches you with your pants down. Although many people will say that mutilate is a better ladder comp and SHD is only a specialized comp designed for countering specific things such as PHD (paladin/hunter/dk), I think anyone attending Cebit can tell you this isn't really the case at all. And to take this a step even further, HON was often swapping their specs (mutilate + frost and shadow dance + arcane) between EVERY game in a series to throw opponents off and make strategies far more difficult to formulate. Now that's impressive.

On the topic of shadow dance, though, I was standing behind DK (HON rogue) as they played Council of Mages in the groupstage play (HON lost this series) and I must say that I think the rogue's spec is entirely dependant on the mage's spec and their synergy together. More simply put, I feel that dance works infinitely better with an arcane mage and mutilate pairs much better with a frost mage. Any deviation to this results in much weaker control, burst, and in turn, success. And personally, I only feel they lost the groupstage series because the HON rogue (DK) forgot to reglyph between switching from Mutilate to Shadow Dance (never applied a backstab glyph; Xom assumed he was using Rupture glyph).

That said, I expect to see a huge uproar of shadow dance rogues in the US in the near future after having seen this tournament. When I was spectating HON's games, I heard both the SK EU and INNERFIRE PMR's complaining about CoM's cheesey strat of "priest gib" with their shadow dance rogue. From what I could tell, their typical strategy was to open on the priest with a cheap to kidney forcing their initial trinket, then immediately vanishing right after the kidney, waiting off stun DR, and re-opening with a cheap shot shadow dance triple ambush and timers from mage basically instakilling the priest. I can personally attest to CoM killing HON's priest 100->0 in 2 seconds flat from this.

Are they really better, though? Personally, I think SK EU, CoM, INNERFIRE, and every other EU team there was just as good as any stellar US team could be so long as they're willing to think outside the box with specs and strategies (ie shadow dance and arcane, etc). However, that said, I feel H O N was playing a tier above everyone else at Germany and anyone in attendance this last weekend can probably testify to this. They were simply playing in an entirely different league and although Ming says that he felt I played the best inidividual performance of any player there on my DK, I think the real MVP award goes to Orangemarmelade. This kid is downright oozing with skill and although he doesn't necessarily carry his team, he definitely won the tournament for them with his amazing 1v2 in the final series vs. CoM. It was probably one of the most epic moments in WoW LAN Tournament history and if you missed it, you can check it out here (gets good around 3:15). It's literally something straight out of a PvP movie with an amazing spellsteal on PWS to set up his incredible RNG burst with an arcane blasted Missile Barrage on a clearcast. In fact, Sck said himself, "that mage is the only mage I have ever seen use mirror image 'properly' by sheeping me for 10 seconds, then 5 seconds, then imaging on top of me for 2-3 non-DR'd image sheeps, allowing regular sheep DR to reset and re-applying fresh 10/5 second sheeps."

I rarely give props like this but I feel we could have easily beat SK EU if Sck had the right spec for it (holy/prot), but HON downright outplayed us and they're easily the most deserving team for that $30,000 grand prize. Kudos to you guys.

Xom, the rogue hero of present, has really made a name for shadow dance just like Boozt did for mutilate in s3/s4. The only person that even compares to Xom with his success is Mahiko who has less than stellar results in comparison (even when playing with Celex and Ely from Gravitas). Even the famed Neilyo-kun has been asking me paragraphs of Death Knight questions lately indicating a possible re-roll for him from a class he feels can no longer compete instead of learning shadow dance himself. Shadow dance has been the entire difference between US and EU rogues (and PMR more specifically) so it really begs the question: which US rogue will be the first one to really master it like Xom (and many eventual others) from Europe has already done?

Patch 3.1

Several significant 3.1 changes were announced during our time in Germany and I felt the DK ones were worth discussing my take on.

-Glyph of Strangulate is really no longer a necessity since it's been gutted from 1 min off cd to 30 secs now to 20 secs
-Blood and Frost burst has also been gutted with the change of MoM/GoG from crit damage bonus to static damage bonus and DRW damage being cut in half. They should add 4/7/10% crit damage bonus back on those in addition to the current effects at the very least.
-Frost Presence got a slight and almost necessary nerf to its passive bonuses which is slightly made up by bladed barrier, however
-VB, UA, and Bone Shield cooldowns doubled, and I know this was done specifically for PvE tanking reasons for Ulduar, which is kind of silly to have them on such long cooldowns especially when all of them have either been nerfed previously or have not been that great (or situational) to begin with.
-They need to buff/fix other trees if they don't want to see every DK and their mom pidgeonholed into Unholy taking everything full circle once again. I suggest something along the lines of giving Blood Plague a shadow embrace type effect to reduce the effectiveness of HoT's without entirely stripping them (the new nerfed plague strike damage doesn't make it worth using for frost/blood anymore), giving Heart Strike a built-in snare, and giving Tundra Stalker an additional bonus of reducing Hungering Cold cooldown by -3/-6/-9/-12/-15 secs (45 secs fully talented deep frost).

Blizzard also announced that season five would be ending either with the release of 3.1 or very soon after (I expect on release) which is entirely expected. I guess it's that time of year again to start caring about arena ratings if you want to end the season with the covetted "Deadly Gladiator" title. You know, that time of year where droves of players transfer off to Emberstorm, Whirlwind, Retaliation, et al for a month or so. Anyways, even though I have Deadly pretty much locked for 5v5, I'm bored enough to deprive the scrubs who currently have top ranks in my battlegroup from it in 2v2 and 3v3 so if you're the right classes that work well with a DK and you'd be interested in doing so also, we can set up a tryout on TR and going from there. PM me here on Gameriot if you're interested.