Well, it looks like the 3rd season of every expansion is going to be the longest one. Phew! Season seven felt like it was here since last decade or something… er… Anyway, season eight is just around the corner and it’s time for some mindless, unsupported speculation. Yay!

The first, and probably biggest change, announced for season eight is the transformation of resilience. You all know what it will do by now but, like anything else, exactly how it will change the game can’t be properly judged until it goes live. It’s easy to look back at previous seasons where burst was lower but other aspects of the game have changed since then.

I immediately thought that WLD could make a comeback, or other variations of a drain team. But then I realised that mana drains of all kind are pretty much worthless right now. If old fashioned ‘outlast’ teams do make a return it will cause even longer games than we are used to. Since draining mana is almost negligible, a drain team would have morph into purely outlasting their opponents. Not particularly by draining mana, just by not dying until their opponents die of exhaustion.

Maybe I’m overestimating the resilience changes a little bit but it seems to me that we could be seeing an awful lot of games going to the time limit in season eight. At least, more than we’re used to.

One thing that I can say with a reasonable amount of confidence is that the usefulness of mortal strike effects will skyrocket; good news for me and my warrior and the level 77 hunter I’m planning on using but bad news for almost everyone else. As much as I love the idea of being carried to a decent rating on the back of my girlfriend – er, I mean comp, er, i mean skill! – it would be a terrible thing for the competitive scene if double healer/x became a real force again.

In the past, I’ve been an advocate of letting different specs and comps into professional play. And I’m sure that the novelty value of watching a double healer team once or twice might be quite fun. But after the third hour-long series had finished streaming I think I’d probably be opening up Word with a pretty easy subject to write about in that week’s column.

Still, if MS suddenly becomes the be-all end-all of arena at least it further increases the chance that we can say goodbye to protection warriors. I didn’t play a lot of arena in season seven, and most of the prot warriors on my battlegroup are apparently pretty awful. But even I can see how irritating a good one must have been. When my priest is stunned to death with barely any opportunity to cast… anything, it was pretty frustrating.

Again, it was kind of funny to watch a few pro games like that, but in the end we want to see the most skilled players winning. Fingers crossed for season eight – it might just be the closest thing to season three since, er, season three.