This news floated around yesterday, but today MMO-Champion wrote about it, so I kinda feel obligated to write some words about it, as probably soon the whole WoW-scene will be talking about this.

A well known for win-trading 2v2 team DonLolo z Wladem has finally reached 3000 rating, win-trading pushed to perfection. Not a big surprise for me, since they are on my realm.

A quote from PvP forums that’s worth to bring to the light:

It’s been linked in these forums, the battlegroup forums, and the realm forums, in addition to the team being reported for 1 month plus. If blizz banned this 3k team, they’d have to do something about the other teams which don’t cheat to such an extreme, which lets face it, would require a fair bit of work.

Season 3 is coming to an end as well, and blizz are pinning hopes the new system in season 4 will stop this. Personally I think it’s going to be as effective as the afk debuff, and that the cheaters / exploiters will still get the stuff, while the people who don’t, are effectively punished.

Tl:dr

lol esport

Sad but true, the system is exploitable for various reason, the main one is that there are simply not enough teams playing at once (at least at 5am in the morning), which makes it easy to set a win-trade. To fix that, Blizzard would have to somehow change the whole queue system, or introduce some tracking system that allows to filter out the win-traders and notify GMs about them for futher investigations. This needs to be fixed, but I don’t really have any idea how, and I guess neither does Blizzard.

Terhix

So, we just got 2k in 5v5 with a new setup - Warrior / Retri palla / BM Hunter / Resto Shammy / Disc Priest - with total 62 games (49 - 13, maybe not the best ratio ever, but nothing to laugh at) and I love it. We struggled with lack of a shammy for over a week, as the guy we played with on the begging started slacking (he have his own team with 2100 rating so it’s not really strange he doesn’t want to play two teams at once), but we got a new guy this week and things worked smooth. After our 2346 broke we played 2 warrior team for few weeks with really different classes, we lacked a holy pala tho (Rayla is busy with sunwell progress), we floated around 1900 but that was it.

I’m looking forward to see how far we can push it with this setup, retri pally gives us the extra dispell and bop/bof that a healing pally would have to provide otherwise, while kicking some serious ass, our resto shammy is the purging machine, we don’t really have any reliable (or repeatable) CC, but the raw power is brutal, in few games when we sat down on a priest, he went down so fast that their pally didn’t manage to drop down the bop (or didn’t notice the priest is dying), that’s how scary it is. What’s interesting - it’s not like we play some unique setup, sure I’m not on US-BG9 or something, but the last few teams we fought against were very similar, like Warrior / Rogue / Enh shammy / Holy pala / Priest - we were just going for each other’s priest and watched which one will be still alive after 10 seconds.

With resilience staying the way it is (we will get 25 with new trinket tho) on S4 sets, while crit and damage goes up, I think we might see much more raw-dps teams to show up, who needs CC or drain when you can drop people in 5 seconds.

On a side note, since I’ve re-specced from 33/28 to 35/23/3, spell reflect is nice and all, but so far I’m noticing that on-demand disarm to win us much more games than SR ever did (or loose games when I didn’t use it and our priest died :<), I’m basically switching to a warrior whenever it’s up and someone is dying, those 5 seconds are often enough for MS debuff to wear off allowing our healers to get those one or two full heals up.

Terhix

The patch notes were updated, two highlights I find interesting:

1. (Hunter) Scare Beast: The range on this spell has been increased to 30 yards and it is now instant cast.
2. (Paladin) Seal of the Crusader: This ability now increases the damage dealt by Crusader Strike by 40%.

Looks like druids are going to get hurt by hunters really badly come 2.4.2, not even talking about ferals. The second change is another attempt (after changing CS to 110% weapon damage, without spell damage shit) to redefine retribution as a pure melee spec, not all pallies are satisfied with it, but even if it doesn’t turn SotC into the pew pew seal, it’s definitely a step in the right direction (and since we have a retri pally in our new 5v5 combo, I hope it works pretty well ;p).

Terhix

Update: Apparently I need more sleep or coffee (or both), since S3 ring already have armor penetration ><. So yeah, it makes Angelista hardly an S4 item, still a decent replacement for S2 ring till the end of S3.

The forums are currently stormed by a bunch of whiners QQing about S4 having high (like 1600 for a chest is high) rating requirements, but that’s not what I’d like to talk about.

Patch 2.4 along with it’s badge rewards introduced one nice item: [Angelista's Revenge]. Some people might compare it to [Veteran's Band of Triumph], I’d rather compare it to [Vindicator's Band of Triumph], as with S4 we will have access to S4+S3 rings. So, let’s look at the stats, the difference between Angelista and Vindicator’s Band are:

- 6 stamina
- 22 resilience
- 0.3% crit (-26 crit rating + 29 agi = 0.88 -1.18%)
+ 14 attack power
+ whooping 126 armor penetration
+ 70 armor penetration

So yeah, the ring is pretty cool, kinda suboptimal for PvP if you consider the lack of resilience, but 126 armor pen is half of the whole S3 set. How much damage is 126 armor pen? Nothing really hard to count, against an enemy with 5k armor:

Armor reduction without reduction: 32.14%
Armor reduction with reduction: 31.58%

DPS increased by 0.82%

Obviously, that % is going up the more armor pen you stack and the less armor the target has (and vice versa), executioner, sunders and armor penetration gear all work perfectly well with each other. Pretty decent ring, I might not want to force myself to do heroics for it, but since we now can get badges from dailies, I’ll probably get it sooner or later.

Update: Just noticed I never linked my Armor Crab Calculator, so there you have it, for all your crabby needs!

Terhix

Yesterday, I managed to grow cotton and to pick, gin and bale it (aka did all daily). After that I was greatly bored. I looked up my friends list and there was this Shammy that asked me to play 2v2 some time ago. Since I had nothing better to do, I decided to try duo with him. Previously I only played with Druids and Paladin.
My guess was that we will get like 1800 and after few lost games we will stop, but hell its better than nothing.
We took some 1820 team and decided we will see how it goes. And than miracles begin.
I cannot stress this enough, how much in shock I was. We steamrolled every single team we came arcoss.
I never thought we can perform that good, offensive playstyle of Shamman perfectly fits my blood thirst. We were able to instagib priests thanks to mass purge, wf, bloodlust and its was a joke how easy that was. We did lose some games against shadow priests, but still we got 2k in now time with 13-4. After that, we gave that team away and decided to start new one to see how much further can we get if we start using ventrilo. We played for another 3h and managed to reach 2022 in 47 games, with one disconnect, we could prolly do it in 45.
I underestimated this setup and never really wanted to try it, but after yesterday I have to say this is by far best setup in 2v2 for warrior like me. Im not much fan of entire “lets outlast them”, i hate to turtle and kite.
Shaman is by far most offensive and one of the toughest healers you can get. He can tank s3 warrior with no mana loss or dish out decent dps with support of purges and wf. If you never concidered playing with shammy because “War/Druid pwns” try it, its really worth it.

Your master, S.

PS.

Ming is a tool.

SandMan