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In Blizzcast Episode 3 Jeff Kaplan is discussing dungeons and raids in WotLK, what got my attention however is this quote:

Bornakk: Will gear sets differ in look or bonuses between the two dungeon versions?
Jeff Kaplan: The art will probably look a little bit different between the two dungeon sets, meaning the 10 and the 25 person version. It might be things like a different color version of the same armor or the higher level, the 25 person content, might have more particle effects, so something along those lines. Something that I am excited to talk about is that the PvP armor will be different from the PvE armor entirely in looks and colors this time.

Good news, assuming the PvP sets are not going to be Sunwell “quality” and they actually make distinct sets for each class, not type of armor. I so hated horde warriors back in the day since they had their own set of armor (and it was awesome one), while I had to wear paladin “golden boy” stuff on my human warrior. That was one of the reasons why I rerolled Orc before TBC - those shoulders were just awesome, and we all know that in the end it’s all about the looks :P.

Terhix

There is an uproar about people getting banned for 72h with all their arena points and all S3 gear being removed. All I can tell is:

FINALLY!

However, there are stories flowing around forums with people claiming they got banned when they did not win trade, I was sceptic about that at first, but in one long topic on Arena Junkies, one guy pasted an email from Blizzard:

Hello, XXXXXX.

I wanted to give a quick followup on the situation. It seems as if the actions made on your account were in error. We do apologize for this situation, as our intention is to clean up the rampant win trading going on, we did encounter a few mistakes along the way. Unfortunately your team was filtered through association, and was tracked and actioned due to an error in judgement. I apologize for that.

The items removed from your character have been restored and should be in your mailbox. Your points should also be returned as well.

Reply to this email if you have any other questions. I realize you will probably question the status of your friends, but I will take care of them.

Regards,
Vlaynoss
Senior Account Administrator
Blizzard Entertainment
www.worldofwarcraft.com

And to back this up, screen shots:

Time to get paranoid?

Terhix

 
Nuff said.

Terhix

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