Pandemic Blue entered this weekend's ESL Global Challenge with a simple goal: to win a championship. While the end result may not have been what they had hoped, plenty of signs from the weekend indicate it may happen sooner rather than later.
“I'm definitely happy with the way we played in most of our matches, but annoyed that we were a round away from potentially making the finals, and we won't be satisfied until we win a tourney,” said team captain Nathan “Kintt” Quinn, after the event.
The round he was referring to happened in a nailbiting series with Blizzard's European Champions, the Spanish squad x6tence. Twice Pandemic took them to the final round of a series, and twice Pandemic made the wrong class choices against an x6tence team experienced at playing the swapping game.
Pandemic battled hard at ESL LA.
“It's good to know we are capable of taking them down,” said Quinn, “at the same time it's pretty depressing to see the team you gave the series to, TWICE, win the championship.”
Their second meeting, in the Upper Bracket finals, Pandemic took a 2-0 lead with their strong Rogue, Priest, Druid lineup, but x6tence charged back to win three straight rounds, stealing the win and sending Pandemic plummeting to the lower bracket.
There, they'd face up with an old rival: the Warrior, Warlock, Druid lineup featured by top Europeans Nihilum, a tough match for any team in the current metagame and one that proved too much. Rogue, Priest, Druid has had some success against Nihilum in the past, but Pandemic's couldn't get the luck it needed to keep enough pressure on in the first game, leaving Pandemic to try an unorthodox strategy – the three DPS lineup they introduce last year at WSVG Toronto, Shadow Priest, UA Warlock, Rogue. Without the necessary coordination with those classes, though, Pandemic missed a golden opportunity to kill Paperkat, losing the series in the process.
The one saving grace is that WLD looks like it won't be nearly as strong at the next ESL event in Montreal, most likely after the launch of the upcoming game changing 3.0 patch.
“It's nice we won't face it again,” shrugged Quinn, “We improved a lot at our main lineup of RPD between Germany and LA, so we thought we stood a chance at taking Nihilum down. We really completely changed our strategy, then gave up on the comp after the first round we played. If we had kept Caal Dreamstate and put out more damage things could have possibly been different. Regardless, it's certainly one of the most difficult fights for our team, so I'm glad it will be easier in the future.”
Overall, the team exited Los Angeles with a 2-4 record and a 4th place finish, beating PMS.h20 in group play and dominating SK Gaming 3-0 in an epic relegation match spawning the biggest episode of nerd rage in history by SK's Swarm. While they lost four times, three of them were 3-2 series, one to Evil Geniuses and two to the tournament champions, x6tence, with their one shutout against Warrior, Warlock, Druid.
“Honestly, we were still learning what would work and what wouldn't work for us at this tournament,” explained Quinn, “We still haven't been playing our lineup as long as other teams, so sometimes you think of a strategy that you haven't had the chance to practice much or see how it works any other way then in theory, and it turns out not to work so well. That, and we need to work on our alternate comps more.”
With an encouraging performance by the team lead by Quinn and featuring tournament veterans Brian “Caal” McPharlin and David “Ohnoes” Atz, the trio will look to build on what they've already established with their sites set squarely on one target: ESL Montreal.
“It's hard to have a concrete plan at this point,” said Kintt, “but I'm still feeling okay about RPD in 3.0. Priests and Druids gain a lot of offensive power with the spell change, and I think the Rogue changes will also be to our favor. I don't know how big of an impact the Lifebloom changes will have on our team, but I would like to believe it won't be as bad for us as on single Druid healer teams. We're going to try and play on TR and see how some other comps work too, so we'll have some options going into Montreal. Our biggest hurdle in the new patch will be RMP and x6tence's Ret Paladin team.”
The unpredictability of Montreal could ruin any team's chances, but if anyone has the skill and experience to make the best of the situation, its Pandemic, and they've certainly shown something they can build on leading towards Canada.
