2500 Rating at Last – What I’ve Learned
by Noktyn
It’s been a long road for our arena team, but we’ve finally reached 2500. The
beginning of the week was looking a little rough for us following a couple of
fluke games, but after our corrections we felt confident enough to keep pushing
until we had achieved 2500 rating. The highlight of the week would probably have
to be our match with one of Nurfed’s teams, the DOTA Quitters. Our paladin was
disconnected at the beginning of the game, but we still managed to pull a win out
4v5. This was made possible by a lucky sap we got off on their shaman and some
quick burst damage we accumulated on their hunter. We were grateful to be so
lucky, as a loss to that team would have been a huge rating hit.
Personally, I’m happy to see that Nurfed is running teams on a regular basis
now. We need more teams at their skill-level queuing up on a daily basis to
promote a heightened level of competition on Bloodlust -- not that it isn’t very
high already. Moving on, I would like to mention our games versus ZERG IT DOWN
(now Check-Six) and how they went. On Wednesday night we managed to get them a total of about
eleven games and despite their opening the night on a really good note. They
started off by beating us and snagging a decent amount of points from us, but
after reviewing and changing our strategy, we were able to pull out ten more
wins -- snagging near 100 rating off their team and putting us into the early
2500s, 2522 to be exact.
Enough about the games though… I want to talk about class compositions and how
much it really bugs me that rogues just don’t fit into groups as well as a lot
of other classes. I’m going to use our roster’s rogue as an example – Nitrana.
Nitrana has played a rogue since he started WoW, always learning everything he
can about the class, doing whatever it takes to win in PvP, using any cooldown,
item, skill or anything that will give him an edge. The guy is amazing and I’m
glad he is a part of our roster, however this is WoW’s major flaw: versus a lot
of higher tier groups he simply isn’t worth running just because of his class.
As I’m sure some people have noticed, when Reznap is in our group we have a lot
more success and I’m just going to say it now, as our team’s leader, that it has
nothing to do with a skill difference—it’s simply a class difference. Hunters
get two health increase talents, entrapment, mana drain, two ranged interrupts
(one of them doubling as a “peel” ability), and awesome damage from range. When
Reznap gets assisted on he can just run and kite the damage, assuming it’s
melee, and still do his job – something rogues cannot do in a group and because
of this they are a gigantic mana drain on healers because they wear leather
whereas hunters wear mail. Now, you would assume Nitrana would be better versus
caster damage correct? Wrong. Let’s take a team like ZERG IT DOWN for example
that are very coordinated casters
A typical fight versus ZERG IT DOWN with Nitrana in the group starts off with us
splitting damage up on the mage and warlock and we start keeping them locked
down very well – our double healing debuffs doing a number on their healer’s
mana. They won’t try to nuke me down because of spell reflection and intervene,
and you would think that they wouldn’t nuke Nitrana down because of Cloak of
Shadows, right? All ZERG IT DOWN does is Deathcoil him then frontload, making
the rogue unable to use his biggest survival ability versus that group, Cloak of
Shadows. Now you could make the argument that the same thing could happen to
Reznap, but that’s not true at all. The health difference between Nitrana and
Reznap is very significant – a whopping 2k+ difference in HP, which is massive.
Reznap can literally tank the frontload and we win shortly after almost every
time.
My suggestion to Blizzard to fix rogues in 5v5s is a very simple solution.
First, they would have to make Cloak of Shadows be able to break any spell, even
Deathcoil, as well as keep the 90% resist to spells for five seconds as normal.
Secondly, they need to gives rogues a buff that works like enrage where if you
attack them there is a downside to it, or if they feel that damage is too high
in the game already they can give them a blessed resilience type ability.
Basically, there needs to be a bonus the rogue gets to being assisted on because
right now they are one of the easiest classes to kill in 5v5s and there is
absolutely no drawback whatsoever for assisting on them. This needs to change.
Overall, I’m happy with the arena so far, but a few minor tweaks could make it
even more amazing.
Stay tuned next week for another Tales From the Arena series from a different
member of Team Pandemic World of Warcraft.
