Blizzcon: Day One Retrospective

Forgive me as this will be quite scattered.

Starcraft II

Incredible. It feels EXACTLY like the original SC; videos really don't do the creepy similarity justice. This isn't a bad thing.

Reapers are really the only Terran unit I messed around with beyond the traditional stuff; I played only 4 games and 3 of the 4 were pretty quick. Reapers are a very cool unit. They serve as a punish for poorly protected bases and as a great counterattack unit. Pumping 5 reapers instantly when your Merc station is fully charged is ridiculous.

Dep and Aesthyr played probably 50ish games today. For some reason they were allowed to just play back to back without hopping back in line after a while; I suspect some swallowing was involved. I think they each lost once or twice when split up but never when playing together all day. Zealots are pretty ridiculous and early Terran game is definitely more complex as you can't just pump marines while waiting on your academy and medics due to the need for Vespene. Banshees are apparently pretty ridiculous; I never really got to use mine, but they're the unit of choice for my friends when playing Terran. Maybe I can convince Aesthyr to write something up later this weekend...

Starcraft Tournament

The number of people watching the Yellow vs Iris match was literally 3-4 times the audience watching the WoW events. The crowd involvement? Infinitely more. People screamed and cheered as Yellow micro'd his mutas and cried out at each irradiate. Even when the overall crowd thinned, the Savior vs Iris games were huge crowd favorites. Savior had some ridiculous plays with his lings and lurkers -- the level of play was just disgusting and the crowd loved it. It made me realize that SC is a great spectator game; it makes sense how it became so popular in Korea. I get how people can cheer in huge stadiums to watch this stuff; it's fucking intense. The female announcer described Yellow's micro as "sexy" over and over again AND I think she meant it. I know I'd suck on those pretty, little, yellow fingers.

WoW 5v5 Tournament

I was pretty disappointed with how DQs recked this event; this comes after DQs prohibited me and my team from ever getting a chance to compete and disqualifying all top 5 teams from my battlegroup. Power trip sans priest was destroyed and that alone makes the whole thing feel somewhat empty. MYM was extremely disappointing to watch. The Nashwan wins were not impressive (nothing against Nashwan), but it just didn't seem they had to work hard at all for the wins.

MoB vs SK was even more lopsided. SK had no clue at all how to handle classic+hunter with their 2345 (which isn't that bad at all). Either more actively CC the hunter, which they did not, or more actively make it hard for him to get range. This isn't complicated shit. It wasn't even viper sting + scorpion domination; the hunter just destroyed as he was left to dominate at range for the majority of every match. I'm not trying to be a dick, but implying that MoB has some huge advantage because they use a hunter and everyone is not used to playing against hunters is a joke. Hunters are generally underpowered, hence their scarcity. They can still be effective, but there's no real "advantage" MoB is getting by electing to run a hunter. I couldn't help but feel watching all of the matches that the level of play was significantly below the 2345 team NiP ran last season. (which was still much better than what I've seen as far as 2345 on Stormstrike this season) Yeah We Lift ran a great hunter+classic last season and if you don't understand that a hunter left to rip into a mage is a bad thing, you need to get more practice.

The commentating was atrocious. I really liked the two of them; they were personable. Leeroy and the guy who quit playing WoW at level 45 because he couldn't afford a mount and hate to watch his friends ride around while he walked. It was silly and they were unpretentious about how little they knew. But...you still need someone who does know this shit. In the RTS commentary, the announcers understand very well what is currently happening and even take the next step of explaining what the players are thinking and what they are about to do next. The commentating for Starcraft was outstanding; it was the best I've ever heard for anything like this by far. The WoW was atrocious; it was less awkward during the lulls than the WSVG announcing, but had they found a player who actually played on a top 50 team, he could have called the important shit in game without sounding like a moron and making the whole spectacle look like a joke. I'm sorry, but WoW is never going to be taken seriously as a competitive "eSport" when you call the shaman a mage for 30 seconds, then talk about the opposing mage isn't sheeping enough (there was no opposing mage), talk about the warlock dying (its a mage bro), and not pay enough attention to the actual match to notice that two people have died and you totally missed it.

I'm really psyched to see the latter part of the tournament just to hear sweet Godfather talk some more. God he's a sexy sexy man.

CGS Event

I have to say that this has sucked hard. It could have been cool. But, well, it isn't. It's in the far back corner of everything where there's no seating at all, and only 4 small screens to watch. The area runs into the main tournament area which again limits how well you can see the action as there just isn't enough floor real estate to watch the action close enough to see what's going on. Obnoxious and pretentious CGS reps make the thing even lamer.

I watched a lot of matches. People don't like it very much it seems. Everyone there complained how 2s were such a joke, how warlocks were retarded etc. When I came over to watch Ghwrin play (he ended up losing), his warlock/pally vs warlock/pally mirror matches were each 20 minutes long. It was horrific to watch. Everyone complained how boring it was, how the players sucked, how they could play better etc. This is all bullshit; I have huge respect for Ghwrin as a player, but people can't really appreciate 20 minutes of drain spamming and hopping around pillars. I'm pretty hardcore and I wanted to kill myself watching those fights. LoS on drains or a cooldown on drains please.

I have a lot of issues with how the CGS 2s thing is run, but I'm still glad it exists. I'll definitely try to watch the finals tomorrow and will give respect and love to whoever manages to triumph. It really isn't going to be THE format for competitive WoW though.

Wrath of the Lich King

I was pretty psyched to be in the first group to play the new expansion; I stood in line for a LONG time and well, it wasn't worth the wait. There was hardly anything at all to see and the time constraint for playing pretty much let you rebind your abilities and kill a few mobs before being forced to get up for the next batch to play. I won't repost what you can find elsewhere, but:

• Four ranks of Arcane Blast
• New Molten Armor
• New ranks of everything else as expected
• New ranks of nukes @ level 70
• Fear Ward getting spread around

Class Changes and Expansion Thoughts

Hunter arena buffs were mentioned. Retribution pallies will be getting only a PvE damage buff, so don't expect Ret pallies to be tearing up arenas soon. Warlocks are "intended" to be the best dueling class. I'll also note that no class during the panel incurred any crowd reaction except warlocks. I'm not saying the mobs of haters are right, but warlock hate is special, its not the same class rivalry that other classes share. Warriors were introduced as "best for last" and mages were described as "Mage is the class we try to break the mold with-- the class we try to do new things with."

The individual class improvement and analysis by the lead developers was mostly nonsense; I'm never going to agree that 1v1 balance doesn't matter. I'm sorry but how can you say 1v1 is unimportant than partner with CGS to offer huge prizes to 2v2 arena when in beta you said you wouldn't reward 2v2 arena because you thought 1v1 balance would spill over and make 2v2 impossible to balance? WELL IT CLEARLY DOES BECAUSE YOUR BEST DUELING CLASS IS UBIQUITOUS IN CGS. THANK YOU. I actually don't really mind, if you want a CGS contract, you just roll a lock or play pally/warrior if it really means a ton to you. It just seems a tad hypocritical to ignore 1v1 balance when it really is not THAT hard to achieve.

I spent a lot of time theorycrafting and thinking about what the expansion does for the mage class. Let me first lay out a few separate thoughts:

• Water Elemental is a significant problem for the class. It is too strong relative to other builds currently. There is no way that a 51 point talent could better than IceBlock + WE. I know people said this sort of stuff before, but the 51 point talent would have to be disgustingly overpowered. Frost is also the tree that has the most compounding in how talents work with each other and is intuitively the tree where dumping those 51+ points makes the most sense.
  
• Spellsteal and Invisibility are still generally useless. However, spellsteal may grow much better as classes gain new potentially powerful abilities we can steal.
  
• Deathknight is effectively a melee class and we are the best class (well maybe hunter) at dealing with melee so this is an indirect relative buff.
• Some of our abilities scale much better with new rank than with gear. This is probably more true for mages than most other classes. (Since we have lots of AE instants)

It'll be very interesting to see more expansion info, particularly talents. While most classes are talking about overpowered 41+/21 type or 31+/31 builds, mages are naively one of the classes best suited to the the 51 point commitments. Now, should I be leveling that gnome finally? Or are really going to see WoTF + Fear Ward next year?

A lot of this was covered in my throughout the day updates, but hopefully the above is less schizophrenic and actually makes sense. (And it includes way less whining about me being lonely while my friends play SC2...though it does lack me making fun of melvins)