Blizzcon: Day Two Retrospective

While day one was mostly about trying to mess around with WLK and SC2, day two of Blizzcon was all about the tournaments. I'll begin with them very briefly:

CGS

I watched NothingSpecial, RapidFlame, and SpanishMafia. Nothing special played rogue/priest and then a surprise respec into rogue/shadowpriest in the finals. They dominated Rapidflame's warrior/druid and SpanishMafia's lock/druid couldn't match Rapidflame's lock/priest. I was somewhat confused with the choice to run druid/war against priest/rogue instead of a druid/lock but I guess it isn't a bad option. The druid play in all of the matches was pretty disappointing to me; they were not able to cyclone effectively at all nor were they able to play effective keep away.

In the US matches, DnT's warrior/priest ousted Dhaoss and Scheme's lock/pally who ripped CTs' lock/pally. The lock/pally matches were great surprisingly; I was extremely impressed with Dhaoss and Scheme who really outplayed CTs dramatically. DnT still won with relative comfort in the finals; warrior/priest is pretty fantastic against lock/pally.

The CGS matches were again terribly run and full of technical issues. Many matches had to be restarted due to disconnects or players lagging out. They also would put stealth classes up on the screens which could be seen with ease by all the players which is pretty retarded. The finals drew a moderate sized crowd, maybe 200ish people; the format could definitely be pretty popular actually if CGS ran the event better.

Starcraft

This was the event at Blizzcon. The semis and finals were three to four times as packed as the other events. Dep, Aesthyr, and I screamed like idiots for a lot of the matches and I'm not even sure we were the loudest people there. People were REALLY into it. The announcing was again incredible; the commentary is so important for gaming as you really need to play up the skill and the Jason Lee sounding dude was awesome.

I was routing hardcore for Iris but Nal_rA proved too sneaky. He had some ridiculously baller fake-outs. His spider mine targeting with his goons was out of control. Iris had a few moves that got the audience screaming: one was where he floated his barracks and hid mines under it so that the goon rush even backed with observer didn't see them which decimated the goons. The second was where he pulled a goon into a mine inside of Nal_rA's probes which splashed at least a half dozen probes. The use of vultures throughout was amazing, but Nal_rA's reaver/dropship control was too much. I've never seen anything like that before. o.O

The finals weren't quite as exciting as Nal_rA's aggressive fancy play was severely punished by Savior's dominating macro. The first finals round had literally a 10 minute battle in the center which showcased almost every zerg unit in the game; ultimately plague and swarm broke the toss lines and Nal_rA was overrun. Until that fight Nal_rA dominated the game. The games were still amazing to watch. ^^

WoW

I had a lot more fun watching the WoW tournament than I thought I would have. The Hukhukhuk's were fantastic to watch and were definitely the crowd favorite along with MoB.

In the first match, HHH had a pretty hard fought win over Tenacity as the feral druid gave them huge problems in the first round. After switching to putting more pressure on the druid, they were able to play their normal outlast and CC game although my intuition would have been to put more pressure on the mage. /shrug

HHH next went up against Nashwan which is true 2345, and while the games were close they committed hard to getting early kills on Nashwan's priest and it cost them every game. It really didn't make sense to play such an aggressive game to me considering they are much better suited to outlasting. It should be noted that the Nashwan priest survived miraculously over and over and over.

MoB crushed Nashwan with little difficulty. While Nashwan worked hard to focus MoB's hunter, he was able to stay free well enough to put huge pressure on Dahl, Nashwan's mage which reduced the amount of CC he could put out and opened up their own warrior to put even further pressure on Dahl. The games were fun to watch and the crowd got pretty into them at the end. (though the crowd was probably 1/10th the size of the SC crowd) Nashwan needed to play more defensively; the shaman needed to assist the mage more and lightning bolt spam less. He just bolted himself OOM every game it seemed.

The commentary was once again atrocious and made the whole thing ten times worse. I was still pretty jealous of the teams who got to compete though and the whole thing definitely made me miss arena-ing a lot.

Panels

I crashed the Professions and Items panel as well as the end of the Class Discussion take two. Most of the interesting parts of the panels are on the web, the only thing you probably can't get from the slides you see online is little things like when one of the devs is talkign about increasing stamina and says "What makes PvP not fun" rhetorically with the intent of talking about getting 2-shot, but instead the audience screams warlocks and continues to scream about warlocks for a good few seconds. You sort of had to be there for that I think. ^^ He also mentioned at one point that he rerolled hunter briefly and "wanted to kill himself." Inevitable WoW forum drama.

As for class changes, the enhancement shaman changes are interesting, I don't really know what will be the end result. There really weren't any other significant changes; mages will get soulwell type things for food and water, which is nice I guess. There was a mention of an inevitable warrior rage nerf in yesterday's class discussion which I haven't heard much talk about since.

Inscription sounds to me like it won't be a PvP profession; we'll just get our shit from suck PvErs who have time to skill up that nonsense. Engineering will get new ranks of the goggles which is hot, and enchanting may go back to being able to craft wands, potentially very good ones. (THESE ARE MY PROFESSIONS SO I TUNED OUT TO THE REST SO EAT IT) The jewelcrafting gems are old news; for PvP, the new JC only gems seem about even with the extra 24 spell damage to rings.

Random Thoughts

I'm wondering if the fact that a hunter team won Blizzcon is actually going to be detrimental to the class, does the class really need help if it still was a part of the "best team" in the world? Yeah, I don't believe this bullshit logic but some will.

Why are 2v2 matches still longer than 5v5 matches even when the 5v5 teams are super survivability stacked?

Will 4DPS be allowed to remain viable considering that Blizzard wants to put on a good show and longer matches are generally going to be more entertaining to watch? It felt like Tom Chilton really believed that the games should last a while while he was commentating. Then again, he also mentioned how DoT times are the "counter" to warrior/windfury teams.

Chilton also said that he felt rogues were quite good in 2v2 and 3v3 arenas and that resilience was not the "problem" rogues face in 5s. He spoke of 2s and 3s in another instance I can't quite remember; I was under the impression that 5s were all that mattered as far as balance goes, will this perhaps change? He made it sound as if some classes were just meant to be better in smaller arenas while others better in the larger arenas, is this really legit?

It's been a long day; I'll probably have more to say after everything sinks in and I can talk over what's been said at Blizzcon. Blizzcon was definitely a good thing for WoW arena; most of the new developments seem to be significant improvements, the expansion ideas all sound like they will improve gameplay, the tournament despite it all was entertaining and people seem to care, but at the same time Blizzcon 5s arena felt a bit stale and not representative of the current state of the game. We'll see what the rest of S2 brings. ^^