Wrapping Up Season 1

It looks like Blizz will keep its word, and barring some unforeseen delays, season one wraps up next Tuesday. One last week to scramble for those top spots: it's going to be definite chaos on some battlegroups. (LIKE OURS!!)

I'm not going to get into a dreary, emo, self-deprecating, reflective "how the season went" thing, don't worry...YET. I will say that I'm pretty happy with the game overall -- dueling on test was a blast, I'm really feeling Game Over's current lineup, and I'm proud of the FH's overall success in arena this season. With SC2 beta on the horizon, I'm sure a lot of the players who are serious into PvP are looking to jump ship to a game where competitive high level plays comes more naturally, and I'm certainly of that mindset myself a bit, but I'm genuinely psyched for Season 2 to get going and to play against our Stormstrike rivals seriously once again.

Oh and in case if you haven't noticed, this is a LOT more "my PvP diary" than my normal content, so you can either skip the rest or keep reading, but I promise you'll find no "real" content.

We didn't get a chance to play too many games on Tuesday. Tuesday is generally the most active day for playing, so it was a bit surprising to not run into any of the top few teams, but I'm sure this weekend we'll all be clashing. We instead played against one of our rival FH teams a few times; its a matchup that we dominate I think, but a DC loss and a pretty big spread in ratings lead the games to being only slightly better than a wash. This is where I complain about how I've played in 30+ 4v5 games all season and only in one 5v4, but that would be REALLY whiny and I'd never do that. We played a half dozen 0-rating games before competition totally dried up and we had to call it a night; it's really unfortunate that, due to various RL conflicts, we really can't play much this week at all (MY FAULT) and we're pretty dependent on the top few teams playing this weekend if we want to catch up, hopefully they'll give us a chance.

As it currently stands, I feel that we're the favorites to win any matchup, though DeadMatch, NiP, and Yeah We Lift I'm sure disagree. ^^ My point isn't to be an arrogant prick, but just that the 4DPS matrix feels really solid. It really is more fun to play for me as well; you really are actively controlling the match instead of just poly juggling, bursting a bit, and waiting on your priest to manaburn the opposition to grind out the victory. 4DPS feels very strong against the classic matrix, feels lacking against tri-healer, and feels generally so-so against the 2.5 healers a teams; I don't think you really pick up a matchup advantage by going 4DPS as opposed to other matrices, but you do gain versatility in how you play some of the fights. I'm interested to see how the PvP Trinket Change affects gameplay, I hate to generalize and theorycraft, so I'll just leave it with that we aren't super dependent on regular CC, so the change probably doesn't hurt the matrix much at all.

As for non-Game Over, but overall FH PvP, I'm very proud of the guild's teams. It looks like we'll have 5 teams in the top 10, and all of these teams I believe return next season, though with some roster modifications. Also on the horizon for next season is a new team built from new FH members formerly of Surge (a rival/friend guild of ours from back on BB) and yet another team that will certainly turn heads, but I'll keep quiet about. Seven teams all with the potential to be serious contenders? Hell yeah ^^

Though some of the best players in the battlegroup have left the game, Makoplux ::cough::, their teams for the most part remain and I have little doubt that Stormstrike will see NiP, Yeah We Lift, and perhaps a new Shining Force team tearing it up next season. As a battlegroup with a ton of pride that was utterly decimated by disqualifications for the Blizzard tournament, it's tough to really say much about how we compare skill-wise to the other battlegroups, and I hate to make silly, cocky baseless statements, but I actually love to make said statements and WE'RE THE BEST BATTLEGROUP IN WOW. Perhaps not, but if Blizzard can avoid totally screwing up the end of season playoffs next season, hopefully we'll at least prove we're competitive with BG9 and BG6.

This is about the time where the serious players are finishing off farming their honor for next season's PvP gear, and at any given time, I see at least a few guildmates doing just that. I personally am a combination of too cynical and too lazy to really get going on the honor grinding until I actually see the new gear, which I guess I can now so I really have no excuses...except for the lazyness. I actually don't abhor the idea as it'll be the first time I've stepped foot in a battleground in months, which honestly is something I used to love. My reservations are of course: Should I really be wearing gear so focused on survivability as a WE mage on a 4DPS team? I mean I NEVER get attacked; most teams just CC and lightly harass to try to reduce my damage output, but I'm certainly the less squishy of the various options. I'm already running around with 10k+ unbuffed HP and 320+ resilience, should I be focusing on other gear instead? In the end, I'll probably stick with the PvP gear as I don't really know what else I'd use as I don't raid or PvE at all. But it does seem that those mages who are truly hardcore enough to do it all that they'd probably get more mileage out of PvE gear playing the role I'm playing in arena. It's not even like you sacrifice stamina in PvE gear anymore, you just trade resilience for DPS, a worthy trade IMO.

I think this wall of text has gone on long enough, and though I have a few more things to rant about, I'll save them for another day. Enjoy the last of season 1 and don't suck.

My UI

Not that I love this UI a ton, nor am I sure that these are exactly the files you need, but...

http://files.filefront.com/Raddy_UIzip/;7680805;/fileinfo.html

I don't exactly know how to test this to see if it will work for you, but you can at least see what I use. Also, note that a lot of the mods have newer versions at this point, but I usually don't update versions until I have good reason.