You walk into a bar and see 2 locks and a druid...

Yep, you guessed it! More 3v3 with my lock buddies last night. I find playing with these guys pretty refreshing. We began the evening talking to each other about our failures on Tuesday night while gather soul shards in Terrorkar. Those poor moths, spiders, and wolves were just victims of the 3 of us bashing our heads together discussing strategies. After Regolas and Fontam gathered their shards up we headed back into town to queue up for a little retribution in arenas. Our goal tonight basically is to survive longer in the matches than we did Tuesday. To do this we thought was to tax their healer's mana pool before CCing him and limiting the raping of the melee DPS.

To tax the healer's mana pool, we decided to give the other 2 targets as many curses as we could instead of just one. This will start forcing the healer to heal 2 targets and keeping him from his alternate duties (like priest mana burns, druid CC measures, and paladin stuns). So hop out, DOT, DOT and hide. DOT, DOT, and hide. I call it the "Chuck and Duck". After we get a few dots on the two other targets, then I jump in with a cycle of cyclones and those are followed up with one of the locks using a fear cycle. Hopefully, we can preoccupy the healer with alot of healing to start burning his mana pool or quitely take down a target with dots before the priest realizes that his buddy is essentially a walking corpse.

To limit the melee we decided to have the locks control the melee with multiple curses. The warrior or melee DPS would get a Curse of Exhaustion and a Curse of Weakness as well as 2 helpings of Corruption. Now those 2 curses dont do alot to kill him, but they limit his mobility and his DPS. Usually, I am called upon to CC melee, but we wanted to try this situation out. Now if there's a druid on the other team decursing and such, then I have to step in and CC a melee target.

So here's a list of our wins (the numbers indicate in which order they died):
Priest(1)/Lock(2)/Hunter(3)
Warrior(1)/Shaman(2)/Hunter(3)
Pally(1)/Shadow Priest(2)/Moonkin(3)
Lock(1)/Druid(2)/Rogue(3)
Hunter(1)/Rogue(2)/Priest(3)
Hunter(1)/Mage(2)/Pally(3)

So as you can tell, no one melee was killed first last night. But in these matches I had a hand in CCing at least one target. My take is that Regolas was chain fearing one target, I was CCing another, and Font was nuking the tar out of another.

Now look at our losses:
Lock/Lock/Shaman (elemental)
Druid/Warrior/Priest
Rogue/Mage/Priest
Rogue/Mage/Priest
In each of these cases I was controlled and never had a chance to appply any CC. So there you have it. Now if you look closely, 2 of our losses were to the classic RMP. I told the guys that we better get used to that makeup, because it's not going away. One last thing, we never ran into the 2 melee/healer team. Maybe they all live in higher brackets?

In walks 2 locks and a druid

Tuesday night I jumped into a 3v3 team with a couple of friends of mine, Regolas and Fontam. Regolas is sporting a SL/SL build and Font is a Demo (Felguard) spec. I've played 5v5 in the past with Regolas and I kinda know how he plays. But I've never done nothing more than battlegrounds with Fontam. But when you get those 2 guys together in arenas, it's really a fun time and they crack me up. But anyway, onto the arena stuff. So we all jump right into a rated match and get smoked by a warrior/mage/druid team. The next game wasn't much better and I dont think it was until our 5th game that we won one. We ended the night at 4-9. I'm pretty sure that I contributed ALOT on killing the team's rating from 1574 to 1486. It was a rough round, but the first night with a new team always is. It's been noted on several arena sites that jumping into a new team is always the largest obstacle to overcome. But these guys are patient and I think we can work things out.

What I did notice that night was that if there was a melee opponent, it should be upon me to be CCing him (which I was doing), while our highest DPS lock starts working on the focus target and the other tries to lock down their healer (which they were doing). But looking at back at it, maybe both locks should get 2 sets of DoTs on the Focuse target and then try going back to fear bombing the healer. This way, the DoTs start working on the FF target while the healer is running madly in circles. Just a thought.

Back to the warrior/mage/druid team. This is starting to seem like a good makeup with a nice melee DPS class, a range and CC class, and a healing and CC class. Granted the warrior could get rooted, but the mage can sheep/DPS a targets as well. Leaving a very mobile healer and range classe out there to work against you. Still not a great team makeup, but it was working Tuesday night.

Well, hold on to your hats and we'll see what happens tonight when I go back for round 2.

Busy Memorial Day Weekend

I took an unusual break from the game over the long weekend. I messed around with an alt, but other than it wasn't until Monday that I did anything significant with Bacon. Sometimes it worth more to spend sometime wrestling with the little boy than grind through some virtual faction in the game.

So Monday I got on with all the intentions of doing some dailies, but I got hung up trying to do a daily AV quest that I have had for a couple of days. For some reason, AV can be a lost cause. I ran AV 5 times and ended up with 5 badges. I wasn't in ONE winning match. Ah the agony. But shortly after I got out of my last AV, I got a whisper from Sweatyz to go with him on a PUG run to Kara. The pug run was pretty fun. All 3 healers were from Heroes Inc (Sweatyz, Tylrian, and myself). We ran it to Curator before the raid dissolved due to people needing to go on guild events.

Once I got out, Beilin had a PVP premade going from Heroes Inc. And I wasted no time in joining those guys. We ran an AB and a few EoTS. We owned every match we were in and never let the horde down off the cliff in EoTS. I should have felt sorry for the horde, but then I remembered their AV wins and my sympathy quickly faded. Matter of fact, at one point I dismounted and feral charged a rogue while he sat on his mount, just to release some pent up anger from those AV losses.

After picking up some more EoTS marks (damn I'm back up to 90 again), Beilin and I hopped over to the Arena Master to start working on our 2v2 team. Once again I started out slowly and then quickly warmed up. We beat some easy hunter/healer teams mostly due to the hunters running with the wrong pet (i.e. if you dont know, then I'm not telling ya) or the team using the wrong healer (NOTE: if your a hunter in 2v2, find yourself a resto druid or disc priest). However, our team, More Homework Please - MHP, got dessimated by a 2 mage team that POM Pyroed me in 5 secs. Beilin started out on the visible one, since the two of us thought the other player was a rogue. But once I popped out to heal Beilin, WHAMMO. No amount of travel form was going to get me away. 11K hitpoints were chewed up in no time by those mages. Looking back, we should have take the fight to one of the Nagrand arena poles. We also had issues with the hunter/druid teams this week. Apparently all the ones we ran into had some smart players and left very few mistakes for us to capitalize on. One last team that really impressed the crap out of me was a rogue/priest team. Beilin opened up on the priest waiting for the rogue to pop. Unfortunately, I had to pop out first by casting abolish poison and hots on myself to heal up Beilin (it's always wise for the druid to proactively cast spells on himself before casting heals on the warrior). By the time I got 2 HOTs on Beilin, the rogue was on me. I patiently waited for the kidney shot and used my trinket only to get blinded (this is where I should have had Beilin intervened on me to take the blind). And just about the time that was up, he sapped me. At this point and time, Beilin was at 25% and the priest then feared me. It was a futile attempt for me since my trinket is my only form of CC. And for some reason I had some difficulties with warriors this week. I need to duel some warriors because I HAVE to get better at surviving against those guys.

Micro Guilds and WoTLK

A new topic being kicked around with the expansion coming out later this year, is that raid instances will have the option for people to run it with a 10 man raid group or a 25 man raid group. The big difference isn't just the raid size, but 25 man raids will have better epics dropped in them than the 10 man versions. Personally I think this is a good thing. I like the smaller raid size and the opportunity to be more an "impact" player in the raid instead of sitting in the rear with 7-8 other healers assisting on 2 or 3 tanks. In my opinion the 10 man raids and their boss fights seem more intense and everything hinges on precise pulls, crowd control measures and healing assignments. Healers need to be on top of the game with regards to mana management and being more proactive with their heals. If your raid has a healer go down, then one of your two remaining healers has to pickup the dead healer's target or scream for a battle rez. And if the poor schlep that died gets a battle rez, then he's already behind the curve on the mana management game. It's intense and alot more fun than 25 man raids. But that's another topic for later on. What I really want to talk about is how this change will affect guilds.

By allowing this change in raid sizes, alot of micro guilds will be formed containing around 10-20 people (probably less than 20). This will fracture alot of current guilds and if you are in a guild like I am, it's already apparent that this may happen. We have a set core of people who like to see new content and raid 3 or more nights a week. I like new content and I could do probably 3 nights a week. But I exist somewhere in the middle of my current guild. I have friends on the raiding front and then I have friends (mostly real life people) that I like to do things with. And it's this later group of people I doubt will be invited to this new guild. So I'm stuck. I'd like to do a little more on the PVE end (especially in a smaller format), but I dont want to leave my RL friends behind. So that means that I need to start investigating other options. Should I start building a 10 man raiding group and lead a ZA or Kara run a couple of nights a week to maybe solidfy a "core" group for a new micro guild? Or maybe I should start looking for another group of people to do some raiding with? Or do I continue to try and plow on doing what we are doing? Well, whatever happens, I want to be able to continue to see new content with my friends and not left behind. And for that to happen I have to keep all my options open. And if it comes down to making a guild to do this, well then it has to happen.

New drippings

Well, I took a sabatical there for awhile from discussing my adventures in WOW. But I am back and ready for some new opportunities. I'll still continue to post things about my raids and adventures as well as PVP strats. But I'm going to start including some discussions about the WoTLK expansion due out later this year. So, sit back and enjoy my ramblings. And if you have a cold beer, feel free to crack that baby open. There's no ID checking here. :)