Patch Day

Here's hoping that the gear-swapping nerf is going through tomorrow...

I had the great pleasure of being unable to meet a client's needs for the first time tonight, falling short of a 2,000 rated 2v2 by several games before hitting the game cap.

While I could blame it on Monday queue times, or rotten luck, I'm going to suck it up, and blame it on teams running 400+ Shadow resist gear from Black Temple.

Shadow resist gear has cost me 100+ rating in a day before, but this is the first time it screwed over a client, and I gotta tell you, it feels way worse.

Here's hoping gear-swapping will out-nerf the resilience buff vs. DoTs. Warlocks are finally getting the nerf-bat, and aside from the mace spec nerf destroying all the skilled warriors out there, this patch shouldn't affect the business, my 2v2, or any of my serious teams too negatively.

2v2 news: Busy week (sold 26 teams, most being 2v2's) with a stretch of a couple days (roughly 350 matches) undeafeated. Now if we can just figure out how to improve our average against dwarf rogue/dwarf priest. When we get our strat down, it's a 90% win rate (see: warrior/druid, warlock/druid), but the priest/dwarf rogue strat has been slow coming. Hopefully, Eternia will figure something out. Shadow resist ate us alive monday night, so cross your fingers that the patch is our answer to finally cracking 2300. Tired of floating between 2100 and 2200 gaining 4 points from victories, and losing 20 points from losses just because they happen to own high end BT epics with 70+ shadow resist per piece.

3v3 news: Tons of 3v3's sold this week, and I know my teammates had as much of a blast as I did. Kicked it old school with some Rogue/Lock/Priest, and got to try out a promising new matrix too. The Druid/Rogue/Lock matrix seems to be coming together nicely, and once Vlak and I get on the same page for a decent CC rotation, we should be able to play that matrix a couple different ways. With Chans, it was Execute or Fail, trading our priest for their healer, and utilizing Improved Death to cinch up our natural rogue/lock 2v2 advantage. Swapping in a druid for the priest gives us the option to play a more graded execute with healer CC (in liu of pure damage), outlast, play a mana fight, and most importantly, being able to fluidly transition between the two strats seamlessly. Oh, and a fond farewell to all those Warrior/Paladin/Shaman teams out there. Your nerfs were a long time coming, but, grats. Well deserved.

5v5 still looks bleak. Short of a server transfer, it looks like we're going to have to farm raise a Shadow priest to run our 4dps FoTM team, and although I'd love to try some 2345, or otherwise, our class balance just doesn't allow for it. That and Silver Hand doesn't have any Elemental Shaman geared enough at the skill level we require to make those teams work. In our scrub 5v5, we're still floating mid 1800's, which is awesome for Silver Hand, but the matrix is terrible, nigh unsensical. Ideally, we'd field Rogue/Lock/Spriest/Mage/ Paladin, but with the respec's it would take to seriously buckle down, and the lackluster 5v5 landscape currently in mid-bracket (sub 2000) 5v5, the risk-reward just doesn't seem too compelling. It's also a little disturbing that our ragtag Rogue/Lock/Holy Priest/Mage/ Paladin team has climbed so far in the brackets playing only 7 games a week. Using 4dps class balance while in reality running 2 healers is a disaster anywhere but BG9 Mid-bracket, apparently.

Anyway, the business has banked over 30k gold over the last 2 weeks, so I think we're going to take it easy for a while. We got a bunch of repeat buyers, and time slots are just running out, so we might just sell off some inventoried teams, and stop offering pre-mades altogether. Might give it another week though, so if you're thinking about getting a pre-made 2v2 for points, I'd recommend hooking up with me sooner rather than later.