POAST

Been a while since the last post for a good reason. Not much is changing in my personal arena spheres, and I'm not going to regale you with tales of leveling Grimtock as its relevance to anything other than APV expanding it's empire to hordeside SH is quite low.

Azchire is working out surprisingly well, and really showing us what a druid can do. While I'd prefer him to play much more conservatively, his aggressive 'CC first, ask questions laster' style helped us climb past a couple of tough double Physical DPS teams (our theorycrafted bane) to a near spotless first week of arena play (32-1 2,000+, but who's counting). Nerf druid CC-lock.

Instead of playing Outlast with a heavy mana focus, nearly all of our wins came by way of early and mid-match execute opportunities, as Azchire's pounce -> maim -> charge -> bash -> cyclone x3 effectively turned all our matches into 2v2's, and let Eternia and myself put our experience in that realm to good use. While I don't know if Gladiator 3's is realistic with such a fresh team, 3v3 is once again the most fun arena for us, no doubt a function of an overpowered class combination. (See? I don't have to say 'matrix.' I have a thesaurus too...)

For some reason, we didn't get the urge to play much 2's this week, and although we have ceased selling 2v2 and 3v3 teams for this season, we played 1 win on tuesday, and called it a week. We're floating 2080 right now, and a single good day could push us into Gladiator range. With my ISP flaking lately, I'm a little hesitant to put such a vulnerable team on the line for extended periods of time, but we'll definately play a couple games this week at the least, in hopes of cracking 2,200 once again.

After embarassing ourselves in 5v5 (we really don't know what the hell we're doing out there), it looks like Eternia's going to finish gearing up his warrior via a couple point-selling 5v5's we have going, and run a modified 2345 next season. (We're currently running a non-matrix of Rogue/Hpriest/Mage/Warlock/Paladin, and floating 1850 is usually a good week.) Our previous idea of running 4dps requires a great shadow priest, clutch shaman, and a moderate amount of coordination. While Chans has been diligently gearing up a shadow set, we will likey be without a sturdy shaman for the first couple weeks as we gear up Valk. Add to these elements that none of us have either the experience or inclination to make a pro 5v5, and all the signs point to just going with the scrub express 2345 variant. Our endless pursuit of the perfect 3v3 and finesse 2v2 makes the idea of a brute force, unthinking 5v5 a nice refreshment to the pressure of the other brackets.

We'll probably end up running Warrior/Paladin/Shaman/Hpriest/ Warlock. I know, I know, we should be using a mage, but we're already using two alts, and I feel like a s3 lock is a close enough substitute in 2345 to avoid leveling up a mage. If we were running something really CS intensive, by all means, I'd use the mage, but outside of Sren's mage alt, there's just no ideal frost mages on the server that would be able to compete at the level we require of our teammates, gear aside.

It's a sad, sad world where the APV is more concerned with Zul'Aman than anything PvP related, but after pugging the first couple bosses on PTR, I'm genuinely excited to be getting back into raiding. I've been poaching several of Unos' best raiders to create a mini pve faction (NOT A RAIDING GROUP) for heroics and such, and it looks like I've got enough people to legitimately hack away at ZA for a couple hours every week in pursuit of whatever PvP loot may lie within. I'm refraining from referring to it as a 'casual raid' since I will still be expecting perfection from everyone. Just because we're only spending 10 hours a week in a raid instance doesn't mean you have a license to fail.

Badges won't be the driving force behind ZA raids as we once anticipated. Our heroic runs have been quite fruitful lately, and all of us are sitting on upward of 40 badges already. Coupled with the news that AV marks will also be considered as legal tender toward one of the awards, our need for badges has diminished greatly. Honesly, I'm just looking for any excuse to raid to spec 40 destro. 6.2k shadow bolts on PTR make me feel like half a man on Live.