Broadening WoW's E Sport Appeal, WSG and beyond

Ok so its clear Blizzard want to make an E sport out of WoW, but what about taking it outside the arena? Wouldn't a Warsong ladder system be great? A system like arena but applied in the WSG setting, you create a team, a roster of perhaps 10-15 people, and have the option to pick a team line-up for certain games, you queue and face other teams, be it horde or alliance from other servers to face off in competitive 1on1 WSG! - I can tell you I'd love to compete in a laddersystem and be able to have rated opposition to play against, it'd be one of the few instanced-bg events/laddersystems I could really see myself getting into, people love playing team play in WSG games particularly if they're in one with people they know, in some situations you may end up being 2-0 down and then you pull it back 3-2, those are the moments that really are fun in the game imo and will always be, the idea of being able to improvise in the event of changing circumstances would be really cool and add lastability and different outcomes to the game, you'd be allowed more leeway even in a highly competitive game vs another good team, in the sense that it would be out of 3 caps, rather than one arena game, you have a 'best out of 3' approach, rather than arena, were one lagspike or bad move can cost the game.

Picturing WSG displayed on 70" Plasmas or massive projectors to an audience showing competative teams facing off vs one another would be an equally as competative and much more entertaining thing to make an E Sport out of than arena if you ask me

I don't know why blizzard didn't implement a system like this long before arena came, but it would certainly have potential to be one of the funnest rated/ladder-style systems currently in WoW if you ask me, I really hope blizz will consider something like this in the future, it would certainly give BG's a new lease of life.

Don't get me wrong, you could also rotate it between other BG's like EoTS and AB, but I think WSG would be the sweetspot in terms of competitiveness and interest.

Utility vs Damage, Thoughts & opinions going into Arena S2

Well, after trying some PvP with the new trinket changes and gear, as a fire mage its interesting to say the least.

I'm trying to keep a balanced mix between crit/sta/resilience, despite resilience hurting your crit allot as we creep towards 400 resil being the norm for most characters, I've been selfish and gone with the silk instead of dread, either way i think I'm going to put 12sta in my gladiator gear.

Part of me regrets not taking the stamina Dreadweave, as this is what I consider the perfect item to help you survive and win the game as a TEAM, its kind of like sword vs mace for warrior, IMO sword is for yourself and mace is for teamplay, same with rogues. I'm a mess at the moment, no money to respec to W/E utility even though I think its the stronger option for me to take

Doing heavy damage is alright as a mage, but utility wins them the game in my eyes, its easy to see why AP/Frost is the best combination for 'coordinated nukes' but i don't know, theres always been something about it that deters me away from it, mage is there for utility, and being AP Frost gives it that one big burst that can change the game, however I still prefer water elemental spec for Arena, so I really cant decide what to go with.

My current plan is to make a 5v5 team and for the time being stick with fire/DB, its still a nice spec for taking enemy DPS off your healers and giving them some breathing space, surprisingly enough in most of the games I've played I haven't been targeted as much as I thought I would. I think most of the teams just automatically presume I have IB. I'm thinking heavy stamina route with nice resilience, utility fire mage, the trinket is a nice boost for survivability, for example if the other team has insane maceproc deepthunder warriors x2 (that thing procs all the time), then that trinket could be a savior at times, I'll see how it goes.

I bet I'll end up going water elemental again, but for now, I need to get some arena games going whatever the spec, and up until 2100 I don't think it will matter that much anyway

Verdict so far, Loving the trinket changes!!!

I just love the trinket changes, its quite significant change to the PvP scene in general, and a huge potential to change matches in both solo pvp, group pvp and arena. I'm loving it vs rogues, hunters and palys, not because I _NEED_ it, but its just a great timesaver, especially vs those saps/stuns, icetraps and repentance, I really hope it teaches those hunters with the trap > trinket > aimed shot combination a bit more variation in their play, though not saying I needed the trinket to save me from this, just it was pure zzz factor watching hunters do the same old ritual 99 times out of 100, usually they died anyway though.

Overall though i'm happy, the only thing i'm dissapointed about is the fact they didnt add any new cloak to the hall of legends honor rewards, don't know why really, i think they saw the spell penetration and thought they didnt want to take any alternative routes to this one, where you have the silk for crit(fun) and dread for hp(the team). Hopefully they will branch out on this in the future though.

I havent decided which class benefits from this trinket the most, i'm sure it has many positives and negatives, I think its quite good for mage though.

The Gladiator 2set 2x resil bonus is looking nice! Around 390 resiliance is much more than i'm used to having. Although having to re-enchant the new stuff is quite costly and gold isnt my strong point, as I find grinding tedious, will have to get the chants and gems sorted at some point, though. The only thing I changed in my gameplan was taking the chest instead of the shoulders, since I could afford it, and i'm debating heavy stamina socketing vs spellcrit. I had awfull crit season one, and i'm loving getting almost 10% more this time round (Yeah I picked silk this time round, and bcast pants to glad pants increases my crit quite significantly, endgame arena gives me doubts about the crit though, but regardless i'll probably try and get dreadweave if and when I get those honor points back

heh, Drake & Gladiator Title, just!

After transferring to Stormscale I didnt have much time to establish myself in a 5v5 team, like I said it wasnt even a plan for me to play Arena again, I was going to stop play, but I got the itch again.

The Drake & Title was a dead cert for me in my Vashj team, but ofcourse I like to do things the hard way, seems I scraped it by the skin of my teeth, with 1 game being enough to put me below the 20% played rule, it dosent come much closer than that, does it? Gonna go and see what setup to go with now in Area 52, i'll post how it goes later :)

I'm well aware many others can achieve this and its not hard, but I consider it quite an achievement for someone who has only been on the server a few weeks, i'm more than pleased with it

Plans for Season 2 - Pants, Shoulder and Wand

I'm considering going for the upgraded Gladiator Pants, Shoulder and Wand.

Reason for this being that my current pants pre-season 2 still have no resil, so pants would be a viable option, also to make it more beneficial i want the double 2-set 35 resilience bonus, the only way to do this is to get the shoulders, since anything else would be too costly to allow me to get the wand without using up all/most of my 5k.

If i went for Pants/Helm, that'd require more of a grind to regain the metagem +18 stamina slot the same week, which atm i can't be bothered with. Not to mention, the 2 pieces I most need a grade on for all-round play are pants and wand, so this fits in kind of nicely for what I want, even though deep down I wanted to go with 1hander and endgame for an easy damage booster

And for hall of legends, the ring, and other grades would be approximately +28 resilience over my current gear

That alone would put me at around 378 resilience, quite the bonus from my current 269 resilience. Then I still have the Hall of Legends grades to include, which should all add up quite substantially

Haven't been able to calculate the exact stamina and mana over my current EQ, as I'm not fortunate enough to be able to re-enchant things straight away such as pants and shoulders to see for myself :)

PS - I got a video rundown I'm gonna post later of my top WoW videos, don't forget to check it out!

Rebuilding a 5v5 team, hunger to reclaim the 2400+

After being out of an arena team for quite some time, it gave me the itch to want to start playing again, one of the perfect comparisons I can think of would be Jay Z claiming he was retiring from rap at the 'top of his game', his status was at an all time high, and he had nothing more to prove, but once he stepped down from his throne of being the King of New York he started to get the itch again and so similar it was for me after being in a 2400+ team on Vashj, I started to feel like it was becoming more of a chore than fun. I kind of regret not playing in the EU event finals with my Vashj team, as we didn’t even get to see what our team could have achieved, we had a great setup that worked well for us. It wasn’t your typical assist target > nuke specced team, it was a 'built to last' team.

(Frein,Dassantwo,Grimtung,Hubris and myself) -> War/War/Priest/Pala/Mage is one of the best setups I work with, we had some great players and occasionally switched to rogue instead of war (Bartkn), but for the bulk of our rated-play times it was the dual Warrior combo, some of our lategames ended as Pala/War/War standing, and we could still pull back in 3v4 situations, Warrior is just so strong in certain situations lategame with the rage buildup and buffs packs an insane punch towards the end and offers extreme lastable dps that dosent need any downtime, even if we didn’t have the pala standing endgame our 2 tauren warriors took one hell of a beating in the dying moments

So after I went to Stormscale I wasn’t intent on searching for a team, it wasn’t the original plan I had, but I started to get the itch again, its not like you can find competitive world pvp currently in this game and I needed a gap to fill. So I joined a Shamans 5v5 team on the server, we had unlucky logging times so hadn’t been in sync much, a few days back we started playing our first games, we ended up going without the shaman and with a similar setup to my Vashj team, War/War/Priest/Pala/Mage

Only difference though, I’m Dragon's Breathe Spec instead of my Vashj spec 17/0/44 (Water Elemental) - Many people would argue that AP Frost is a much more viable spec to take since you get the coordinated nuke off with the 2x Warr's DPS on a focused target and it could be deadly, however I disagree, its not all about combinations or tactics, its about what works best for YOUR team, and this for me was 17/0/44 at the time

Anyway, I stuck with DB (mainly because i don't have the gold to respec anymore) we climbed up to a 2k rating with my Stormscale team of Orcgo, Yrly, Galla Shaden and myself, and me as this heavy fire spec, i'm hoping we get more time to play this week so hopefully we can get some more good results, i'll admit though I was missing the role of utility in arena badly, full on sheeping/detect magic, easy icelance debuffs and taking targets off the healer can seem boring, but believe me its equally as usefull if not moreso than just doing plain old DPS with the occasional sheep/CS thrown in, not to mention the winters proc off icelance is free debuffs to mess with their paladins

If you get focused by the other team and they don't manage to nuke you down as a blazing speed mage it can be very beneficial lategame for us (as we saw in oldtimes vs Madbaal from Jacklins old team, a blazing speed mage with Manky giving him a trap to run around), its a huge plus BS kiting 2 or more targets from the other team and being able to pull a sheep off, although we lack the awesome BoF rotation that my previous Pala from Testify had, but it still has potential, i hope we can get some more GG's in before tuesday