Eric Replied

That’s not Shinsoku
I’m well aware of that.  It’s a discipline priest.  A troll discipline priest (Athene would stone me if he saw it - Weakness of the HEX).  This last week was an exercise is trying “someone else’s shoes on” to see what it would be like to be in the hot seat of a [spot] healer.  I’ve always felt that one way to get to a higher level of playing is to understand the other classes almost as well (if not as well) as your own class.  Getting an in-depth understanding of how a class functions gives me valuable insight into the pitfalls, weaknesses, and timing.

All the forum posts and FAQ/Guides won’t ever give me the information needed to battle back against competing classes.

So What Did I Learn about Disc. Priests?
I’m no master on the class, but playing a healing class is definitely a different experience.  All the little things that annoyed my healers annoyed me all the same:  Line of Sighting, Crowd Control-chaining, and Mana Burning among some things.  Something I can take back to my warrior is to always be aware of my healer’s positioning.  In fact, a better lesson to be learned is that I should help my healers position themselves advantageously.

How can I manifest this?  Well, I describe this process to be a lot like wearing a rubber band around you and your healer.  If you go too far, you snap back to your healer.  You never want to make your healer run through the crowd to get to you because there’s a high possibility he’ll get CC’d or burned (or a combination of both).

Arena in Review
Main Team - Slash Hungry (5v5) put up some great fights this week despite playing a limited week.  We started with Oblivions, but opened with a few hefty losses putting us as far down as 1850 at one point, but we pulled it together and battled back to get to 1927 (+27 rating for the week) to end the night at 6-4.  While this was a rather lackluster performance, we did have two notable matches that opened up the doors to hope for our team.

We beat Team Noobsauce twice (Twice!) taking 24 and then 23 points.  When I checked their ranking for last week, they were #3 on our bracket.  This is akin to Appalachian State upsetting University of Michigan earlier in the Fall of 2007.  It was great synergy, and I’m hoping for some strong wins in the upcoming week to finally push the 2000 barrier (It’s like the Great Wall of China).

We Only Know Three Words (3v3) worked its way to 1886 from 1853 this week, but this was shy of our highest rating of 1915.  It was tough battling many teams this week, but we held in and made a modest gain to make this the sixth consecutive positive week this season.  Here’s to another 2000 breakthrough.

Alt Teams - Bear Blasting is a new 5v5 team featuring my Troll Priest.  It’s a rather odd setup that changes day to day, and we have yet to ever feature a Warrior or a Paladin in any of our slots.  Our typical DPS includes a Hunter, Warlock, Rogue, and Mage.  Our healers go between Druid, Priest, and Shaman, and more often than not a combination of at least one of them.

In all practicality, the team is incredibly effective for its unorthodox method of play.  The style can be best marked as “Drain DPS” from the Viper Stings and Mana Burns.  Needless to say, the strong DPS count a long with the mana drains can quickly break many teams.  Unfortunately, our gear level and synergy is lacking, but as we pushed 41 games this week, we started to gain rhythm to finish the week at 1600 something rating with 1640 being our highest for the week.

I Hate Rerollers!
Several teams this week seemed to be coming from rerolled teams because even my alt team would be fighting players that were decked in S3 Shoulders and S3 weaponry.  We felt the lash of a rerolled team our 5v5 because we lost 23 points to a team that had the S3 shoulders and Weaponry.  Given this freak week, we still pulled through and we’re looking to claim our own shoulders and continue to move up the ranks.

Who knows - maybe the Grass only gets Greener on the other side of 2K.

-ERP-

Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 11:18 pm.
Filed under PvP Week-In-Review, WoW PvP.
Subscribe to RSS 2.0.
Leave a comment or trackback.