We started off with a couple of wins and a couple of losses, including one against a hunter/druid combination that was so disheartening that after the game I actually said, "Well we could always just try and find a hunter in LFG for 3s ..." Most matches we have are pretty close, with both teams having moments where they are able to apply pressure, forcing the other team to use defensive cooldowns. While some games do end early on during one team's burst CDs, the vast majority end up being fairly long, with dampening (dampening reduces healing effectiveness and gradually increases as the game goes along) reaching a high enough point that the healers simply cannot keep up with the damage output. And then you have some games where one team is just clearly in control - forcing all the defensive cooldowns of the other team, not having to use any of their own. The druid/hunter combo match was the latter type of game; it seemed like we simply had no chance.
The games after that went pretty well though. We had one wild game against a priest/rogue where I was somehow able to take the priest down very early on in the game with my first cycle of burst CDs. Most teams know to use defensive cooldowns / CC when they see Incarnation popped ... but it's possible to use Incarnation first, bait those cooldowns, and then pop Berserk afterward. This is exactly what I did with the priest in this match and it worked amazingly well. It always shocks me when I kill a healer this quickly because it is a rather rare occurrence - I actually yelled out loud when it happened!
We faced some double DPS teams and did well against them, as we usually do (apparently Disc Priests really shine against double DPS). One of the teams was a rogue/shadow priest comp that ... well, this was possibly the funniest game of the night. The rogue opened on our priest, I opened on the rogue, and got a 5 point rip (DoT) on him before getting blinded. The shadow priest hadn't really engaged yet so I didn't trinket and just sat in blind (7 seconds?). The rogue got feared (and didn't trinket or cloak it) and was still in fear when blind wore off. I was able to get stealth back, opened on the rogue and he dropped in a matter of seconds. The game was over, just like that. I don't even think the shadow priest ever tried to drop shadowform and heal the rogue. Both of us laughed and puzzled about what they were doing. Still no idea.
We had an interesting fight against a Warlock / Paladin team, too. We haven't done well against this comp in the past. In fact, I am not sure we've ever beaten this comp. Warlocks in this comp essentially play a long-term, wear you down style. You don't need to worry about any burst damage, but at the same time, their survivability makes it so it's hard to burst them down, too. The past couple times we've faced a team like this, I've tried adding my dots to both the paladin and warlock, trying to beat them at their own game. It hasn't been successful yet, but we have done better than when I just focused on one or the other. This game it worked pretty well - so well, in fact, that the Paladin had to go and drink a couple of times. The fact that he was able to drink was a failure on our part; we hadn't really seen a paladin need to do that before so were not ready for it and couldn't stop him. I think had he not gotten any drinks in we would have won. As it turned out, I managed to kill the warlock with me and my priest at about 30% health. Dampening was so high at this point that despite trying to spam heals on my priest, his health barely budged. The paladin, at full health, was able to kill my priest. I got stealth back and was going to wait for my passive healing to bring my health up (and wait for my cds to come back), but the Paladin started to res the warlock. Knowing that couldn't happen, I had to open up on him ... and ended up losing, just barely. Definitely closer overall though, and made me feel confident we might be able to beat those teams going forward with more focus on the opposing healer's mana.
As our rating crept up, we started facing more and more hunter teams. We saw hunter teams with just about every single healer type - monk (lost), shaman (won), priest (won). I'm going to be honest - monks just confused me. I don't understand which of their abilities is interruptable or the length of their CDs or anything. That game was much closer than the druid/hunter match we had earlier, but I'm still not sure they were ever in real danger. The shaman and priest teams both made the same mistake - switching from focusing me to focusing the priest. I honestly have no idea why they did it, but in both cases that pushed the match in our favor (in my mind, at least). Switching from me to the healer does 2 things:
1) it takes away one of the main CCs the hunter has, as priests can dispel ice trap but feral druids cannot. So instead of trapping the priest and forcing him to sit in it, they would trap me and then I would get immediately dispelled
2) it allows the priest to "pillar hump." Pillar humping describes a defensive behavior that basically boils down to running around one of the objects on the map that you cannot run/shoot through. The healer, trying to get away from the hunter, can focus on healing himself and running around the pillar, trying to LoS (line of sight) the hunter and reduce his damage. When the hunter focuses me, on the other hand, I can't just run away from him because then I can't do any damage - I have to try and keep up with him (or the healer).
I usually try not to check our rating after we win as I don't want to jinx myself or get too amped up about what a win/loss could mean, but we had been doing pretty well and it was hard to refrain from checking.
1994. One win away 2000. At this point it was kind of hard to ignore it and not mention in chat, "one win away!" Of course, this led to jokes about another hunter/druid team. And as we entered the arena we saw it ... another hunter/healer team. This time the healer was a paladin, just to complete the full spectrum of healers we'd seen that night. Paladins would seem to have some decent synergy with hunters, especially with Blessing of Freedom keeping the player on which it is placed free from snares (it's hard enough to keep up with a hunter even when you can snare them!). I figured we were in for a long, painful game.
As the game started, I was able to move over and open on the Paladin without getting hit by the Hunter's flare (this doesn't happen often, but when it does ... oh man, brutal). As I opened, I got two lucky clearcasting procs (allows you to use an ability without using any energy) and got the Paladin down to 30% health without even using any of my CDs. He didn't bubble (makes him immune to damage for a certain amount of time, basically their big defensive "oh crap!" button), but he did use some of his big heal defensive CDs (I don't know what they are really called). Back to full health. Ugh. I waited for energy / minor CDs to regen and then popped my own burst cooldowns. I was able to keep him stunned until he was below half health, at which point stuns were on DR, and he started running. As his health went lower and lower, I waited for his bubble to come up. Priests are able to dispel it if they are glyphed a certain way, so I wanted to make sure I called out for it immediately (and also not use a finisher on him while he was bubbled ... goodbye combo points!). 25% health ... no bubble yet. 15% health ... screw it, I'm using my finisher. BOOM.
A chorus of cheers and laughter was heard in chat, as well as some remarks, "wait, what? did he not bubble?"
Incredible.
Congratulations! And what a fun recap, love the details and the drama and excitement!
ReplyDeleteOops, wrong lingo! GARTS!!!