In year 2004, with John Stockton's retirement, and a disappointing post season the year before, Karl Malone's career was coming to an end with very little hope for a championship. Rebuilding was not something he wanted to go through, and that was when the LA Lakers offered him a spot on their 5v5 arena team, and the rest was history.

In year 2008, with Tent's retirement, I found myself in the same predicament. In just one month, I went from having a spot on SK100 to 2000 scrub status. With Blizzard's biggest tournament ever coming up, my current 3v3 team can't even crack top 20 in my own battlegroup. While I can certainly find a suitable priest or wait for Radikal on Tent to develop and work our RMP back to where it used to be, I just don't feel good about the future of RMP. Like 2345/2346 in 5v5, the most popular comp is rarely ever the most powerful one. With the death of double AR, shadowstep is really meant to be played with double melee. I still believe it has too many disadvantages against top double melee teams and top warrior double healer teams. And let's not forget the hunter/druid/x teams. Perhaps the 2.4 mutilate (with further buffs as Blizzard promised) will change this, but I still didn't feel comfortable going into the tournament with RMP as our main comp. And that is when Serennia approached me with an offer I couldn't refuse.

From left to right: Serennia, Ming, Qazdia, Geecee



While the man hasn't been active as of late, Serennia quitely put together the most marketable roster the sport has ever seen. Their warrior double healer team will feature Serennia at warrior, Geecee as shaman and Hafu-chan as druid. Geecee is probably the best shaman in the game today and he comes with a whole bag of drama bombs of his own. Not only he took warrior/holy paladin/restoration shaman to Merciless Gladiator in BG9 S2 during the peak of RMP strength, the 2.4 shaman buffs should give him the same boost 2.3 hunter buffs did for Cherekee/Megatf. Hafu is probably the best female WOW player today and her sweeter than chocolate voice should suppress Serennia's chakra leaks very well. I believe Glickz will be on the team so that will be the ultimate motivation for Hafu-chan to make the regionals.

Hafu and Glickz:



So where do I come in? You can't go into a tournament like this without a secondary line-up, and Serennia is settled on rogue/rogue/druid. While I haven't played WOW seriously since Tent lost interest in the game, I believe I can recover very quickly if I had something to play for. An opportunity to win a championship, that will certainly keep me motivated. Yes, Serennia had other rogues in mind but the majority of them are already committed to their sponsors. Double melee is not exactly rocket science and the marketing potential Ming brings to the team will easily outweigh whatever little upgrade a no-name player can bring to the table. But Ming, after all the horror stories with Serennia on BG9, why would anyone play with him?

Simple, because there will be no clashing of egos whatsoever. Coming into this team I understand I will be playing Serennia basketball and I am 100% committed to his triangle offense. As someone who sees more than enough verbal abuses on his own blog, I have skin for criticisms (reasonable or unreasonable) is as thick as the great wall. If I can handle clients upset about multi-million dollar transactions at my day job, I am sure I can handle someone who is very passionate about a computer game. There is very little question whose team it is and I am eager to learn the RRD comp from Qazdia-senpai as well. I may not be able to produce 25 points and 12 rebounds a game like I did when I played MVP-caliber arena during AR/prep days. But I can still get 15 and 10 easily especially considering when I play, the opponent will probably be vulnerable to double melee.

I can go into more details about the actual comp and spec choices but we played until 6AM last night on PTR tournament server. So I will save that for another day. It was a pain in the neck to set up a character with hundreds of people mashing right clicks at every vendor, but I am glad it is over. I am actually very satisfied with the offensive stats of the S2/T5 mix, especially with the 2.7 Rod of the Sun King. Trying to get used to the spec Serennia asked me to play as soon as possible. With 320 resilience, 1600 AP and 32% crit (with MOTW), AR+CB actually hurts a lot more than I thought considering my spec excels at keeping the target in melee range.

Much more about my experience with Serennia as the week progresses! And yes, I am looking for an alliance team on Tichondrius (RRD is preferred, Serennia and Qazdia are both on horde side at the moment so I need an alliance team, or I can always stay in BDF since I already have Ultimus). I don't believe the best teams in BG9 are better than the best teams from other BGs (and this tournament will probably prove it), but the talent pool is just so much bigger and makes it much easier to test out new comps and recover from player retirements. And as a professional blogger, to come up with interesting contents, I need to be where the drama is. Staying in a small town has its perks, but big cities simply have more opportunities.

Much more as the week progresses, Serennia-sama, arigato.