How did your team come together? I know originally zilea was playing with Hunter Hero Twixz. What was behind your decision to reroll warrior in the peak of Warlock/DK/paladin (Shadowcleave) strength?

Well Valrath and I have been playing together for two years or so now, if either of us are ever going to be in a competitive team it's a given the other will be there as well. We needed to find a new healer for the tournament realm though since the only two healers we usually play with (Ooi and Musee) weren't eligible to compete due to where they live. Paladins were the flavor of the month at the time so I just tried to think of any skilled paladins I had played against that probably wouldn't be locked down in a team already. I asked Zyori originally but he wasn't interested, then I remembered playing Zilea in 5v5 on BG9 and being fairly impressed by his play style and skill so I approached him asking if he wanted to try some games on the TR with us, then after we had a fairly impressive first session going 50-5 or some such we decided we'd make a push for rank 1 together.

As far as rerolling warrior/cleave, it really wasn't much of a conscious decision actually. When we played dk/lock/pal on TR the only comp that gave us trouble was RMP. When the patch hit, all 3 of our classes got nerfed in some way, and all of RMP either went untouched or got slightly buffed. Needless to say, staying with the same comp just didn't seem like an option. I was getting tired of my lock on live and we messed around with a cleave team just for fun then realized how strong it actually was.

On the topic of Warrior/DK/Paladin. Is it stronger than its similar equal Warrior/DK/Druid? Why or why not? Can you see this comp living throughout Blizzard's onslaught of patches or will 3.2 put you at a disadvantage?

Well I don't believe there are any real nerfs planned for it this next patch (other than buffing warlocks and resto shamans), and if you're playing it on the live realms it will probably be even stronger with the new weapons... melee just scale so much faster than casters. And I don't think the resilience change will have too significant of an effect on it either. But as far as druid vs. paladin I'm really a pretty big fan of paladin, I can't even imagine trying to face an RMP without freedom or dispels. Versus any non-mage teams, druid is probably a bit stronger. I don't think it's worth using unless you're content in handing out free points to any RMP you encounter.

I know you are one of the very few people with all of the rank 1 titles Blizzard released (Merciless Gladiator, Vengeful Gladiator, Ect ect). What comps were you playing to achieve these titles season by season? Can we expect a Furious Gladiator title this season?

Let's see, season 1 was warr/lock/pal (there wasn't a rank 1 title available that season but gladiator was only a few teams per bracket so almost as prestigious still), Merciless was our 5v5 TSG consisting of warr/lock/mage/druid/pal, Vengeful was both druid/lock 2v2 and druid/lock/rogue 3v3, Brutal was lock/rogue/mage/sp/rsham 5v5, Deadly was lock/rsham 2v2 and lock/dk/pal 3v3. And a Furious title should be pretty much guaranteed, though it will be on my warrior not my warlock. Not sure it'll be quite as cool not having them all on the same character, but still counts in my opinion. ;P


Everyone is now aware that you qualified, but nobody really knows a whole lot about your road to qualification. Was it easy or hard? Which online teams did you struggle against?

It was surprisingly easy. We really didn't have much competition but a lot of it may have had to do with people not being aware they weren't going to reset the ladder. There were 1 or 2 RMPs that gave us a bit of trouble but we still had winning records against I believe, and all other teams we probably had at least a 2:1 ratio against. We had a 100 point lead on second place at one point but we just kept playing since we thought the ladder was being reset as well, in the end we got dropped a bit in rating since we were so much higher than everyone else but still maintained winning records all around.

Coming into this tournament how confident were you?

We were very confident. We were most concerned about our opening round, I was under the impression that if we could get pass the first round we'd have a clean run to the finals. Didn't quite turn out that way but that's how we approached it, and I believe it's better to be confident and maybe even a little arrogant than to be concerned or worried in any way.

Were there any teams in particular you were worried about, or did you expect to beat everyone?

I felt we should have beat everyone, and I still feel that way but it's difficult to predict how nerves and anxiety will affect you. We probably played at 75% of how we normally play on live, I'm sure every team was affected the same way to some extent, but it's funny how just being in a LAN scenario can knock you down from Furious Glad quality players to just any other gladiator caliber.

Interview continued on page three...