In World of Warcraft, change is always occurring. Blizzard, the game's developer, is constantly tweaking the numbers on spells, implementing new abilities, and adding items. Since WoW's inception into the e-sports community, we've seen multiple patches change the landscape of the tournament scene.

It started with Pandemic's dominant Rogue, Mage, Priest (RMP) in the World Series of Video Games era. Fnatic then became the powerhouse running Warrior, Warlock, Druid (WLD) with the change to Fel Armor. Most recently Retribution Paladins and Arcane Mages received changes in 3.0 and now you can't win without one of the two in arena. Now Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK) is finally coming out and WoW as an e-sport is going to be changed forever once again. Nitrana, Team Pandemic's famous Rogue puts it, “WotLK is a reset. Every team can be good. Its all a matter of who can be the most creative.”

Patch 3.0 changed the way 3v3 matches are dealt with. As Rhaegyn of Fnatic puts it "You can't play defensively now at all. If you try to do anything but zerg something down, you lose”. With WotLK bringing new items to the table, boosting the average player HP to around 17,000, the extremely high amount of burst damage should go down, but only by a little bit – damage will still be out of control.

On the same topic, Isaac 'Azazael' Bentley said "Although I believe that the tournament scene wont be what it once was, the added HP and resilience gained in WOTLK will help to balance out the amount of damage being done in 3.0, so it's a step in the right direction."

Along with the new items hopefully equalizing out damage, new abilities should help some of the weaker classes out. Each class is receiving 2-3 new abilities and many of them will determine how that class is played in 3v3. Warlock's for example now have a Blink spell, allowing them to teleport back to a spot they put on the floor beforehand. This might allow Warlock's another way to get out of harms way. Warlock's are just one of nine classes so you can imagine how many different play styles will come from the new spells. And then there are Death Knights.

Many people are overlooking the new class being added to the game, the Death Knight. This class will most assuredly be re-tuned after people cry on the official boards, but for now we're going to have to live with how brutally overpowered this class is. Death Knight abilities consist of every unique ability from every class in the game, buffed, and put into one class. Also add in a Scorpion-esque ability, serving as a taunt, and you have a high damage class with a way to keep pull players to them and keep you in place for quite some time, along with silencing you and putting up a magic immune shield. Yeah, it'll be fun.

Right now RMP is the dominant composition, at least in the tournament scene. This mostly can be contributed to how strong Arcane Mages are. At 80 however, things might be different, and many players are hoping they are. As Conrad 'zyz' Lope, Rogue of Team EG, said, "The tourney scene for Wrath of the Lich King directly depends on how broken arcane mages are at 80. If they remain how they are now, tournaments better bring a ton of extra laptops to these events, because things are going to get smashed."

But what if there is a new composition out there that hasn't been found yet? Ryan 'Didy' Pinkham of team GotGame said, "Wrath is going to add some variety to the arena, obviously there is going to be a flavor of the month comp like WLD that has the least amount of counters. But honestly I think every combo in the future will have at least 2 or 3 hard counters. I think the teams with the most versatility will be winning tournaments in 2009 opposed to the teams that got lucky with getting good at the right composition."

Last but not least, one must consider that teams might change their roster due to players not being able to play certain classes. We've already seen some rosters change such as Dan 'sp0h' Street leaving Team EG. We might be seeing some more in the future. David 'shawn' Kugelmann, a WoW admin for ESL, had this to say on the subject, "WotLK and the 3.0-patch will change the tournament scene completely. Teams broke (and will continue to break) up because their classes don't work together as well anymore which makes current tournaments quite difficult to handle. I enjoy the fact that people will have to re-learn certain aspects of the game but at the same time. I fear that the level of play won't be as high as it used to be in the late phase of 2.4 for quite some time."

Wrath of the Lich King brings change. Whether or not this change is for better or worse remains to be seen, but many players are ready for it. In the coming weeks new compositions will be made, new teams could be seen, and new players introduced to the scene. World famous, and newly sponsored, European Hunter Jonny 'cherez' Martin says it best: "Different people will end up being carried by their classes come 80, I just hope I end up being one of them -- like the nu-age Hafu."

- JP McDaniel is a free-lance eSports journalist with published material by GotFrag, Gameriot, CGS, ESFI and more. The "live" debut of McDaniel's new podcast, featuring professional WoW players all giving their insight on WotLK and much more, can be heard here, at 8 p.m. (CST), Wednesday, November 12.