We were lucky enough to get a great interview with Corey “Emolol” Ratliff from Gravitas Gaming, better known as Duelist Going for Glad, on the passed ESL tournament which ran the 3.0 patch. It was a very good tournament to give everyone an idea of what we might see in the future from teams as discussed. Enjoy!
Thank you for taking the time to sit down and answer a couple of questions, I know with both school and active WoW tournaments recently it has been busy for you. Anyways, could you just quickly introduce yourself and your team to give the readers an idea of who you are.

My name is Corey Ratliff, and I play rogue for Gravitas Gaming on the team otherwise known as Duelists Going for Glad. My two teammates are DJ “Celex” Roggenkamp and Daniel “Ely” Vulis. I’m currently going to school part time to obtain a certificate in Commercial Arts but i’m not sure if this is what I want to study so i’m considering other majors that have more to do with business so I can pursue a career in e-sports after my time as a professional gamer has expired. I’m also looking for a part time job, but it’s hard to find anything good that offers a flexible schedule that I need for all the traveling.

Ok, so the ESL tournament was this passed weekend, in which your team Gravitas Gaming placed 2nd overall. Going into the tournament you were aware that they were going to use Patch 3.0 for it. What was your initial thought when you heard this, and did you think it would hurt or help your famous RMP makeup?

The large majority of the players at ESL got little to no practice in arenas due to server issues or lag. The main form of practice was basically laggy duels, which really doesn’t give teams much to work with as far as 3v3 strategy, the majority of ideas might of looked good on paper, but would get stomped without practicing execution. Getting used to our new specs was a little difficult, I think Ely forgot to use penance the first few games, Celex missed a bunch of his fireball procs, I wasn’t 100% used to shadowdance binds so I was a little slow with it, I could of used it a little better than I did for sure. Overall we were excited about our comp. with new mage talents and rediculous damage and so much variety in specs for rogues.

Were you able to prepare for it enough compared to tournaments in the passed such as MLG, or did you guys feel rushed with the fact that it was 3.0 and not much time to practice with the new patch?

Had the servers and arenas been working properly, we still would of lacked practice because of all the traveling recently. The 1st weekend of October we had a tournament in Dallas, the weekend after that I went to Blizzcon and the weekend after that was ESL Montreal. If I didn’t go to Blizzcon I think our team would of tried to practice on Beta / PTR so we had more of a feel for all the changes. But yeah, ESL Montreal and the Blizzard Regional in Boston are the only tournaments we couldn’t practice for every night. (We lacked practice for regional because DJ had to evacuate Texas for 2 weeks for a hurricane.)

Did you see the usual lineups like we have seen at blizzcon or MLG, or was there new lineups because of the 3.0 changes that teams decided to run? If so, what were some of the new team lineups foreign to tournament play, and do you remember how well they did?

We tried to run rogue, ret. paladin, priest vs SK. Theory crafting it, I don’t think we could lose with it, but we lacked prior practice with the comp, so we basically gave them a free win. Our team is still confident that with practice it’s going to counter PMR. I would consider team Got Game’s RMD a significantly different comp with sodah playing full moonkin, it’s a very scary 3dps team atm. Also, Fnatic was running Warrior, Ret Paladin, Druid which is definatly scary. Overall, you saw everyone trying their main comps with the exception WLD teams who have no lost all confidence with their over-powered comp. PMR and RMD are comps that got major buffs because you won’t see any WLD teams anymore, and even if you do, you can generally win all the games now.

After experiencing the whole tournament, would you say it was the right move for the ESL to decide to use the 3.0 patch, or should they have stuck with the 2.4 patch to keep the consistancy going from tournament to tournament?

This can swing both ways because something was needed to nerf WLD teams. People were literally forgetting their old comps and learning how to play WLD because of how strong it was. Obviously they did alot more than was needed to nerf WLD by introducing whats now basically a new game which kind of sucked for the tournament overall because nobody was really able to practice anything new. I think the tournament would of been best if they just nerfed WLD a little and kept everything else the same as 2.4, or atleast giving teams a month to practice with the new talents and stuff.

I noticed that the finals match against SK was a very close finish, I beleive it came down to the final 5th decided game where unfortunatley you lost. Any thoughts you would like to share on the final match and would you say that it was a complete disapointment that you lost, or did you guys do better than you expected in just reaching the finals?

I’m happy with 2nd, and i’m not upset losing to SK at all. All of us on Gravitas Gaming have plenty of respect for their players, we know they are very good at their classes and play PMR very well. If a WLD that really didn’t communicate anything besides, “MS IS UP KILL THEM LOL” won, I would of been pretty upset. I think our team was more frustrated with the fact that we always come so close to finishing 1st but can never pull it off, we’re starting to call it “the duelist curse”. Oh, and PMR mirror is really about how good of an opener you can get on the other team, if I cheapshot their rogue before he cheapshots me, our chance of winning is increased by like, 75% atleast. It’s honestly a gamble for eyes, and a gamble for a sap/cs on the enemy rogue, the only other option is sap’ing mage while crossing your fingers you don’t get sap’d in this time, and your priest dispels him and you rape him by rolling your face across the keyboard blowing all cd’s immediately.

Do you still see a strong future for both your team and competetive WoW in the future for Wotlk? and if so, what do you plan to run in Wotlk if not RMP?

If mages damage stays as ridiculous as it is now, you can expect PMR to be a dominant comp in Wotlk, if it’s not, or if it’s got a few hard counters, you can expect us to learn classes that will counter - counter comps lol

Any shoutouts you would like to make?

Gravitas Gaming of course for helping us financially, steelseries for the sick gear, betmost poker, XL Bet and I can’t forget all the buddies that hang out in our Dojo, specifically Rubicon, Snk, Triks, Shios, Jones, Kesher and my very chill team, Celex and Ely.

www.GravitasGaming.net

Thank you for your time again, we really do appreciate it and look forward on following your success in the future!

yeah no problem man, see you guys around.

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