Celestial Tournament: Fifth Aftermath

The latest round seems in the books for XoO. Haven't heard the official word from RoX yet. They were set to play last night but, well, I wouldn't expect to hear good news as they drew a very tough opponent.

As for OoX, well, it was the expected rout against [meh]. For the first time, I didn't play (Which, granted, since the last two matches have been forfeits isn't saying much. But I was on and in the 8 person team for both of those. Still, it's now going on three rounds since I've played a match in the tournament.). Just wasn't feeling really up to it the past few days and I decided in advance that since I wasn't going to be practicing on my own or with the team that it would be best if they found someone else from the roster to take my spot. So, Sunday night I come home and sit down for a night of some soul-searching blogging when my roomie tells me that somebody named “Billiard” left a message for “Rex” and that I'd know what it was about. I knew right away that Billiard had called because the team was short and they were desperate for another player. Accusations that I've been moonlighting as a gay pornstar lingering in the air, I scrambled to boot up my gaming computer and log in. I wasn't planning on playing, I wasn't really in the right headspace to play well, but when I got that message I came to a decision – my team needed me and it was time to stop moping and get on with my life. Of course, I get online and, lo and behold, they've got eight and they're forming up to head in game. Ah well. At least I got to hang around vent (Once I dug out my headset, anyway.) and watch the matches on observer. Later on we ran some GvG which I sat in on and those went rather well. We seemed to presage the latest SoTG article by pulling off some mighty ganks. Got to play a Paragon again in a very offensive build which is something I've been wanting to try out.

As for the actual matches, well, the first one was on OoX's home map and we pretty much got rolled. They ran mostly what we expected them to run and we ran a build we felt was optimized against that. And we still got hammered. Given that our map is very split friendly, I think we might have been better off running with our typical 5/3 split and trying to run them around instead of fighting 8v8 but, well, it wasn't my call. In the second match, with all bets off, the team decided to run something wacky – 4 Thumpers, 4 Monks which we'd seen [meh] have trouble with and looked like a lot of fun. There was some talk of letting me play but rather than break the group up I deferred to pal Clamatius as he was already warmed up and he could use a few spins at chasing people around with deadly weapons in hand. I probably couldn't have done much better as it's been six months at least since I've played a Thumper. And, well, it was another loss but I think we gave them a much harder push on their Uncharted map thanks to the inherent splitting.

That loss pushes us down to 3-2 for the tournament (Again, 1-2 in matches we've actually played). The next match should be played by Friday and hopefully we'll get a good match-up this time around from the remaining 9 point teams.

The Mothership on the otherhand, did us all proud by beating Ten Swords Lorden 2 games to 1 in a fiercely fought match (They dropped the first in VoD thanks to an NPC disadvantage, switched up their build and went on a tear. The build? Well, it was the one OoX was practicing last night.). That pulls them even with OoX and gives them some pretty impressive wins over quality teams.