Celestial Tournament: Seventh Aftermath

It was nights like tonight that were the reason for me to sign up for the tournament.

We finally got a decent enough opponent and, as expected, it was a great match. OoX pulled out a come-from-behind win over Signet of Ultimate Doom, winning 2-1. Our opponent's were down a player and elected to go with a Fighter henchie and while that cheapens the win somewhat, I still think we did a great job to recover because they were running a heavy pressure build with a lot of Thumpers - I'm guessing their 8th would have been another Thumper or Ele so the Fighter Hench wasn't all that awful for them. And their map was Burning so when we loaded in we were expecting something completely different. It caught us off guard, especially in the first few moments where we had a bit of a miscommunication about the flag. We were rolled, hard, and our Monks heavily DPed by the two or three minute mark. From there we played the turtle game but once we had the kinks worked out the pressure from our own 2xWPRM build started to take its toll - they really couldn't stand up to us and it was only the twisty turny pathways of Burning that block LoS that hampered us. We tried to split in the end but couldn't pull it off, they had their NPCs and we had none and by the time our Lord walked it was on to map two.

On our own, split-friendly map, we elected to go with a 5/3 of sorts. And we just took the fight to them. I was playing on a Water snarer (Sadly, no Shatterstone headshots. Yet.) and we had one memorable sequence where we snared and blocked their runner for a complete two minutes - from the time we capped and he started to counter-cap to when we got a boost. That match went to VoD, too, but that time around we had all our NPCs and they had none. We have something of a history of blowing even the biggest advantages come VoD in OoX but not that time.

Since they'd lost the second match, round three would be played on the Signet's map again. We figured they weren't likely to change their build or their map and so we switched again to a straight up balanced build, abandoning the idea of splitting altogether in favor of a heads-up 8v8 scrum. I stuck with the Water snarer but we added in Extinguish and I was paired up with a Blindbot Air Ele while we had a Melandru's Dervish to run the flag for us. Simply put their Thumpers couldn't do a thing in between being Blinded, Blurred, Snared, and knocked down while we were pressuring out their pets. They pulled a ninja resign spike at the 10 minute mark (Thankfully, someone else was quicker on the screenshot button than I was.) giving us the match. We hadn't really gotten many kills but they barely got anyone below half health and we had pushed up to trap their runner in the lava and were about to initiate another stall for a boost.

Afterwards, a few of us decided to storm the HA with some other members of our alliance (You might not have noticed, but Onslaught of Heroes, our main HA division, has been on a holding streak lately. I've been meaning to get in on that and all.). By the time the night ended, I'd gotten a handful more of fame and came within a step of winning the Halls. It was the relic running rules and we had a dedicated running team with two Paragons who'd put Make Haste on each other. We were down one cap and the other Paragon was achingly close to the cap as the game was winding down. But I didn't have an eye on the timer and went back to pick up another relic myself, leaving me out of range to deliver a speed boost that could have won the game for us. Ah well, not bad considering it was our first time with the new halls and those new rules.

In all, hats off to our opponents and hopefully we can get another game like that one in before the tournament draws to a close.