MLG Orlando has passed and although FnaticMSI's Halo3 team performed extremely well, our World of Warcraft squad was unable to attend due to a points debacle. However, after a little while we caught up with Neil 'Neilyo' Mosunic, and this is what he had to say.



First off I'm not trying to bash BB here or anything, I still have a lot of respect for them as a team, but a lot of people were surprised with some of their performances at Orlando. Mainly it was their mirror match vs CoL's RMP where Orange apparently "choked" while getting focused.

This is very interesting to me because 1v1 probably is more popular in Korea than in the US, meaning I would expect Orange to have dueled many times vs a lot of top rogues so playing defensively while getting trained by a rogue should be pretty instinctive, most of the top US mages I know would be difficult to train because of knowing rogue vs mage so well they know what the worst things are that can happen for the rogue.

Next, it looked like Hiren only had 3 macros (2 tricks), I'm pretty sure I saw both macro tabs but just to be safe I'm not 100% sure. But it wouldn't be a surprise to me if he really only had 3 macros, a lot of people are still stuck in the notion that its OK to do everything manually. Now of course most macros don't add huge significance except focus macros. Most of the games I saw that Hiren focused the mage, after mirror images he never had the time to re-focus him the entire game whereas if he used /focus arena1 arena2 and arena3 macros he would be able to re-focus instantly at ease, and also have time to swap focus to better utilize focus abilities on more than just 1 focus all game.

Reckful also vanished all but 1 of Hirens vanish cheap shots in that series. One other thing I thought Hiren should have done and should have known from dueling was (vs pookz) gouging out of block. Sure he got a restealth off a few times during block but every other time I think he should have stood in front of the blocked mage with gouge held down waiting to gouge out of block, this is very helpful because u have 3 possible outcomes:

1) Gouge before he blinks, gives your mage time to line up burst/cc, gives you another CP and a guaranteed mutilate with a possible poison app on gouge.

2) Gouge at the same time as blink, this drastically reduces the effectiveness of his blink and lets his mage line up burst/cc's.

3) You are too slow and don't gouge, but if your quick you should be able to land it more than half of the time either before blink or at the same time.

Yes this wasn't necessary to win that series but I would have expected to see it done instead of standing behind the block. Lastly the priest still clicks unit frames, and he can do it very well just like any top healer that clicks unit frames, but clicking is clicking and binding is always significantly better so he is denying himself from taking it to the next level.

So basically I feel like individually these players are no better than any of their top US counterparts, they are good, but most of their talent is in team play and their synergy which of course plays the biggest role.