EN24 recently had a chance to sit down with Bluemelon, a pilot for Warlords of the Deep, winners of Alliance Tournament XIII.
Bluemelon is a theorycrafter for the team, a veteran of Hyrda Reloaded and this year the pilot of Warlords of the Deep’s very expensive Scorpion Navy Issue flagship. You can review the matches in 3D thanks to CREST on NULL-SEC.COM and on CCP’s official Youtube channel as they become available.
Welcome and thank you for talking to us today.
Thank you for having me.
Warlords of the Deep flew many ship setups to victory- what was your favorite one to use?
My personal favorite is a setup we call Purple Mistress of the Shadow – our Widow tinker with Cambions that wasn’t beaten until we came up against The Camel Empire in the finals. The real shame was we never got to field it at full strength as the Etana was constantly banned against us. The really cool thing about Purple Mistress was this setup was built and perfected all the way back in AT11, we just never had a chance to bring it. Hydra then fell out early in AT12 and The Camel Empire during their amazing run in that year took a very similar version to beat PL with.
Any setup you wanted to bring but weren’t able to?
There were a few we had still hidden that I’d call 1st Tier setups, similar to Mistress, but we didn’t get the opportunity or the reason to use it. For obvious reasons I cannot tell you what these were but safe to say they’d have been as much fun to fly as Mistress was.
There have been a lot of complaints of AT ships costing the same points as other ships in their class despite being much better. What changes do you think need to be made to the tournament format if any at all?
Honestly regarding AT ships I believe their point value is fair, as the ship is defined within that class. As to them being more powerful than their T2 counterparts, yes of course they are more powerful, however their cost is also many many times more. The risk of bringing an AT ship is massive, consider team morale if they die, the isk value lost and the different way they make you FC the setup your in. In AT12 we saw barely any uniques fielded at all, the usability of these ships depends on the meta, and with some meta changes (e.g. ET restriction to logi) it’s possible that no point adjustment is needed.
If anything it is their value for points that make them even remotely viable to bring. For example, our use of the malice in the TFI setup was an afterthought to replace the vengeance in order to bait malice bans. It certainly made the setup better but generally we don’t build setups around uniques. That results in mediocre setups that are only better because of the uniques. Indeed, when the malice was banned we brought the TFI composition with vengeances anyway if we wanted. We use uniques to augment already solid compositions that can work without them. Another example is that the Widow+SNI composition works with just harpies and a basilisk. It’s obviously better with cambion/etana but is still very strong without them.
I do not think the tournament requires any major changes in format. The changes to the prize structure were very good, if anything I would say allowing T2 drones (except sentries) back in but removing faction/augmented might be an option.
What was your preparation like?
Warlords kept the same ethic that Hydra Reloaded did. Our preparation was solid, training 3 times a week for about 3 hours a session, however it was sometimes more, sometimes less. The hardest part about practicing in such conditions was finding a practice partner dedicated enough as you are, and your leadership/pilots/logistics guys not burning out. We practiced a few times more than normal before the start of the AT due to missing tests because Singularity was down.
Did you encounter any problems with metagaming due to the lack of Duality?
Duality wasn’t so much a problem for us due to how we practice, in a wormhole. However I can see how for some others, this may have been a problem up until CCP introduced the new Tournament practice module that I think solved most of the metagaming/spying issues that people would have had. As to our own issues with metagaming, I do not think we encountered many, if any.
There were claims of collusion between you and Camel Empire, even leading Eve-Bet to release a statement on it. Comments on this?
The claims of collusion between both of our alliances was mainly instigated by members of a single alliance, that being Pandemic Legion. The reddit and Eve-O threads were started by PL members, and the Eve Bet statement, while attempting to look neutral, also subtly gave flame to any fire. Ironically Eve-Bet is also run by PL members I think. The idea of fixing matches against a closely matched opponent with close floating odds, limited amount, betting system simply doesn’t make sense. Regardless of whether it was an organised smear campaign or not, that’s how it looked and it was essentially one-sided. While people were busy posting stupid things, we practiced and won the tournament instead.
As to the actual facts of the matter. The Camel Empire are a small group of people who are of extreme skill and talent in the game. Their main problem is that they lack the ability to test internally due to the small nature of alliance. This is the same issue that Hydra/Warlords had. As I said earlier one of the hardest things to do is give practice partners of quality and dedication, Camel has this in spades. Now one of the things that happens when people practice together, is that you’ll kill your opponents ships, see the fits and see how it is FC’d. Practice partners means we know each other better than anyone else, that is as far as the partnership goes.
What was the hardest team/match?
The Camel Empire in the Winner Bracket semi-final. We got out executed, out drafted and out played hard. After then, I’d say Tuskers and PL.
How will prizes be distributed?
As leadership we will determine percentage values of how much each person helped. Our total prizes would be 100% of the value. Each person would be given a certain percentage depending on how much we feel they deserve. So Theory Crafters, logistics guys, FC’s and organizers will get a higher percentage than the line member. Everyone will be assessed on their practice attendance etc. Then once a percentage is assigned to people, they’ll have the option of exchanging part or all of that percentage into an AT Ship, which will cost a certain percent.
The first thing of course however, would be to ensuring that all the uniques that were lost were replaced and the costs of the tournament are reimbursed.
What factored into you choosing a Navy Scorpion as a flagship instead of say a Bhaalgorn?
The simple answer is we decided what meta we wanted to play and the Scorpion Navy fitted in to this perfect, and gave you good options to use the extra rules the Flagships get. Our Flagship for example cost nearly 100bn isk and could pump out around 1400-1500 cruise DPS with very good application because of faction Target Painters, officer webs, neuts and so on. Further more as I said above, Purple Mistress of the Shadow and a few other setups like Shallow Grave* could work very well with the flagship Scorpion Navy Issue. It brought a lot to the table.
The Bhaalgorn is a popular flagship because it is an amazing Battleship, arguably my favorite (to my killboard’s regret), however the way we were playing the tournament it’s bonuses did not seem as useful to us.
*Shallow Grave = Scorpion Navy Issue + logistics energy transfer setup with Tech 3 Destroyers, Cambions and 2 Claymores
The meta this year favored missiles more than anything else. What were some more subtle changes that you had to take into account in theorycrafting?
It’s hard to describe the subtle differences you have to make without describing the much larger ones. The reason the meta changed so drastically was that t2 and augmented drones, as well as bastion, were banned from the tournament. This means the insta-blap sentry meta or the assign and go afk of previous tournaments was no longer possible. Missiles bring a whole new set of challenges with them but the main one we had was making all our logistics vessels survive from long range missile spam. We recognized the power of remote repair drones but there are more subtle things out there such as changing prop mods, links, energy transferring to your logistics so it can perma repair, playing with the nerfed damps and having to protect from ECM and missile spam that caused a lot of problems for us.
What is the decision making process of bans/piloting?
Actually this is one of the things I truly love about Warlords, and about Hydra last year. There are many important things we discuss before the match. For example: How we will run the setup against each archetype of setup we could face. Then we listen as a team to a hype song, this could be Game of Feels, or Indestructible, whatever it is, it will be broadcasted on comms, everyone will be in silence and just get mad hyped for the tournament. Final checks are done, we make sure everyone has named their ship correctly to their BattleWarlord name and off we go to battle.
During the match things get very hectic, we have a primary FC who makes the main calls, but support groups can be in communication at the same time. Logistics can be communicating and DPS ships can be communicating all at the same time. So there is a shitload of talking, all of it relevant, but everyone listens to what they need to.
As to who decides what to ban/bring: Leadership gets together to discuss what we’re gonna ban and what we’ll do with what the enemy bans, but the final call us up to Kadesh, we just give our input.
As a pilot what is your favorite thing to do?
Other than winning, I think my favorite part of the tournament is landing at the arena and seeing what the opposition has. This is the most exciting time because you either know you have an easy win, because your setup is just better and counters them, or you have a super hard game. You then have to decide how you’re going to play that match, communicate it, do assignments and then actually execute.
I think another part that i really enjoy is being able to feel the flow during the actual game. It is a great feeling when you know you’re winning, but an even better feeling to be having to fight back against the odds and coming out on top.What kind of ships did you fly and what kind do you prefer to fly?
During last year I was a heretic/light missile support ship/Command ship pilot. This year I flew the Flagships, Command Ships and Battleships. I love the Bhaalgorn, it is my favorite ship in the game by a mile but sadly Warlords never used it. I must say though I very much enjoyed flying the energy transfer Eos. I just approached our logi, put on links and energy transfer and went AFK.Any final comments?
Overall we’d like to say thank you to CCP for an incredibly smooth and well run tournament. A big thank you to the people that watched us, bet on us and cheered for us during the finals/semi’s. Props to The Camel Empire for really bringing it in the finals, and of course honorable mention to PL, without that alliance in the tournament, warlords would have little motivation to go as hard as we did so thank you for being top quality competitors…..(and posters).Final shout out goes to Kadesh Priestess, the Warlords of the Deep Captain, this man was our head theorycrafter, motivator, resident Nazi, Stalin and Kim Jong Un, he ran a tight regime but got us the win.
Congratulations on your win and we’ll be looking forward to seeing you next year.
