Tremble in fear, Saurfang!

And, well, there aren’t any left.

I don’t have a single serious arena team across my characters right now, and while I don’t mind messing around with new comps, at some point it’s a bit frustrating when your teammates don’t have the same expectations that you do. Recently I seem to end every session yelling at somebody or rage logging, and it’s not what I signed up for.

I don’t quite have the energy to server transfer and try and find more serious partners; the timezone (and accent!) makes it difficult enough, and awful rogues are twelve for ten cents anyway.

I don’t mean to complain; I’ve been having a lot of fun playing Torchlight and Borderlands, and what I’ve played so far of Dragon Age has been breathtaking. But there’s nothing out there quite like wow arenas, and I miss it a lot.

Stay in touch, everybody :>

Upon reflection, that might be a coincidence.

Mu linked me to this AJ thread which details how you can click on another character as you log in and for the duration of your session you’ll be using that second character’s model. Since you choose the character you can customize exactly how they look, and unlike MPQ hacking it won’t affect other players with the same race.

Of course it’s temporary, client-side only, and it will revert if you get polymorphed or shift forms. Still, it’s a lot of fun to see how you’d look as another race. I’ve come to the conclusion that every class is improved significantly by using the male undead animations.

I was trying to convince Keys that it’s great operant conditioning for priests, since failure to Shadow Word: Death an incoming polymorph will result in you becoming a fat dwarf again. A fate worse than death! Unfortunately, SW:D breaks poly a split second after it hits, so you lose the form regardless.

In other news, they’re still trying to kill prot paladins:

• Sacred Shield: The damage absorption effect from this ability now triggers only once every 30 seconds.
• Infusion of Light: This talent now also reduces the cooldown on the effect of Sacred Shield by 12/24 seconds.

That should probably do it.

Since Azuba has been away from wow for the last few weeks while he studies for his finals, my rogue has been team hopping around helping people gear up and trying new comps. I’ve played most of the “viable” rogue comps now, and it’s been fun learning the pros and cons of each one, even if some of my partners have been enormously mediocre. I know nobody cares about 2s any more, but I think MP rogue + IS resto druid is one of the best comps you can play right now.

(but maybe that’s just me, I always did love outlast and ridic cc chains)

My priest has caught up on gear, and is now sitting at around 1050 resil and 2700 sp with 2/5 relentless and the t1 wep + oh. Still a few deadly pieces to replace, but at least now when I die I feel like it’s my own fault and not my gear!

The thing I love most about priests is the fact that sometimes you’re at 30% health with no hots and casting mind blast is still the right decision. You have a lot of choices to make at every stage of the match, though the flipside of that is you can get punished pretty badly for making the wrong ones.

Speaking of bad choices: rogue/dk/disc. What a spectacularly shit comp that is. Let me know if anyone has a serious non-cleave 3v3 opening for a rogue :3

The VODs are already up on Gotfrag.com if you want to have a look.”

It’s actually surprisingly painless to gear up a character from zero; especially with the surplus honor you get from levelling in Alterac Valley. The tier 1 weapons are placed such that you can get them without a serious gear investment, which is good, since that’s the earliest pvp weapon you can get these days. Wintergrasp commendations being BoA mean that you can put your alts to good use farming honor for the characters you’re actively gearing.

On my rogue, I tried the 44/2/25 MP build that everyone’s talking about, but I really can’t stand the poison application and burst damage of running DP/WP. I can see how it might work in a cleave like RRP or RDKP where you’re mostly training a single target, but even in 2s when I was jousting with another rogue the entire match, my DP stacks would fall off way too often.

We have a change for Vanish in place for 3.3. You will get to try it out soon ™. As promised, if it proves a significant buff to rogues, we may have to compensate elsewhere. Just because it hasn’t worked as intended doesn’t mean it will be balanced when it does.

Call me a pessimist, but I’ll believe it when I see it!

Wow has been pretty quiet the last week, but Az and I have been having some fun levelling a rogue/mage team with his new mage alt. It’s an incredibly different playstyle to rogue+healer, and it’s been an interesting learning experience for both of us. It definitely requires a lot more finesse than tunnel-visioning death knights with snd rolling. No one man should eat this much strudel, though.

I also discovered Puzzle Quest (a little late, I know) which takes a leaf from the popcap “crack cocaine casual gaming” playbook, only this time it has copious RPG elements and endless stuff to unlock. Highly recommended if you like bright colors, spam clicking, ever-increasing numbers, and Johnny-style spell combos.

In other news, I’m getting my wisdom teeth out this Friday, and my flatmates have scattered to the four corners of the earth, but are somehow all playing Mass Effect. It’s going to be a weird week!

AV now has a separate 70-79 bracket, worth roughly half the XP. I believe the heirloom items are supposed to work on battleground XP now, but that’s still a pretty huge nerf for levelling. I was hoping they’d bring the other battlegrounds up to AV level rather than nerfing it this way, but oh well.

I hope everyone is excited about getting shit on by feral druids!

EDIT: I take it back!

The experience gains in Alterac Valley were not adjusted in patch 3.2.2. The gains were percentage-based according to level brackets. Since the level brackets changed in 3.2.2, the experience gains decreased as a result. Because of this, we’ve added an across-the-board increase to experience gains in all Battlegrounds to compensate for the adverse affect on Alterac Valley that came as a result of the level bracket changes, as well as make gaining experience in our other Battlegrounds more viable.

Reckoning 2v2 Gladiators

         Druid =>  34 ##########################################################
       Paladin =>  29 #################################################
  Death Knight =>  27 ##############################################
         Rogue =>  25 ###########################################
        Priest =>  20 ##################################
       Warrior =>  18 ###############################
       Warlock =>  11 ###################
        Shaman =>   9 ###############
        Hunter =>   3 #####
          Mage =>   2 ###

Reckoning 3v3 Gladiators

         Rogue =>  18 ##########################################################
        Priest =>  17 #######################################################
          Mage =>  13 ##########################################
       Paladin =>  11 ###################################
       Warrior =>  10 ################################
        Shaman =>   9 #############################
       Warlock =>   8 ##########################
  Death Knight =>   7 #######################
         Druid =>   6 ###################
        Hunter =>   4 #############

Reckoning 5v5 Gladiators

        Priest =>   4 ##########################################################
       Paladin =>   4 ##########################################################
  Death Knight =>   3 ############################################
        Hunter =>   3 ############################################
       Warlock =>   2 #############################
         Druid =>   2 #############################
         Rogue =>   1 ###############
       Warrior =>   1 ###############
          Mage =>   1 ###############
        Shaman =>   1 ###############

Reckoning Any-bracket Gladiators (no dups)

         Druid =>  38 ##########################################################
       Paladin =>  38 ##########################################################
         Rogue =>  37 ########################################################
        Priest =>  34 ####################################################
  Death Knight =>  32 #################################################
       Warrior =>  27 #########################################
        Shaman =>  18 ###########################
       Warlock =>  17 ##########################
          Mage =>  14 #####################
        Hunter =>   8 ############

Reckoning Multi-bracket Gladiators

         Rogue =>   7 ##########################################################
        Priest =>   6 ##################################################
       Paladin =>   6 ##################################################
         Druid =>   4 #################################
  Death Knight =>   4 #################################
       Warlock =>   3 #########################
          Mage =>   2 #################
       Warrior =>   2 #################
        Hunter =>   2 #################
        Shaman =>   1 ########

Jordons (priest), Furen (dk), and Substantial (lock) got glad in all three brackets.

After initially tanking the rating a bit, we had a couple of great nights of 3v3 games, despite there being two different enhance/warrior cleave variants taking turns trucking us down. Sallice’s team in particular is crazy strong, and though we forced them to a close 2v2 once, we never managed to beat them. I really think enhancement is one of the most underrated specs in the game right now. High skill cap, I guess?

As you’d expect there was a huge amount of RMP in the last week, and we’ve gotten much more solid against that comp recently. By the end we got into a great rhythm, when the dispel magic is flowing freely and Azuba is in the zone frost mages get absolutely nothing done against us. We decided to call it at 2668, which was around 25th at the time, and then there was nothing to do but sit back and refresh the armory every half hour until the servers went down. Well, and finish up zuba’s latest nerd point fascination.

Looks like we’re in good shape though: the 2s ended up 81st (cutoff: 97) and the 3s ended up 31st (cutoff: 36) and that’s without factoring inactive teams in. Truly/Tama on horde side have been sitting on their 2527-rated 2v2 team for half the season and we laughed when they ended up tied for 98th, but with 5 or 6 inactives in that bracket I think they’ll still sneak in.

(taken just as the servers went down, so not quite up-to-date)

Great season! There were highs, there were lows, there were occasional prot warriors (complete with aoe spell reflect, rofl). There was a lot of sitting around Dalaran Sewers waiting for the 5s queue to pop. Huge thanks to everyone in the Reckoning arena community and especially to my fantastic teammates for making it possible.

Bring the player, not the class! See you in s7.

I only just saw the Master Poisoner change, I’m guessing this is their idea for increasing assassination sustained damage slightly without affecting PvP burst. Seems like a reasonable change, although it does dumb down the spec a bit more for raiding since you no longer have to time your envenoms after a DP tick.

I wonder if it will make using offhand deadly a good choice as PvP HfB?

BONUS: 2v2 Comp breakdown for the Reckoning top 100 after the dust has settled.