~chron

This weekend is the last chance to get your rating up before the end of the season, so I’m sure a lot of people are going to be keeping an eye of the ladders. Last I checked Reflex and Jordons have pulled ahead in the Reckoning fglad race, leading by about 4 points. They’re holding #1 3s as well, which seems a bit greedy :>

There’s a lot of threads on the AJ Gladiator Bubble forum about the various reckoning brackets, not that they contain anything more than idle speculation.

Then after that you’ve got a week to finish grinding honor to buy next season’s offset pieces! Basically you’ll be looking at:

• 75000 honor saved
• 148900 honor from capped bg marks
• 1241 from the daily pvp quest
• 18540 from the wg weeklies
• 10000 from arena commendations (unique 5)
• as many wg commendations as you can afford!

This coming maintenance is also the last lot of arena points you’ll get before they reset, so don’t forget to spend whatever you have remaining on off-spec pieces. Or axes!

I’m a firm believer in customizing your spec to your playstyle, but I’m also intensely curious about the current flavor of the month in rogue specs. There’s a few interesting filler choices in the prep/mut build, and people’s builds tend to shift around with the differing metagame of each patch.

Recently I had a look at some Reckoning armories. There’s 44 rogues in top 200 2v2 teams currently, with 41 mut/prep specs between them.

This is the most popular prep/mut spec, which accounts for ten of the 41 specs. It takes Imp Kidney Shot, 2/3 Find Weakness, and (surprisingly to me) Initiative.

I experimented for a while with taking bleed talents in an attempt to make a dent in plate teams, but it never really worked very well. Even fully talented, rupture is a fairly small component of your damage.

The second most popular spec, used by 4 rogues, trades Imp KS for Focused Attacks (which would be my preference for 2s) and Initiative for Serrated Blades. Then there’s 3 with Imp KS and Serrated, 3 with FA and Initiative, and the rest is a long tail of people trying out weird stuff like Deadened Nerves, which I’m still very much in love with!

So it seems like the only arguments people are having are Imp KS vs FA, and Initiative vs Serrated Blades, which are both about 50/50. Glyph selection looks much the same as ever:

Your cookies, I cut them.

Only just saw this, but apparently the 3k rating cap was removed with 3.2 (see the Arena Junkies thread about it). Wonder if all those capped teams will start queueing again, or just sit on their rating?

Kalgan also posted some details about the restriction on fighting the same team twice in a row, which was something I’d seen a lot of speculation about:

There is currently a 2-minute queue time addition to play against a team you just played against (so, 2 minutes plus normal queue time to be matched against them). This time value was 5 minutes when 3.2 was first released, but was lowered to 2 minutes in a hotfix last Friday.

The purpose of the time addition is to make it less likely that an average team doing arena games for a night isn’t likely to run across the same team in many of their games for the session. We’ll continue to tune the system to make sure that it doesn’t feel like too much of a nuisance when there simply aren’t other teams within a reasonable rating range to play against.

BRB 4k!

It’s official: Two weeks left in season 6!

That means it’s time to start obsessing over armory updates and the SK-100! Arena Junkies have updated their famous calculator so you can have a look at the community’s best guesses at battlegroup population.

Here are some graphs for Reckoning 2s and 3s based on the official armory ladder and using AJ’s population estimates:

It’s also time to figure out what pieces you can buy with your last two weeks worth of points. Sadly I’m going to end up one week short of the MH+OH axe pair. Possibly MH fist would be a more sensible choice since I can use it with my current dagger. Sigh!

Finally here’s a list of the current 2v2 comps for your amusement:

I actually really didn’t expect the patch to hit today, because for whatever reason I assumed that the release of 3.2 would coincide with the end of the arena season. They did that last season, but it hasn’t been a regular thing in the past.

So, I was pleasantly surprised to learn this morning that I’d be equipping my axes that much sooner. I’m not sure how much longer the season is going to run, but it seems like they’re still committed to giving two weeks notice so probably either two or three weeks more. I wonder if they’ll have another one-week grace period between seasons this time around?

I’ve still been playing a lot of games (just about at the thousand mark for my rogue’s 2s, even) but because I’m working slightly more traditional hours at the moment and a lot of my teammates are in different timezones, we’re mostly confined to playing weekends.

I’ve been trying deep holy on my paladin since Dowser has been fiending for a 5s team for a while now. 5s as a paladin is very turret, but holy has slightly more interesting spell-selection than prot at least. With the beacon buffs this patch the spec is going to be a lot better in small bracket too, and I’m looking forward to trying it out for 3s (still DK/Elem/Paladin) when we play this week.

It seems like the prot changes (or, more commonly, the lack thereof) and the new sacred shield HoT are going to firmly cement deep prot as the 2v2 healing spec of choice, though. Unless I’ve missed something, it only seems to be getting better.

On my warrior I’ve been struggling around in the 1600s with a friend’s even-more-undergeared druid alt. Playing in that bracket and not being able to beat awful keyboard turners because of the gear disparity and your partners’ inexperience is probably one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever encountered in this game. I’m hoping there will be an easy-to-obtain upgrade to the destroyer at some point, since it’s going to be fairly far behind the curve next season, and I’m not interested in raiding on this character at all.

My rogue’s 2s is rollercoastering around based on the percentage of druid/plate teams in the queue, but 3.2 contains some significant druid (purgable innervate) and dk (2 min IBF, dodgeable frost strikes) changes in addition to the shaman buffs so I’m hoping we can push that a bit higher. We had a great 3s session the other night playing disc/rogue/elem and pushed that team past 2500 for the first time, which was pretty cool, too. We’re running into issues keeping our priest alive against some compositions (she tends to crack under pressure a bit) but it’s something we can improve on and there wasn’t really anybody that could beat us consistently except a 2700+ wizard cleave. And really good rmp, which thankfully most of them aren’t.

I’ve been streaming some brackets on xfire but I have it set to friends only at the moment, so hit me up in game if you want the details.