Notice the huge spike of games which ended after 20k damage (roughly a single health bar for each of us) where presumably some serious CC chain happened right off the bat or (more likely) the rogue got opened on out of LOS and died in two globals. Quite a lot of the games Azuba dies in are games like this, most often from hard-to-peel cleave teams like rogue/dk/healer that blow cooldowns to get a kill at the start.

Protip: don’t ask Ina about that one game where he took 220000 damage or you’re liable to be death coiled. Yes, it was double melee.

Here’s the same thing for wins instead of losses:

Note that we win a huge amount of games in which our warlock is left alone. I don’t think that will surprise anybody! Note also that there are games where our warlock gets ridiculously trained and we still win, like this – Same cleave as before, check the ret’s damage! Apparently we can also win games where I get crapped on all match, like this double caster priest on RoV.

You can’t see it from the graph, but there’s also wins where nobody takes any damage, usually when some 2k cleave champion warrior charges behind a Nagrand pillar, trinkets KS and dies in a dismantle duration to tricks conflag lava burst.

Thinking about it, though, the number of respecs doesn’t tell you enough by itself. It’s a function of how rich you are, how much you raid, how long you’ve been playing, and whether or not you have dual spec, as well as how much you like experimenting (which I guess is what I really wanted to measure). Still, it’s more interesting than the “emblems of conquest looted vs 3v3 rating” graph I did along with it.

My rogue is at 71 respecs currently.

• Two Bads Make a Good, Holy/Prot Paladin + Unholy DK
• The Fact of Life, Resto Shaman + Mut/Prep Rogue
• Azuba is Uber, Resto Shaman + Mut/Prep Rogue + Destruction Warlock

Note the subtle omission of my paladin’s 3s, keep grindin’ that gear Milkduds. Anyway.

Some general comments:

• RoL is officially my worst map, though I’m certainly still not fond of RoV, especially with aggressive priests¹.
• My rogue does ~80% of the damage of a death knight these days, and isn’t too far off with rets and warriors either.
• Fact’s mage ratio is low because mages only ever play in double dps and double dps is horrible. Mostly because of glaring rogue and shaman survivability issues ;)
• The counter for shaman is apparently better shaman. Hi2u grounding fakecast metagame?
• Druids are the most annoying healer for all three teams, RoV mana burn notwithstanding.
• Warriors are the most difficult melee to peel in 3s.
• Our RLS is 80% win versus RMP. Some of those were probably at low ratings, I guess.
• 16k Chaos Bolts through Pain Suppression are balanced.

It’s harder to get a good sample size for 3s because of the enormous variety of compositions. And by variety, I mean “which healer would you like with your two melee?” Still, you can see some interesting trends.

If you’re an E’T armory stalker like me you might also enjoy reports for Stanso’s Rogue/Priest, Endarl’s Rogue/Priest (oh look, 70% win ratio on RoV), and Balandil’s Rogue/DK (not even kidding).

¹ Which is exactly all of them these days, thanks for nothing Hydra 5.

And Reckoning 3v3:

Note that the 3v3 graph is only the top 100 teams, since the total population is so much lower. Since last time somebody asked me about what ratings these graphs represented, note that the 200th 2s team is 2178 and the 100th 3s team is 1952.

Penance cooldown is going back up, maim is an actual stun (maybe?) and innervate is getting a pretty decent PvP buff. Most importantly from a rogue POV, they’re removing spammable blood boil!

I mentioned in my last post about paladin glyphs that using Glyph of Turn Evil was basically a metagame choice. Since then, I’ve seen maybe two death knights in arena, and not many more warlocks, so I think it’s time to retire it in favor of something more exciting.

So, as usual, it may be educational to see what everyone else is doing…

(Reckoning 2v2, top 200 teams)

Today I’m defining “holy paladins” as paladins who have holy shock and at least one point in unyielding faith which should hopefully narrow it down to PvP healing specs only. I’m not going to worry about deep prot healing specs, at least… not yet.

Here’s the same chart run against the infamous Bloodlust battlegroup:

Note that the top 200 teams actually goes right down to about 2k rating at the moment, so a lot of these people are probably not superstars.

Druid/Warrior making a comeback, believe it! Maybe all the AJ “season 3 was arena’s golden age” cyclone apologists will get what they’re after.

However, it poses an interesting problem from a data mining point of view – how can you ascertain the intent of a spec now, since a player can only have one set of gear equipped at a time? In the past I’ve tried to make educated guesses about whether players are specced for PvP by looking at whether they have certain trinkets equipped, or are over a certain resilience threshold.

You can still do that to some extent since one of the specs will be marked as active, but it’s much less solid, and of course doesn’t allow for the possibility that both of a player’s specs are intended for PvP; different arena brackets, perhaps.

You could possibly check for the existence of certain talents – Master of Deception for rogues might be a good candidate, but not every class has talents which are so clear-cut. It’s a brittle implementation, and very class-specific.

The fact there’s no arena season going at the moment means there’s no real pressure to re-glyph immediately, and it’s entirely possible people are concentrating on PvE while Ulduar is shiny and new. Nevertheless, here’s a graph of glyphs for mut/prep rogues (the only requirement for this is that they have a point in mutilate overkill¹ and a point in prep) in top 300 Reckoning 2v2 teams.

There are currently 40 such rogues, out of 65 rogues total in the top 300 teams.

I’m currently running Mutilate, Vigor, and Gouge. I’ll have to see how much time I spend peeling death knights off my healer to decide whether the Gouge glyph is worth keeping; I can see a stronger case for Prep now that Death Knights and Paladins both do more of their damage with their melee weapons, and now that warriors are getting a few (much-needed) buffs.

¹ I’m doing the analysis with overkill instead of mutilate since there’s a display bug that sometimes makes your point in mutilate disappear. I doubt there’s many rogues with overkill and prep but not mutilate. Stranger things have happened though!

There’s 710 total if you add them up. You’d expect there to be 800 (200 teams * 2 members * 2 profs each) so I guess there’s a few people who don’t have two professions yet. Slackers!

I’m not sure how many of those people would have chosen their professions solely for PvP reasons; my guess is not that many. The figures do put something of a dent in my “every team over 2200 is running double GLG” theory :>

Also: according to the latest mmo-champion notes, PTR 9757 includes a fairly substantial GLG nerf.

Total games played: 483 (286 wins, 197 losses, ratio: 0.592)

            Death Knight/Rogue =>   6   0   6  1.000  282.33
          Death Knight/Warrior =>   4   0   4  1.000  202.00
                  Mage/Warlock =>   3   0   3  1.000  132.67
                 Druid/Warrior =>   3   0   3  1.000  217.00
                Hunter/Warrior =>   2   0   2  1.000  265.00
                Priest/Warrior =>   2   0   2  1.000  169.50
                 Druid/Warlock =>   1   0   1  1.000  637.00
               Warrior/Warrior =>   1   0   1  1.000  183.00
                  Mage/Warrior =>   1   0   1  1.000  252.00
            Death Knight/Druid =>  17   1  18  0.944  181.06
                    Druid/Mage =>  11   1  12  0.917  227.67
             Death Knight/Mage =>   5   1   6  0.833  198.50
                     Mage/Mage =>   4   1   5  0.800  282.00
               Paladin/Warrior =>  19   6  25  0.760  434.92
                Priest/Warlock =>   6   2   8  0.750  329.00
                Paladin/Shaman =>   3   1   4  0.750  361.25
           Death Knight/Hunter =>   3   1   4  0.750  132.00
                 Paladin/Rogue =>  11   4  15  0.733  303.13
                 Druid/Paladin =>  11   4  15  0.733  277.73
                   Mage/Priest =>   5   2   7  0.714  510.14
                  Druid/Shaman =>   7   3  10  0.700  394.30
                Hunter/Paladin =>   6   3   9  0.667  215.33
                 Hunter/Shaman =>   4   2   6  0.667  350.83
                 Hunter/Priest =>   4   2   6  0.667  244.67
                  Druid/Hunter =>   8   5  13  0.615  194.69
           Death Knight/Shaman =>   3   2   5  0.600  261.60
                   Druid/Rogue =>  13   9  22  0.591  203.55
                    Mage/Rogue =>  25  19  44  0.568  174.80
                  Priest/Rogue =>  21  18  39  0.538  278.62
          Death Knight/Paladin =>  39  39  78  0.500  235.38
                  Mage/Paladin =>   8  10  18  0.444  189.83
               Paladin/Warlock =>   8  10  18  0.444  346.11
               Paladin/Paladin =>   3   4   7  0.429  260.71
           Death Knight/Priest =>   6   9  15  0.400  266.80
                Shaman/Warrior =>   3   5   8  0.375  239.25
                Paladin/Priest =>   3   5   8  0.375  270.88
                Shaman/Warlock =>   2   5   7  0.286  294.29
                  Rogue/Shaman =>   5  14  19  0.263  282.42
                   Hunter/Mage =>   0   3   3  0.000  221.00
                 Rogue/Warlock =>   0   2   2  0.000  309.50
                  Druid/Priest =>   0   2   2  0.000  211.00
                   Druid/Druid =>   0   1   1  0.000  228.00
     Death Knight/Death Knight =>   0   1   1  0.000  136.00

Here’s the individual class breakdown:

                       Warrior =>  35  11  46  0.761  338.04
                         Druid =>  71  26  97  0.732  237.60
                        Hunter =>  27  16  43  0.628  227.05
                          Mage =>  62  37  99  0.626  215.40
                  Death Knight =>  83  54 137  0.606  228.36
                       Paladin => 111  86 197  0.563  279.03
                         Rogue =>  81  66 147  0.551  239.87
                        Priest =>  47  40  87  0.540  292.72
                       Warlock =>  20  19  39  0.513  322.46
                        Shaman =>  27  32  59  0.458  307.47

And finally, by arena:

            Blade's Edge Arena =>  79  45 124  0.637  245.93
                Dalaran Sewers =>  52  33  85  0.612  260.46
                 Nagrand Arena =>  50  33  83  0.602  310.23
            Ruins of Lordaeron =>  67  49 116  0.578  254.07
             The Ring of Valor =>  38  37  75  0.507  236.37

It’s interesting to constrast this with rogue/shaman – this team is much stronger on BEM (Orgrimmar still sucks!) and much much stronger against Warrior teams in general. Shaman teams seem to be the hardest for us, though my rogue/shaman has around a 0.5 ratio versus dk/paladin so I think that’s definitely something we can work on. Our record versus mirrors of exactly 0.500 is pretty amusing.

And warlocks are horrible >:(