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!

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.

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!

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!

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:

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.

I always seem to neglect the blog when I’m on holiday, there’s too many other fascinating things to occupy me, such as bear-style hibernation and re-released Lucasarts adventure games.

Arena-land has been busy as always. We’re deep into season six now, and Azuba and I are gradually climbing the ladder in an attempt to de-throne our realm’s current #1, a cleverly named horde-side DK/Druid team. I think they might be sitting on their rating at the moment, since they haven’t moved from 2527 in quite some time. At least we’ve built up a lead over our closest alliance competitors, Dues’ holy/unholy team.

I’ve been tempted to start writing a rogue/shaman strategy guide since over the last few weeks there have been a phenomenal number of “how do I shot it” posts on AJ about the comp. I’m no expert by any means, but it’s a very underplayed comp, and the dearth of reference material is unfortunate to say the least. A lot of the (primarly PvE-focused) rogue blogs I follow have also mentioned arena in some capacity, and It’d be nice to have something introductory to be able to point people to. Having played close to a thousand 2s games this season, we’ve picked up a few leet tricks too.

Actually nah, I’m pretty bad, but I couldn’t think of a better excuse for linking that picture.

We’ve also been playing RLS a bit, up to about 2330. Partly because Azuba was interested in playing elemental more seriously (it’s been his PvE mainspec for some time) and partly because our warlock only logs on about 10% of the time, we started a second team with a discipline priest to play “lightning RMP“¹, with some success. We were using a second charter for it at the beginning, just in case it turned out to be an awful comp, we didn’t want to tank the rating too much. Besides that, we also thought it would be quite amusing to fill up the Eldre’Thalas 3v3 ladder with team names of the form “Azuba is %s”, hopefully getting sillier and more elaborate each time like a kind of space goat Chuck Norris.

ANYWAY. The comp is actually really fun, and plays a fair bit like RMP does. Although a shaman doesn’t have the control of a frost mage (they do have some), they bring a lot of other defensive options to the table like shocks, grounds, and off-heals. Their DPS isn’t as reliant on freeze effects either, which gives you an edge killing hard-to-snare classes like druids or paladins. And you can’t forget lolthunderstorm off BEM!

And just like with a destruction warlock, you can get some fantastic 100-0 gibs if the shaman is left alone to freecast.

Eventually we got bored of switching teams twice a week and losing our PR (turns out a 2400 3s team is worth a lot of points) so we have merged the two teams into the latest charter, and we’re currently working on grinding Inamorata’s PR up on that team.

My gear is almost done now; just gloves next week and then throwing weapons the week after, then I’ll finally be able to start saving for some combat weapons. Possibly even axes, depending on when the season-end announcement happens.

Apart from that: I’ve been duelling a lot of rogues (Garotte is not as good an opener as you think, Splakken), accumulating fans, and fighting with people on the realm forums about whether PvE is harder than PvP. My priest is still 74, but I did grind inscription at least!

¹ There’s probably a better name for disc/rogue/elemental. Depending on how fixed you consider the ordering rules, you can abbreviate it as RPS!