~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!

chronic Arena

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!

chronic Arena

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:

chronic Arena gchart, graphs, reckoning

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.

chronic Arena 3.2, Arena, Paladin, Rogue, warrior

Oh, hey. It’s been a while!

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!

chronic Arena, Rogue Arena, rls, Rogue, rps