~chron

I got my priest the 1h weapon this week, which was something like +400 spell power over the heirloom staff I was using previously. Of course, since the heirloom staff was Headmaster’s Charge, this is a huge downgrade in the visual department, but you can’t have everything! Now I just need to replace his s4 wand, and he has a full set of serviceable pvp gear, even if the set pieces are still mostly i213.

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.

chronic Arena

I’m trying not to regurgitate too many blue posts, but this one is too good to pass up:

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!

chronic Arena

Too lazy for a real post, but here’s Patch 3.2.2’s best kept secret:

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.

chronic World of Warcraft

Too lazy to do any real graphs today, but here’s some OG ascii gladiator breakdowns:

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.

chronic Arena

Nail-biting season end! We’ve been sitting on our 2s rating for a couple of weeks but we still needed to make some progress on our 3s team to get the title for our priest. Well, that, and Azuba wouldn’t be satisfied unless he could get glad as both resto and elem. And now he’s putting an enhance set together! But I digress.

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.

chronic Arena Arena, pvp, reckoning, Rogue, rps, season-6