~chron

100 tokens later: the hat is mine.

It’s looking pretty certain that the new arena season will begin tonight, we’ve had confirmation both from the in-game goblins and the blues. Good thing too, jousting can only entertain one for so long!

For my rogue I’m going to be playing more or less the same spec to start the season; prep/mutilate. Despite neither rogues nor shaman getting any significant changes I’m still pretty excited about the prospects. Both classes got some amazing glyphs (ES in particular is crazy) and most of the specs that were giving us problems (largely overtuned bs like holy, shadowfrost and survival) are going to be significantly more beatable. There’s enough small changes (tremor totem, PPM poisons, etc) and metagame shifts that I’m pretty sure rogue/shaman is going to be a competitive comp this season. And hey: deadly throw missile speed increased!

I think my rogue play has come a long way over the last few months and continues to improve. I’m by no means a top-tier player but the necessities of season 5 have taught me a lot about pooling and burst damage, about cooldown management, about positioning and control, and about opponent prediction and foresight. One thing I would really like to do for S6 is learn to play Shadowdance at a competitive level – Az and I talked about playing elemental/shd (or possibly elemental/cb+shs) since there’s some fairly strong elemental improvements in 3.1. I don’t know how well it would work, but it might be fun!

My other goal for this season is to forge a strong 3s team. It looks like Obs is planning on gearing his warlock this time round so RLS would be a possibility. Endarl also mentioned wanting to play rogue rogue priest. I played mercenary on a few different teams in S5 but I vastly prefer playing with the people I know well. Of course it helps that they’re all pretty good players ;)

For my paladin, I’m still lamenting the loss of Divine Purpose and Repentance from my build; the wotlk playstyle for holy has been significantly more aggressive and both of them were interesting buttons that increased the skill cap of the class substantially. I’m not really looking forward to returning to the TBC style of pillaring and FoL spam, but Divine Sacrifice and Aura Mastery are both very nice talents and I’m willing to give oldschool holy/prot a chance.

Endarl says the arms changes herald the return of paladin/warrior, which is probably just wishful thinking on his part because he plays with a betrayer warrior. I’m excited to see how the metagame for this season turns out!

On live both Exorcism and glyphed Shadowflame (hi 70% snare) go through Cloak of Shadows. Anyone know if this is working as intended? Anyone seen anything else that goes through CloS but seems like it shouldn’t?

3.1 has brought some new changes to the armory, notably the inclusion of both specs on the talents page, as well as the associated glyphs. I’ve been curious about glyph choices for a while, so my obligatory Friday graphing extravaganza is going to focus on PvP glyphing.

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!

Some testing over on AJ has unearthed an interesting rogue bug. On live, the Glyph of Backstab currently reads:

Increases the damage dealt by Backstab to stunned and incapacitated targets by 20%.

What it actually seems to do on live is increase all your damage versus stunned and incapacitated targets. I tested it myself on training dummies (with 2x [Main Gauche] and a [Lovely Black Dress] and it definitely increases mutilate damage; people in the AJ thread report everything from evis to white damage benefiting from the multiplier.

That makes it a pretty amazing burst damage glyph!

Of course, it’s getting changed to a worthless attempt at a PvE glyph in 3.1 (which seems weird to me, surely they don’t think Shadowdance is overpowered right now?) but unless they ninja-hotfix it you can still take advantage of it until then!

(Sadly, it probably won’t make our hardest matchup much easier)

EDIT: Here’s the official solution – fixed in 3.1, but they’re upping the Sinister Calling damage bonus on hemo and backstab from 5% to 10% so subtlety isn’t hit too hard. Interesting change, since it’s shifting some sub damage from burst to sustained.