~chron

Blizzard have introduced a new feature to the official Armory: arena records.

Basically if you go to any team page (Here’s my rogue’s current 2v2, for example) you get a couple of extra tabs along the top that let you see the match history and opponent history.

The Match history shows you a pretty fancy line graph of your rating and you can hover over individual nodes on the line to see information about each particular game. It has a decent set of filters down the bottom allowing you to set dates and rating cutoffs or to find individual teams, and it has a small graph below the main one that shows your rating change over a much larger timescale and allows you to select the display window for the main graph. Very slick!

It even shows you cool information about your rating delta for the window you have selected and your average rating change per game. If you click one of the games it takes you to a page with a detailed breakdown for that game with damage/healing done, fight map and length, rating changes, and all that good stuff.

Finally at the bottom you have a tabular view of your games which you can sort in various ways.

The Match History page shows you a tabular view of all the teams you’ve played against with their win/loss ratio and total rating delta vs that team.

This is an incredibly awesome feature and I’m looking forward to a lot more detailed and accurate arena statistics now that this information is publicly available – goodbye forever, Arena Historian!

You can have a look at the Arena Reports FAQ, the Opponent History FAQ, and the Match Report FAQ. The original blue post about it is here.

Remember all the forum posts back in the day about how core the Mortal Strike effect was to PvP? How everything was balanced around its presence? We laughed and said “nobody would take a ret paladin or an enhance shaman over a rogue unless they can do twice as much damage!”

Who’s laughing now?

On my rogue I’ve been doing 2s with Azuba as resto, so we’ve been talking a fair bit about shaman gearing and different spec possibilities recently.

I ran a similar report to the paladin one I did the other day with the current top 200 Reckoning 2v2 teams – restoration shaman only. I won’t do any analysis since I don’t know that much about shaman, but I thought I’d post the output here anyway in case people were interested.

Here are the results!

As a bonus there are Google Chart URLs with each of the statistics if you prefer to consume your data in pie form. Here’s the “weapon equipped in main hand” one for your viewing pleasure:

Note that I have completely excluded “PvE geared” (ie, no Medallion) shaman from the report. Here’s one more pie, the partner class. Looks like shaman have a few viable choices:

I’ve been thinking recently about re-gemming for survivability on my Holy Paladin, since I’m only at about 550 resilience in my current gear. It’s not every fight that I feel like I need it, but I’m pretty happy with my throughput (healing is only really a problem if I get CCd or school-locked) and mana usage. I have about 18.5k mana and either JotW or drinking (depending on the comp) in concert with Divine Plea mean we very rarely lose on mana to a team that isn’t aggressively mana burning.

(The deadly libram will also be a great throughput upgrade, I just wanted to replace all my blues first!)

So, as always, let’s go to the Armory and see what high-rated Paladins are doing. My sample this time around is Paladins from the top 200 2v2 teams on Reckoning, and I’ve only included people wearing pvp gear (medallion or human with >100 resil) at the time of the survey. I’ve also explicitly excluded meta gems since there isn’t really any contention there: int + manarestore all the way.

Here’s the initial results. I’m assuming the strength gems are from people caught in their ret gear (but still as holy spec), but I didn’t actually look them up. I’ve also excluded the quality of the gems, since it didn’t really seem important for my purposes. The data set consists of 75 characters between ~2750 and ~2140, with 784 total gems.

                                         Intellect => 149 | 20.93%
                                       Spell Power => 113 | 15.87%
                                 Resilience Rating =>  96 | 13.48%
                         Spell Power and Intellect =>  54 | 07.58%
                 Spell Power and Resilience Rating =>  51 | 07.16%
                           Spell Power and Stamina =>  49 | 06.88%
                     Resilience Rating and Stamina =>  44 | 06.18%
            Spell Power and Critical Strike Rating =>  41 | 05.76%
                             Intellect and Stamina =>  29 | 04.07%
                            Critical Strike Rating =>  19 | 02.67%
                                           Stamina =>  18 | 02.53%
              Spell Power and Mana every 5 seconds =>  18 | 02.53%
                Intellect and Mana every 5 seconds =>  10 | 01.40%
                                      Haste Rating =>   5 | 00.70%
                Critical Strike Rating and Stamina =>   5 | 00.70%
                      Spell Power and Haste Rating =>   3 | 00.42%
                                          Strength =>   2 | 00.28%
                              Strength and Stamina =>   2 | 00.28%
                                        Hit Rating =>   2 | 00.28%
             Haste Rating and Mana every 5 seconds =>   1 | 00.14%
               Strength and Critical Strike Rating =>   1 | 00.14%

We can do some basic categorization of the gems, too. I’ve divided them into throughput (spell power, crit, haste), longevity (intellect, mp5), utility (hit rating) and defense (stamina, resilience). I realise these categories aren’t entirely accurate because most paladin stats affect multiple areas (for example, via Illumination), but it’s a good starting point.

                                        throughput => 181 | 25.42%
                                         longevity => 159 | 22.33%
                                           defense => 158 | 22.19%
                                defense/throughput => 105 | 14.75%
                              longevity/throughput =>  73 | 10.25%
                                 defense/longevity =>  29 | 04.07%
                                             other =>   2 | 00.28%
                                           utility =>   2 | 00.28%
                                     defense/other =>   2 | 00.28%
                                  other/throughput =>   1 | 00.14%

Then maybe it’s useful to see totals for each category, if you count a “pure gem” as 2 points for its category and the hybrid gems for 1 point in each:

                                        throughput => 541 | 37.99%
                                           defense => 452 | 31.74%
                                         longevity => 420 | 29.49%
                                             other =>   7 | 00.49%
                                           utility =>   4 | 00.28%

From looking at that it seems most people are balancing their gemming across the three major categories, and browsing through the individual results seems to support that. Let’s see one last view over the data, since this is starting to get long.

This table contains a row for each paladin, with a column for each of the three major categories defined above – the cells show what proportion of that paladin’s total gems are used on that category. Hybrid gems are split across both categories as in the previous report, and strength/hit gems are ignored although they do still count in the totals.

          name throughput  longevity    defense
    Varluneyna       0.33       0.33       0.33
        Heimen       0.45       0.35       0.20
         Jeuce       0.38       0.50       0.13
        Haydee       0.39       0.11       0.50
    Unicornica       0.50       0.50       0.00
       Wcstyle       0.60       0.10       0.30
      Mchaggis       0.45       0.23       0.32
        Aiiden       0.44       0.38       0.19
        Braves       0.36       0.45       0.18
          Gina       0.50       0.22       0.28
        Dercas       0.43       0.43       0.14
     Mournhold       0.71       0.29       0.00
       Beldara       0.39       0.28       0.33
         Oryun       0.59       0.14       0.27
      Dimarius       0.56       0.44       0.00
      Tygrilol       0.50       0.17       0.33
       Sasorii       0.38       0.63       0.00
   Solidarityx       0.46       0.46       0.08
        Ieetoh       0.10       0.00       0.20
       Reepent       0.25       0.50       0.25
      Harumaru       0.55       0.45       0.00
      Magicpie       0.39       0.39       0.22
        Pummie       0.44       0.56       0.00
     Holynight       0.44       0.33       0.22
   Redemptionz       0.44       0.39       0.17
     Derreidos       0.41       0.59       0.00
     Femaleftw       0.44       0.28       0.28
     Diplomacy       0.50       0.50       0.00
           Qiu       0.65       0.15       0.20
        Gellin       0.45       0.55       0.00
        Stylec       0.25       0.50       0.25
         Aurog       0.35       0.45       0.20
         Kaara       0.40       0.20       0.40
      Mcjordie       0.50       0.35       0.15
        Arasof       0.50       0.06       0.44
  Bubbliciouss       0.61       0.28       0.11
   Eskimopally       0.50       0.25       0.25
         Zyrxy       0.38       0.50       0.12
   Lostprophet       0.56       0.17       0.28
       Valefor       0.40       0.35       0.25
     Sylvanisa       0.44       0.33       0.22
       Luncarn       0.30       0.70       0.00
     Feladence       0.50       0.50       0.00
    Smokealarm       0.39       0.33       0.28
         Ermad       0.28       0.72       0.00
   Appocalypse       0.50       0.11       0.39
        Macabe       0.38       0.63       0.00
        Fiaraa       0.50       0.35       0.15
         Trawn       0.56       0.19       0.25
   Moomoobeezy       0.38       0.38       0.25
        Oculis       0.19       0.56       0.25
   Espectrolol       0.50       0.30       0.20
      Romulisa       0.50       0.28       0.22
         Clint       0.38       0.42       0.21
       Kehrsyn       0.40       0.00       0.60
        Sayami       0.29       0.71       0.00
         Jdubz       0.31       0.38       0.31
    Shadgavena       0.55       0.14       0.32
         Serjj       0.65       0.25       0.10
      Judgmant       0.36       0.64       0.00
   Crispybacon       0.30       0.30       0.40
          Guli       0.31       0.44       0.25
  Annihilacion       0.64       0.36       0.00
       Clapton       0.44       0.44       0.11
         Zatin       0.44       0.56       0.00
        Tranze       0.38       0.63       0.00
      Brianlee       0.23       0.77       0.00
       Makitoo       0.45       0.55       0.00
          Fron       0.64       0.23       0.14
       Zenakuu       0.44       0.39       0.17
         Duner       0.36       0.64       0.00
          Evir       0.78       0.11       0.11
        Zorgat       1.00       0.00       0.00
       Svendor       0.63       0.38       0.00
          Mute       0.60       0.25       0.15

They’re sorted by rating, if you’re wondering.

So, just like Ghostcrawler foretold, resilience and health levels are at the point where you can’t 100-0 somebody in a stun (double-engineering rogue/mage notwithstanding) and games have turned back into 10+ minute outlast (hi feral druid/paladin) where you spend most of the time strafing around Nagrand pillars and drinking. Replace drinking with meleeing pets if you’re a Paladin, I feel like a TBC dreamstate druid sometimes.

There are still some ridiculous outliers in terms of damage (hi hunters) but it looks like Blizzard has identified the most egregious problems and 3.1 has further rebalancing. It seems like they’re actively moving towards a more balanced arena system and I’m pretty happy with the trajectory at the least.

The thing that troubles me the most about the current arena is the amount of matchups that are grossly in favor of one side or the other. There were always rough matchups, even at 70 – I played a lot of holy paladin/warrior in TBC and some comps like ualock/priest were basically impossible if at least one of the opposing players had either a keyboard or mouse installed.

That’s fine, and the nature of the classes mean some comps are always going to be tough – warlocks find rogues difficult, priests find hunters difficult, paladins find warlocks difficult… it’s not exactly rock-paper-scissors but there are advantages and disadvantages there. You can usually make some of it up by partner selection and just playing well.

Playing Holy Paladin/DK at the moment, it seems like the vast majority of our matchups fall into this category. I won’t pretend we have the worst of it by any means; it’s a strong comp, and a lot of the matchups fall in our favor – melee/paladin, melee/druid, dk/shaman (for example) are probably 90/10 to us with perfect play. Even difficult teams like disc/rogue or rogue/mage are probably 70/30 to us with no mistakes. But the flipside of that is ualock/healer, hunter/paladin, shaman/rogue are pretty much impossible no matter what we do.

I guess I’d prefer it if it didn’t feel quite so predestined.