Interesting arena graph du jour; popular arena compositions on Reckoning! The first week of the season is over now but given that everyone started from zero this time around there’s probably a large number of people who still haven’t finished levelling their teams yet. It’s too early to really tell what’s going to dominate the season, and Blizzard have shown that they’re willing to tune as necessary. Nevertheless, some clear trends have already emerged:
Druid/Warrior making a comeback, believe it! Maybe all the AJ “season 3 was arena’s golden age” cyclone apologists will get what they’re after.
chronic Data Mining, World of Warcraft Arena, gchart, graphs, pvp, reckoning
I’ve been thinking about rogue hit caps since the time has come to start picking up the new season’s honor pieces. Increasing your white hit percentage is not important for rogue PvP because such a high percentage of your damage – especially your burst damage – comes from your special attacks and your poisions. However getting to that special hit cap is of vital importance because it affects all your utility movies – your openers, your finishers, everything. Missing a kidney shot could easily swing a game against you!
The special melee hit cap against players is 5%. You need 32.79 hit rating for 1% of melee hit. That means you’ll need 164 hit rating for the special cap, or 230 for special cap versus night elves. Those numbers would be 132 and 197 respectively if you have Heroic Presence from a draenei (the perks of running rogue/shaman!).
The spell hit cap against players is 4%, which is relevant because it affects your poisons. It’s not as important a cap to hit because although your poisons provide your snare and your mortal strike, you have a very high application chance and thus it’s very unlikely one failed proc will set you back. You need 26.232 hit rating for 1% of spell hit, so you should be able to cap poison hit (105) as a happy side-effect of capping specials.
Spell penetration: poison damage is good, but it’s not that good.
Here are your main options for hit, assuming a full PvP setup:
- Furious Gladiator’s Cloak of Victory – 42 hit rating. Also comes in a crit version.
- Furious Gladiator’s Pendant of Victory – 42 hit rating. Also comes in a crit version.
- Deadly Gladiator’s Band of Victory – 38 hit rating. This is the only deadly melee ring available.
- Icewalker Enchant – 12 hit rating. Obviously useless if you’re an engineer, which you should be!
- Enchant Gloves – Precision – 20 hit rating. Undercosted compared to the attack power enchant, and again, not an option if you are an engineer.
- Titanium Weapon Chain – 28 hit rating. This is a must-have for the disarm duration reduction alone.
- 12 sockets (2 yellow, 4 red, 5 blue, 1 prismatic), in which you could socket Glinting (or Pristine), Rigid, or Vivid. Note that one of those reds will be a yellow if you’re still using the engineering goggles.
- If you’re desperate, the burning crusade rogue arcanum included 16 hit rating, although the Wrath one does not.
Without gemming or enchanting (except the chain) you’re already at 150 with the aforementioned gear. If you’re using PvE weapons (which I anticipate will be significantly less popular this season given how readily available, cheap, and high quality the furious offerings are) you’ll probably score some extra hit rating from there, and you can comfortably gem for the rest based on how much you hate Artic Winds. I recommend 2 x [Pristine Monarch Topaz]!
chronic Rogue gear, hit, Rogue
So the official Armory now shows both specs for characters who have shelled out the cash for dual talent specialization, along with the accompanying glyphs for each spec. That’s great, and the format they’ve chosen is pretty much exactly what I hoped they would do.
However, it poses an interesting problem from a data mining point of view – how can you ascertain the intent of a spec now, since a player can only have one set of gear equipped at a time? In the past I’ve tried to make educated guesses about whether players are specced for PvP by looking at whether they have certain trinkets equipped, or are over a certain resilience threshold.
You can still do that to some extent since one of the specs will be marked as active, but it’s much less solid, and of course doesn’t allow for the possibility that both of a player’s specs are intended for PvP; different arena brackets, perhaps.
You could possibly check for the existence of certain talents – Master of Deception for rogues might be a good candidate, but not every class has talents which are so clear-cut. It’s a brittle implementation, and very class-specific.
chronic Data Mining
There’s a blue up about the ninja replenishment hotfix – in arenas replenishment now only affects the person who provides the buff, not her teammates. This is a pretty huge (and largely warranted) kick to the groin for disc/ret.
I didn’t feel like the comp was unbeatable before this change but Az and I certainly played some difficult ones while levelling our team. One of the priest’s only weaknesses is her fairly shallow mana pool, and hyper-efficient penance combined with the new fiend and reworked hymns already make up for this quite a bit. Replenishment on top of all that is just crazy overkill.
What I’m really happy about is the speed at which they’re hotfixing arena issues now. I hope they keep it up, enough small tweaks like this will get the game in much better shape than the oft-lamented season 5.
Interesting undocumented rogue nerf: you can no longer reactively cloak out of hex.
chronic Rogue
