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!
chronic Arena, Paladin, Rogue
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?
chronic Rogue 3.1, Rogue
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 overkill 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.
chronic Arena, Data Mining, Rogue armory, glyphs, Rogue
I got bored of pies, so here’s a bar chart to brighten up your Friday. It’s the professions of people on the top 200 Reckoning 2v2 teams. It only includes the two members from each team with the highest PR, so it’s probably missing a few people.
There’s 710 total if you add them up. You’d expect there to be 800 (200 teams * 2 members * 2 profs each) so I guess there’s a few people who don’t have two professions yet. Slackers!
I’m not sure how many of those people would have chosen their professions solely for PvP reasons; my guess is not that many. The figures do put something of a dent in my “every team over 2200 is running double GLG” theory :>
Also: according to the latest mmo-champion notes, PTR 9757 includes a fairly substantial GLG nerf.
chronic Arena, Data Mining
Arena season 5 is rapidly drawing to a close, quoth Bornakk:
We are currently planning to end Arena Season 5 as early as April 14, or possibly a week after this date. At that point we will go through our normal process to determine who is eligible for the end-of-season rewards. This process should take approximately one week. It’s very important for players who feel that they may be eligible for the arena-specific titles and/or Deadly Gladiator’s Frostwyrm to refrain from transferring their character to another realm until after Arena Season 5 ends.
The following Arena Season will not begin for at least one week after the current season ends. During this time between seasons, all rated matches will be turned off and only skirmishes will be available. When Arena Season 6 begins, all teams, personal rating, and arena points will be wiped, but matchmaking rating and honor points will remain.
I guess that means the patch can’t be too far away, either!
chronic Arena