After the ‘death pie’ the other day I mentioned I wanted to do a graph showing damage taken in 3v3 arena. I settled on what you see below, a line graph with a seperate line for each character showing the total amount of damage taken in a single arena match along the X axis with the number of times that total occured (ie number of matches) along the Y axis. I know it’s not a perfect graph because the data we have access to is kind of limited (mostly because people keep fighting after a match is effectively over), but it’s still fairly interesting.
Notice the huge spike of games which ended after 20k damage (roughly a single health bar for each of us) where presumably some serious CC chain happened right off the bat or (more likely) the rogue got opened on out of LOS and died in two globals. Quite a lot of the games Azuba dies in are games like this, most often from hard-to-peel cleave teams like rogue/dk/healer that blow cooldowns to get a kill at the start.
Protip: don’t ask Ina about that one game where he took 220000 damage or you’re liable to be death coiled. Yes, it was double melee.
Here’s the same thing for wins instead of losses:
Note that we win a huge amount of games in which our warlock is left alone. I don’t think that will surprise anybody! Note also that there are games where our warlock gets ridiculously trained and we still win, like this – Same cleave as before, check the ret’s damage! Apparently we can also win games where I get crapped on all match, like this double caster priest on RoV.
You can’t see it from the graph, but there’s also wins where nobody takes any damage, usually when some 2k cleave champion warrior charges behind a Nagrand pillar, trinkets KS and dies in a dismantle duration to tricks conflag lava burst.
chronic Arena, Data Mining Arena, gchart, graphs, rls, World of Warcraft
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s Vindication nerf, Blizz has now hotfixed in a change to stuns that have an interrupt component so that the school lockout only applies to mobs. It’s continuing the path of separate effects for PvE and PvP which I still generally approve of. They should definitely have an easier time balancing both aspects of the game this way.
BUT. This particular change is awful. Before abilities like HoJ worked kind of like a mage’s counterspell – you could stun whenever and that would prevent your target from casting, but it was dispellable or trinketable or even blinkable by a mage. If you were prepared to wait and catch someone while casting you would get a (shorter) full school lockout which is much more devestating. Especially since nobody usually wants to trinket a stun they’re already half-way through.
You can hammer a mage’s arcane school to prevent a blink, his frost school to prevent a block (this never actually happens) or hammer a holy paladin’s heal to prevent divine shield. EDIT: HoJ cyclone = caster form no barkskin.
It was an interesting choice, and now that interesting choice is gone.
chronic Paladin
I wanted to see if there was a correlation between number of talent tree respecs and arena success, so here’s a scatter plot for high-rated 3v3 rogues on Reckoning:
Thinking about it, though, the number of respecs doesn’t tell you enough by itself. It’s a function of how rich you are, how much you raid, how long you’ve been playing, and whether or not you have dual spec, as well as how much you like experimenting (which I guess is what I really wanted to measure). Still, it’s more interesting than the “emblems of conquest looted vs 3v3 rating” graph I did along with it.
My rogue is at 71 respecs currently.
chronic Data Mining, Rogue gchart, graphs, World of Warcraft
Quoth Bornakk:
We are in the process of completing a hotfix that could go live as early as this afternoon that will make the Paladin talent Vindication no longer reduce Intelligence or Stamina from the target it is applied to. The talent will continue to reduce Agility, Spirit, and Strength as it currently does. We felt this change will help balance the ability out, especially in the lower arena brackets where they are very prominent, while not being a negative impact on a Retribution Paladin’s PvE dps.
Once this hotfix is live, the tooltip will be incorrect until we can update it in the next content patch.
Fantastic change, people on AJ (and pretty much everywhere else I guess) have long been calling for this as a simple first step to balancing ret paladins without breaking them in PvE. That’s around 4500 more health I’ll have in an average HoJ, could easily be the difference between life and death.
It was always a ridiculous idea for a talent really. Sanity finally prevails!
chronic Paladin
Another MLG event played out over the weekend. By all accounts a fantastic tournament and huge grats to Realz’ SK-US team for pulling off a win. I caught a few of the Saturday matches (including the RLS mirror between EG and fnatic, pretty interesting even if both teams played kinda flat) but I’m eagerly awaiting the VoDs being posted so I can see the whole thing. Vhell is still an awesome commentator.
There’s coverage of the various days all over the place including Gameriot (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), Gotfrag (Saturday, Sunday) and WowInsider (Saturday). As usual, Radikal has some entertaining opinions.
I’m not sure you can take anything meaningful from the results regarding class balance since it’s a really tiny sample size. Still: buff paladins. Payce is a total beast and their team did do pretty well, but I don’t want to have to play some horrible PHD team to be successful. It’s worse than cleave, really.
Unrelated: is Paladin/DK supposed to beat Shaman/Ret? That matchup makes me rage more than Rogue/Shaman vs Warrior/Druid.
chronic Arena Arena, mlg, tournaments, World of Warcraft