~chron

Too lazy to do any real graphs today, but here’s some OG ascii gladiator breakdowns:

Reckoning 2v2 Gladiators

         Druid =>  34 ##########################################################
       Paladin =>  29 #################################################
  Death Knight =>  27 ##############################################
         Rogue =>  25 ###########################################
        Priest =>  20 ##################################
       Warrior =>  18 ###############################
       Warlock =>  11 ###################
        Shaman =>   9 ###############
        Hunter =>   3 #####
          Mage =>   2 ###

Reckoning 3v3 Gladiators

         Rogue =>  18 ##########################################################
        Priest =>  17 #######################################################
          Mage =>  13 ##########################################
       Paladin =>  11 ###################################
       Warrior =>  10 ################################
        Shaman =>   9 #############################
       Warlock =>   8 ##########################
  Death Knight =>   7 #######################
         Druid =>   6 ###################
        Hunter =>   4 #############

Reckoning 5v5 Gladiators

        Priest =>   4 ##########################################################
       Paladin =>   4 ##########################################################
  Death Knight =>   3 ############################################
        Hunter =>   3 ############################################
       Warlock =>   2 #############################
         Druid =>   2 #############################
         Rogue =>   1 ###############
       Warrior =>   1 ###############
          Mage =>   1 ###############
        Shaman =>   1 ###############

Reckoning Any-bracket Gladiators (no dups)

         Druid =>  38 ##########################################################
       Paladin =>  38 ##########################################################
         Rogue =>  37 ########################################################
        Priest =>  34 ####################################################
  Death Knight =>  32 #################################################
       Warrior =>  27 #########################################
        Shaman =>  18 ###########################
       Warlock =>  17 ##########################
          Mage =>  14 #####################
        Hunter =>   8 ############

Reckoning Multi-bracket Gladiators

         Rogue =>   7 ##########################################################
        Priest =>   6 ##################################################
       Paladin =>   6 ##################################################
         Druid =>   4 #################################
  Death Knight =>   4 #################################
       Warlock =>   3 #########################
          Mage =>   2 #################
       Warrior =>   2 #################
        Hunter =>   2 #################
        Shaman =>   1 ########

Jordons (priest), Furen (dk), and Substantial (lock) got glad in all three brackets.

chronic Arena

Nail-biting season end! We’ve been sitting on our 2s rating for a couple of weeks but we still needed to make some progress on our 3s team to get the title for our priest. Well, that, and Azuba wouldn’t be satisfied unless he could get glad as both resto and elem. And now he’s putting an enhance set together! But I digress.

After initially tanking the rating a bit, we had a couple of great nights of 3v3 games, despite there being two different enhance/warrior cleave variants taking turns trucking us down. Sallice’s team in particular is crazy strong, and though we forced them to a close 2v2 once, we never managed to beat them. I really think enhancement is one of the most underrated specs in the game right now. High skill cap, I guess?

As you’d expect there was a huge amount of RMP in the last week, and we’ve gotten much more solid against that comp recently. By the end we got into a great rhythm, when the dispel magic is flowing freely and Azuba is in the zone frost mages get absolutely nothing done against us. We decided to call it at 2668, which was around 25th at the time, and then there was nothing to do but sit back and refresh the armory every half hour until the servers went down. Well, and finish up zuba’s latest nerd point fascination.

Looks like we’re in good shape though: the 2s ended up 81st (cutoff: 97) and the 3s ended up 31st (cutoff: 36) and that’s without factoring inactive teams in. Truly/Tama on horde side have been sitting on their 2527-rated 2v2 team for half the season and we laughed when they ended up tied for 98th, but with 5 or 6 inactives in that bracket I think they’ll still sneak in.

(taken just as the servers went down, so not quite up-to-date)

Great season! There were highs, there were lows, there were occasional prot warriors (complete with aoe spell reflect, rofl). There was a lot of sitting around Dalaran Sewers waiting for the 5s queue to pop. Huge thanks to everyone in the Reckoning arena community and especially to my fantastic teammates for making it possible.

Bring the player, not the class! See you in s7.

I only just saw the Master Poisoner change, I’m guessing this is their idea for increasing assassination sustained damage slightly without affecting PvP burst. Seems like a reasonable change, although it does dumb down the spec a bit more for raiding since you no longer have to time your envenoms after a DP tick.

I wonder if it will make using offhand deadly a good choice as PvP HfB?

BONUS: 2v2 Comp breakdown for the Reckoning top 100 after the dust has settled.

chronic Arena Arena, pvp, reckoning, Rogue, rps, season-6

This weekend is the last chance to get your rating up before the end of the season, so I’m sure a lot of people are going to be keeping an eye of the ladders. Last I checked Reflex and Jordons have pulled ahead in the Reckoning fglad race, leading by about 4 points. They’re holding #1 3s as well, which seems a bit greedy :>

There’s a lot of threads on the AJ Gladiator Bubble forum about the various reckoning brackets, not that they contain anything more than idle speculation.

Then after that you’ve got a week to finish grinding honor to buy next season’s offset pieces! Basically you’ll be looking at:

• 75000 honor saved
• 148900 honor from capped bg marks
• 1241 from the daily pvp quest
• 18540 from the wg weeklies
• 10000 from arena commendations (unique 5)
• as many wg commendations as you can afford!

This coming maintenance is also the last lot of arena points you’ll get before they reset, so don’t forget to spend whatever you have remaining on off-spec pieces. Or axes!

chronic Arena

I’m a firm believer in customizing your spec to your playstyle, but I’m also intensely curious about the current flavor of the month in rogue specs. There’s a few interesting filler choices in the prep/mut build, and people’s builds tend to shift around with the differing metagame of each patch.

Recently I had a look at some Reckoning armories. There’s 44 rogues in top 200 2v2 teams currently, with 41 mut/prep specs between them.

This is the most popular prep/mut spec, which accounts for ten of the 41 specs. It takes Imp Kidney Shot, 2/3 Find Weakness, and (surprisingly to me) Initiative.

I experimented for a while with taking bleed talents in an attempt to make a dent in plate teams, but it never really worked very well. Even fully talented, rupture is a fairly small component of your damage.

The second most popular spec, used by 4 rogues, trades Imp KS for Focused Attacks (which would be my preference for 2s) and Initiative for Serrated Blades. Then there’s 3 with Imp KS and Serrated, 3 with FA and Initiative, and the rest is a long tail of people trying out weird stuff like Deadened Nerves, which I’m still very much in love with!

So it seems like the only arguments people are having are Imp KS vs FA, and Initiative vs Serrated Blades, which are both about 50/50. Glyph selection looks much the same as ever:

Your cookies, I cut them.

chronic Rogue specs

Only just saw this, but apparently the 3k rating cap was removed with 3.2 (see the Arena Junkies thread about it). Wonder if all those capped teams will start queueing again, or just sit on their rating?

Kalgan also posted some details about the restriction on fighting the same team twice in a row, which was something I’d seen a lot of speculation about:

There is currently a 2-minute queue time addition to play against a team you just played against (so, 2 minutes plus normal queue time to be matched against them). This time value was 5 minutes when 3.2 was first released, but was lowered to 2 minutes in a hotfix last Friday.

The purpose of the time addition is to make it less likely that an average team doing arena games for a night isn’t likely to run across the same team in many of their games for the session. We’ll continue to tune the system to make sure that it doesn’t feel like too much of a nuisance when there simply aren’t other teams within a reasonable rating range to play against.

BRB 4k!

chronic Arena