~chron

It’s official: Two weeks left in season 6!

That means it’s time to start obsessing over armory updates and the SK-100! Arena Junkies have updated their famous calculator so you can have a look at the community’s best guesses at battlegroup population.

Here are some graphs for Reckoning 2s and 3s based on the official armory ladder and using AJ’s population estimates:

It’s also time to figure out what pieces you can buy with your last two weeks worth of points. Sadly I’m going to end up one week short of the MH+OH axe pair. Possibly MH fist would be a more sensible choice since I can use it with my current dagger. Sigh!

Finally here’s a list of the current 2v2 comps for your amusement:

chronic Arena gchart, graphs, reckoning

I actually really didn’t expect the patch to hit today, because for whatever reason I assumed that the release of 3.2 would coincide with the end of the arena season. They did that last season, but it hasn’t been a regular thing in the past.

So, I was pleasantly surprised to learn this morning that I’d be equipping my axes that much sooner. I’m not sure how much longer the season is going to run, but it seems like they’re still committed to giving two weeks notice so probably either two or three weeks more. I wonder if they’ll have another one-week grace period between seasons this time around?

I’ve still been playing a lot of games (just about at the thousand mark for my rogue’s 2s, even) but because I’m working slightly more traditional hours at the moment and a lot of my teammates are in different timezones, we’re mostly confined to playing weekends.

I’ve been trying deep holy on my paladin since Dowser has been fiending for a 5s team for a while now. 5s as a paladin is very turret, but holy has slightly more interesting spell-selection than prot at least. With the beacon buffs this patch the spec is going to be a lot better in small bracket too, and I’m looking forward to trying it out for 3s (still DK/Elem/Paladin) when we play this week.

It seems like the prot changes (or, more commonly, the lack thereof) and the new sacred shield HoT are going to firmly cement deep prot as the 2v2 healing spec of choice, though. Unless I’ve missed something, it only seems to be getting better.

On my warrior I’ve been struggling around in the 1600s with a friend’s even-more-undergeared druid alt. Playing in that bracket and not being able to beat awful keyboard turners because of the gear disparity and your partners’ inexperience is probably one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever encountered in this game. I’m hoping there will be an easy-to-obtain upgrade to the destroyer at some point, since it’s going to be fairly far behind the curve next season, and I’m not interested in raiding on this character at all.

My rogue’s 2s is rollercoastering around based on the percentage of druid/plate teams in the queue, but 3.2 contains some significant druid (purgable innervate) and dk (2 min IBF, dodgeable frost strikes) changes in addition to the shaman buffs so I’m hoping we can push that a bit higher. We had a great 3s session the other night playing disc/rogue/elem and pushed that team past 2500 for the first time, which was pretty cool, too. We’re running into issues keeping our priest alive against some compositions (she tends to crack under pressure a bit) but it’s something we can improve on and there wasn’t really anybody that could beat us consistently except a 2700+ wizard cleave. And really good rmp, which thankfully most of them aren’t.

I’ve been streaming some brackets on xfire but I have it set to friends only at the moment, so hit me up in game if you want the details.

chronic Arena 3.2, Arena, Paladin, Rogue, warrior

Today Blizzard posted the rogue Q&A. They’ve all been pretty marginal since the shaman one, I suppose because shaman are getting a lot of interesting changes this patch so there was more immediate stuff to talk about. Rogues are in a good place for both PvE and PvP, so a lot of the answers were along the lines of “yep it’s fine bro, no we’re not changing that”. Also, are people really still complaining about “stunlocks”?

Anyway, yeah, it’s all pretty bland. The only thing I couldn’t believe was that it seems like they’re happy with 90% cloak:

Q. Cloak of Shadows is an incredible ability; it helps rogues avoid most incoming spell damage and effects. However, how do we feel this ability stacks up versus classes that possess both melee and spell damaging abilities? Do we still feel the 90% avoidance is sufficient to aid Rogues in PvP encounters against spell casters and hybrids?

A: It’s meant as a tool that’s part of a toolkit, not an I-win button. It’s sufficient, and extending it to 100% would make rogues largely immune to interesting PvE effects they shouldn’t be (e.g. Mimiron’s Shock Blast).

It’s not supposed to be an I WIN button except that 94% (or whatever) of the time it is, and 6% of the time it randomly fails and you die. I’m usually fighting to maintain some level of RNG to keep things interesting, but this is just too stupid. I have faith they’ll eventually come around like they did with heartbeat sap resists and other stupid crap.

It’s a shitty answer to the question anyway, which explicitly mentions PvP and hybrid damage.

STILL LOOKING FORWARD TO AXES THOUGH GUYS.

PS. Let me cloak scourge strikes if you’re not going to let me mitigate their damage!

chronic Rogue