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.

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.

I always seem to neglect the blog when I’m on holiday, there’s too many other fascinating things to occupy me, such as bear-style hibernation and re-released Lucasarts adventure games.

Arena-land has been busy as always. We’re deep into season six now, and Azuba and I are gradually climbing the ladder in an attempt to de-throne our realm’s current #1, a cleverly named horde-side DK/Druid team. I think they might be sitting on their rating at the moment, since they haven’t moved from 2527 in quite some time. At least we’ve built up a lead over our closest alliance competitors, Dues’ holy/unholy team.

I’ve been tempted to start writing a rogue/shaman strategy guide since over the last few weeks there have been a phenomenal number of “how do I shot it” posts on AJ about the comp. I’m no expert by any means, but it’s a very underplayed comp, and the dearth of reference material is unfortunate to say the least. A lot of the (primarly PvE-focused) rogue blogs I follow have also mentioned arena in some capacity, and It’d be nice to have something introductory to be able to point people to. Having played close to a thousand 2s games this season, we’ve picked up a few leet tricks too.

Actually nah, I’m pretty bad, but I couldn’t think of a better excuse for linking that picture.

We’ve also been playing RLS a bit, up to about 2330. Partly because Azuba was interested in playing elemental more seriously (it’s been his PvE mainspec for some time) and partly because our warlock only logs on about 10% of the time, we started a second team with a discipline priest to play “lightning RMP“¹, with some success. We were using a second charter for it at the beginning, just in case it turned out to be an awful comp, we didn’t want to tank the rating too much. Besides that, we also thought it would be quite amusing to fill up the Eldre’Thalas 3v3 ladder with team names of the form “Azuba is %s”, hopefully getting sillier and more elaborate each time like a kind of space goat Chuck Norris.

ANYWAY. The comp is actually really fun, and plays a fair bit like RMP does. Although a shaman doesn’t have the control of a frost mage (they do have some), they bring a lot of other defensive options to the table like shocks, grounds, and off-heals. Their DPS isn’t as reliant on freeze effects either, which gives you an edge killing hard-to-snare classes like druids or paladins. And you can’t forget lolthunderstorm off BEM!

And just like with a destruction warlock, you can get some fantastic 100-0 gibs if the shaman is left alone to freecast.

Eventually we got bored of switching teams twice a week and losing our PR (turns out a 2400 3s team is worth a lot of points) so we have merged the two teams into the latest charter, and we’re currently working on grinding Inamorata’s PR up on that team.

My gear is almost done now; just gloves next week and then throwing weapons the week after, then I’ll finally be able to start saving for some combat weapons. Possibly even axes, depending on when the season-end announcement happens.

Apart from that: I’ve been duelling a lot of rogues (Garotte is not as good an opener as you think, Splakken), accumulating fans, and fighting with people on the realm forums about whether PvE is harder than PvP. My priest is still 74, but I did grind inscription at least!

¹ There’s probably a better name for disc/rogue/elemental. Depending on how fixed you consider the ordering rules, you can abbreviate it as RPS!

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.

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.

¹ I’ve decided my favourite RLS mirror strat is go on the rogue, because then instead of the game being decided based on which rogue can kill a warlock faster, it’s mostly decided by how well your shaman can lock down (see what I did there) an opposing warlock and avoid CC as well as how quick your bloodlusted warlock can backdraft chaos bolt somebody into oblivion. And my shaman/warlock will crap all over yours :]

Our match history is a total rollercoaster of 18 minute ret/druid games and queueing into hard counters six games in a row. Still, we persisted, and these glowing pieces of (virtual) pointy metal represent the fruits of our labor:

That wasn’t the only milestone we hit last night, either. Inamorata took some time out of his busy schedule crushing rets in trade chat to carry our RLS to 2216, currently realm #1. It’s also already worth way more points per week than our 2v2 is, whee rating curve rebalancing.

Massive thanks to Azuba for being an absolutely fantastic teammate and rising above his troubled class and our somewhat questionable comp by basically outplaying the shit out of everybody. If this was a Steam game there’d be a series of achievements for HoJs grounded and you’d have all of them! <3

I don’t have a 5s at the moment, but Arena Master is looking more doable by the day. Fifty (oblig) whole nerd points, that’s hard to pass up.

PS: No, I’m not going to stop calling it BoP.

• Two Bads Make a Good, Holy/Prot Paladin + Unholy DK
• The Fact of Life, Resto Shaman + Mut/Prep Rogue
• Azuba is Uber, Resto Shaman + Mut/Prep Rogue + Destruction Warlock

Note the subtle omission of my paladin’s 3s, keep grindin’ that gear Milkduds. Anyway.

Some general comments:

• RoL is officially my worst map, though I’m certainly still not fond of RoV, especially with aggressive priests¹.
• My rogue does ~80% of the damage of a death knight these days, and isn’t too far off with rets and warriors either.
• Fact’s mage ratio is low because mages only ever play in double dps and double dps is horrible. Mostly because of glaring rogue and shaman survivability issues ;)
• The counter for shaman is apparently better shaman. Hi2u grounding fakecast metagame?
• Druids are the most annoying healer for all three teams, RoV mana burn notwithstanding.
• Warriors are the most difficult melee to peel in 3s.
• Our RLS is 80% win versus RMP. Some of those were probably at low ratings, I guess.
• 16k Chaos Bolts through Pain Suppression are balanced.

It’s harder to get a good sample size for 3s because of the enormous variety of compositions. And by variety, I mean “which healer would you like with your two melee?” Still, you can see some interesting trends.

If you’re an E’T armory stalker like me you might also enjoy reports for Stanso’s Rogue/Priest, Endarl’s Rogue/Priest (oh look, 70% win ratio on RoV), and Balandil’s Rogue/DK (not even kidding).

¹ Which is exactly all of them these days, thanks for nothing Hydra 5.

There once was a death knight called Andy
Whose cleave team was going just dandy
and Inamorata
the warlock pinata
was quite clearly filled up with candy!

As a bonus, since we’re talking about warlocks:

The self-proclaimed warlock from hell
once tried to escape with a spell
but his portal was still
on a very steep hill
and so; cursing loudly, he fel.

Don’t get me wrong, RLS is ridiculously good fun. Just not as fun as limericks :]