• 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.

I ran a similar report to the paladin one I did the other day with the current top 200 Reckoning 2v2 teams – restoration shaman only. I won’t do any analysis since I don’t know that much about shaman, but I thought I’d post the output here anyway in case people were interested.

Here are the results!

As a bonus there are Google Chart URLs with each of the statistics if you prefer to consume your data in pie form. Here’s the “weapon equipped in main hand” one for your viewing pleasure:

Note that I have completely excluded “PvE geared” (ie, no Medallion) shaman from the report. Here’s one more pie, the partner class. Looks like shaman have a few viable choices:

(The deadly libram will also be a great throughput upgrade, I just wanted to replace all my blues first!)

So, as always, let’s go to the Armory and see what high-rated Paladins are doing. My sample this time around is Paladins from the top 200 2v2 teams on Reckoning, and I’ve only included people wearing pvp gear (medallion or human with >100 resil) at the time of the survey. I’ve also explicitly excluded meta gems since there isn’t really any contention there: int + manarestore all the way.

Here’s the initial results. I’m assuming the strength gems are from people caught in their ret gear (but still as holy spec), but I didn’t actually look them up. I’ve also excluded the quality of the gems, since it didn’t really seem important for my purposes. The data set consists of 75 characters between ~2750 and ~2140, with 784 total gems.

                                         Intellect => 149 | 20.93%
                                       Spell Power => 113 | 15.87%
                                 Resilience Rating =>  96 | 13.48%
                         Spell Power and Intellect =>  54 | 07.58%
                 Spell Power and Resilience Rating =>  51 | 07.16%
                           Spell Power and Stamina =>  49 | 06.88%
                     Resilience Rating and Stamina =>  44 | 06.18%
            Spell Power and Critical Strike Rating =>  41 | 05.76%
                             Intellect and Stamina =>  29 | 04.07%
                            Critical Strike Rating =>  19 | 02.67%
                                           Stamina =>  18 | 02.53%
              Spell Power and Mana every 5 seconds =>  18 | 02.53%
                Intellect and Mana every 5 seconds =>  10 | 01.40%
                                      Haste Rating =>   5 | 00.70%
                Critical Strike Rating and Stamina =>   5 | 00.70%
                      Spell Power and Haste Rating =>   3 | 00.42%
                                          Strength =>   2 | 00.28%
                              Strength and Stamina =>   2 | 00.28%
                                        Hit Rating =>   2 | 00.28%
             Haste Rating and Mana every 5 seconds =>   1 | 00.14%
               Strength and Critical Strike Rating =>   1 | 00.14%

We can do some basic categorization of the gems, too. I’ve divided them into throughput (spell power, crit, haste), longevity (intellect, mp5), utility (hit rating) and defense (stamina, resilience). I realise these categories aren’t entirely accurate because most paladin stats affect multiple areas (for example, via Illumination), but it’s a good starting point.

                                        throughput => 181 | 25.42%
                                         longevity => 159 | 22.33%
                                           defense => 158 | 22.19%
                                defense/throughput => 105 | 14.75%
                              longevity/throughput =>  73 | 10.25%
                                 defense/longevity =>  29 | 04.07%
                                             other =>   2 | 00.28%
                                           utility =>   2 | 00.28%
                                     defense/other =>   2 | 00.28%
                                  other/throughput =>   1 | 00.14%

Then maybe it’s useful to see totals for each category, if you count a “pure gem” as 2 points for its category and the hybrid gems for 1 point in each:

                                        throughput => 541 | 37.99%
                                           defense => 452 | 31.74%
                                         longevity => 420 | 29.49%
                                             other =>   7 | 00.49%
                                           utility =>   4 | 00.28%

From looking at that it seems most people are balancing their gemming across the three major categories, and browsing through the individual results seems to support that. Let’s see one last view over the data, since this is starting to get long.

This table contains a row for each paladin, with a column for each of the three major categories defined above – the cells show what proportion of that paladin’s total gems are used on that category. Hybrid gems are split across both categories as in the previous report, and strength/hit gems are ignored although they do still count in the totals.

          name throughput  longevity    defense
    Varluneyna       0.33       0.33       0.33
        Heimen       0.45       0.35       0.20
         Jeuce       0.38       0.50       0.13
        Haydee       0.39       0.11       0.50
    Unicornica       0.50       0.50       0.00
       Wcstyle       0.60       0.10       0.30
      Mchaggis       0.45       0.23       0.32
        Aiiden       0.44       0.38       0.19
        Braves       0.36       0.45       0.18
          Gina       0.50       0.22       0.28
        Dercas       0.43       0.43       0.14
     Mournhold       0.71       0.29       0.00
       Beldara       0.39       0.28       0.33
         Oryun       0.59       0.14       0.27
      Dimarius       0.56       0.44       0.00
      Tygrilol       0.50       0.17       0.33
       Sasorii       0.38       0.63       0.00
   Solidarityx       0.46       0.46       0.08
        Ieetoh       0.10       0.00       0.20
       Reepent       0.25       0.50       0.25
      Harumaru       0.55       0.45       0.00
      Magicpie       0.39       0.39       0.22
        Pummie       0.44       0.56       0.00
     Holynight       0.44       0.33       0.22
   Redemptionz       0.44       0.39       0.17
     Derreidos       0.41       0.59       0.00
     Femaleftw       0.44       0.28       0.28
     Diplomacy       0.50       0.50       0.00
           Qiu       0.65       0.15       0.20
        Gellin       0.45       0.55       0.00
        Stylec       0.25       0.50       0.25
         Aurog       0.35       0.45       0.20
         Kaara       0.40       0.20       0.40
      Mcjordie       0.50       0.35       0.15
        Arasof       0.50       0.06       0.44
  Bubbliciouss       0.61       0.28       0.11
   Eskimopally       0.50       0.25       0.25
         Zyrxy       0.38       0.50       0.12
   Lostprophet       0.56       0.17       0.28
       Valefor       0.40       0.35       0.25
     Sylvanisa       0.44       0.33       0.22
       Luncarn       0.30       0.70       0.00
     Feladence       0.50       0.50       0.00
    Smokealarm       0.39       0.33       0.28
         Ermad       0.28       0.72       0.00
   Appocalypse       0.50       0.11       0.39
        Macabe       0.38       0.63       0.00
        Fiaraa       0.50       0.35       0.15
         Trawn       0.56       0.19       0.25
   Moomoobeezy       0.38       0.38       0.25
        Oculis       0.19       0.56       0.25
   Espectrolol       0.50       0.30       0.20
      Romulisa       0.50       0.28       0.22
         Clint       0.38       0.42       0.21
       Kehrsyn       0.40       0.00       0.60
        Sayami       0.29       0.71       0.00
         Jdubz       0.31       0.38       0.31
    Shadgavena       0.55       0.14       0.32
         Serjj       0.65       0.25       0.10
      Judgmant       0.36       0.64       0.00
   Crispybacon       0.30       0.30       0.40
          Guli       0.31       0.44       0.25
  Annihilacion       0.64       0.36       0.00
       Clapton       0.44       0.44       0.11
         Zatin       0.44       0.56       0.00
        Tranze       0.38       0.63       0.00
      Brianlee       0.23       0.77       0.00
       Makitoo       0.45       0.55       0.00
          Fron       0.64       0.23       0.14
       Zenakuu       0.44       0.39       0.17
         Duner       0.36       0.64       0.00
          Evir       0.78       0.11       0.11
        Zorgat       1.00       0.00       0.00
       Svendor       0.63       0.38       0.00
          Mute       0.60       0.25       0.15

They’re sorted by rating, if you’re wondering.