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:

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.

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.

And Reckoning 3v3:

Note that the 3v3 graph is only the top 100 teams, since the total population is so much lower. Since last time somebody asked me about what ratings these graphs represented, note that the 200th 2s team is 2178 and the 100th 3s team is 1952.

Penance cooldown is going back up, maim is an actual stun (maybe?) and innervate is getting a pretty decent PvP buff. Most importantly from a rogue POV, they’re removing spammable blood boil!

I mentioned in my last post about paladin glyphs that using Glyph of Turn Evil was basically a metagame choice. Since then, I’ve seen maybe two death knights in arena, and not many more warlocks, so I think it’s time to retire it in favor of something more exciting.

So, as usual, it may be educational to see what everyone else is doing…

(Reckoning 2v2, top 200 teams)

Today I’m defining “holy paladins” as paladins who have holy shock and at least one point in unyielding faith which should hopefully narrow it down to PvP healing specs only. I’m not going to worry about deep prot healing specs, at least… not yet.

Here’s the same chart run against the infamous Bloodlust battlegroup:

Note that the top 200 teams actually goes right down to about 2k rating at the moment, so a lot of these people are probably not superstars.

Druid/Warrior making a comeback, believe it! Maybe all the AJ “season 3 was arena’s golden age” cyclone apologists will get what they’re after.

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: