~chron

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

At the beginning of the season I was somewhat pessimistic about the direction they were going with holy arena. I won’t argue that the paladins of season 5 were balanced, but the aggressive style and CC options made for some very entertaining gameplay.

After having had a few weeks to play some live games, though, I’m pretty satisfied with what turned out to be very even-handed changes to paladin healing. Paladins haven’t disappeared from SK, they still have a number of viable comps to run. Blizzard didn’t outright kill any of the specs, quite the opposite – as far as I know this is the first season that paladins have had a viable healing spec in every tree.

The old repentance spec of S5 has become 32/0/39. Since you can’t feasibly get Infusion of Light with any of the nice ret stuff, you push even deeper into ret to pick up Art of War and Fanatacism, which means you get an instant FoL on your judgement crits (instead of HS crits) and your judgements crit at a reasonable rate. Some people take Seal of Command for the guaranteed crit versus stunned targets, but I haven’t found it that useful.

You still get the ret utility you know and love – most importantly Divine Purpose and Repentance; but Sanctified Retribution is also a lot stronger without the specific aura requirement. Judgements of the Wise has actually been buffed and now returns a huge amount of mana (25% of base) every judge. Pursuit of Justice and Vindication are both still amazing.

The deep holy alternative has become 49/22/0. The protection talents they’ve changed up in 3.1 are amazing, with Divinity and Improved Devotion Aura increasing your healing substantially and Stoicism + Improved Righteous Fury increasing your survivability noticeably. Having a second Sac in the form of Divine Sacrifice is absolutely amazing, and makes a lot of double DPS or CC-heavy compositions a ton easier.

This also gives you the throughput talents in deep holy, such as Judgements of the Pure, Holy Guidance, Infusion, and Light’s Grace. Enlightened Judgements (increasing range to 40 yards) is also pretty useful now that Judgement is your only real way to keep people in combat or snipe totems. This spec feels a lot like the TBC paladin – you do have to drink, but it’s usually possible to set up opportunities to do so. 40 second HoJ is nice but doesn’t give you nearly as much CC potential as repentance does.

Which brings us to the dark horse of the collection, 20/51/0 deep protection. It sounds crazy until you actually look at the control possibilities and raw healing power of the available at the bottom of the tree. You get a 20 second HoJ (!) along with a 3 second silence and a daze on your Avenger’s Shield (30 second cooldown), which also increases your damage contribution. You get undispellable Divine Plea that refreshes on melee hits. You get a bunch of free stamina from talents like Sacred Duty (and some passive defenses like Ardent Defender) and then you convert that stamina into spellpower via Touched by the Light. You end up with a huge amount of spellpower, and although your crit is lower than the ret subspec when you do crit you’re looking at 8.5k flashes (10k+ on a warlock or mutilate rogue!).

The huge downside to the prot spec is, of course, the complete lack of any sort of instant healing. The new Aura Mastery helps here, and part of it is just adapting to the playstyle, but it’s a limitation and it makes the spec a lot weaker when you’re tanking a melee who can interrupt. Which, in a way, is also a lot like TBC!

I hear actual ret and prot paladins aren’t doing too badly, either.

chronic Arena, Paladin Arena, Paladin, prot, pvp, specs, talents, World of Warcraft

Dresorull has posted patch notes for the upcoming changes in 3.1.2, there’s some minor rebalancing of priests and destruction warlocks.

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.

chronic Data Mining, Paladin 3.1.2, Arena, gchart, glyphs, graphs, Paladin, pvp

I’ve been thinking recently about re-gemming for survivability on my Holy Paladin, since I’m only at about 550 resilience in my current gear. It’s not every fight that I feel like I need it, but I’m pretty happy with my throughput (healing is only really a problem if I get CCd or school-locked) and mana usage. I have about 18.5k mana and either JotW or drinking (depending on the comp) in concert with Divine Plea mean we very rarely lose on mana to a team that isn’t aggressively mana burning.

(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.

chronic Data Mining, Paladin armory.rb, gems, Paladin

So, just like Ghostcrawler foretold, resilience and health levels are at the point where you can’t 100-0 somebody in a stun (double-engineering rogue/mage notwithstanding) and games have turned back into 10+ minute outlast (hi feral druid/paladin) where you spend most of the time strafing around Nagrand pillars and drinking. Replace drinking with meleeing pets if you’re a Paladin, I feel like a TBC dreamstate druid sometimes.

There are still some ridiculous outliers in terms of damage (hi hunters) but it looks like Blizzard has identified the most egregious problems and 3.1 has further rebalancing. It seems like they’re actively moving towards a more balanced arena system and I’m pretty happy with the trajectory at the least.

The thing that troubles me the most about the current arena is the amount of matchups that are grossly in favor of one side or the other. There were always rough matchups, even at 70 – I played a lot of holy paladin/warrior in TBC and some comps like ualock/priest were basically impossible if at least one of the opposing players had either a keyboard or mouse installed.

That’s fine, and the nature of the classes mean some comps are always going to be tough – warlocks find rogues difficult, priests find hunters difficult, paladins find warlocks difficult… it’s not exactly rock-paper-scissors but there are advantages and disadvantages there. You can usually make some of it up by partner selection and just playing well.

Playing Holy Paladin/DK at the moment, it seems like the vast majority of our matchups fall into this category. I won’t pretend we have the worst of it by any means; it’s a strong comp, and a lot of the matchups fall in our favor – melee/paladin, melee/druid, dk/shaman (for example) are probably 90/10 to us with perfect play. Even difficult teams like disc/rogue or rogue/mage are probably 70/30 to us with no mistakes. But the flipside of that is ualock/healer, hunter/paladin, shaman/rogue are pretty much impossible no matter what we do.

I guess I’d prefer it if it didn’t feel quite so predestined.

chronic Arena, Paladin Paladin, pvp, qq