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.

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.

That’s fine, though to some extent I’m envious of caster classes that get to worry about things like haste plateaus and actually get to consider the comp they’re playing when they decide how to gear. Nevertheless, there’s one area where rogues do have some options, and where playstyle and comp can affect your decisions significantly: your trinkets.

Let’s take a look at what I consider the different options for rogues in season 6. I’ll try to be relatively comp-agnostic, though my rogue+healer 2s bias will probably shine through.

PvP Trinkets – Medallion / Titan-forged Runes

If you’re a human, your active racial means you don’t need to equip a PvP trinket. For everyone else, a trinket from this category is absolutely essential. Thankfully now you have a number of options available to you for the passive part of this trinket. The default one available from honor provides passive resilience, but most rogues are going to prefer the offensive-oriented wintergrasp versions which can bestow attack power, crit, or hit.

Buff Proc Trinkets – Mirror / Anvil / Infuser / Blood / DMC: Greatness / Grim Toll / Mjolnir

These trinkets provide passive damage stats with a proc on a 45 second internal cooldown that provides some sort of short-duration offensive benefit. You get a better deal in terms of sustained dps compared to the activatable trinkets, but the downside is you can’t control the timing and procs can end up partially (or completely) wasted.

In terms of the procs, the huge amount of ArP Mjolnir and Grim Toll provide are the strongest, especially if you have other armor penetration on your gear. They synergize well, which humans can take advantage of.

Grim Toll, Infuser and Blood of the Old Good all have hit passives, which are typically wasted, though that will depend on the rest of your gear. The anvil has a resil passive, which is also not that desirable. For that reason Mjolnir pulls ahead of the pack, with DMC:G a very viable alternative.

DMC:G has another advantage in that the agility it provides confers a non-trivial defensive benefit.

Damage Proc Trinkets – Bandit’s / DMC: Death

These trinkets both have a chance on your attacks to deal direct magical damage, with a similar 45 second ICD. The proc rate is high enough that they’re extremely likely to occur in your initial opener, which makes them very strong for overkill burst openers.

Bandit’s Insignia is significantly better because of it’s very strong attack power passive, but because it drops off heroic Sapphiron it is also quite a bit harder to obtain.

Note that the ICDs for these two trinkets are completely independant, so if you’re a human you can use them both and they will often proc together. This is probably going to get nerfed, but right now it’s very strong!

On-use AP Trinkets – Loatheb’s / Platinum Disks / Wrathstone

These trinkets provide an attack power buff on a two-minute cooldown. The strength of them lies in the fact you can choose exactly when to activate them, so you can time them with enchant procs, with other trinkets, or for moments when you have momentum in the fight (successful kidney shot that your opponent won’t trinket, for example).

The flipside of this is that some people find another keybind challenging to manage; and the fact you’re waiting for a perfect opportunity means some time will be wasted. Activating these trinkets does not trigger a global so you could theoretically macro them to one of your other abilities.

The disks have a resil passive, but they’re very easy to get compared to the other two.

On-use Damage Trinkets – GLG

This trinket has been tweaked since its somewhat overpowered inception as a high damage cast-time nuke in season 5. It’s now instant cast and off the GCD completely, but it shares the 10 second “burst damage” cooldown category with activated buff trinkets and the pyro-rocket glove enchant. Compared to Bandit’s/Death, it has a slightly longer cooldown (60 seconds instead of 45) and can’t be timed with the rockets, but it has the advantages that it’s completely controllable and usable from range.

The crit rating is a decent passive, but the fact that this trinket still backfires means it’s not nearly as desirable as some of the alternatives. Not terrible, but not amazing, which I guess is to be expected from a profession blue.

Defensive Trinkets – Battlemaster’s / DMC: Berserker!

The Battlemaster trinket provides a short-term health boost which can be very helpful if you’re able to get it off (can’t do that while stunned). It’s purchased with honor, and much like the wintergrasp trinkets, you have your choice of passives: hit, crit, haste, ap. The attack power one is by far the strongest in terms of raw damage.

DMC:B is something of an odd customer. It procs off both incoming and outgoing damage, and has quite a high proc rate, so it’s going to be up pretty much all of the time you’re in combat. Essentially it’s a passive 105 resil and 105 crit rating. It’s not bad, but perhaps not as exciting as some of the alternatives.

On-use Tentacles – Vanquished Clutches

Tentacles. Need I say more?

Whoever thought it was a good idea to encourage carebear retards into battlegrounds in the name of nerd points needs to be thrown in shark-infested water and shot repeatedly. If the sharks happen to have swine flu, I won’t complain.

EDIT: The WowInsider Commentary is pretty spot on, IMO.

EDIT2: And Scott Jennings says it even more eloquently.

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:

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.

First, the relevant glyph changes:

• Glyph of Exorcism – Increases damage done by Exorcism by 20%. (Old: Your Exorcism also interrupts spellcasting for 2 sec.)
• Glyph of Beacon of Light – Increases the duration of Beacon of Light by 30 sec.
• Glyph of Divine Plea – While Divine Plea is active, you take 3% reduced damage from all sources.
• Glyph of Holy Shock – Reduces the cooldown of Holy Shock by 1 sec.
• Glyph of Hand of Salvation – When you cast Hand of Salvation on yourself, it also reduces damage taken by 20%.

Well, they’re not as exciting as Pain Supression while stunned or Cloak becoming a shield wall, but I can certainly see that shock one getting some use. The exorcism glyph nerf was absolutely inevitable once you factor in the changes to the spell, but secretly I hoped that it would at least be something useful for holy.

The Death Knight Unholy tree has been shuffled around quite a bit and Gargoyle is now at the top – I have no idea whether it will change how people spec, but less gargoyles would make the Turn Evil glyph a lot less attractive.

Exorcism can now be used on all targets, but is now a guaranteed critical strike vs Undead and Demon type mobs.

This is a cool change. Bursting down felhunters is going to be a bit easier, and having an instant damage spell which doesn’t share a cooldown with your instant heal is going to be nice for gib opportunities. At the moment if you have a full HoJ duration to burn somebody you don’t really have enough spells to fill four globals.

It’s not going to hit nearly as hard as holy shock, but it’s cheaper (8% vs 18%) and has a 30y range instead of 20y.

Judgement of Light now procs off spells as well. (Previously only “attacks” would trigger this)

Bonus. I actually find there’s a lot of situations in 2s where light is the only useful thing I can judge, so extra procs via Icy Touch (or whatever) are welcome.

Purifying Power (Tier 6) now reduces the cooldown of your Exorcism and Holy Wrath spells by 17/33%. (Previously increased the critical strike chance of those spells by 10/20%)

Taking this would change Exorcism from 15 seconds to 10 and Holy Wrath from 30 to 20. I’m not sure the spells get used enough to justify taking this talent. That’s okay though, I don’t really have the points to spend there anyway!

Pure of Heart (Tier 5) now reduces Curse, Poison, and Disease effects by 15/30%. (Previously was 25/50% but did not include poisons)

Probably a good change. It’s too strong against hex/tongues at the moment, and 7 seconds instead of 5 seems like a reasonable comprimise. My initial thought was that this would be fantastic versus Wyvern Sting but it turns out that’s actually getting reduced to 6 seconds in PvP so it’s not as big a deal as I imagined. Still, 4.2s Wyverns and 7 second rogue poisons are pretty nice.

And hey, the more globals I can force a hunter to spend applying Serpent Sting the less globals I’m getting LnL Explosive Shots to the face, right?

Blessed Hands has been moved from Tier 5 to Tier 4 and now reduces the mana cost of Hand of Freedom, Hand of Sacrifice and Hand of Salvation by 15/30% and cooldowns by 10/20%.

If you take this in conjunction with Guardian’s Favor you can get a 14 second freedom on a 20 second cooldown which is significantly more uptime than the baseline version. On the other hand, this talent used to grant dispel resistance, so this change might actually be an average uptime decrease. Nerf tranq shot?

While pretty minor, the HoSac and HoSalv (if you glyph it) cooldown reductions will be nice.

Improved Concentration Aura’s (Tier 4) reduced silence/interrupt effect now works while any aura is active.

This is really nice. A lot of games versus (for example) mage/rogue I’ll be forced to sit in conc aura even when nobody is on me just so my partner doesn’t die in an imp CS. With this change I can use frost and mitigate more damage, or ret for the Sanctified Retribution bonus!

Blessing of Kings is now a baseline ability. Trainable at level 20.

This one has been a long time coming, as Rohan will be quick to tell you. A lot of holy specs can’t really fit kings in (especially PvE ones) and it’s an irreplaceable and strong buff. I’m curious to see what they’ll replace the talent with since tier 1 prot looks kind of empty now. Since the alternative is Divine Strength, I’m hoping it’ll be something generic enough to appeal to holy.

EDIT: The replacement is “Divinity: Tier 1 protection talent, increases healing done by and to you by 1/2/3/4/5%.” Holy crap, that is sweet. Now how do I fit it into my build?

Divine Guardian (Tier 4) now has been changed to redirect damage “(up to a maximum of 150/300% of the Paladin’s health).” (Previously had no limit)

Rough, but probably necessary. HoSac + DG was a targetable shield wall, admittedly at the cost of your primary defensive cooldown.

Improved Hammer of Justice (Tier 4) is now a 2 point talent, reducing the cooldown of Hammer of Justice by 10/20 sec. (Previously had a 3rd rank that reduced cooldown by 30 secs)

Slight nerf, but more targeted at retribution paladins I think. Prot gets to keep their 30 second HoJ and holy just has to live with it. If things go live like this, I’m not sure anybody would be speccing holy/prot anyway.

Improved Retribution Aura has been removed from the game. Improved Retribution Aura’s effect has been merged into Sanctified Retribution (Tier 5).

There’s not really anything much else to spend points on in the ret tree, but I’ll take it.

Divine Purpose has been moved from Tier 5 to Tier 6.

This change breaks 49/0/22 completely, which is kind of sad. The talent is still not out of each of the 37/0/34 variations so I’ll be curious to see if they’re happy with those builds existing or whether they’ll make further changes. Making the top 20% of the holy tree actually interesting for PvP would be a good start!

The rogue changes are pretty minimal (and entirely PvE oriented) so I’ll wait a bit before I go into those. That said, let the record show that I am all for normalizing instant poison proc-rates so I can actually use my dual Anarchies!