~chron

Interesting arena graph du jour; popular arena compositions on Reckoning! The first week of the season is over now but given that everyone started from zero this time around there’s probably a large number of people who still haven’t finished levelling their teams yet. It’s too early to really tell what’s going to dominate the season, and Blizzard have shown that they’re willing to tune as necessary. Nevertheless, some clear trends have already emerged:

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.

chronic Data Mining, World of Warcraft Arena, gchart, graphs, pvp, reckoning

On my rogue I’ve been doing 2s with Azuba as resto, so we’ve been talking a fair bit about shaman gearing and different spec possibilities recently.

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:

chronic Data Mining, Shaman Arena, armory.rb, gchart, pvp, Shaman

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

The initial (and as far as I know, incomplete) patch notes for 3.1 are available on MMO-Champion and although I’m a bit late I thought I’d go through the interesting Paladin changes.

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!

chronic Paladin 3.1, glyphs, Paladin, patch-notes, pvp