After all the engineering QQ last week I decided the old “if you can’t beat them, join them” mantra applied and PL’d engineering to 425 on my rogue for the oft-maligned GLG. Fel Iron was incredibly expensive, but apart from that the material costs weren’t too harsh. Big thanks to Aely for smelting (among other things) 300 cobalt bars for me since the ore was so much cheaper. At least the UI has a “create all” button, I guess.

It ended up costing me about 2.5k all up, and so far I definitely think it was worth every copper. Azuba skilled up eng the same weekend and we’ve had some incredible tricks+cb evis+double GLG gibs that I have unfortunately so far neglected to fraps.

I also managed to grab a Sinister Revenge from the Regression alt Naxxramas run which was a pleasant surprise. PvE daggers and gimmick professions; I have become everything I hate and it is fucking delicious.

This is what a CS->KS typically looks like on a level 80 training dummy, with no shaman assistance or buffs:

CS -> Hyperspeed Accelerators -> Mut -> Pause -> KS -> Mut -> Mut -> CB Evis -> GLG while running to 30 yards to restealth

(optionally, rocketboots around like a retard)

Balanced. I haven’t tried out the pyro-rockets yet but I’ve heard they are also quite fun, and 45y range to boot.

Who’s laughing now?

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.