~chron

Nail-biting season end! We’ve been sitting on our 2s rating for a couple of weeks but we still needed to make some progress on our 3s team to get the title for our priest. Well, that, and Azuba wouldn’t be satisfied unless he could get glad as both resto and elem. And now he’s putting an enhance set together! But I digress.

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.

chronic Arena Arena, pvp, reckoning, Rogue, rps, season-6

It’s official: Two weeks left in season 6!

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:

chronic Arena gchart, graphs, reckoning

Did a Reckoning 2s graph again today, figured I’d share:

chronic Arena Arena, comps, gchart, graphs, reckoning

Since for some reason I find class balance and arena representation fascinating at the moment (possibly just because of how much I’ve nerdraged about warrior/druid this week) here’s some updated graphs for Reckoning 2v2:

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.

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

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