Ret PvP for 3.2

Hey guys,

So I wanted to take a minute and address some of the PvP changes listed in patch 3.2 Some are pally specific others are general, but surprisingly no one seems to be writing about it. And frankly at least one of the points is huge....

Well I'm not going to dance around the elephant in the room.

• The newest season of Arena gear can only be purchased if you meet the requirements with your 3 or 5 player team rating. Rating requirements from 2 player teams can still be used to purchase the previous season of gear.

HOLY CHIT SENIOR ~ If you've seen my previous posts you know the current participation for 3's and 5's is at an all time low. So much that 5's is basically a dead bracket on my server and for the majority of players 3's is not much better in terms of it being where you get your rating from.

So come patch 3.2 if you want any Furious gear for the season your 2's rating will not be enough. 3's or 5's will be mandatory. I'm talking everything from the lowly furious bracers at 1400 to that sexy 2h weapon at 1750. If you're like a huge percentage of teams out there without a 3's or 5's you'd better get any gear you qualify for NOW. You've been warned... Sure at the end of the day it should increase participation in these dead brackets which ultimately will be good. But scheduling will be more of an issue, more fights will break out amongst teams and overall I think there will be less gear progression in PvP, that is not a good thing.

Moving on:

Dalaran Sewers

• The entire Arena has increased in size by 25%.
• Mounts can now be used in this Arena.
• The position and collision of the crates on the central platform has been modified.

Ruins of Lordaeron

• Alcoves have been removed from the starting chambers.
• Two line-of-sight tombstones have been added to the slime pool on the southern side of the map.
• The collision around the central tomb has been smoothed out to prevent players from becoming stuck on the terrain as often.

Well, hard to speak too much on the sewers, until I see it in action. as far as the Ruins go, this clearly is a bonus for people that know how to pillar hump, and a nerf to casters. LOS will be that much more important here.

• Exorcism: Now has a 1.5 second cast time, but can once again be used on players.
• Art of War: Now only applies to melee critical hits, but will make your next Flash of Light or Exorcism instant.

Ah, now a lot of Pallys are glossing over the return of Exorcism Not here. There have been PLENTY of matches where a healer is down to almost nothing and i have ZERO spells left. Nothing but auto attack. I'm not saying this will be huge again, but it's 100% better then what we had with the nerf which was unusable in PvP period.

There we go, there's a lot of other stuff, seal changes, wintergrasp changes, battleground changes. They're all being covered nicely at just about every other site. So I'll leave it to them for now. Plus you can be assured about half of it will be tweaked before the patch.

Upcoming Paladin changes for 3.2

Hey guys, looks like it's been a month since my last post (how time flies).

Seriously, it's not that I'm not updating the blog, it's that there hasn't been much to report. Arena is going slow, no crazy new content...just the occasional pally nerf...and who want to hear me go off about that!

There's a bunch of changes announced today, but I'm going to focus on the Pally changes... the general PvP changes will come later (hey I need something to write a new article about)

Below is the list... it's rather large but overall excellent changes for once. Believe me not everything is a "buff" per se. A lot of things are just swapping A for B if you know what I mean. But some clear buffs including:

BEACON OF LIGHT REWORKED
EXORCISM USABLE AGAIN
SACRED SHIELD BUFFED

I won't go into all the theorycrafting I know a lot of other pally blogs have done the work already.

Paladins

• Blessing of Sanctuary: This blessing now also increases stamina by 10%. This effect is not cumulative with Blessing of Kings.
• Charger: Can now be learned at level 40.
• Exorcism: Now has a 1.5 second cast time, but can once again be used on players.
• Hand of Reckoning: Redesigned. Now does damage only when target does not currently have the caster targeted, but damage done increased to 50% of attack power, occurring after the taunt effect is applied.
• Judgement of Light: Now heals for 2% of the attacker's maximum health instead of a variable amount based on the spell power and attack power of the judging paladin.
• Lay on Hands: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 10/20% instead of increasing the target's armor.
• Righteous Fury: No longer has a duration or mana cost, remaining until cancelled or death. Also cancelled when a Paladin activates a different talent specialization.
• Sacred Shield: When a paladin casts Flash of Light on a target with this buff, they also now place a heal over time effect on the target, healing that target for 100% of the Flash of Light amount over 12 seconds.
• Seal of Blood: This ability has been removed.
• Seal of the Martyr: This ability has been removed.
• Seal of Vengeance and Seal of Corruption: These seals have been redesigned to deal substantially more damage. Now, once a paladin has 5 copies of the debuff from these seals on his or her target, on each swing the paladin will deal 33% weapon damage as Holy, with critical strikes dealing double damage.
• Shield of Righteousness: Now deals 100% of shield block value as damage instead of 130%.
• Warhorse: Can now be learned at level 20.
• Talents
• Holy
• Beacon of Light: The healing amount on the Beacon of Light target is now based on the total healing done (including over-healing) instead of the effective healing done. Radius increased to 60 yards. Multiple Paladins can now have this active on the same target. Buff indicating a player is within range of the Beacon target is no longer displayed.
• Divine Intellect: This talent now gives 2/4/6/8/10% increased intellect instead of 3/6/9/12/15%.
• Illumination: This talent now returns 30% of the mana cost of the spell instead of 60%.
• Protection
• Ardent Defender: Redesigned. Currently, any damage taken by the paladin while at 35% health or below is reduced. Instead, any attack that would reduce the paladin to 35% health or below has its damage reduced. In addition, once every 2 minutes an attack that would have killed the paladin will fail to kill, and instead set the paladin's health to 10/20/30% of maximum.
• Retribution
• Art of War: Now only applies to melee critical hits, but will make your next Flash of Light or Exorcism instant.
• Crusader Strike: Damage reduced to 75% weapon damage to match the new 4 second cooldown.
• Seal of Command: Redesigned. This seal now deals 36% weapon damage on every swing, and deals substantially less judgement damage.
• Vindication: Redesigned. Now lowers target attack power, is consistent and does not stack with Demoralizing Shout.

The end of Ret Blogging? or the end of Ret?

Drunkenclod, have you been drinking again?....

Sure, but not right now, at this moment I'm quite sober and have noticed a sobering trend going on. THE DEATH OF RET.

No, I don't mean Blizz is eliminating the Ret class, nor do I think everyone's going to stop playing as a Ret pally and switch to a DK (or other class) alt. But I've been having this feeling of...well... apathy towards my Ret Pally ever since this latest patch went live; actually it's even more twards WOW in general, but since Ret is my default spec I think it's causing my happy feelings of Ret to vanish. The sense of "Fun" is going away. Turns out it's not just me. Other Rets are feeling the same way (I bet other classes are as well, but I'm sticking to RET for now).

Let's see what's changed in patch 3.1 for me. Perhaps the best thing to do is to compare what I WAS doing in 3.0 and what I AM doing in 3.1

GOLD FARMING / DAILIES - Before 3.1 I was grinding out dailies on a regular basis, and enjoying it. My stash of gold had dwindled to a couple thousand and I needed to get it back up. I also needed Holar Rep for a shoulder enchant, AND farming plenty of ore for AH sales. After 3.1 it seems less important. I'm back in the 6-7k gold range, with nothing realy to buy. Added rep isn't going to get me anything besides an achievement point, and I swear there's only so many times I can joust an opponent in the Argent daily before I just get tired of mashing the same 3 buttons, in the same pattern, against the same opponent, in the same circle... well you get my drift.... Gold Dailies have lost their "luster".

PvE - Before 3.1 I was going raid and heroic content like mad (for me anyway) traditionally I wan't a fan of raiding, but in patch 3.0 the best gear came from 25 man, and excellent gear from 10 man, even a few 5's if I saved the badges. I ran everything from 5 man heroics to 25 man OS and even pugged Naxx a couple times. I looked forward to a nice 25 man OS group each week and VOA. (VOA will be addressed later as part of Wintergrasp)... After 3.1 it didn't make much sense to bother with 5 or (outside of Uldar) 10 mans at all. I mean the gear is so poor compared to Uldar or high level Arena that unless you've just hit 80 your gear is better already. Even old 25 man content gear is "average" for the veteran player but nothing to look forward to.

That leaves me to try and pug Uldar, which I havn't evn tried considering how hard folks say it is, and my PvP guild sure doesn't run it.... Leaving me no real gear upgrade outside of VOA and Arena... so let's look at those.

Wintergrasp/VOA - Before 3.1, ah wintergrasp was excellent. Sometimes laggy but overall playable. Sweet daily honor and enough turnaround to make it interesting. Also it was pretty easy to pick up a pug for 10 and 25 man after victory... And that pug would down the boss 80-90% of the time after the 1st month or so.... After 3.1 Wintergrasp gameplay was similar enough, but VOA bit the big one. Harder to get PUGs together. And when you did a large argument ensued on whether to do both bosses - just 1 - which one to do 1st and of course the people that left in disgust when the 2nd boss didn't go down, leaving you to wait and find replacements. I've HEARD this is somewhat better so after a couple weeks of leaving VOA alone I'm going to give it another shot. Wintergrasp remains one of the last interesting things going on. I hope the former glory days will come again. Not sure if the fact the honor goes back to weekly from daily will cause another round of fail though.....

Arena - Before patch 3.1 the season itself was very frustrating to play, BUT it was easy enough to get more then enough arena points. In fact I could outfit both specs in a couple months and still have left over points. The only problem was that the gear was sub-par. After 3.1 New season, new gear, and it's GOOD gear. But it takes a long time to get the gear. More honor is needed for each piece and (for most people including me) I'm getting around the same number of arena points....... Add to that the problem of any PvPer not having an upgrade path for a weapon... and the fact that you get the same # of points for a team rating of 150 as you do for 1,500 it just doesn't give you as much incentive to do a ton of arena. For the average player 10 games a week is as good as 50, especially in 3's and 5's.

BG's - Before patch 3.1 well overall OK with SOTA replacing AV as the main place to go for honor, a lot of grinding but the gear upgrades were huge. After patch 3.1 BG's the same but better queuing and improved AV again... another uber long grind for gear but this time it's more of an incremental gear upgrade rather then seeing a huge stat boost from crafted blue gear.

Playstyle - Here's the deal, a Ret Pally is all about DPS. In PvE DPS it's fairly similar before an after the patch. Gear and talents provide some improvement but other classes have similar improvements so compared to others our DPS numbers on the raid charts haven't moved much. In PvP we received nerf after nerf.. no exorcism, less burst, bubble dispellable by warriors and priests, and of course (for many) Armor upgrades with no Weapon Upgrade. This means life is harder for RET in PvP... In fact blizz thinks the playstle is so "broken" their giving it a new overhaul once again... we'll see what this does for Ret but I'm not holding my breath; I expect either it's great but they wind up nerfing it so severely it sucks again... or their attempts to make it more "interesting" will realy just make it "harder"

So is it just me? Am I jaded? I don't think so.... look at the blogs I link to. There's 7 Ret Pally Blogs and they used to be updated multiple times per week, some every day. None of them except for Eye for an Eye have been updated recently... and what does E4E post? That he's not doing as much in WOW and is going to stop blogging regularly.

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Finally a 3's team - but no one to play against.

Hey folks,

So I got what appears to be a solid 3's team going last night. I've played with both people before and we all get along well. The leader of the group is an excellent player; however this is an alt character for him.

I'm thrilled to join what could be a regular 3's team.... The only problem? I think we're going plateau in the 1600s; this is much lower then our team would have peaked in other seasons. What's the problem? No One is Playing 3's.

What do you mean Drunk? Well let's take a look at the armory. We ended the night with a 705 rating. That put our team on page 3 of 11... and 950th place.

Wow 3rd page out of 11, and in the top 1,000 already? Seems kind of high doesn't it. Well it turns out that by the time you get to page 7 all the teams are inactive.



So how many active teams are there in my battlegroup? Well if you count active as more then zero games then roughly 2,200. If you count active teams as more then 10 games we're closer to 1500.

Now I know it's early in the season, but plenty of folks have reached or surpassed the 1500 mark in 2v2.

Teams over 1500 in my battlegroup 2v2 = 1275
Teams over 1500 in my battlegroup 3v3 = 339
Teams over 1500 on my server 3v3 = 13

Now here's where I could start talking about how I'm PRO, my teams LEET and we'll PWN everyone for Gladiator in 3's.... Instead I'll be more realistic and say that if we get past 1500 this week we'll be one of the top 10 threes teams on my server

That my friends is a sad story for arena, and shows that Blizzard needs to encourage more participation in arenas. Do you need more proof? Would you like me to answer what place I would be in with a just over 1500 team in 5v5?

Currently a 1513 rating in 5's will give me:

• 1st place on my server
• 22nd in my battlegroup.

Linky linky

40k honor weekend

Actually 42,956....but who's counting :).... Lets face it, with Season 6 there's hours upon hours of grinding honor ahead of us. The Deadly offset runs over 256,000 honor. Heaven help you if you need to gear 2 specs!

So Friday night I log in and no arena partner hounding me to play 2's.. So I get on the honor grind and boy am I in for a pleasant surprise.

First let's get to what's NOT a surprise.... Wingergrasp. If for some strange, freaky, insane, reason you're not running this once per day you're throwing away a solid 5k honor for about 20 minutes of play. If you do no other grinding of honor you should get in a raid, and do the 3 daily quests associated with this battle. BOOM 5k minimum honor,




NOW, let's get to my very pleasant surprise!.............. Alterec Valley! (shh not so loud) After abandoning this BG for months, literally trying it out only a handful of times in WOTLK with absolutely horrid results, I had given this BG up for dead.

I mean truly terrible results, I'm talking 5 alliance to 40 horde at the start. People joking about ever winning again and the horde getting crazy achievements while farming AV for 1200 honor in about 10 minutes, while the poor alliance get killed a dozen times and end with about 50 honor. It was so bad I opened up a ticket with Blizzard asking them to fix the huge start disparity (They assured me there was no problem)

Well this weekend was AV weekend and I thought I'd give it another try. Blizz clearly fixed something in patch 3.1

• Que time = Instantaneous, or 1 minute at most, usually within 5 seconds.
• Average BG time = 10-12 minutes. Both teams just zerged all day. That's 5-6 battles per hour
• Average honor for loss = 1,000
• Average honor for win = 1,500
• Average win % = 70
  

This was like a dream come true, sure a few battles were 20-30 minutes but VERY few. and more wins then losses. Here I am raking 6-8k per hour on average. WOW. My only regret is that I couldn't spend more time doing AV. My time these days is limited and I took some of it to arena. I'd say I did about 5 hours of AV total over the 2 days.

So did I get anything nice for myself with all that honor? Sure did. Now that deadly trinkets don't have a rating requirement I scooped up the Battlemaster's Conviction to replace my faithful Battlemaster's Determination. BAM +190 AP (actually +110 over my old one) plus an instant 3,385 heal YES PLEASE

Here's a couple screenshots of my weekend.... as always CLICK for a large view.

#1) I logged inside wintergrasp, horde controlled. Here's me killing the two horde inside and planting my awesome flag of ownership in one of their rotting bodies.


#2) Here's one of the better WG's I out healed everyone by a crazy amount. Just under 2k honor for that win, although it was one of the longer lasting games.

Arena gear - Cost and Time breakdown

Hi Folks,

I've been a bit busy at work (you know the thing that keeps a roof over my head until my blog is bought out by Blizz for millions :) But now that the 2nd week of Season 6 and many players are starting to eye their first piece of arena gear.

I've put together a chart showing all of the gear cost, complete with honor points, rating and arena points. Click the chart to see it in full size

Depending on a variety of things last season your gear is probably a mish-mash of Saronite - Deadly gear so I'm not going to go into detail on what to upgrade first, that's going to depend on how good/bad your current gear is and how high you expect your arena rating to hit this season.

I will say this - with deadly offset gear requiring no rating, and Deadly core sets rating ranging from between 1250 - 1500, I wouldn't waste time on hateful gear if at all possible. Go straight to deadly and furious offsets.


Don't know how you're going to do this season? Look at your rating last season and assume you'll be right around the same. That should help you figure out if you're going for the Furious Bracers at 1400 PR, or sticking with Deadly.

What about cost? This is where it gets ugly in my mind, especially if you're gearing for two talent trees (Holy and Ret in my case) With Blizzards new rule that any team rated under 1500 will earn points as if they were at 1500 here's the minim you will earn each week, even if your rating is at 1, or 100, or 1,000

2v2 = 261
3v3 = 303
5v5 = 344

Worst case scenario (and most likely for many people) is that you only have a 2v2 team and it's under 1500. That means you'll be waiting between 2-3 weeks to get enough arena points for the core deadly gear, or about 3 months for the full core set. 6 months to deck out both specs.

Furious is even crazier. Even if you get to the 1700's for some of the main pieces it's about 4 weeks per piece (assuming a 1750 2's rating gives you 519 points, and a core item runs over 2k AP)

So, the lesson here? Don't burn yourself out, you'll be playing the whole season to gear out. No mad rushes for gear like S5. Blizz has slowed the progression of acquiring top level gear both in PvE and PvP. Not a bad thing in my opinion but a change of pace from what we've seen in WOTLK.

Arena report Day 1 - Season 6

Ok folks, while I (and many others) stand my my big FU to Blizz from yesterday; it's time for a more coherent post. Unfortunately the armory hasn't updated yet so I don't have the match by match stats but after an evening of arena I have stuff to report. Some of it great other stuff not so much.

First of all, I'm pleased to report I did get a CHALLENGER title along with the achievement. It was probably the most frustrating season I've played in and I've played since S2 So congrats to me!

THE OVERVIEW

So log in late last night and immediately whisper my long time arena partner Kyllia. Turns out he's got some RL issues going on and says he's not going to be very available for games for a few weeks. That's not good since all teams now start at a ZERO rating. It take quite a few games to get up there. Fortunately now that I"m in a PvP guild I've met other folks exited to play and got a Death Knight to join me. I wound up playing 28 games last night. 18 of them with the DK, 10 with my Rogue partner.

Ending win/loss = 17 win 11 loss
Ending Rating = 799

THE GOOD

You're starting at a ZERO rating, it's actually awesome. Because the rating is so low, every loss you take is a zero point loss. Every win is a 47 point win.... Let me say that again because it's so important to what's going to make the season feel good to folks. Until you get well past 1k rating there is no penalty for losing you loose nothing. And every win is 47 points. Frankly it made last night probably the funnest to play in a long time. No need for your teammate to get pissed because some bonehead move got you killed. There's just no real pressure for the first 50 games or so. That's a nice change.

I'm not sure how high you need to go before you start loosing points. In two matches my opponents each lost 1 point while we still gained 47. My guild leader ended the night at a 1304 rating and said that he still hadn't seen any point deduction for a loss.

My 800 point rise in rating last night leads me to believe that the overall rating you get in S6 should be at least as high as you got in S5. That means gear will be easier to obtain. All Deadly gear has a maxium PR of 1500 and furious gear starts at 1400 for the off set. Combined with the fact that if you have less then a 1500 rating you will get points as if you had a 1500 rating... it's great news for caual PvPer's as well as moderates. I hope arena participation will improve.

THE BAD

Not all good news. Holy and Ret PvP builds are gimped compared to S5. The DK I was with Out DPS'ed me when I played RET. With exorcism gone I need to re-glyph myself. I swapped to Holy wich worked out much better (9 wins in a row, almost HOT STREAK). But I can tell it's still gimped. I'm running out of mana faster, I have no stun break, it's not great but it does still seem to work.

In other bad news, (for certain classes) I expect the same old combo's to be OP despite any nerfs, so plan on seeing more DK/Holy Pally teams, expect warriors and warlocks to suck, etc, etc.

At this point I'm unclear on what a zero start rating means for switching teams. Will you go back to zero PR every switch? Man that's going to be problematic I think.

Lastly, this isn't new but there is no Deadly gladiator PvP weapon just two tiers of Furious weapons.. minum rating for that is 1850.... Leaving most people to try to PvE for a better weapon.


GOOD LUCK IN SEASON 6 FOLKS!