Arena after the patch - Put your head down and trudge on

Hey folks,

As promised here's a rundown of Week 4... It started out bad, horribly bad. How bad is that you ask? Try 2-8. Yeah 2 wins 8 losses.

Now some of that is me. But it turns out a lot of it was my warrior partner. He had regemmed for STR from Armor Pen. Well folks I can tell you that even after the armor pen nerf your warrior should stick with it. Tuesday night my warrior is crying out in dismay on why he's critting clothies for 1-2k damage. I'm crying out because of a new humongous 21 second CD between stuns....the rating tanks from 1807 to 1778.... I call it after 10 games in disgust and go pick up my Relentless Gladiator Cloak of Dominance before the rating slips under 1750 and I become ineligible.

We hit it again last night playing 22 games. Jeddak has regemmed to Armor Pen and is critting for his more usual 3-5k again. We end up going 11-11 and the rating goes up slightly to 1787. We went up and down quite a bit with a low of 1740 and a high of 1797.

So what does this mean for Prot/Warror 2's?

#1) The warrior needs to stick with arm pen. I dont' have the math or theorycraft but I have a combined 30+ arena matches this week with Jeddak CLEARLY saying arm pen is better. He'll also be picking up a mace next week for an added 15% arm pen on top of that. He's talked to a couple top level warriors on our relm about it and they all agree...even after the nerf if you have the Attack Power already (say 4k) stick with Arm Pen.

#2) I'll be sticking with Protection in 2's. We're more or less maintaining in the high 1700's - low 1800's in 2's. This is much higher then the low 1600's I was doing last season as Holy Spec.

Now, let's break down how the nerfs have affected me:

Ardent Defender (reduces damage taken below 35% health by 7/13/20% instead of 10/20/30%.) - Well I'm sure this is affecting me, but at the end of the day it's not feeling like I'm dying to much quicker so I'm calling this a minimal nerf to my play style.

Touched by the Light: ( provides 20/40/60% of the paladin’s strength as spell power instead of 10/20/30% of the paladin’s stamina.) - Surprisingly very little noticeable difference here. This change dropped my spellpower by about 400 but between the mace and cloak upgrades I actually only lost 135 spellpower from last week, and with the huge crits provided by Sacred Shield I'm still spamming FOL quite successfully.

Judgements of the Just: The reduction in cooldown to Hammer of Justice provided by this talent has been reduced to 5/10 seconds instead of 10/20 seconds.

OK THIS IS THE HUGE, UGLY, KEYBOARD BANGING, VENT YELLING, MOUSE THROWING nerf. It's MUCH worse than even I feared. out of the 19 losses this week, I can attribute at least 9 to having my HoJ a few seconds off cooldown giving a healer that one big heal to get back up to 50-75%, effectively resetting the mach. OR not being able to stop a nice long 10-15 second chain CC because I couldn't stun back.

It's so frustrating seeing what would have been a win last week turn into a loss this week, specifically about this nerf. The problem is that with both stuns on the same 30 second CD timer you now have a full 21 seconds of nothing between stuns. This is up almost 100% from the 11 seconds between stuns we had before the patch.

I've even put a post up on the pvp forums requesting the HoJ stun to be reduced to 25 seconds from 30. You can see the article (and my logic) here. Yeah I don't expect much sympathy but this is such a big nerf it's just crazy.

BOTTOM LINE: Prot isn't going anywhere in 2's. The excellent mana regen and heals are still there, the CC is sort of there, and (so far) it seems to still be working.