Blessing of Might

Arena S7 Week 5 - Double DPS from Hell

2009-10-06T09:10:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

So my arena partner was sick most of last week, we didn't get any games in until Sunday night. We started the week at 1807 and for a while things were going pretty well. We got up to 1829 before suddenly tanking like crazy. Lose, lose, lose 1789 (grr). We ended it at 1801.

As a little side note, minimum requirements to be in my guild are 1800.... I don't think they're hard core enough to drop you if you fall below 1800 later in the season (permanently) but our GM is a little "fly by the seat of your pants" kind of guy.

So what was the comp of the night? Double DPS.. yeah 2 mages, Ret Pally/Rogue, Ferril Druid/Rogue, Mage/Rogue...a lot of Rogue last night. Some we pulled thru, others we didn't.

The damage of double DPS was just awsome. I'm no slouch rocking 850 resilience and my partner is at 952 but against a double DPS team it felt like ZERO.... Sometimes by the time I got out of a polymorph or cyclone my partner was basically dead.

My advise here is to not be afraid to blow your CD's much sooner then usual. Did the rouge sap you and 2 people are on your partner? TRINKET OUT OF IT, don't wait the 6 seconds because he'll be dead by then. Are you getting focused and are at 30% Don't want until 10% to bubble, you might not get a chance between 10% and 0... a good team will know the bubble is coming and kick the spell, counterspell, etc and you're dead.

Now don't blow things to early. If you trinket out of a sap right away and the rouge isn't on your partner he's just going to go back and sap you again. Good timing and situational awareness is key. If you can survive the initial burst of double DPS you're all set because their big attacks are on cooldown and you've got a healer - they don't.

That's all for now, hopefully we'll get some games in for week 6 tonight or tomorrow.

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

2009-09-25T12:01:00.000-07:00

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.

AWW Crap patch 3.2.2 live today

2009-09-22T08:17:00.001-07:00

I can't stand up right now, because blizzard just shattered my knee caps with their NERF bat.

Righteous Fury: The bonus threat from Holy spells caused by this talent has been reduced from 90% to 80%.
Ardent Defender: This talent now reduces damage taken below 35% health by 7/13/20% instead of 10/20/30%.
Blessing of Sanctuary: This blessing now grants 10% strength in addition to its current effects. Also, the strength and stamina bonuses from this blessing will no longer be lost when Blessing of Kings is removed.
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.
Touched by the Light: This talent now provides 20/40/60% of the paladin’s strength as spell power instead of 10/20/30% of the paladin’s stamina.

I was hoping for at least one more week, but clearly I'm not going to get it. What does this mean to me, well clearly it's going to be harder to stay at a high ranking. Not only is this set of stuff a huge nerf, most other classes are getting buffed!?!?!

No one's surprised about these nerfs coming, even I know a little something should change. But the loss of roughly 400 spellpower is hard to swallow. However, one can make up some of that with gear. Loosing 10 seconds of cooldown on a stun however, that's just unpleasant.

I'm unclear on how much the Ardent Defender change is going affect me. At the end of the day we'll see how the rating goes. I should be hitting some games tonight so we'll see what happens.

Beating that Warlock/Healer comp

2009-09-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

As promised I'm going to write about how to beat a comp that was giving us problems these last couple weeks, warlock/healer.

Traditionally in 2's if there's a healer you go straight for them. I interrupt the heals and the warrior beats them into submission! When it's a warlock though, this strategy has been a big FAIL for us. Despite my partner's high DPS the constant fear's the lock puts out doesn't let my warrior partner put out enough sustained damage, giving their healer a much needed break to heal to full.

Our next though was for me to CC the warlock and the warrior continues with the healer. Unless the healer is very squishy, it's a fail again. I have about 9 seconds of CC followed by a 11 second break. Easily enough time for that fear to strike, especially with resilience keeping the healers up longer.

So we moved on to the Warrior beating on the warlock, and me CCing the Healer. WIN ! With me interrupting the first two heals the warlock is usually pretty low on health, forcing the healer to spend precious mana on large inefficient heals and/or blow a trinket to get out of one of the stuns. 11 seconds later I rinse and repeat.

If we're especially lucky the warlock panics a bit and LOSes his healer allowing a quick victory, if not my excellent mana use/regen allows us to win a protracted mana war, since the healer is feeling too pressured to start mana draining or CCing me too much.

Of course I've been seeing a lot of Druids as healers and the good ones will chain Cyclone me. This becomes a question of who can CC the best, me or the Druid. Many times with this comp we need to switch to pressuring different members depending on how low their mana is. If we can force those big, mana ineffienct heals or get the lock to blow most of his mana right away we come out on top....eventually

Arena S7 week 3 - Ding! 1800

2009-09-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

That's right folks, Jeddak and I hit 1807 in 2's last night. I immediately called a stop and let the points roll in on Tuesday. That means on Tuesday I'm going to have a nice shiny Relentless Gladiator's Gavel !!

What a huge update from my current Titansteel Guardian.
49 Int
16 Sta
21 MP5
41 Resilience
164 Spell Power
30.6 DPS
1 Sockets

I owe it all to a decent partner and the Prot/Holy spec 19/52/0. This spec is insane, with two available stuns on short cooldowns and excellent survivability. Considering that our win percentage last night was 75% (15-5) with gear upgrades I'm thinking 2k might even be possible for the first time ever!.... At least until the nerf comes thru.

I'll talk a little bit about some match strategies in a later post, but for now I'll mention the match that put us over the top.... It was a priest/rogue combo. We head out and I put Blessing of Sacrifice on my partner along with Sacred Shield. The rouge does his stun on me and we wait for the priest to show himself....Somethings different about that priest though

He's Shadow! ... Now I haven't seen a shadow Priest in arena since climbing out of the 1500 bracket and I'm not very familiar with their spells. But but I pop Hand of Freedom on Jed yell at Jed to wail on the guy. I use both of my stuns to lock him up and he's almost dead... to easy!

BUT WAIT... he turns into a purple ball and is basically immune to Jed's attacks. So Jed switches to the rogue. Suddenly the priest reverts back to his normal form and we start taking a lot of damage, my stuns aren't up yet - the rouge is back at 100% health and I'm thinking OH NO don't screw this one up!

Jed hops back on the priest and combined with HoF and my 2 back to back stuns we have the priest dead shortly. Wrap up the rogue and it's 1807 team rating!

Next time I'll talk about one of our problem comps (Warlock/Healer) and how to beat them.

Rumors of 2v2 death have been greatly exagerated

2009-09-16T09:29:00.000-07:00

So you may have read that 2v2 is dead. Blizz has mandated that only 3v3 and 5v5 teams will be eligible for a Gladiator title and weapons. They will also not balance around 2's.

This has effectively killed off the 2v2 bracket with everyone rolling 3's teams, right? WRONG! In fact almost nothing has changed.

What do you say Drunkenclod? Have you been hitting the alcohol particularly hard this morning?

No sir.. but as they say in WOW "Screenshot or it didn't happen"... Sure I got your screenshots right here baby! Check out my excellent article from May of this year (aka season 6)
http://blessingofmight.blogspot.com/2009/05/finally-3s-team-but-no-one-to-play.html

In it you'll see roughly 2,200 active 3's teams back in Season 6.... How many are active today? 2,125 !!

SAY WHAT?!? How can this be? Everyone says 2's has died.

Here's why 2's aren't going anywhere

#1) If you play in the under 1500 bracket (and 60%+ of you do) nothing has changed for you
#2) If you play in the under 1800 bracket (and 90%+ of you do) nothing has changed for you
#3) If you play in the under 2000 bracket (and 95%+ of you do) nothing has changed for you

Why is this? All but 2,200 rated gear is available in 2v2 play, points earned are the same and on the blizz forums (unofficially at this point) it seems that titles EXCEPT for gladiator will still be awarded.

So if you were playing arena in S6 at under 2k keep on PWNing and getting PWNed in S7 - Everyone else is!

Easy points Calculator

2009-09-14T09:23:00.001-07:00

Ever get tired of plugging numbers into the amory? I sure do. Here's a little cheat sheet on all brackets from 1500 - 2000. Since now fifteen hundred is the lowest points you'll get as long as you play ten games a week you'll get points as if you rated at fifteen hundred.

I've also done three color codings, green, red, and blue.... This is based on the full 5v5 points given. So you can see that in order to equal the (roughly) same amount of points in 3's team as a bottom rank 5v5 team you'll need 1550 or in 2's team you'll need 1600.

I find that to be beneficial for me for time managment. If I know I'm getting 344 points for 5's this week and there's no way I'll be able to get 1550 in 3's I can skip it since I'm already getting more points- make sense?

	2v2	3v3	5v5
1500	261	303	344
1525	282	327	372
1550	305	353	401
1575	328	380	432

1600	353	409	465
1625	379	439	499
1650	405	470	534
1675	433	501	570

1700	461	534	607
1725	490	576	644
1750	519	601	683
1775	548	635	722

1800	578	669	760
1825	607	703	799
1850	637	737	838
1875	666	771	876

1900	694	804	914
1925	722	836	950
1950	749	868	986
1975	776	898	1021
2000	801	928	1054

Drunkenclod - WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

2009-09-09T10:44:00.000-07:00

Right here Baby!

Seriously though, I took a break from the blog because all the nefs to Ret have forced me to abandon RET. Yeah I can't belive it either. If you would have asked me this at level 70 I would have looked at you like an insane person.

At 80 though it's a whole new game. At 80 Blizz has provided NO pvp weapon upgrade path in Season 6 for people under 1800 rating. In Season 7 I (recently) get a very slight bump with 5 man TOC drops but it's not enough.....

Ret has always been extremely gear dependant, and your Weapon has been the single biggest improvment you can get. With me rocking a Titansteel Destroyer all of S6 no half serious team wants me as RET, so I switched to holy. This was a bit more forgiving with titansteel weapons as long as the armor was good.

This Season I've got prot/holy (19/52/0) and so far it's been AWSOME. Incredible survivability, excellent CC and most importantly my partner and I are steadily increasing in ratings.

SO.... I can no longer speak to RET as well, but I'm going to chronicle this season week by week, we'll see if I stay protection after the 3.2.2 nerf.. but for now 19/52/0 is where it's at.

Season 7 starts today - Items/ratings below

2009-09-01T15:39:00.000-07:00

Arena Season 7 has now officially begun, and players can immediately begin competing for the new Relentless Gladiator PvP item sets. We have reset all Arena team ratings, Arena points, and personal ratings though players retain their honor points and matchmaking rating going into the season.
Also, to coincide with the launch of Arena Season 7, players who were on the top teams from each battlegroup at the end of season 6 should be receiving their end-of-season rewards today. These include Arena-specific titles until the end of the new season, and for players that have earned the rank of gladiator, a Furious Gladiator’s Frostwyrm.

Here is a list of some PvP items that will be available in Arena Season 7 and their expected rating requirements:

No Rating Required:
Deadly Bracer
Deadly Belt
Deadly Boots
Deadly Neck
Deadly Ring
Deadly Cape
Deadly Trinket
Furious Bracer
Furious Belt
Furious Boots
Furious Neck
Furious Ring
Furious Cape
Furious Trinket

Rating Required:
700+: Furious Relics
800+: Furious Gloves
900+: Furious Legs
1000+: Furious Chest
1100+: Furious Helm - 12,000h /700 arena
1200+: Relentless Bracer (honor) - 39,400
1250+: Relentless Belt (honor) - 62,000
1300+: Relentless Boots (honor) - 62,000
1350+: Furious Shoulders -9,600h /550 arena
1400+: Relentless Gloves - 1,300 arena
1450+: Relentless Neck (honor) -47,400
1500+: Relentless Ring (honor) - 47,400
1550+: Relentless Legs - 2,150 arena
1600+: Relentless Chest - 2,150 arena
1650+: Relentless Trinket (honor) - 62,000
1700+: Relentless Wands/Relics/etc
1750+: Relentless Cape (honor) - 47,400
1800+: Relentless Weapon - lvl245 35,000h / 1,200 Arena
1900+: Relentless Helm
2000+: Relentless Shoulders
2200+: Relentless Weapon - lvl258
2300+: Relentless Tabard

Wow Armory on iphone

2009-07-16T08:43:00.000-07:00

I've just installed it and it's absolutely, positivly, insanely FANTASIC. It's what I've been looking for from a warcraft iphone app since i got it and it's FREE.

Here's a video

Ret PvP for 3.2

2009-06-22T08:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-18T11:23:00.001-07:00

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?

2009-05-18T11:30:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-05-14T08:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-11T10:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-06T12:13:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-22T08:15:00.000-07:00

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!

Exorcism can no longer be used on players

2009-04-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

Maybe I'm tired, maybe it's just been a rough week. Whatever the reason I only have one response to Blizz once again nerfing ret at the last second, and specifically for PvP where Ret is not dominant.

(please excuse my french)

FUCK YOU Blizzard, Fuck you.

That is all... for now.
===========
Exorcism can no longer be used on players

We made a change in the 3.1.1 patch to prevent Exorcism from being used on players. We didn’t announce this change ahead of time because we were trying to get the tooltip changed at the same time to reduce confusion. We still plan on getting the tooltip updated ASAP. Exorcism’s use in PvE has not changed at this time.

Going with a “not on players” solution is not ideal and we will be re-designing how the ability works in a future patch (the plan is sooner rather than later). We don’t like for PvE and PvP mechanics to work differently when we can avoid it. We also don’t like for a major damaging ability to be excluded from the PvP game. However, we thought this had become a balance issue serious enough to address at this time.

We shifted around paladin damage for 3.1 trying to increase sustained damage while reducing burst damage. Unfortunately, the Exorcism change did the opposite. Instead of stealing a GCD from a paladin, it actually gave them an extra one. A Retribution paladin could use Exorcism to cause damage while closing to melee and then be ready to go with their melee damage attacks. (Exorcism of course is not limited to Ret paladins either.) We changed the way paladins do damage for Lich King, so while it is unfortunate (and we accept full blame), it also isn’t too surprising that it is taking some effort to get their damage in the right place.

In the same patch where we remove the “not on players” limitation for Exorcism, we are going to change the way paladins do damage so that their normal combat moves have more depth to them instead of just using abilities every time they finish their cooldown. This should make causing damage as a paladin more interesting and also less bursty. While we have some ideas on how to accomplish that, if you have suggestions or your own ideas about how this could work, this would be a good time to share them. (As examples of abilities you don’t just use whenever their cooldown has finished, you might look at Conflagrate, Brain Freeze, Rip, Overpower or Arcane Blast.) We do request that you don’t fill the forums with posts of limited content or insight about how you don’t like to be nerfed. Nobody does.

It is always a judgment call about when a fix (a buff or a nerf) can’t wait. Some things we can’t change easily in hotfixes or small patches, and some things we consider too risky for technical reasons or for their potential effects on the game.

Get your patch 3.1 Ret PvP spec here (maybe)

2009-04-14T15:10:00.000-07:00

Well, I was checking out the new wowhead talent calculator and trying to figure out a way to shave enough points out of the Ret Tree to keep a 30 second stun. Well I may have found it.

0/19/52

So let's look at what's missing from my tree.

SOC - Yep, Seal of Command is gone, the word from PTR folks is that because judgments count for a lot less damage, the blowback from Seal of Blood/Martyr is reduced greatly making this better for all around Damage. If there's an instance where you absolutly can't be taking damage, then you can always dust off that old Seal of Command or even go to a holy seal.

2H Weapon Specalization - Well, this was gone a long time ago for me. So not putting it back doesn't hurt.

Improved Blessing of Might - There it is... the two point loss that (if anyone coments) people will be looking at hard. I hate running numbers and I don't even have time for it right now, but my thought is wtih BOK trainable, a ret pally will be OK using BOK instead of BOM on himself. Sure there is less AP, but you get more health, more mana, bigger crit to make up for it. And you suddenly buy youself 2 spare points to get the 30 second CD for Improved Hammer of Justice and keep Divine Guardian which will just be huge.

The excellent blog RET PALLY SMASH has put up a different build 0/20/51 You get basically the same Prot tallents, but the ret tree gives up RV and Fanaticism instead of BOM and 2H weapon damage.

Here's the thing, Ret Pallies are getting their burst reduced already, RV and Fanticism work great together to help keep the burst up. 18% extra chance to crit AND when the crit happens 30% will be a DOT. Is that better then 6% white damage... Yes I think it is. Is it worth not having improved BOM? Only a little real world testing or heavy theorycrafting will tell.

Religulous

2009-04-10T08:41:00.000-07:00

Yep RELIGULOUS (like the Bill Maher movie)..... if you don't know the movies it's a comedy about the various religions of the world.

Well, the reason I mention it is that I went ahead and swapped to Holy, and it feels a little comedic; especially dueling and anything that needs DPS like daily quests :)....With the assumption that patch 3.1 is coming on the 14th or 21st I'm going to try to stay holy until the patch. My build is 51/5/15 which is PvE and feels just wrong.. no stun removal, no movement increase, no repentance; but excellent healing when not interrupted. Here's what I've healed so far:

10 man VOA - With only 9 people the raid leader wanted me on raid heal, and put a druid on MT/OT heal. We wiped due to people not staying out of the cloud. 2nd time I asked to switch to tank heals and we did just fine.... I have to say though I was feeling a little low on mana by the end of it.

25 man VOA - Raid heal again, but no idiots standing in the cloud it was a cake walk, although again not a ton of mana left at the end of the fight

Heroic VH - Now this was my first real test as far as I was concerned. Being the only healer means everyone's looking at me to keep them alive. It's probably the easiest heroic as a DPS so I figured it was a good place to start.

Well, let me tell you the first boss we get is Zuramat, which is maybe the hardest boss in there and I just about caused a wipe. I'm casting crazy heals and running out of mana, so I go to case Lay on Hands on myself - unfortunately I had a teammate focused, so the LOH landed on them. I ran out of mana and died, everyone else started dropping as well. Fortunately our groups RET pally had the presence of mind to cast LOH on our tank and the tank lasted just long enough to kill him (down to maybe 10% health with everyone else dead). Still we avoided the wipe which is what counts, but no thanks to me.

The rest of the fight is fine, but I constantly found myself having to manage mana. I'm not sure how the other pally healers do in 5's but with very little down time in VH, I found myself constantly trying to keep above 50% of mana

My observations so far:

1) I know I've read posts that say Holy Pally mana pools are just about infinite, and I can see that in in short bursty arena's or large raids where you're getting mana back from other effects. But if you're the ONLY healer, I just don't see healing heroics without the occasional stop to drink.

2) Beacon of light - Well this certainly helps with healing, but 1 minute? Wow that's annoying to reapply all the time AND I have to go select the guy to re-apply, perhaps I should just write a macro - the annoying thing is that I need to put in the persons name every time I'm healing a new group.

3) I need to get a little better poping abilities like HOP, which means I need to be a little more friendly with my F1-F5 keys me thinks.

Feeling a little "meh" before patch 3.1

2009-04-07T09:10:00.000-07:00

I've had this growing feeling of boredom while waiting for patch 3.1 Let's look at the stuff I do in a given week and why it's getting boring.

- PvP
Ah my true love, like a prison inmate waiting for a conjugal visit I yearn for more arena. The problem is that my teams have stopped playing.. Why? Well my 2v2 SHOULD be OK for a challenger title, and with my current 2's partner pulling 12 hour days at work we don't want to jeopardize it with sloppy play so we're just waiting for the season to end...

Also with arena points being reset at the end of S5 there just isn't anything to play for, so my arena partners are focusing on other things untill S6.

There's always BG's and Wintergrasp.... But I've been honor capped for a couple weeks, and nothing new in WG to buy, I'm basically saving WG marks for the next season and playing more WSG and AB just for the marks - which feels like not the best use of time to sit in a half hour AB for 1 loosing mark and no honor.

-Raiding
Yeah, I've been doing a lot more of that. At some point every week I get in 10/25 man VoA and 10/25 man OS. In fact over the weekend I managed to pick up Gauntlets of the Lost Conqueror which I turned in for Valorious Redemption Gloves for my Holy Set....That's all fine and dandy but running all 4 of these takes up maybe 4 hours in a week, with one of them spent sitting around waiting for the group to form. Then it's a 1 week lockout and I"m forced to move onto...

5-man heroics = (Sigh) it's fine, and pugs are a dime a dozen, but I'm way overgeard for anything to drop for me, pretty much relegating me to buying frozen orbs with the emblems that drop. It's also starting to feel pretty grindy, I mean how many times can a guy run heroic VH and come away exited? That just leaves....

Naxx = That would be fine, it's pretty new content for me and has gear upgrades, but unlike just about every other raid instance this one is relatively hard to find pugs for on my server (relative compared to finding pugs for all the other content) AND most importantly requires a solid 2-4 hour commitment which I don't have a lot of.

Dailies - Nothings more grinding then doing the same quests over and over for more gold... I try to slog thru 3 Holdar dailies minimum per day, plus the WG dailies. Sometimes more. At one point I needed the cash, now I"m sitting at over 5k gold so there's no real pressure. I'm sure with new gear enchants and a 1k Dual Spec fee I'll feel poor soon enough for now though I'm just going thru the motions.

So what's left for me to do? - I'm open to ideas. Frankly I think I may respec to Holy for the last week, not only should it give me a little variety but I'll help me get "into shape" for when I'm asked to heal.... Funny enough this weeks 10 man OS only had 9 people and 1 healer. So for boss fights I swapped to my holy set and off healed along with a shadow priest. It went slow, but no wipes :)

It's not a carry.. we're a TEAM

2009-04-03T08:34:00.000-07:00

Ok guys, as you know I joined a PvP Guild a while back. One of the guys in my guild Jeddak is a fury warrior that loves to PvP AND talk smack. I want to start off by saying that he's a nice guy, on my 3's team, I enjoy doing arena and BG's with him and.. I OWN HIM IN DUELS I mean, I really, really, really kick his butt. We've dueled maybe 20 times and my record is 19-1, with my one loss occurring when I decided to duel in my healing gear (keeping the ret spec) and answering a phone call at the same time.

Now normally I would never go humiliating someone online, but good old Jeddak has a habit of Dueling me when we're the only two people of our guild on. THEN the next day when others are on I suddenly see the guild chat flooded with "lol Drunk I OWNED you last night in Duels".... Despite my protests to the contrary with what really happened there's no admission of loss, just more smack talk that he won against me multiplee times with me taking no wins.

To add insult to injury he convinced one of our PRO healers to carry him in 2v2. Their team rating is 1976. So now as we're going back and forth he's reminding folks to look at his arena rating. When I tell him he's lucky to get such a great carry he always replies "No... We're a Team" Hey.. if he ACTUALLY won and wasn't getting an arena carry he could smack talk all he wants, all day, all night. But since he's loosing every match it's just a fun lie at best. I'm not offended or angry I'm sure he's joking... But because it happens with our Guild leaders on and we're a PvP guild... I want to set the record straight.

Last night just after 11pm server time Jeddak invites me for more duels... Knowing he's going to bring it up when I log in tonight with more "lol I owned you like i own my dog" I went ahead and screenshotted our 5 matches... If you click on the pick for full screen, you can clearly see the time stamps and some in game comments.

Match#1 - (Winner Drunkenclod)

Match #2 (Winner Drunkenclod)

Match #3 (Winner Drunkenclod)

Match #4 (Winner Drunkenclod)

Match #5 (Winner Drunkenclod)

And finally - His "It's not a carry... we're a Team" 2v2 team in detail
(notice he's played 21 of 575 games)

Sorry Jed, you brought this on yourself my friend. Consider it the ultimate smack talk, but with proof.
It's a carry - You're NOT a Team :)

What makes a PRO? - T H I S

2009-03-30T12:33:00.000-07:00

I know, there's no paladin here, but this guy definitely deserves his own spot. In the 3v3 finals a mage is down to 10% health, and little mana... and it's a 2v1 situation; he wins

The video shows the critical part of the match and breaks down how it happens. Sign me up to this guys team!

Did Blizz make a game modification in response to ME?

2009-03-27T11:48:00.000-07:00

We'll never know for sure but here's one of today's blue posts:
Raids & Dungeons
Vault of Archavon

Archavon, Emalon, and their allies will now banish themselves 10 minutes prior to the beginning of a Lake Wintergrasp battle. A warning will be given 15 minutes prior to the start of Wintergrasp. They will not banish themselves if in combat.

So why do I think there's even a remote possibility that I influenced this blue post in the least?... Grab a beer, sit back and listen to my Tuesday evening.

So I log in Tuesday night looking for either a 25 man OS or VOA.... I see a VOA group is up and get the invite. Wintergrasp is starting in about twenty minutes, fortunately this is a quick raid so we should be fine. Here's how the raid went down.

1) Take the usual few minutes for everyone to get there, while we wait the trash is cleared. I show up about half way thru the trash run.

2) Shortly after the 15 minute WG warning we start on Archavon, but my cries of "buffs please" go unheeded and all I've got on is my blessing of might.... It seems that no one took the time to buff the late comers so half our raid was unbuffed.

3) We wipe on Archavon with 70k life left... GRR

4) We all res, and reset with everyone getting buffed now.... And restart Archavon with 4 min 30 seconds left.

5) At about 100k health left we get a warning that "This raid is scheduled to reset in 30 seconds"... We DPS the guy down but I die... I get a rez and quickly loot my two emblems of Valor... and then Archavon DISAPEARS!

Yep, no one got any loot and some people haven't take their emblems of Valor yet. I can painfuly verify that even if you drop the boss before the raid resets he will de-spawn and you will get no loot.... Now there was a nice chestpiece I would have liked to get, and only 2 other paladins in the raid (not sure their spec).

Knowing it's a long shot I opened up a ticket to Blizz explaining what just happened. I expected the typical "Sorry we can't do anything" line, but instead I got this:

=============

Thank you for contacting the World of Warcraft Game Master Department.
Your petition has been forwarded to our character specialists for further
investigation and troubleshooting. Please keep in mind that, due to the
nature and complexity of these types of petitions, it may take several
days for us to contact you with the conclusion of our investigation.
Please do not delete, edit, or re-submit your original ticket,
as it contains essential information needed by our character specialists.
We appreciate your patience and understanding during this time.

================


Then I got this:

=================
Thank you for contacting the World of Warcraft Game Master Department
and bringing this matter to our attention with additional information
to assist in our investigation. We will contact the master looter to
decide how the items will be distributed to resolve the loot issue you
have experienced.
=================

So far nothing else in terms of a resolution, but it is interesting that two days after I put a ticket into Blizz about this and they agree to look into it a new blue post is issued that would prevent this from happening again!

Well there you go, my very very very tedious claim to fame :).... and stupidity, because as someone already pointed out, the smart thing to do would have been to leave the group when I saw less then 5 minutes left before the reset... Of course that would have royally pissed off 24 other people that I might meet again in group, but that's a discussion for another time.

65% fewer arena teams in S5 vs S4

2009-03-25T08:51:00.000-07:00

Hey guys,

Gameriot.com has a fascinating article that basically shows 65% fewer teams on average this season, with some battlegroups up to 75% fewer teams depending on bracket. It's all layed out very nicely HERE

Frankly I knew it was lower, but I didn't realize that much lower. In my opinion this is clearly due to the inferior gear PvP gives out this season compared to PvE gear for all but the very best PvP players.

Why grind hours of BG's and do countless arena games if you can't make it into the 1600's at least? And even then, in terms of time spent you're probably better off just running 25 man content gear anyway.

While I still actively do PvP, I have to say that I've run more 5,10, and 25 man content during this arena season then my whole WOW life combined.... Hell I'm doing PvP with a PvE spec for the higher burst damage!?!?!

It's nice to see the new content but it leaves less opportunity for PvP and with my current rating I'm gear capped in PvP, so running 25 man content is my only upgrade path at the moment.

Season 6 looks to change that for a while, but I have a funny feeling I'll be running Uldar a lot more then I think.