Now I face a serious Dilemna

What trinkets do I use? I'm using Darkmoon: Berserker and Anvil of the Titans right now, and I need to replace one with the Battlemaster trinket. Problem is, I'm low on crit as it is- 26% before my berserker trinket and libram, which do put me at about 30%. But I'll replace that libram eventually with the deadly one... can I afford to give up my crit trinket too? I could give up the 1k attack power proc- it's not very reliable- and use berserker and battlemaster, I suppose. Or I could drop back down to a paltry 540 resilience and use the mirror of truth with my battlemaster trinket. Or I could just give up the crit and use Anvil+Battlemaster's... I dunno.

More on arenas and pvp balance...

Sorry! But with pve just being so uninteresting and pvp being... the thing I've always been most interested in, you're going to get a lot of this.

I joined a new 3v3 team last night, the comp was Ret/Resto/Survival. The hunter has only been 80 for 2 weeks, but he's pretty well geared considering this. We had about a 2:1 record by the end of the night over 49 games, putting us at a 1875 rating (though we'd broken 1900 and then fumbled at the end). We really weren't getting many points per win :|

Though I've broken 1800 multiple times already this season, this marks the first time where my PR is also high enough for me to finally buy my last piece of ret honor gear- the Battlemaster's Conviction. I'll be working on that today, I'm sure. I'm pretty confident that this team is going to get me my full deadly set, though I don't know how much higher than 2100 we can go... we'll see. Seanimus made some mistakes that cost us a few matches, where he LoS'd Vampette, or made Vamp run out into the open- those are mistakes that will cost you matches. We generally played some great games though. There were a lot of tense moments, some spectacular saves and all that good stuff. It was a ton of fun, and I love my nitro boosts all the more, as they saved my own life and Vampette's more than once. I also got to face my old 3v3 team, which is now running DK (the good one in my guild who was never on for matches), Fury, Holy. We had the privelage of beating them down despite their double Betrayers, thanks to catching the warrior in a stun midfield and bursting him down. I was a bit surprised we won actually, the DK alone, my friend Krueger, nearly soloed me himself, and after shielding... I was very fortunate to not die before their warrior did, put it that way.

I will say, pvp feels a lot less 'broken' than it used to, damage wise, in large part due to the recent mage and rogue nerfs, but also due to more players getting resil. While we haven't seen many priest healers or especially druid healers, many locks or dps shaman... it doesn't feel quite so much like there is insurmountable burst all over the place. However, there were about 2 billion DKs, and they ARE a massive source of burst. They do more burst damage than any other class, that's for sure, I'd go as far as to say they do 50% more burst damage than I do when I use Seal of the Martyr, it's just that obscene. And of course they have their ridiculous survivability, abilities like dark pact and raise ally and all these other things to ensure that no class in the game can beat them 1 on 1. Just really annoying all around. I feel like, though, with rogues nerfed and DK nerfs probably right around the corner, the return of druids and priests, with some buffs, isn't too far off either. Warlocks don't seem terrible themselves, underpowered sure, but not so far from being 'in the game' as a lot of people seem to think. The most blatantly awful cases of underpowered are, I think, probably dps shamans and shadow priests. It'd be nice to get other specs into pvp though, for pure dpsers, like fire, arms, etc. TBH, buff dps shamans and priests, and nerf the hell out of DKs, and we'll be pretty close to a nice level of balance in pvp. Divine Plea, for holy, might also need a nerf in the amount it regens.

It'll be interesting to see what this next patch does for ret as well, though perhaps a little worrisome. Our burst is certainly pretty high when using SoB/SotM, but it feels too low to me when just using SoC. Maybe with exorcism that won't be the case though, and they could always buff SoC's damage some too... I also wish they'd fix sacred shield, but blizzard is probably rightfully hesitant to buff ret paladins like that. :|

@ KLEPS I VOTED FOR PVP

Because it's hilarious to hear you rant about it.

Also, my holy gear is fairly awesome now for pvp, hopefully I'll get to try it out sometime soon in arenas.

Sojourner (sp?) asked if Fury was pvp viable now, and the answer to that question is... sorta? Fury is the way to go for warriors in pvp right now, it just hits a lot harder than arms, and both specs have the MS debuff now. But in 2v2, while holy pally/fury warrior or resto shaman/fury aren't bad comps by any means, they are totally outclassed by replacing the warrior with a DK and likely survival hunters as well. OTOH, DK/fury/holy is a very good 3v3 comp. Fury warriors aren't bad, but they have rough competition for their spots on teams.

Why do people hate the vehicle thing in Ulduar so much?

Granted, a lot of people don't like the last phase of Malygos. But we haven't even seen what the Ulduar stuff is like, and it's JUST ONE GAUNTLET AND HALF A BOSS. And there are 14 bosses in Ulduar. Yeah, I think you'll live.

Meant to update a while ago... oh well. Arenas!

So a week and a half ago I did arenas with my brother, who is basically completely new to the game and playing a fury warrior. And I don't know what to do to help him... He was so amazingly slow to react to anything and generally bad. He resists getting on vent, and backpedals a lot. I at least managed to break him of the habit of clicking early on. But what do you do to help a player like this? I don't know how to give him advice, because it feels like the stuff he does wrong, stuff so typical of bad or new players, is stuff that is almost second nature to me. Ughhhhh and he constantly wants me to do arenas with him now to get him points towards savage gear, but I don't want to leave my good teams to find my way into the high 1300s again. It's extremely frustrating because now he's exactly the kind of player I try and make a point of avoiding as much as possible, but I feel obligated, naturally, to do whatever I can to help him out.

And I can get him gear- I've already played his warrior through naxx 10 once now, and might again this week. But he thinks all there is to this game is gear, he thinks he'll become an awesome player as soon as he has full epics. He WANTS to be a big time, super tough, arena dominating, BG destroying pvper. He just doesn't seem to realize that all the epics in the world don't mean a damn thing if he can't play well. But hey, he's really good at counterstrike, so being good at arenas should be NP amirite?


Oh well, my other forays into arena have gone better thankfully. In 3v3, I'm having to get used to a lot of stuff I did naturally in S3 again, like really watching my positioning in relation to the healer. I've made a few embarassing mistakes in that regard. But my god, dumping the bad DK on our team for a good fury warrior has done the team a world of good. Now if only I knew a good DK :| I might be trying a hunter/resto shaman/ret comp, but I dunno yet. In 2v2s though, I did a few games with a rogue alt in my guild and hit 1825 pretty fast. I'm looking forward to doing more of those games this week, they were pretty fun, and I'd like to get back up to 2k asap in at least one bracket, for god's sake.

Nitro Boost Failure, and Other Engineering Woes

I'd like to start by stating 2 very important facts about Engineering:

1) The only reason to be an engineer is for the Nitro Boosts and

2) If you aren't an engineer, you have no soul!

These might sound contradictive. I assure you, they are not. Anyway, I have issues with engineering. They are as follows-


Nitro Boosts: The biggest issue I have is that the only tinker worth using regularly, the Nitro Boosts, have a chance to fail and do nothing (or shoot you straight up into the air if you're outside). Seriously, this is a case of nasty RNG for pvpers, the sort of thing on the same scale as missing an important spell like Hammer of Justice, and that sort of RNG has in almost all cases been phased out. I mean, we're talking about a 3 minute cooldown. I really feel that, if you're inside, these boots should absolutely not fail.


Other Tinkers: The next big issue is that the rest of our tinkers aren't worth using, or at least I wouldn't put them on anything except gear I don't use anymore. What's the point of having a Parachute Tinker to replace the old Parachute Cloaks, if we can't just put it on the cloaks we wear regularly? The Parachute Tinker has no practical uses in raids or arenas, they're really just for jumping from the Lumber Mill to the Blacksmith and that sort of thing.

Would it really be so 'OP' if tinkers didn't replace enchants and belt buckles? The only 2 slots that have any effect on balance are the gloves and the feet. I don't feel like it would be wrong for our tinkers to not force us to give up stats, when all we'd be gaining is an Icewalker Enchant and the Rocket Launcher gloves or whatever. But even if Blizzard did feel strongly about that, isn't there some way they could at least let us put Binoculars on our belts and Parachutes on our cloaks without losing our buckles and enchants?


Our Crafted Items: What's up with these? The only things we have to sell are some guns, our BoP helms are worse than the BoE helms blacksmiths make, our only real source of income is mote clouds from an item I made almost 20 levels ago... am I the only one who leveled engineering high enough to make the afore-mentioned Nitro Boosts and stopped there? Would it be at all possible to be able to make some items that are actually in demand, like every other profession out there?

Of course, the question is, what should we sell? Most professions have some items that are always in demand. Enchants, leg armor, belt buckles, gems, potions, etc. Some of these professions can also make some decent gear for other people early on, like our guns or the titansteel weapons from blacksmiths. Unfortunately there is little demand for our guns, and we have nothing we can make and sell to others that would be in demand regularly. I think this is especially important. But what can we sell that others would need? I don't think tinkers are the right answer, there are already enchants available for every slot of gear. Probably, then, a raid consumable type item, akin to the old drums, but make them available to everyone who wants to buy them (as opposed to the drums which only leatherworkers could use). I would suggest repair-bots as well, but those wouldn't be in high demand since any engineer in the raid can drop one for everyone.

Perhaps, to take advantage of the upcoming dual-spec system, some kind of 'spec-switching' machine you can sell to players, with a few charges on each so they can respec mid-raid. The Respectrometer. Or maybe some kind of machine that acts as a consumable with charges, that increases your critical strike chance temporarily, the Aim-atron or some other ridiculous name.

Anyway, point is, we've got nothing to sell and nothing to look forward to, other than a really expensive vehicle with no purpose other than looking cool around Dalaran.

Yes yes Klep, arenas are fairly horrible... right now. Also, you suck, so there. Speaking of which, Blizzard really needs to use 3.1 to buff stamina. Player damage isn't just too high, healing is in many cases crazy too. Penance, or a holy shock+FoL, or a Riptide+1 sec LWH, these things all bring players back to full health or close from near death. But those same healers can often easily die in a lockdown of stuns and silences nearly as fast. The obvious answer to me is to buff player HP. And yes, this will fuck up pve, and pve will need to be retuned. But Blizzard retuned all their fights before, why not again? After that, we can get to more specific class changes to improve pvp.

Figures, now that the ret paladin playstyle itself is nearly everything I'd once imagined (see an older post for details!), pvp itself blows. At least I look awesome.