I don’t participate in the Arena Tournament anymore and it’s been a really long time since I last joined a match. I know it’s not the best reason but the reason why I tried the tournament before was just to get some better gear to fill some holes I had for PvE. After all, PvP gear is decent for PvE until you can get better PvE gear.

item level 239 arena weapons

Making season two gear available for honor back in the day just killed my desire to do any arena matches since I could just do battlegrounds for the gear I want. I really wanted the other gear from the newer seasons but I just didn’t want to do any matches especially when they made rating requirements for some of the gear.

I know this is an old topic but the subject of rating requirements for arena gear is still relevant even today and it just got a bit more relevant after Blizzard Poster Crygil came out with news about a change they’re implementing. It actually seems like this change is already in effect based on his words.

The current arena rating system allows more players to have higher ratings in the 2v2 bracket when compared to 3v3 and 5v5. We are preparing an in-game update that will be improving the rating system of the 3v3 and 5v5 brackets to allow all three of the brackets to have a similar number of players able to achieve ratings on par with what’s currently possible in our 2v2 arena bracket. As a result, we are changing the personal and team rating requirements for the item level 239 weapons from 2200 to 2350, but keep in mind the tooltip will continue to show the requirement as 2200 until patch 3.1.2.
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note: To see Crygil’s entire post, just click the link above.

This means that it’s going to be much harder for players to get these arena weapons, with the rating requirement being raised. Some teams were probably trying to get that 2200 rating just for this and now they’ll be disappointed to see it’s been raised. I guess it’s all for the best anyway since these weapons are the best pvp weapons available at the moment, being compared to weapons you can get from heroic Ulduar. If it gets too easy to obtain then the welfare epics discussion from the past may be revived because of this.

One of the hardest, if not the hardest, tasks to do in World of Warcraft and any similar game is game balance. Not only do you have to balance between the many different classes and specs but also for PvE and PvP. This is probably why every patch, even if they make a change to balance something there seems to be another balancing problem that arises.

replenishment

One of the newest changes made in the hope for more balance concerns the Replenishment effect in the Arena Tournament. Replenishment was changed through a hotfix so that it will only affect the player and not the rest of the group inside Arenas. It will continue to function the same way anywhere else. CM Zarhym mentioned that replenishment remains balanced for bigger groups but not for smaller groups. In my experience, arena matches are supposed to be fast enough that players should not really need replenishment anyway. But making it work for the whole team could really provide make players go all out with the damage and healing without worrying about resources.

Like I said before, I’m not really a big fan of PvP. That’s one of the main reasons why I decided to roll on a PvE server and stuck with it. I’m still open to doing the occasional world PvP and battlegrounds but only when I feel like it. For WoTLK, I haven’t felt like it even until now.

pvp toggle

The past few days I’ve been wondering about a problem my mage has been having. He got flagged the other day and while I’m not totally sure how, it might have been when I dueled a friend. Anyway, for the past few days I’ve been trying to get rid of that flagged status and up to now it’s still there. I’ve tried toggling pvp on and off and the countdown to turn off pvp doesn’t start. Taking a flight path didn’t work but it’s supposed to. I tried going in an instance and while it went away inside, the second i stepped out it went right back.

This is really the strange occurrence that’s been bugging me the past few days and I’m glad I don’t really play my mage much these days. I think it’s time to put in a GM ticket but the strangeness of the situation is keeping me from doing so right now. Have any of you experienced anything strange like this while playing WoW?

update: Learn something new everyday. Thanks to a guildie, I was able to get rid of this problem. Apparently if you have a pvp daily in your quest log (which I wasn’t aware I had), you won’t unflag until you remove it from your log.

The WoW Armory has been a valuable tool for all of us World of Warcraft players. It has something for everyone, whether you just want to take a peek at someone’s spec or looking at potential upgrades for a certain gear slot or even use the built in arena rating calculator. It has a lot of uses and it’s been known to keep improving as time passes by. Now is another one of those times with a new feature to help all you Arena nuts out there: Arena Records.

Every Arena team profile on the Armory (http://www.wowarmory.com) now includes Arena Records, new tools that track and measure the performance of every Arena team in World of Warcraft. These tools comprise the Match History tab, the Opponent History tab, and Match Reports.

* The Match History tab displays every Arena match that a team has played during the season in an interactive graph showing the date, opposing team, and result of each match.

* The Opponent History tab displays a team’s Arena matches in relation to the opposing teams faced, which helps track performance against particular team compositions.

* The Match Reports display the same end-of-match results and statistics that appeared in-game. For more details, visit the FAQs for these new tools:

* Match History - http://www.wowarmory.com/faq-arena-reports.xml
* Opponent History - http://www.wowarmory.com/faq-opponent-history.xml
* Match Reports - http://www.wowarmory.com/faq-match-report.xml
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I can think of a lot of uses for this new tool. You can use this to aid in arena team recruitment, By showing others your history, you can show proof that you’re as good as you really say you are. Of course this can work the other way by showing others exactly how bad you are and get flames from the forums. I’m sure this tool should be handy in gathering more specific data about the best arena teams out there for each bracket. If there are hardcore guilds, I’m sure there are hardcore arena teams and this tool should prove invaluable to gain info about everything they need to get better. Or for the casual player, it should prove to be a cool new tool to play around with.

There’s an outburst in the druid community now because the class is getting some nerfs in patch 3.1. One of them is the change to the feral talent Heart of the Wild where at max rank, the stamina bonus it gives will be reduced from a 20% increase to just a 10% increase. According to Ghostcrawler, this is part of their effort to make all tanks’ HP pools closer together but of course a nerf is a nerf and this sucks for bear tanks.

The next change is the one to the resto spell lifebloom, the resto druid’s best friend in tank healing in groups/raids. The change goes as follows:

Mana costs of all ranks doubled. When Lifebloom blooms or is dispelled, It now refunds half the base mana cost of the spell per application of Lifebloom, and the heal effect is multiplied by the number of applications.

Of course all resto druids are pretty mad that their bread and butter tank healing spell will become less efficient especially since the practice of rolling lifeblooms negates whatever bonus was given to it blooming given that that’s what rolling lifeblooms is all about - keeping the 3 stack up at all times. Ghostcrawler’s forum post on the matter gave you a sense that they felt the spell was too efficient a heal especially if kept rolling but instead of nerfing the heal itself they decided to just increase its cost. After being assigned to raid healing a few times in 10 man Naxx a few times, I found out that I cast lifeblooms and let them bloom quite often so this might be a nice change for people who do this since the bloom will refund mana and get a healing bonus.

While this change is quite a sad one for PvE resto druids, it’s quite a buff for ones who do PvP a lot. People will think twice now before dispelling HoT’s especially in the arena tournament. This is quite a welcome change to complement the fact that the PvP resto druid’s worst enemy has been tamed because of the removal of the Death Knight’s ability to remove HoT’s through Plague Strike. These two changes just might catapult resto druids back to king status as arena healers.

Patch 3.08 was a patch that was pretty victimized with bugs, as demonstrated on patch day a few days ago. Things were going wrong all over the place from npc’s not showing up to server crashes and the like. All this has led to the disabling of Wintergrasp (we hordies in my server are happily collecting our spirit shards from dungeons since we controlled it before it got disabled) and the Arena matches so that a fix could be sought.

Because of the extent of the problem in the arena, Kalgan has stated that they hope to rollback the arena ratings to what they were before the patch went live. It’s a bit funny that that talk about a new improved matching system has been implemented with the release of the patch but no one can really benefit from it yet due to the current problem.

I have to admit that I haven’t done any arena pvp in a very long time and now playing a restoration druid probably won’t make me do it anytime soon because of all the talk about death knights eating through our HoT’s. The latest announcement about a new matchmaking system for the arena tournament still looks really interesting even if I’m not really very familiar with exactly how it works.

WoW EU Blue poster Wryxian wrote the following on the subject:

With the release of patch 3.0.8 we have implemented a new matchmaking system for arenas that will improve the overall system and help ensure that players will be matched against others of equal skill. The new matchmaking system uses a rating that you cannot see, and is separate for each of the arena brackets.

The rating changes at the end of each match are affected by this new system, and as it just came out, there may initially be some odd behavior in rating changes, but these will straighten out fairly quickly.

We will monitor this new system and update it as needed to help provide the best experience possible in arena matches. source

From what I understand, it seems like this system will be using more updated ratings in its matchmaking for each arena team bracket. This should make matchmaking more fair for all arena tournament participants.

update: Kalgan gives us more insight into the hidden rating talked about above.

The hidden rating uses a different approach to determining player ratings. It’s more complex, but it tends to figure out a player’s skill level far more quickly/accurately than an Elo system does.

However, changing player’s actual team/personal ratings extremely rapidly isn’t exactly what we want. So, we’re using an approach where we use the hidden rating (internally we refer to it as the GDF rating since it uses gaussian density filtering) for matchmaking since it creates better matchups than Elo and we use it as an anchor to figure out where the team/personal ratings should be moving toward. source

In the latest PTR patch notes for patch 3.08, balance druids got the news that their talent Celestial Focus will no longer work with Starfall. As always you can see the latest PTR patch notes here.

I play a balance druid right now but only to get to 80 faster then I’ll be switching to Restoration. But I do know that that the stuns this talent brings can be pretty useful in PvP, especially with Starfall since you have so many stars amounting to potential stuns. I haven’t done any PvP on my druid and I don’t really intend to so I haven’t tried it but looking around in the forums and asking friends confirmed that it is a technique that balance druids use. I’d use it myself if I did any PvP.

But with the change coming in the next patch, not only is this technique no longer possible with Starfall but some people have even questioned Starfall’s viability as a 51 point talent. Starfall’s alleged horrible damage output and the fact that it’s on a 3 minute timer has it in the running in worst 51 talent point debates. Personally I still find it a bit useful especially when I’m trying to kill a lot of targets fast when I’m soloing.

What do you think about this change?

First of all, I’d like to say that the Spirit of Competition event that will happen every two years is a great idea. Not only does it get players in the mood and the spirit of international competition but it’s also a cute way to get cool rewards. I do have one question though.

As I said earlier, the Spirit of Competition event is a great way to foster the competitive spirit in everyone, so that we can be somewhat involved in what the Olympics stands for. Aside from the love for competition, the Olympics is about the honor and the glory. Competing in the different battlegrounds in the game sure fits the bill since it brings honor and glory to your faction and for yourself. But isn’t that what the arena tournament is also about? The arena is basically a duel between two groups, wherein the team that performs the best is awarded accordingly. The arena is a quest for personal glory. Yet the spirit of competition does not involve the arena tournament.

I know that this is just a minor rant but it really doesn’t seem to make sense that the arena tournament isn’t involved in this event in any way.

CM’s Slorkuz (EU) and Drsyc (US) have taken some time to share some wisdom about the Gnome racial Escape Artist and Resurrection timers, respectively.

Escape Artist

Escape artist works against movement impairing effects such as snares or roots, not stuns/fears/incapacitates or other forms of CC. This includes, but is not limited to, abilities such as hamstring, entangling roots, frost nova, crippling poison, etc.

It should be noted that escape artist is subject to talented dispel resistant abilities such as entangling roots. If, for example, the druid in question who rooted you has those talents, it is possible that the use of escape artist will not remove the desired debuff.
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If escape artist worked on stuns, fears and incapacitates then it would be such an overpowered racial. Who would need a pvp trinket if you’re a gnome if that were the case. As it is, it’s already a pretty sweet racial especially since it’s now instant cast.

Resurrection Timer

To control the respawn of players that are fighting near a graveyard. It helps to put some importance on your life instead of just insta-rezzing every time and running in to battle to die again with little consequence or thought.

Also, now with diminishing returns no longer affecting honor gains it helps reduce farmability. source

This sounds like some of my escapades while pvping in warsong gulch and even halaa. I die and resurrect only to die soon after. I think the resurrection timer actually saved me a few times by having to wait a while instead of going on to die again.