Icecrown Citadel on Tuesday? Mid-Season Patches, Gearing Up for Season 8, The Longest Season Ever, and Divine Inflame Part TWO

Icecrown Citadel on Tuesday?

There’s been a lot of recent Speculation about the release of patch 3.3 on Tuesday, and Mmo-champion even predicted it. A lot of people challenge Mmo-champion’s legitimacy, but you have to remember, these are the same guys who predicted the entire Death Knight class, 3.2’s release date, and all of Cataclysm.

 3.3 brings on a whole host of new changes, particularly some “burst” nerfs to destruction and elemental. Shaman’s 4 piece t9 and the Warlock spell “Conflagrate” now deal the same amount of damage, but instead of it coming in all at once, part of the damage is inflicted directly and the rest ticks down on you in the form of DoT. This keeps damage the same, but reduces the sheer bursting power that wizard cleave has.

Wizard cleave (and MLS in particular) is an extremely dominant comp this season. However, with 3.3 possibly arriving in the middle of s7, this could change quite a bit. I still see MLS as being very dominant because most of its strength comes in the form of its non-dr CC, it’s going to take a big hit in the burst department. Some warlocks are talking about playing Affliction, which would really change the way the comp works. Either way, these nerfs are much needed, and should make the rest of season 7 a lot more competitive, and less wizard cleave dominated.

Mid-Season Patches – PvE vs PvP

Blizzard released 3.2 during season 6, which brought on the resilience change. Comps were scattered and matches played out a lot slower than usual. Some comps struggled because of their inability to kill healers (see TSG representation) and others flourished because they had more time to control the game. No one really expected this to happen, but it did. I’m pretty confident the exact same thing is about to happen again in 3.3, via its possible release on Tuesday. 

It really makes no sense at all to totally alter certain class mechanics in the middle of a season, but Blizzard has proven time and time again that even the most absurd changes can and will go through (Shadowfrost DK’s, Protholy Paladins, 3.0 Ret, etc). You do have to give props to blizzard for releasing the raid in wings though. This way, PvE heros won’t be downing hardmodes during s7, and then proceeding to destroy everyone with 3.2k spellpower wizard cleave comps.

One of the major factors in getting these patches out is the large demand of the PvE community. Seasons are supposed to last for a certain amount of time, and while patches are meant to coincide with arena seasons, it is often a very hard task to balance. Most raid guilds have ToC25 on farm, and a lot of guilds are finished with ToGC too. The community begins to get tired of running the same raid every week, especially when they have all the gear they need and the fights are no longer challenging. Blizzard has to get new content out in order to maintain a subscription base, but the times at which patches need to be released don’t work well with arena seasons. This is just one more reason why the worlds of PvP and PvE are so challenging to balance, one day blizzard may be able to find the balance they’re looking for, but that day will not be Tuesday.

Gearing Up for Season 8

When Season 8 finally does roll around, I’ll be starting off with 4 piece wrathful and one piece of PvE badge gear. This shouldn’t be too hard to attain, as there are a ton of ways to collect emblems of frost. By simply doing your weekly raid each week, and doing a random heroic every day, you’ll be able to get 19 badges a week. Now think about doing VoA every week (2 more badges), and If you pug any form of ICC (or do it with your guild) you’ll be getting even more badges. This means that without even working very hard, you can be getting upwards of 32 badges a week, allowing you to get the Meteor Chaser's Raiment just 3 weeks into the season.

Unless blizzard makes the smart choice and nerfs the insane mage 4 piece bonus  I’ll be picking that up later in the season, and then using 1 piece of Wrathful. You might think that wearing 4 pieces of this set would make you pretty squishy, but with the new items coming in for season 8, that won’t be the case.

The PTR currently has no new Wintergrasp or Battlemaster trinkets, but it does have a new PvP trinket that has 153 resilience on it. Using this trinket along with relentless ring and wrathful rings + full pvp offsets will put you around 800 resilience (more than I’m running now) and still give you a TON more firepower via the 4 piece set bonus and the sheer amounts of spellpower, crit, and haste that PvE sets bring to the table.

There will be quite a few new ways to mix and match gear for maximum efficiency, but we'll get into that in a later article when the patch hits, that way I'll be able to see all the gear we can use, and not just some of it.

The Longest Season Ever?

If blizzard follows its “4 season per expansion” pattern, season 8 will be the longest season ever (and by a very large margin). Seasons 5 and 6 were 17 and 18 weeks respectively, and if Season 7 follows suit, it will end in mid-January. When season 8 drops, we’ll either play that season until 4.0/Cataclysm release, or blizzard will create a season 9 in WoTLK. While I think the latter is very unlikely, the former seems rather odd too. Having a 5-8 month long season (almost 30 weeks ?!) would be extremely boring. A lot of arena players' interest in the game is already dwindling, and I think a 30 week season would just further push people towards hitting "cancel subscription". Blizzard will probably think of something to spice things up, and Cataclysm may be a lot closer that we think. If that's the case, I can't wait to get to 85 and start season 9.

Ghostcrawler made a post regarding player health in Cataclysm, saying that the game's pace will be slightly slower, and that while killing people and keeping them alive will still be possible, it's going to require more than a few buttons to get someone down. This certainly seems like a very bright future for WoW, almost too good to be true, but everyone is holding their breath in hopes that Cataclysm will bring arena the balance it needs.

Divine Inflame Part Two

This class act started out by first insulting his fellow SK|Gaming sponsored team (SK US), and then proceeded to produce this video, targeted at aAa. Yiska touched on this in his blog with some of enforcer’s comments, but I’d like to talk about it again. I saw most of the “Best Warlock in the world” stuff as trolling to get a rise out of people, but what he’s been producing lately seems like it’s going to far. Openly insulting everyone you play against (and with) is not a good way to build a rep for yourself, and if he keeps this up, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised to see him get jumped at a LAN event. Won’t be so divine without a row of front teeth eh?

Thanks for Reading! Don’t forget to +1, and drop any questions or comments in the comment box.

~Controlz

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