Arena Queuing Changes, Life After JC Nerfs, The Proper Fix for DK's

Arena Queuing Changes
A lot of arena players have noticed an undocumented change in the latest patch that alters the method in which your team matches up against other teams in arena. Currently, it seems as if there's a minimum amount of time between games during which you can play against a team consecutively. In this time, you can be matched up with another team, however. This change is significant for a couple reasons.

First and foremost, it makes life for rating squatters even easier as it becomes increasingly more difficult to climb the ladder this way due to the nature of the lack of high-rated teams queueing. With this change, two high-rated teams playing at the same time are still not guaranteed to get each other and will have to deal with long queue times even if they do. There have been many reports of 2700+ MMR teams queueing only against one other one of the same rating yet sitting in 5-6 minute queues before getting them again (neither one was dodging either) and also reports of simply getting teams well over 400 MMR below the team playing.

This change has the reverse effect of making it more difficult to dodge the teams that you don't want to play. You know how it goes: play a team that comp stomps you, so then you wait a couple minutes before your next queue, right? Well, these changes make that waiting time relatively obsolete and it will really be a wildcard whether you wait or not.

Although I can only imagine Blizzard put this change in place in order to attempt to curb win-trading and two teams arranging a series against each other, I'm not so sure they understand the ramifications of it and how annoying it will be to climb the ladder when many teams are already complaining about ridiculous queue times at even 2400 rating.

Finally, speaking of high-rated teams, I really think Blizzard should raise the arena rating cap to 3200ish after fixing the MMR gains/losses so that all those teams that got a winning streak to 3000 have to actually make an effort for their titles instead of having it guaranteed no matter what anyone does weeks before the end of the season.





Life After JC Nerfs
Since pretty much every competitive arena player was a Jewelcrafter, patch 3.2 impacted almost everyone reading this significantly due to the changes in Jewelcrafting and how the Dragon's Eyes arn't prismatic anymore. I know it's taken me personally hours and thousands of gold to fix all of my gear outfits (PvE tanking, PvE DPS, PvP). The hard part wasn't really buying the gems (although I spent probably around 3k gold doing this) but rather figuring out how to min/'max my socket bonuses and meet my meta pre-reqs without the luxury of 3 free prismatic gems.

It's far different for every class, but for I'll make some recommendations for Death Knights:

-Only go for strength socket bonuses if you want to max your damage output. Skip everything else like crit, resilience, etc.
-Use 4 new epic spell penetration gems. DK PvP gear has a lot of blue sockets with str socket bonuses and 4 of the new gems will put you at 135 spell pen (35 on cloak, four +25 gems). This overcomes auras and shadow protection without sacrificing much.
-Pretty much every DK goes with the 3% crit meta, which is obviously best for frost (since it relies on crits) but for Unholy I prefer the AP/Run speed meta. This is because the amount of things that can crit for an unholy DK (basically strikes and white swings only) is very few and even a top end scourge strike crit will gain very little from this meta (7k ss + 200ish bonus from meta). Whereas having the AP/run speed meta can not only free up 2 talent points but also benefit ALL of your damage both crits and non-crits, as well as helps your ghoul and gargoyle scaling.

Finally, as general advice, if you're not the richest person out there, don't go lunging for new epic gems just yet. Give it a few days or even a week and you'll notice a tremendous price drop in them as more people get the designs and as all the casuals run their beloved heroics and fill the market with more gems via emblems.





The Proper Fix for DK's
In this patch, DK damage in both Unholy and Frost was brought down significantly in more ways than one. Frost saw Frost Strike base damage nerfs, the ability to dodge it, and sigil nerfs while Unholy saw base scourge strike damage and disease scaling nerfs, desecration 5% damage loss, as well as a much easier to kill gargoyle. Although some of these nerfs were definitely necessary (such as the XT sigil), some were also completely overboard and just resulted in a really bloated unholy tree. I'm mainly referring to the desecration change where they split that talent into the new desecration (2pt pvp talent for just the snare) and the new "Desolation" (5pt talent for 1% damage per point after blood striking). They could have at least just made it "increases your damage by 1/2/3/4/5%" and it would still be a dumb talent but they found a way to make it even worse, cool.

In any case, Blizzard really doesn't understand the true problems right now with Death Knights and there are 2 in particular that stand out to me the most:

1. Endless Winter - the ability to apply frost fever (and ebon plague if you're unholy) after doing your main snare ability (chains of ice) is pretty overpowered and the fact that the diseases are a different dispel type from the chains of ice just makes matters worse. Like most classes, a DK should have to make the decision on whether they want to use their resources offensively or defensively, not both.

2. Chains of Ice - I think the ideal fix for CoI right now is to give it diminishing returns when applied on a target already affected by chains of ice. This would keep it as a useful snare still while fixing the problem of CoI spamming to completely shut a team down with or without dispels.

Fix those 2 problems and the hero class isn't so heroic anymore, but like anyone else. Maybe then Blizzard will realize some other glaring problems that exist right now. Sup mages?