My Picks for Best and Worst of 3.1

With the end of season 5 and patch 3.1 looming on the horizon, there remains a lot of questions marks and uncertainty of what comps people will want to run in arena. Many popular comps of today will be completely destroyed, while certain other comps will be made even stronger. As always, this is entirely due to the shift in balance of power that Blizzard is making with many classes in the upcoming patch. Tonight, I wanted to cover what I feel will be some of the more upcoming strong sleeper classes/specs, as well as the specs dramatically losing stock.

On the Up

1. Destruction Warlocks - If you've been keeping up with the PTR changes for 3.1 thus far, and have seen some of the numbers that can destruction warlocks can put out there (conflag crits over 10k on pvp targets), you'll understand why they'll be the source of incredible burst potential. Even in the current 3.0.9 client that we play on live, many destruction warlocks do very well in both duels and arena. Just the other day on the tournament realm, I was watching a lot of big name rogues duel against Brutal Gladiator Psyhawk with him running as a destruction/soul link spec and to be completely honest, he was absolutely destroying almost every rogue that challenged him, undead or otherwise.

His strategy, although fairly simplistic (instant seduce x3, shadowfury, death coil, re-seduce, etc) was executed almost flawlessly every single duel; so well that you could literally sub him in a Drakedog video and no one would know the difference. The only chance that any rogue had would be to open with an immediate cloak of shadows, burst as much damage as possible in those 5 seconds, vanish, and re-open before he can bandage it back up. By then, the rogue would either have to trinket or will the next seduce which would lead into either a shadowfury and/or death coil, followed by chaos bolt, immolate, conflagrate, and the CC chain would start all over again by then if they wern't already dead.  I highly encourage any rogue that thinks they are an all-star dueler to challenge Psyhawk on TR1 to a series and see if you can beat him yourself.

Bottom line is that if a talented warlock like Psyhawk can already make destruction work this well in its current state, there's really no telling how powerful it will be come 3.1 with the enormous damage buffs gained all around in the tree. Sure, succubus survivability isn't the best in arena, but then again, destruction is usually meant to compliment burst-oriented comps where wasting time on a pet is usually a very unattractive option.

2. Arms Warriors - Although they'll likely never return to their previous prowess they held in seasons 2, 3, and 4, the upcoming patch is making Arms warriors look pretty strong given the right support in season 6. Despite the move of improved intercept to fury, Arms in return gained the ability to charge in combat as well as guaranteeing a critical slam or mortal strike following the charge, a reverse MS effect, weapon mastery (disarm reduction), buffs to overpower and scent of blood, battle stance and berserker stance buffs, as well as fixes to both rage generation through absorbs as well as rage retainment after switching stances.  Oh, and last but not least, the ability to remove immunity from paladins and mages; who could forget that one?

Will it be enough? Like I said, they won't be the mace stunning wonders that they once were, but you'll definitely start seeing them in arena again. Blizzard has gone to great lengths in order to make battle stance a more viable alternative to use than the berserker stance that they've been using for five seasons straight, but I still feel despite these buffs, warriors absolutely need to be able to pummel in battle stance or it will still be entirely too situational and ultimately not worth using. Fix that and they're golden.

3. Holy Priests - Although this a more debatable choice, I still feel that holy priests will definitely be a strong contender for best healer come the 3.1 patch. With buffs all around the class ranging from longevity, survivability, and mana return, to the specific holy buffs of things like Body and Soul, as well as Empowered Renew, I think priests might go full circle back to the season one days of being holy spec with Blessed Resilience once again.

While Holy Paladins are taking many hits, restoration shamans not getting many improvements, and restoration druids taking some hits as well despite a few buffs, Priests will definitely have their time to shine next patch. Although discipline will still most likely be the most popular spec especially with the upcoming ability to cast Penance on yourself, I think removing the one weakness that priests had (poison dispel) with spec'ing Holy will be more than enough reason to try it out, not to mention the other buffs the tree has gotten. Will life be hell without Pain Suppression, self-penance, and Focused Will? I think it's worth a shot.





On the Down

1. Holy Paladins - Not much to say on this as it is mostly self-explanitory.  The long list of nerfs holy paladins are getting include: sacred shield, divine purpose, blessed hands, pure of heart, infusion of light, enlightened judgements, improved hammer of justice, spiritual attunement, and many others. In return, the only real buffs they received were aura mastery, glyph of holy shock and salvation, imp conc aura, baseline kings, and divinity.

Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about this game and arena would know that the pros don't outweigh the cons here and that holy paladin stock will once again drop. The real question is will it send them back to the days of season 2-4, or simply just put them more in line with the other 3 healers instead of being entirely superior?

2. Survival Hunters - This really comes as a surprise to no one. The class with arguably the most tools and versatility of any dps class gets nerfed tremendously with hits to explosive shot damage, frost trap, entrapment, disengage, glyphs, wyvern sting, and several others, are basically compensated with little to nothing in the survival tree, and only mild buffs in the marksmanship tree.

These changes will likely pidgeonhole every hunter into marks bringing them back to the good 'ol days of season three and four yet again if they want to compete. Although I'm rather skeptical of how well this will turn out for them, I know our PvE hunter has been running a marks spec on Ulduar PTR raids and has done pretty astonishing damage on some fights. Will that carry over to arena? I honestly doubt it but I could be wrong.

+1 this article if you think Levidia is an enormous tool, also.

3. ShadowFrost Death Knights - Yep, so Blizzard basically finally realized how powerful the spec was and the burst potential that it could deliver not only as magic damage, but at long range. Patch 3.1 significantly neuters this spec, almost making it entirely obsolete. Sure, you can still simulate it with the new talents, but there are simply far better options next patch for arena DK's. With nerfs to virtually every early frost talent that the shadowfrost spec used to min/max its burst damage, as well as some nerfs and changes to unholy such as Impurity and Gargoyle, many DK's will be confused as to what to spec come patch day.

In the more recent PTR builds, Blood has had Death Strike damage increased once again as well as Glyph of Heart Strike effectively being a 10-second hamstring now instead of the 5-second snare it was before, and Frost has had its amazing undispellable 10-second snare applied from Frost Fever (Chilblains) for a while now on PTR, making both of them very viable options for arena. Unholy, although it has received several buffs to things such as Death Coil and Scourge Strike, now has the weakest snare of all 3 trees with only having Desecration due to the removal of Blood Boil snare. While doing a ton of damage is great, snares are almost always mandatory in order to do that damage. I'll most likely discuss 3.1 DK specs in a future article so I'll just leave it at that for now.





Reminders
-Season 5 gladiator cutoffs are much much tighter this season than previous seasons. Make sure you know what the cutoff is for your specific bracket/battlegroup before the season ends and you miss out on a sweet frostwyrm. You can find the cutoffs on the Arena Junkies site here.

-If you're in contention for the coveted Deadly Gladiator title on your battlegroup, I strongly recommend not doing anything that violates the ToS whatsoever. Blizzard has cracked down extemely hard on these types of activities and their logs are amazingly thorough (more than I thought tbh). Better safe than sorry.

-Tournament Realm ends next Tuesday so make sure you get your 200 games in if you wanted to advance to the invitational phase (starts April 14) as well as to be eligible for the Vanquisher title and armored murloc pet. If you don't have a team yet but have registered, you can check out the TR recruitment forum on Arena Junkies here and you'll probably find people in the same boat willing to play.

-With every new season and every new content patch there comes a new raid instance that is usually much more challenging. This time around it is Ulduar and Ulduar has surprisingly been a nice experience on PTR outside of the lag and server crashing as a result of trying to hold all of the testing on just two servers. The encounters are challenging and the hard-modes are even more challenging. The loot is very rewarding from hard-modes and as you all know, PvE gear makes an enormous difference in arena (sup legendary healing mace). If your guild isn't a stellar one now (around top 100 in the US), I'd recommend you shopping around for a spot in one that's capable of clearing Ulduar and all of its hard modes if you want to min/max yourself come season 6.

Good luck, it's gonna be a crazy week next week.