Season 3 Delayed, BGs Are Fun Again, AR/Prep The MVP Build of 2.3

Season 3 is delayed by one week which is not necessarily a bad thing. I bought both 20AP and 10AP/5 crit rating epic gems, so I need a little time to build back up to 75K honor. I am hoping PVE guilds will sell BT gems as well so I can squeeze the last a few drops of AP out of my character.



I already have enough enchanting supplies/gems for the entire season and the only thing left on my to-do list is 22 more heroic badges for the amazing cloak Dory's Embrace, and I need Berserker's Call from ZA final boss as well. Being rushdown style I have no use for the +1750 healing trinket, although I would love to get Signet of Primal Wrath to go with the season 3 honor ring. In an ideal situation I would like to obtain both cloak and trinket by season 3 opening, hopefully I can get some ZA runs soon!



One of the most frustrating aspects of preparing for a new season is building up to the 75K honor cap. Once again Blizzard killed many birds in one stone with the BG daily quests. I did yesterday's AB with three others in one shot, and pugged today's Warsong in two attempts. It is amazing how much more effort everyone put up when there is something on the line. Players on both sides play so much harder when they are trying to get that nice little bonus gold/honor and it makes for entertaining games. In an ideal situation a 25 minute PUG game (much shorter if you 5 men it with good players) gets you 800-1000 honor after you pick up the bonus, and 12 gold. As long as you do your daily's, hardcore pre-season honor grinding is a thing of the past. BG daily's makes the game even better for PVPers with a tight schedule.



And AR/Prep is easily the MVP build of 2.3. PVE rogues are discovering that yes, they can put up very competitive numbers with 0/30/31! On spreadsheets, AR is not nearly as good as relentless for PVE. In practice, two AR's coupled with trinket activation when boss goes below 35% is massive damage, and the extra vanish has plenty of applications in PVE when used as an extra aggro wipe, a 30 energy garrote, as well as immuning CC effects that greatly closes the damage gap. Of course, the majority of the rogues playing this for PVP will be mace specced and fall short of 19/42 combat swords. But the damage gap is about as big as combat dagger vs combat mutilate, good enough to keep most raid leaders happy especially with PVE contents on farm status as it is. Hemo's damage-per-energy really starts to pull away from 41 combat's sinister strike with raid buffs and deadliness, especially with 2.7 - 2.8 weapons (even with normalization the weapon base damage range is much better).



There will be inevitably people who can't stand the loss of relentless and the rushdown nature of this spec, but I truly believe coupled with other offensive minded players, AR/Prep will take my effectiveness in arenas to a whole new level. Currently we already have Neilyo and Girlzz playing the spec in 3v3 to 2400-2500 area, and I am working on my third and last 3v3 gladiator team in past month or so which should also end on a high note. First night we went from 2040 to 2220 with a 15-1 record and both Haables and Tent are playing much more aggressively than they used to be.



Although teams with little CCs do have to eat both ARs (warrior shaman paladin, warrior priest paladin, warrior lock paladin just to name a few) in full, the real power of double AR against CC heavy teams is the fact that you become a huge presence for your team, that the other team simply must put a lot more attention on you to win. And with two sets of cooldowns, it is not easy to slow you down at all. This opens up the rest of your team to do whatever they want. Let's not forget AR/prep can get the opening sap way more often than combat mace and combat mutilate, and puts your team in control from get-go.



While in 2.2, rogue/lock/druid was the best overall rogue 3v3 team in the game, I feel rogue/mage/priest will finally be able to top it in 2.3. The buffs to hemo, frost bolt and 33% of +healing as +damage gives this team comparable DPS to 2.5 DPS teams, while giving up no durability whatsoever. Chastie and physical blind gives this team even better CCs. The biggest weakness of the 2.2 RMP team was the lack of lasting power against turtling teams. In season 3 with better CCs and way better damage from the rogue, I feel this team can finally reliably tear down a SL/SL warlock. With felhunter as the only dispel, the rogue/SLSL lock/druid team won't be able to deal with power infusion and pain suppression, the RMP team will probably at least split against RLD, and do much better against warrior/lock/druid, warrior/shaman/paladin teams. Tent is not even discipline yet and I expect to end the season around 2350-2450, largely depend on whether we can find enough liquidity in our BG.



Pretty much every good team that moved into BG9 got higher ratings than their old BG. Arena is a zero sum game just like poker, and more players you have, higher the pyramid. More points for everyone involved. Of course, I have very solid teams lined-up in Stormstrike for season 3, I won't be going anywhere unless these players move with me.