Friday, June 8, 2007

Arena Season 2 Upgrades?

I expect we'll see all classes out pretty shortly, but thanks to wowhead btw, note the improvement going from season 1 to season 2 for warriors:

+639 armor
+36 strength
+31 stamina
+22 crit rating
+18 hit rating
+6 resilience

Identical Set Bonuses, Sockets, and Socket Bonuses

If you head over to Ming's Blog, he talks about the trinket change along with the upgraded warrior set. Suffice to say, mine and his opinion on resilience are totally antithetical. I think that the stat will scale with stamina well, but it doesn't seem like that stamina is scaling anywhere near as much as I had expected with season 2 gear. I had expected 1-2k more hp on the sets, not 300.

I really wish PvP gear was just best geared towards PvP than it is. Here is what I feel would be a justifiable upgrade going from season 1 to season 2 gear for a mage, prepare for imbalance and then disappointment when the real info comes out.

+85 Armor (Why not)
+25 Stamina
+20 Intellect
+35 Spell Damage
+20 Spell Penetration
+150 Spell Haste Rating
+15 Resilience

Basically, slap 5 stam and 4 int on every piece of glad gear; this alleviates the atrocious stam/int ratio that already exists on our arena gear plus provide a sizable upgrade to the core stats. Tack on 7 damage per average per slot as well. Toss 10 penetration on 2 of the pieces as the stat is basically free in item points cost, and that stat is basically absent from all of TBC gear. Now toss on 3 resilience per piece as well.

I like spell haste as a stat; I understand that it is primarily a PvE stat and as someone who you frequently see dueling without using a single casting time spell (LOL), what's the point of spell haste? 150 spell haste is ~10% casting speed, which is hardly game breaking in PvP. I just like the idea of casters going back to casting more, and the only way this is happening is with shorter cast times; plus it speeds up gameplay, forces people to react more quickly to CS/Kick heals and let's any healer or caster stay slightly more agile. I think it's a good stat for PvP, the problem of course being PvErs taking their spell haste glad gear into Black Temple.

Beyond doing that, allow mages to have 2 sets of gear available to them in arena with glove bonuses that appeal to each spec or change the glove bonus to be more general. Why not -2 seconds off CS cooldown or something that mages of any spec would get use out of?

I don't mean to mope/whine, just ranting about how I'd like to see the arena gear full of the new stats: spell haste and armor avoidance are both stats that really call out to be included on PvP gear, it's a shame if they remain PvE only stats.

It seems like everyone is saying deathcoil won't be removed by PvP Trinket next patch, thus you can ignore my earlier comments on how it isn't a big deal anyways; now that we can't remove it, it is of course a HUGE deal and I'm taking this issue straight to the WoW forums.

11 comments:

imYemeth said...

Thanks for the stats summary.

It's a shame that the "new" gladiator set is just a boring stat upgrade. New gloves or a different setbonus *sigh*

- Improves range of your Blink spell by 4 yards
- Increases the Range of Arcane Explosion by 25% (I still love Mage T2 set, it had really great setboni)
- Increases duration of Counterspell by 1s
- reduces the duration of Frost Nova by 1s
- reduces cast time of Polymorph by 0.1s
...

So many possibilities...

Oh, and I think the Deathcoil thing is a bug.

imYemeth said...

Oh, should read" Increses Duartion of Frost Nova". ;-)

Artanias EU said...

seems hunter traps and scatter shot is left out too, probably a bug too, just wondering what about Dragons breath? since its a disorient like scatter.

Neit said...

Raddy, what's your 4 DPS Line-up? You speak of it often but i never saw the actual 5 classes in it^^ Care to share pls :D can't figure out with your armory profile too...

Anonymous said...

oh gimme a break, 10% cast time reduction in huge in pve its gonna replace t6 if that happens nub

Artanias EU said...

then give t6 more spell haste.
i like the idea myself, quiet alot actually, and remember pve gear will always have the superior amount of +hit and +dmg

Anonymous said...

passive spellhaste should never have been implemented.

it will have a huge impact on both pve and pvp damage, and will spill over into wherever it is not.

that said, now that its out of the bag it should be put on pvp gear. fuck pve'ers, its not like they deserve better than pvp'ers :x

Anonymous said...

DeathCoil will be removed. It doesn't work on PTR right now but was dicussed on the forums that it will work, same for hunter traps. Everyone can stop speculating. JoJ will not be removed however.

Don't forget with the stat upgrades you have the three new epics and one ring to count for stat upgrades as well.

klassick said...

Get on PTR already, its boring out here.

Raddy said...

Looks like tomorrow night till we see the new gear for other classes.

I obviously realize that spell haste goes a long way in PvE.

What if arena gear cost 5 times as much as it currently does? It cost so much that only the absolute top 2-3 teams would get a full set in a season, and even then they'd likely not have enough. Would PvErs still complain that some PvP gear is better than its PvE counterpart?

I'm not trying to be a dick; it's just that there is phenomenon where if I say, "it seems kind of silly that the best mage pvp gear is now exclusively in raid content" I'm told basically "yeah, that kinda sux bro, but we're talking REALLY hard PvE here" but I can never say "well only the best players are going to hav a full arena set of gear to bring into pve"

That didn't exactly make sense, so I'll stop and say I totally agree with imyemeth. Stat upgrades are nice but when we see PvE gear getting more creative itemization and PvP gear isn't it, PvPers are obviously going to be frustrated.

Granddream said...

I feel that passive spellhaste should not be implemented. It will only serve to screw up the PVE vs PVP balance as well as class vs class PVE damage and healing. In fact for PVP, class vs class damage will be also affected.

For example, spellhaste would case casting to be faster and we all know that it would result in a huge dps increase. For PVE, warlocks who depend primarily on dot damage will go even higher up the dps charts when their shadowbolt spam after dotting will become even faster. Other dps casters such as elemental shamans and mages will come in closer to the top dps of raids while melee dpsers do not get these perks. Also healing classes such as paladins will become relatively more effective than druids and priests since they rely more on casting heals than HOTs and heal over time. Passive spellhaste in this sense will cause a little PVE class imbalances that might not be intended.

For PVP, DPS caster classes will become stronger no doubt. A 10% drop in casttime will mean a 2.25 second frostbolt/lightning bolt and this will make these DPS casters much stronger in the arena (esp the 5v5s). It might not matter a lot in duels for say a mage who relys a lot on instant casts and have to be consistently on the move. However, for elemental shamans this becomes a signifcant buff. I am assuming that passive spellhaste if implemented, will be on other caster sets as well not only mages because I think implementing it on only 1 caster class might seem a little too bias. This huge dps increase due to a shortening of cast time will result in rogues, an already weak 5v5 class to be further dropped down on the roster of wanted 5v5 classes.

The problem with spellhaste implementation is that it will screw up the class vs class balance in both PVE and PVP. I do not think the solution is as simple as "Put more spellhaste on PVE". More spellhaste on PVE also means that PVP gear might be replaced by those PVE gear since spellhaste scales with damage and the increase in dps output is too much in both gameplay aspects.