Four DPS Team Explosion
During the first half of the season, I'm willing to bet that a THIRD of the top 20 teams will be 4 DPS. A month ago, it was 1-2%, it is now perhaps 10-15%. I think 4-DPS is going to become extremely popular; once you put shadowpriests, fire mages, and UA locks in gladiator gear with high resilience they suddenly aren't so squishy, and can easily survive the opening 20 seconds to land their OMG ZERG damage combo on their target of choice. Run in BoP your lock, Bubble up, silence opposing healers and AP Pom Pyro NS EM CL MB Death Shadowburn Fireblast omgeese. It's pretty scrub, but some matrices have no good counters to this. It also allows teams with PvE gear to really bring it into the arena and do some damage with it, which leads to my second prediction.
PvE Gear Explosion
So what? Lots of teams run pallies in healing gear already. Well, expect to see a ton of casters sporting double 2pc and then PvE gear to fill up a lost of the rest of their slots. For most teams, a mage with 10k HP, 300 resil, and 950 damage is a lot better than one with 11.5K HP, 420 resil, and 800 damage. Expect the Nightseye-Star of Elune price spread to move a LOT during the season as players move to more rounded gear. I'm going to go with: Half of top 20 teams are going to be wearing 20+ Tier4 or higher items on their starting five.
ClassX2 Matrices
Double Warrior, double warlock, disc priest and shadow priest, or even double mage. I'd bet that at least 20% of all top teams in battlegroups run a 2x matrix as their staring matrix. Why? 2xWar is obvious. When run with the shammy/druid/pally version, this matrix is pretty much the opposite of 4 DPS. Outlast (without dependence on mana burn) and wear down. Very similar to 4DPS in that a lot of classic matrices are going to accuse this makeup as "scrub friendly."
As more serious teams use last season's lessons in how to counter what they've seen through the season (classic matrices for the most part), a lot of teams are going to run what they feel are counters.
I've also always felt that most classes work better with another one of themself than other classes. Warlock/Shadow priest is the counter example to this, but 2 warriors provide each other both shouts and can effortlessly go from split to focused DPS on targets. Shatter is an obvious example for mages as is the fact that poly is certainly more annoying when 2 targets are down at a time. Double priest guarantees one (or both) are free to wreak havoc with mana burn.
Resto Druids
Everyone talked up feral druids before season one. Everyone went on and on about how druids were going to own it up in cat, pop out and cyclone, toss out a heal, hop into bear and charge that pally heal, and then switch back to cat and finish off the main assist. World of theorycraft is a pretty cool game.
Even with the nerf to cyclone, cyclone is still amazing and is a real problem for some teams. 1 healer and 2 healer teams are always in danger of their available healer being stuck in unbreakable CC for a LONG time. The lifebloom buff really makes it more viable.
Early season one, I think a lot of teams that ran with resto druids grew discouraged that they died extremely quickly if they didn't immediately retreat from incoming damage whereas priests can really be in the thick of it for a while and still shield/dispel/fear and be pretty annoyingly effective. However, with gear scaling druids should be able to be in caster a bit more frequently and make use of their powerful uninterruptable heals and cyclone spam more than last season.
I'm betting 10% of all top 20 teams run a druid in their active roster at season 2's end. (Compare this to like what, 1-2% now?)
To be more bold, I bet that in 2s and 3s, resto druids gain % share in top teams more than any other class next season. Druid/warlock will be a common top 5 2v2 team.
More Warlocks
Teams that ran classic matrix with a hunter last season will work to replace the hunter with a warlock or shaman. The classic hunter/warrior/mage/pally/priest will take an overall hit in popularity as more teams move to 4DPS and 2X teams, but this combo in particular will grow scarce. Not more than 1 or 2 teams in the top 20 battelgroups are going to run this come next season's end. Classic matrix teams will shift towards the warlock to help them win the long games against 2.5 healer, help them survive the burst via healthstones against 4DPS teams, and help them counter and control the opposing healing when playing other classic matrix teams.
It's harder to imagine warlocks being more dominate in the smaller arena sizes, but all signs point to this being the case. UA locks with even more survivability and their main counter (rogue/X) teams taking a huge hit with the PvP trinket changes make me think that without significant class changes, 40% of all top 10 2v2 teams will include a warlock.
Renewed Interest in BGs
Maybe I'm projecting here a bit, but it was not necessarily the case that BGs were "skill-less" or "just a zergfest", it was largely that we as players were just sick of them. We were sick of doing the same 2 BGs for nearly 2 years, and the PvP playerbase became increasingly more interested in roaming 5v5 than battlegrounds. We hated videos full of BG PvP, tried to get roaming 5v5 going on our home servers, and were awestruck when Blizzard announced that a huge part of TBC was going to be 5v5 arena PvP.
But wait, these top teams aren't full of necessarily amazing players, even videos coming from the absolute best teams usually leave you with a "yeah that's pretty much what everyone does" feeling. When I think of the best PvP movies coming out of TBC, while the HukHukHuks vid was fantastic (it's the best arena vid by a mile IMO), I'd still much rather watch Evertras' latest dueling vid or Neiyo II.
Why? If arena is pinnacle of PvP, shouldn't it be more inspiring? My point is just that PvP is more than Arena in WoW; I could be fantastic at dueling and atrocious in the Arena or vice versa, the skillsets are not really that similar. If dueling is about planning and execution with some moderate dependency on reaction, Arena is much more reaction dependent and has more emphasis is on coordination, gameplay and class knowledge, and strategy.
I don't want to ramble forever here, but my prediction is: Reemergence of competitive WSG teams on the big battlegroups and video releases from the big PvP guilds. Players will have fun discovering how their old core strategies fit in the TBC world of huge HP and resilience.
Arcane Mages
Tier 5 2PC has a lot of potential as does just generic AM spam. AP/frost mages will look to the Arcane side of their damage output as opposed to trying to just bolt between CCing. Hard to make a real prediction here, but: 40/0/21 will be significantly more popular than 33/0/28 at season's end. Tier 5 2Pc will become more prevalent on top AP/frost mages than the T4 2pc.
Tons of Arena PvP Vids
Arena videos were somewhat scarce season 1; they've gotten certainly more popular as the season progressed, but the ratio of arena to world pvp/BG vids is still probably favoring World PvP -- PvP videos will be arena footage next season 3 to 1.
Dueling Videos
Oh I had to, come on. ^^
Killing Blue Bars
More teams are going to go after the mana pools of opponents than before. Now that CC one healer, spell lock another, pom fireball fireblast + other DPS isn't getting the job done, classic matrix teams, 2.5 healer teams, and true trihealer teams are going to play much more for the long game.
Spellsurge
On pretty much everything with a blue bar. (Well not hunters and maybe not mages) Druids, paladins, priests, shamans, and warlocks will be sporting spellsurge as their weapon enchant of choice on high rated teams.
Engineering
I really thought engineering cheese would be way more prevalent season one, but it is pretty rare. Sure reflectors show up a little bit, as do harm prevention belts, but I expect the envelope pushed on this one next season. I'll bet 60% of top 20 2v2 teams have at least one engineer. (that is perhaps not a very bold estimate considering how common engineering already is with PvPers)
A Big Balance Things Patch
Obviously, everyone expects:
- Rogue Buffs
- Warlock Nerfs
- New Profession Crap
Pretty much every DPS class is running around with the Heroic mode trinket in their second trinket slot. I think a lot of people are going to move to more defensive trinkets to counter 4DPS teams. I'm sure we'll see a lot more: reflectors, healing+resil pvp trinkets, engineering toys, petrified scarabs (get owned), and other various toys becoming increasingly popular especially on the players on classic type teams who need to survive 4DPS onslaught.
6 comments:
*Few months later, all of Raddy's predictions were off by 1%, thereby destroying blogger.com as thousands of people come here to poke fun at Raddy*
"Warlock nerfs"
Sigh, I'm going to have to endure a guildie of mine's complaints about it. He's a great guy, but his views about warlocks are hilarious.
I think those predictions are pretty good. I disagree about druids, largely because Blizzard made the wonderful decision to give druid gladiator gear the lowest amount of stam of all the classes. I imagine they were trying to balance this around bear form, and perhaps even feral talents. Of course, a resto druid in the resto set won't have those talents, and really doesn't want to be spending time in bear anyways. It's when the warrior intercept stuns him and opens up a can of whoopass when he's in caster form, that's the problem.
I'm thinking that locks will be less common in 2v2 if anything, buying shadow resist is just too easy of a counter to warlocks in small scale PvP.
Honestly I see more and more and more double warrior teams in 5s, and tons of pally resto shaman warrior teams in 3s, as well as the 23589025 billion pally warrior teams in 2s doing really well.
Yeah I think that the prevalence of shadow resist could really hurt the lock/X teams in 2s. Though there are some problems with running around in SR just because you see a lock (say you fight mage/lock), you'd be totally fucked.
My thought is that there isn't anything new happening that's going to make more people stack resist gear in arena; tons of shadow resist gear is around now, why doesn't it get used?
It does get used, warrior pally hides behind piller and switches rings and neck if its that shadow priest lock combo they see every other week.
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