WOTLK'd S5/6

This blog is about WOTLK S5/6 and the broken polava that was a constant in the arenas of the World of Warcraft.

To be WOTLK'd - to be outskilled by mechanics blizzard have put into the game leaving you with nothing you could of done to a reasonable degree to prevent a loss.

The spirit of being WOTLK'd has been strong since S5 and looks like it's very much set to continue to the end of the expansion, but what exactly has been WOTLK'ing us throughout the seasons and breaking numerous headsets and keyboards (most likely ones owned by rogues). From the never to be seen above 2k again Deadly Gladiator's to the super skilled protection heroes (10k shockwave outplayed m8) back pedalling their way to the tip top of the arena, let's take a look at what's happened over the course of the expansion.

Season 5 - Enter the Hero Class

Enter the WOTLK, the start of season 5 was a fairly ludicrious affair, when everyone started off in blues/pve gear with a few lucky people having some voa/badge items nothing was safe from dying within the space of a cheap shot. RMP mirrors came down to luck with the spirit of redemption glyph more often than not, who could forget having SOR up for 30s+ with good RNG? Holy was the spec to be early season because any other spec would leave you eating dirt within the first 10 seconds of the match unable to heal anything. The amount of damage that could come out of an arcane/muti RMP in the opener back then was obscene even on todays standards. Divine hymning through the ROV barriers was also a great way to abuse lazy coding, also who could forget the fire that popped up and broke cc/did stupid amounts of damage.

Slappywag's video shows the early stages of S5 in a rather accurate way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9lfD27DbuE

All sorts of comps came out in early s5 but there was a staple in any top tier comp in the early weeks of the season, rogue/ret/arcane, the 3 super high burst classes which had enough cooldowns to spam to survive for more than 10 seconds. Mages also had the lovely mirror images spamming sheeps which weren't on any kind of DR, this combined with the arcane burst seen here led for some amazingly competitive games where the enemy healer could end up sheeped for 20s+ without anything they could do about it. WOTLK also saw the introduction of mage armour , which to this day carries on being a bane to warlocks adding another rng factor to the warlock vs mage meta game of devour/spell lock lottery. These 3 classes and the death knight zoo were fairly prevelent throughout the early period of season 5. What's the death knight zoo you ask? Who could forget the dk coming back to life as a ghoul, with his dead ally coming back with him as a ghoul, with his ghoul pet, and a gargoyle, and maybe a hunter pet, and some wolves from the future. Another issue with death knights was the fact that standing in death and decay resulted in what looked like rolling your face across WASD whilst they're bound to a /cower macro due to one of the best glyphs in the game. Blood was also an option with DRW doing 100% of the DK's damage making it pretty much unhealable on cloth. The S key was no obstacle for this DK achieving the highest of ratings.

As the season started to progress hunters/dks/paladins started to gather pvp gear, thus was born Shadowcleave & PHD. "Lets remove all rng proc stuns, but give one to hunters" said blizzard, thus was born something even more annoying/retarded than mace stuns off hamstrings/whirlwinds, the triple stun tnt explosive shots that were the bane of everything that got caught by it. They also had to option to spec Readiness+The Beast Within and have back to back immunity whilst their pet killed everything. One of the other top tier combos was a triple engineering RMP (engineering was good for everyone but a triple engineering team would make all the difference more often than not). The combination of GLG/Pyro rocket/bandits insignia/DMC:D allowed for a huge amount of on demand/rng burst that could come out of nowhere, engineering was at it's peak in this season before the rocket glove/glg nerf that put them on a shared cooldown.

DK's however were something else all together, DND glyph having an AOE cower added to it whilst being incredibly funny to use as a DK nearly cost me a keyboard playing a rogue vs it. This was nothing before Serennia found that DKs could do more damage spamming Icy Touch than meleeing, leading to a retarded caster hybrid that could do 6*back to back Icy Touches with the potential to crit for 5-6k each. What made this even better was that DK's could go on to dual weild Silent Fang and have 2*Strangulate proc sword, who needs weapon damage when you can icy touch, right? Plague strike was pretty much turned into a glorified druid counter at this point as every unholy rune could safely be burnt on it without a second thought (could we have the part where it removes 3 stacks of lifeblooms back without the druid getting any mana or health, please, it was balanced, I might be able to solo kill a druid on my dk again after that).

The trends after this pretty much went to PHD's in 3s and DK/Pala+DK/Hunter in 2s, paladins had a place in all of this as well with their holy/ret spec. Shadowcleaves also made an appearance playing on the strength of DK's combined with warlock dots/cc's to create insane amounts of pressure (with chains for peeling so the warlock could survive). The ability to get infusion of light and judgements of the wise and repentance led to paladins probably being in the most interesting state they've ever been (they could still die to being outskilled by icy touch spam/tnt stuns at this point). By having a low CD CC, Freedom breaking stuns and infinite mana it put them at a new level of offensive utility which hasn't really been seen since (holy is a very boring spec these days compared to the bullshit versions of it in s5/6 imo). Another huge issue was the ability to put sacred shields on multiple targets, think of how the current arena scene would be if that had stayed in the game pretty much nullifying most swaps.

Druids were also far from the tanking gods they are today, plague strike spam removing (note, not dispelling, no heal from those removed blooms) all their hots and a lack of armour led to an extremely squishy healer even for s5 standards. This combined with the huge amounts of burst able to easily out damage the hots from a 1.8k spell power druid made them pretty much a rarity to see as resto in 3.0.x. This led to many druids adopting a 0/34/37 spec for survival instincts and feral charge to play a similar style to S4 druids. Another nonfactor early in the season were warriors, defenseless without resilience and forced into fury spec to be able to create any pressure. The trend of warriors going from piss poor to great(ly overpowered with enough pve gear) within the space of an expansion has continued.

Season 6 - Prot paladins and warriors and arparparp oh my.

The first things to note with the Ulduar patch are the huge nerfs to DK's, Black Ice being changed to a small shadow/frost bonus rather than a large frost bonus and improved icy touch being changed to less +% damage to spell the death of the shadowfrost spec. They also decided that removal of RNG stun talents would be a bit better for the game as taking one step back after removing mace stun by adding TNT stun to irritate players even more might of been a slightly terrible idea and many DEADLY GLADIATOR Legolas's faded into obscurity shortly after. There was also the arcane power/pom shared cd nerf (this was actually done in 3.09 or so just before the end of s5). Holy Paladin's also had their trees swapped around so Infusion of light would no longer be accessable to ret specced paladins, not that this was needed with what was to come. This was the beginning of the rise of the resto druid with buffs from every angle.

* Improved Barkskin: This talent now also grants 80/160% additional armor while in Travel Form or not shapeshifted.

* Improved Tree of Life: The armor bonus to Tree of Life Form from this talent has been reduced to 67/133/200% bonus armor.

This and plague strike being toned down to normality led to a sudden influx of druid heroes plaguing the arena favouring the newly 'nerfed' dks as partners and becoming the dominant setup of mid S6. The first weeks of S6 however was dictated by one simple change that led to the mighty Furious Gladiator Billian claiming his title within the first 2 weeks of the season.

Penance: Damage increased approximately 30%. This spell can now be cast on yourself.

Shortly after this, Blind and Fear ended up on the same DR and rogue/priest was back to normality which is when the druid/dk's started farming their way back up after the pala/dk's of S5 skey'd their way back down. Mid season 6 also saw a boost in the average MMR of everyone resulting in a rating inflation that boosted most teams MMR by 200~300.

Once DK's had began to raid Ulduar and discovered that Scourge Strike can now crit for 8~10k depending on their procs the knights of daeth came back in full swing with a choice of this or back to back 9k frost strike crits with the XT Sigil. Combining this with the new found survivability of druids led to a very stable comp for both out lasting and gibbing people with the pure shadow damage scourge strikes of which do more damage than my dk with full 277 gear+shadowmourne does these days. The stability of dk/druid's survivability combined with the overall setting for S6 led to a fairly overpowered comp which had very few weaknesses for most of the season. Innervate also being changed mid season led to the pretty much near infinite mana situation that we have today. A 6 min cooldown innervate being dispelled would mean the druid would be oom long before the next one came up, with a 3 min one it was often easy enough to turtle until the second one came up. They also created an interesting bug which allowed dk's to sit there spamming the blood boil button until a rogue was nearby at which point it would cast the spell and instantly destealth them. What was interesting was that they nerfed scourge strike before the season ended practically halving the damage 3~4 weeks before the end which was the turning point for the dominance of DK's and pushing them towards the death coil centric playstyle that we have now.

Retribution paladins were also not half bad for most of the season, the ability to global anything with chain crits as seen in this was quite hard to beat until they nerfed vindication and gutted (and later removed) seal of blood/the martyr. Protection paladins however, were on the rise. Not just the PROT BEATZ dps paladins, the PROT BEATZ holydins which were soon to become the plague of the 2v2 bracket. Simply take a paladin specced into prot for the stamina conversion to spell power talent, equip full holy gear and go to town on the stamina gems and what do you get?

A nearly unkillable holy paladin with a ridiculous amount of spell power and defensive talents. The only weakness of the prot paladin was the fact that they HAD to cast to heal, they had no instant cast heals but their flash of lights crit for ridiculous amount due to the protection talents and this combined the sacred shield gave them huge hps when they were free to cast. This wasn't even the worst part of it though, the fact that they had a 20 second cooldown hammer of justice and avenger's shield that crit for 7~8k AND silences for 3 seconds let the prot paladin not only heal but provide a huge amount of offensive utility. Oh and divine plea? yeah that was undispellable with this spec and refreshed itself on a melee hit, who needs int gems. Another problem with prot paladins was that the ones that had access to 4P T8 had a sacred shield that procced every 4 seconds, with the ridiculous amount of sp prot paladins had (3.2k+, very close to what paladins have now a full 2 tiers of gear later) this made them even harder to kill despite dropping a bunch of resilience for the bonus.

* Resilience: No longer reduces the amount of damage done by damage-over-time spells, but instead reduces the amount of all damage done by players by the same proportion. In addition, the amount of resilience needed to reduce critical strike chance, critical strike damage and overall damage has been increased by 15%.

* Armor Penetration Rating: The amount of armor penetration gained per point of this rating has been reduced by 12%.

Both of these were huge buffs to warriors combined with the bladestorm/juggernaut buffs with the Ulduar patch and some talent refinements. This led to the rise of warriors and the top tier comps that came with this for them of TSG and pala/warrior in 2s (note how paladins have been in a good 80% of the top tier comps so far this expansion). No longer was 2s a DK fest with arp soft capped warriors destroying stuff in blade storms with a Mjolnir/GT proc up (hi tankz) whilst their 30k hp healer chained hammer into an avenger's shield only for it to happen all over again 30 seconds later if you didn't die to the first assault.

A faint glimpse of the future lied ahead of people with the destruction buffs to come with the Ulduar patch, destruction locks were quite comfortably globaling people until the resilience buff came and whilst there was not really any fotm comps for them at this point pretty much any combo of healer/destro/rogue was working ok vs most teams and later led to RLS going mainstream (and healer/destro in 2s was arguably better than affliction vs a lot of setups).

Closer to the end of the season blizzard released the TOC patch. This gave warriors and the now gutted on damage dk's access to ilvl245 2h weapons with a nice amount of strength/arp on them and made facing the [Dual Blade Butcher] heroes for the last few weeks of the season a rather painful experience (with death's verdict also being available very late on). Along with this patch was not the nerfs that prot paladins needed, instead blizzard attempted to fix the full holy specs for 2s and indirectly gave prot paladins a huge buff with the FOL hot which now made them even tougher to kill with that ticking away for 600+/tick.

Sacred Shield: When a paladin casts Flash of Light on a target with this buff, they also now place a heal over time effect on the target, healing that target for 100% of the Flash of Light amount over 12 seconds.

This patch also came with a huge amount of buffs for shadow priests and was the start of them returning to viability within S7 and becoming the powerhouse that they are today. What lied ahead of the brave followers of the arena system was a land of wizards and tanks entering into the arena claiming rewards from more deserving players with absurdly broken game mechanics, but that'll have to wait until next time.