Hey guys, welcome to my first column for SK-Gaming.com. I’m very excited, and indeed proud to have this opportunity, but without further ado:

Who am I?

Now, I don’t want to spend too much time on this, as I’m here to provide content, but just to give you a rough overview:
I’m 18, English, and a keen WoW player. I’m a high-rated Druid and Paladin, and mid-to-high rated Priest. I formerly wrote for Eurospective.com before the project was abandoned, upon which time Thorin was kind enough to offer me a post writing here.

What will I cover?

SK of course already has an excellent WoW columnist in the form of Zechs, so I’m going to merely be writing supplementary articles, in that I’m going to look at trends, changes, and the top comps, along with what needs changing in my opinion. As such, expect my columns to be less impartial than those of my colleague Zechs. I’m also intending to include frequent interviews with players from our four WoW teams (although my Korean isn’t up to much :P).

Season Eight – What’s happened in the first two weeks?

So, we’re two weeks in to the final season of this expansion. Blizzard have promised that they’ll be keeping a very close eye on balance, especially as the new arena tournament realm should be up very soon.

The changes to resilience and indeed to healing in arena at the beginning of this season have had a rather large effect on arena balance, and just how strong each class is. Games seem to have become noticeably longer, and as such obviously different classes are beginning to thrive. So what should we expect to see being addressed soon?

If there’s one class that is being complained about at the moment, it’s Hunters. Quite simply, it’s argued, their damage is ridiculously out of control as Marksmanship. I must confess to playing with a Marksmanship Hunter myself, but the hunters I’ve played against certainly are putting out near-unhealable damage as a solo DPS. Therefore, I asked him what he thought the problem was, if he was being utterly impartial (he prefers BM and Survival anyway as I understand), and he decided upon gear scaling, and perhaps Readiness.

If his estimation of where such damage is coming from is true, then we’re unlikely to see coL.Black for example pulling an MM hunter out anytime soon in a tournament, as obviously S5 gear doesn’t amount to terrific MM damage. However, a nerf for Live is still in order, and the main suspect is burst from Chimera Shot. Now, obviously the numbers would need to be tweaked, but I would personally favour either making the damage dealt by Chimera Shot physical, or simply nerfing the coefficient from 125% to 110%. While not a huge nerf, it’s certainly a reasonable start, and unlikely to push them too far in the other direction.

Warlocks and Shadow Priests are also being subjected to “nerf-calling”, and most deservedly so. The haste change before pushed their damage ridiculously high once it was ramped up, and the resilience change gives them more time to deploy said damage. Indeed, there’s been a huge shift in the Priest community, with many Priests taking this opportunity to move to Shadow while the going’s good.

I think this is actually quite a hard issue to address to be honest. While there needs to be some sort of damage nerf, particularly to Shadow Priests in my opinion, one thing that must be absolutely avoided is nerfing them too far, and pushing them back into relative obscurity. Back when they changed resilience to affect all damage, not just DoT damage, (so basically buffing DoTs comparatively), I made the point that “by the very nature of DoT damage and how it operates in PvE to PvP, it will need to be lower in PvP than other types of damage when they’re both operating at 100% in PvE”. However, at the same time there’s the danger of Blizzard becoming TOO reliant on resilience as a stat to deal with potential problems in PvP, and it being massively over-budget to such an extent that it’s not worth Gemming/Enchanting anything else. Reverting the Haste DoT effect would be counter-intuitive and “lame” in my opinion, as would removing crit from DoTs.

That leaves a real dilemma for Blizzard to address. For Shadow Priests, I’d probably nerf Mind Blast as an interim measure, and perhaps decrease Devouring Plague application damage too. For Warlocks, I’d reduce the damage-enhancement from Haunt by either 5 or 10%.

SK-100, and what it tells us about Balance so far:

While it’s often stated that SK-100 isn’t an accurate way of judging balance, and I accept that to an extent, it’s actually remarkably good at displaying trends. As I stated many times over at Eurospective, as a tool, it’s the most accurate analysis of arena balance we, as players, have access to.

Looking at the 3v3 representation statistics, the first thing I noticed was the dramatically lower representation of RMP than last season. However, upon talking to a former arena partner of mine who’s RMP is apparently in negotiations with a sponsor, I’m told: “The change has actually been beneficial in my opinion – we were having problems with cleave before but now we’re able to win based upon CC, as they’re finding it harder to secure a kill”. I’m not sure what to attribute this fall to then, perhaps just simply other comps also becoming stronger? Or perhaps the top RMPs, such as Dignitas, just haven’t played enough games yet. I’ll review this situation soon.

At the moment, the highest-represented comp is the tri-plate cleave made popular by TSG. Last season, it fell almost completely off the radar, peaking only at the end of the season at 5% representation (in the SK-100), it’s currently the most popular 3v3 comp with 8% representation.

While the Death Knight nerfs have supposedly hit the comp hard, I’d argue the comp benefitted greatly from the resilience and healing changes. The comp is still perfectly capable of tunnelling unhealable damage into a target, while it’s significantly harder to drop any of them, particularly as they all have potent defensive cooldowns. I know for a fact that RMP is encountering significantly harder games against tri-plate/TSG, and the comps that previously drove tri-plate’s representation down, Wizard Cleave variants, now have a significantly more difficult job, particularly as tri-plate is now liable to outlast them.

If I was to zero in on one DPS class that was too strong last season and is still too strong, I’d be staring the Warrior Class straight in the face. While Protection Warriors seem to have almost disappeared this season – I’m yet to encounter a single one; Arms Warriors are still going strong having seen no notable nerfs between this season and the last. With games getting longer, Warriors seen an indirect buff, as they’re able to, of course, keep on going indefinitely, and with ICC gear becoming widely available, the amount of ArP available to arena Warriors is increasing. Indeed, out of the non-healer classes, Warriors are currently sat at the second highest representation behind Warlocks.

Armor Penetration – the unbalanceable stat?

As I’m sure you’re all aware, Blizzard are removing Armor Penetration as a stat on gear in Cataclysm (along with many others). I’d like to think this was, at least in part, due to the fact they’ve been completely unable to, since the mechanic was introduced in any form, make it worthwhile but not overpowered. However, if we are to wait till Cataclysm to be free of this wretched monstrosity of a stat, the least I feel Blizzard could do is apply another interim nerf to ArP as they did not too long ago, nerfing the benefit by approximately 14%. This would not only nerf Warriors, but also nerf those pesky MM Hunters I mentioned earlier, as they also deal the majority of their damage via physical means.

Thanks for reading, and feel free to drop a comment, I’ll do my best to keep an eye on them.