Vhairi's Scratchpad

Excellent job at whoever did the analysis, there are some things that immediately jump out:

- The warlock complete dominance in 2 vs 2, 3 vs 3 seems to be perhaps the best balanced format.
- 5 vs 5 is silightly more balanced, except a few classes are fucked like druids and rogues/hunters.

I would rather this didn't evolve into another thread where everyone bitches about general class power, but it seems clear that certain classes clearly need some buffs and some need some adjustments. 20 times as many warlocks as hunters in 2 vs 2 is in no way acceptable.

I am also very puzzled by the lack of ice mages at the top of the 2 vs 2 foodchain, I figured you'd at least a few paired up with another offensive dps class.

Some issues with this type of analaysis is that the number of teams at the top is too small to be extremly accurate, but since we don't have the exact numbers he used it is hard to judge the p-value of the data.

The top of the 2v2 foodchain is Druid/Warlock. Frost mages don't do much against that.

I would like to see this chart segregated by talent spec.

Well the only thing to note would be class population. There is less druids because they are one of the most underpopulated classes, where as rogues and hunter are the most overpopulated. But this is a very interesting chart.

Edit: On most servers

I think even if you normalize by number of level 70's in the class you won't change the ratio's that much, expecially not all the way at the top.

Agreed, talent spec would be interesting - I suspect that priests are the only class that has two viable high end arena specs though.

I've mentioned this to a few other people, but Druid for 5v5 is really quite the exception, because it takes an extremely high level of skill to play exceptionally well or the druid is a liability -- whereas most other classes have a very linear correlation between player skill and the resulting skill of the class played. A bad druid is absolutely atrocious. A normal druid is still not that great. A good druid is OK. A great druid is pretty decent. An exceptional druid, however, is a dramatic improvement over that. That's one reason why you don't see many of them as well -- if the druid isn't exceptional, he's very much a liability on the team as opposed to any other class. It's really very quickly apparent to me I run into one of those druids, and it's not very often. They know exactly when to kite, you can never catch them, yet somehow they still somehow juggle cyclones and hots and roots and everything else. That's argueably the most decision making that any class has to make, and they have to do it almost perfectly or again, they're a clear liability.

This is not intended as a QQ druids post either (I'm not a druid anwyays!) -- it's just pointing out my reasoning for why you just don't see many of them.

As for Frost Mages, the thing with them is they're more about control than damage -- think about what that mage usually does in 5v5's. He sheeps, he freezes, he counterspells, damage is usually a secondary concern. They can do some burst damage of course, but 2v2 is just a much different animal than 5v5. Mages are extremely suspectible to being LoS+kited in a lot of cases, and in 2v2 you've lost 50% of your DPS as a result -- maybe more if your other partner is being pounded on by, say, a warrior.

The other thing that chart shows is Shamans being at the bottom of the healers, which is what I would have expected. Without getting into particulars, that's just about their survivability and healing tools in general being somewhat weak in an arena setting. I know they show up as higher on 5's, but that's because a lot of those shamans are Elemental, not Resto.

The graphs certainly make a very powerful point about the lack of Hunters though, that's for sure.

We ran into an amazing druid this week in what I can only imagine is a selling team because they were insane. They took over ~150 points from us (and this alone convinced us to work in another day so we can afford to sidestep such teams and get more practice) and I'd say almost solely because of the druid. If he was left alone he just seemed to magically cyclone 3 of us at a time. None of our DPS could do anything all fight and sure enough when one of us was low all the healers were cycloned. I know that's impossible but it just seemed like it, the guy was just doing everything he needed to do right when he needed to do it. Trying to kill him... yeah, that didn't happen either. Any other class in that spot and we might have had a chance to kill at least one of them before humiliating defeat, but with him there it was impossible.

Snowy, I agree with your argument about druid only in a small scale pvp, but if what you said was true generally, you should see a sharp peak of druids around 2.3+ rating, since at that level of play most players are excellent, but you don't really, at least not in 5's.

In 2's on the other hand you see exactly what you said - and I know this is the case because I 3 vs 3 with an exceptional restoration druid.

In 5's druids are just fairly poor, even at the very very high end.

The dominance of warlocks is in exact correlation to the absence of Frost Mages. You see a low more rogue/lock pairing this season even though I'd consider rogue/mage a stronger combo for overall class balance, but mages just get eaten by locks whether they are playing 2dps or dps/healer 2v2 setups, so that really lead to the rise of warlocks even more.

Top of the food chain is now Warrior/Druid with Warlock pets scaling with no resilience, warrior teams are able to dominate them allowing them to get to the top. After talking to many top Warrior/Druid teams they say the 1900-2200 rating is more difficult because their bane is double DPS, once they break the double DPS barrier in most battlegroups, they are able to farm their way to the top by fighting Warlock/Healer teams and Rogue/Healer teams.

Just wanted to emphasize the bit on druid skill even more. My current 5v5 (which is basically just something I'm doing for arena points) runs several different lineups, but the one we've had the most success with is rogue/aff warlock/ice mage/holy pal/resto druid.

Now, we have 2 resto druids that play with us. The first druid does decently. He can keep people alive pretty well, and he certainly is a contributor instead of a liability (at least at our rating), but he isn't as good with his CCing and what have you.

The second druid literally carried us to a 26 point win over a gladiator team. Yeah, the rest of us were all on the ball, and the opposing team's druid made the mistake of shifting out of bear when our rogue had a 5pt kidney shot ready, but really, it was our druid that made that win possible. It seemed like every time there was a warrior all over a clothie, he was cycloned a second later, every time I got hit with tongues, it was off a second later, every time somebody needed more burst healing than I could muster, there was a lifebloom popping, etc.

The truely great resto druids make it look easy, but I think that it is the hardest class to play to it's full potential in high-end 5s.

EDIT: /wave shadowborne. Can you guess who the druid was?

Axumx