2. Because Shaman have so many instant heals they can use. Oh and they can bubble out of silence and you can't? Oh no... wait...

3. Another very Paladin centric viewpoint. In 2s and 3s especially, the dmg/heal change is MASSIVE, especially for resto shaman and priests who can provide a lot of extra burst at the start on top of their offensive dispelling. The lowering of the Chain Lightning cast time only adds to this. I think 2 healer warrior teams will benefit greatly from the ability of their healers to DPS in clutch situations.

You're right about heroics though. I hate them, and now I have to run about 20 of them.

I must say also, as a Rogue, I don't see what the big deal about the Hemo change is. Sure, it's decent whilst your 2 x ARs is up, and the new Dirty Deeds is nice. But really it's not a huge change. We still get owned by hamstring and warriors, we're still soft targets, and Mutilate hasn't been buffed enough to remain viable (my personal bugbear).

[I recently switched back to mutilate and the biggest and most unexpected problem, after being maces for a long time, is positioning. Having to be behind someone is a HUGE disadvantage against decent players...]

This is a weak troll considering a Paladin cannot DS out of a holy lock, which is most of what a Paladin has to deal with in the arena.

Genuinely not trolling. He mentioned silence and they can bubble out of that. My point still stands - only Druids / Priests suffer 'less' from either interrupts or silences. Paladins aren't out there on their own. Not to mention that Shaman suffer far more from CC in general (e.g. sheep).

Double Healer+Warrior will be a lot stronger in general in 3s, I believe. 2s is nearly impossible to predict, and 5s will stay roughly the same (with possibly more hunters, but they still have some issues).

What happened to that sticky in the PVP forums about not making retarded posts like list wars?

As for 2.3/Season 3, all I'm really looking forward to is playing with a new 2's partner if things come through. I don't see how a new season makes arenas and battlegrounds new and fresh again or why people want it to end so bad unless they don't have their drake yet and they are going to get Gladiator this season. A new season means I need to go and farm another 75k honor again, which sucks. But on the bright side, I have 60 badges for the PVP cloak, 75k honor, 100 of each BG token, and 5k arena points and a whole bunch of enchanting materials, so I'm pretty set for season 3.

I'm pretty excited to see what kind of push we can make in the 2.3 mechanics week with my tri-healer drain team. The spell damage for healing change significantly increases our ability to finish people off, and I'm looking forward to all of the delicious hunter changes. I sort of just want to arena all of that week and screw anything else.

It's a matter of competition. The first few weeks of a season are really interesting to play in due to the rating resets and balance changes that are typically implemented. It's really for the people like me who get psyched over facing new blood.

But, I can see why you're negative about it. Most of the players who take in new patches as a farming spree are just negative in general.

Just curious what hunter changes are going to give you such a huge edge than before? I know the dead zone is going to help but other than that it seems kind of lackluster. I have never played a hunter in arena before but to me it seems that hunters didnt get anything that will make them a force in arena.

The dead zone change is huge, and the arcane shot change is pretty significant as well. Being able to strip HoTs off people, break through BoP without another dispeller, pop PW:S, etc - are all potentially game winning uses of the arcane shot dispel effect. The MS addition to Aimed Shot isn't a big deal, but with my setup (warlock/hunter/holy priest/holy paladin/resto druid) it's a reasonable way to finish someone off if you can get them snared - I can easily wind up an Aimed Shot while a target is Cycloned, for instance.

It's nothing individually groundbreaking, but it's a bunch of small changes that I can see having a huge impact when added up.

I don't think it's bad that there's a new season starting up, I just don't get the big excitement that comes around whenever theres a new season starting. Class changes have nothing to do with new seasons, classes have been getting changes all throughout season 2 and there has even been a major arena change in the middle of a season, gear swapping once the gates have opened.

All a new season accomplishes is a) Purging of dead teams and b) New gear. I'm pretty sure majority of people get excited about a new season because of the latter.

Every class is going to be affected by this upcoming patch/season. I'm very interested in seeing subtlety rogues, hunters, possible enhancement shaman, and even how the +damage from healing change affects a team's playstyle when the oppurtunity for burst is put into play. Sure, classes have been getting changed around for the length of the season, but the affects of -this- upcoming patch will be a fresh of breath air for anyone who climbed for Merciless Gladiator and has seen the same re-hashed teams/playstyles a thousand times over.

I'm not saying that the actual season is going to totally revolutionize the game; the patch that is coming out one week before a fresh season, though, will be quite enjoyable to start off with on top of already recieving new gear and reset ladders.

I'm not really sure what to feel about this either. On one hand, doing a greater variety of activities to accrue PvP gear is nice for a change of pace. On the other hand, getting together a team skilled enough to handle ZA or Heroics is a challenge in and of itself.

I believe the argument made by devs was that 'you can certainly do heroics in season 2 arena gear' (the actual comment was regarding tanking iirc), and actually arena items are a pretty good amount of ilvls above what heroics mandate. With that level of gear, heroics are really really just not hard at all.

Being forced to PvE for just 1 slot of gear isn't that bad even if you hate it, and you have multiple avenues to accomplish this (heroics, kara, ZA). It's way less painful to get 60 badges if you hate running heroics than it is to get 80k+ honor when you hate doing 2 year old battlegrounds, and just skipping it and not getting the item would affect you a lot less than skipping the honor grind.

I'm just curious what the logic behind ending the season a week after the patch?

That doesn't seem like a ton of time for the people who benefit from the changes to grid up their ranking. You also might see people passing on that week if they are either negatively impacted or unsure on the impact for fear of losing too much standing.

They want a week to make pve fixes from the patch before they have to start fixing pvp stuff, too.

No it isn't! Grinding 80k honor requires you to press a button every 5 minutes while reading a book, watching a movie, talking with friends on the phone, playing Guitar Hero III, studying for class etc. Also, 80k honor is not one item, one item is 18~k honor. At a lazy pace of afking AVs at 1000 honor per hour that's 18 hours of playing for one item. The cloak, clearing mechanar in one hour of semi focused button mashing adds up to twelve runs. At one hour per run and 30 minutes to get people online, there, etc we are at 18 hours of playtime. The differance is that while in AV you are free to do other things and are simply stuck to the computer while in a heroic you need to pay enough attention to the heroic that you can't do the things I mentioned above.

You have to get 50 EotS, 40 or 80 WSG and 40 (I think) AB badges too though.

Aye, combined with lower mana costs for exorcism this really gives paladins a nice edge against those damn dogs.

The bonus spell damage from +healing isn't something that's designed to turn healers into nukers though, but it definitely gives a few advantages for certain spells with high coefficients and low mana costs (judgement of righteousness and insect swarm spring to my mind). With JoR and holy shock a pally can potentially do 2k burst in a single global cooldown, assuming 500-600 spell damage. If you take the time to pre-emptively judge crusader, or run with a ret pally, that figure becomes even more dangerous. It's not something you want to spam every cooldown, but it will change the dynamics of play as healers suddenly become able to finish off low health targets in a pinch.

Insect swarm, for many resto druids, is something that they use against melee classes anyway for the miss %. Having it do an extra 300-400 damage every 12 seconds is nothing to sneeze at.

I'm not sure if there are shaman / priest equivalents, since I haven't played these classes in like two years, but I'm not looking forward to trying to burst down resto shamans while they slam me with 1k frost shocks.

Getting off topic but I dont feel this should be advocated and unreplied to, if their are 40 people afk in the cave how much honor do they get? 0. Unrealistic? Ok their are 20 people afk, a new game starts every 3 mins so each game tends to have the same people. Horde or alliance only need to look at the scoreboard and see that going for total domination of the map and spending 2-3 mins longer to get the win for 60 more honor is feasible.

Each player afk lowers the potential for their side to get honor. Pre afk patch Horde often had few enough actually playing that their honor would not have passed 200 honor per hour let alone 1k.

If 'their' are 40 people AFK in the cave the first side to get an active tank and a healer will quickly kill the npcs and get a ton of honor. I see that you have 6585 lifetime honorable kills. I really do not think you understand what kind of an annoyance it has been to grind honor again and again and again and again. The novelty of playing PUG PvP via the solo queueing has worn of years ago.

I am typing this as I just noticed I got AFK'd out of AV 5 minutes ago - I have 107K lifetime honorable kills on my hunter, and my alt druid was rank 13 pre-BC. I have absolutely no desire to ever do pug BGs again, except perhaps on a lark to play with a new weapon. The BG honor grind is pretty much the worst element left in WoW, and I have absolutely no qualms about shadowmelding in Icewing Bunker throughout AV weekend to get my points and get out.

The content is beyond stale already and they require you to play the damn things way more than you would normally just want to play the same thing. AFK is the only thing that keeps me sane for more than 1 game at a time. Less honor is a fine price to pay for not playing the BG.

I'm quite partial to Snowfall Graveyard myself. Or another thing I like to do is AFK just south of the Dun'Modor (sp?) South Tower and ninja it back right near the end for kicks and giggles.