It's a consequence of being near the top of the bell curve. Most teams queueing are ranked below you, so, you'll either lose a lot of points or win a few.

Look at a top team's win/loss record once they hit 2500. They need to win a lot more games than they lose to stay there. (Pure conjecture on my part, but it makes sense)

Give it time, things will return to normal in a few weeks.

Our APPoMPyro/Elemental Shaman team was formed because the they were leftovers from new comps we were trying in 3s and 5s. When we started we didn't think we would beat too many decent teams. I spec'ed the Mage out of Frost specifically to support the Elemental Shaman and initially planned to catch some well geared bad teams by surprise and maybe steal a few wins, hence the deception tactics.

Our APPoMPyro+NSNPCL gib burst turned out to be a little more effective than we thought (~6.6k standard, ~8.3k+DoT if APPoMPyro crits). We can essentially drop ~10k worth of instants on somebody within 1 GCD, more if we crit. I think in 2s people expect 2 DPS teams to be a bit higher on control chains and a bit lower on burst. There isn't much coordinated CC chain, just the threat of one gigantic shot of instants if we get a toon below a relatively high threshold.

All but one of our losses were against Paladin-Warlock comps. There was no way we can control the Paladin and burn down the Warlock (way too much health and resistance on the Warlock, plus SL/SL, Spell Lock, and Devour Magic). All we could do was work the Paladin, force the bubble with the threat of CDs, reset, then kill the Paladin with CDs, but it took so long we got too far behind on health and mana, the Warlock just kept up the pressure and won despite us getting the first kill.

- - -

It seems like there are more Paladin+SL/SL and Paladin+SL/SL+? out there than ever. Paladin+SL/SL+? does not suck against melees; the Warlock does not have to insist on running the Felhunter to work the healer. Even with all the ArP and melee scaling it is neither trivial nor fast taking down a well guarded VW 2+ times.

Try having a Warlock put on the Solarian trinket and get a decent Frost Mage to duel the Felhunter. The little modderfogger can almost solo a Mage. A good two thirds of spells won't even stick on the little modderfoggers. Paranoia also gives Rogues on Warlock teams a huge edge against other stealthers.

With all the powers the Felhunter offers in PvP, I think it has all the survivability it deserves at this point of scaling. ArP and melee scaling has gotten to the point where Blizzard will not have to nerf the living f--- out of the Felhunter, that is all.

It is a good thing that Felhunters are countered to a significant degree by melees now. Felguards, on the other hand, probably deserves more survivability at this point. Those buggers offer only Intercept and a bit of damage, and are far easier to gib than Felhunters are.

Paladin/warlock cannot possibly win vs priest/rogue. It is literally the most lopsided match up you can imagine.

My first impression is that Rogues have gotten completely out of control. 80% of our games at 1600-1900 were versus Rogue/x teams, and they completely infest the 3v3 bracket as well.

I don't think Blizzard bases class balance on completely min/maxed geared out characters fighting at top levels, but here's something to ponder. I reckon at top gear levels for each class and equal skill, a PvE geared Rogue and a Druid are literally unbeatable by any other composition in the game.

That does not bode well for game balance, and I think just for the fact that the top Rogues are amassing 4 piece/4 piece and Warglaives at alarming frequency, they should be due for a huge nerf. And this is from the perspective of a Warrior (supposed Rogue counter class but laughably, laughably not). Rogues with PvE gear have probably the highest power levels of any class any spec in any arena season. Surely 50% of all 1700+ 2v2 teams or 3v3 teams having a Rogue is not intended? Certainly Rogue/Rogue 2v2, R/R/D 3v3, and other comps were really never intended? All other classes have to worry about balances with each other, Rogues can simply ignore everything.

And for the record, I agree Warriors are a bit powerful at the moment too.

The negative impact of T6/Sunwell gear in arenas is pretty obvious by now, but unfortunately there aren't any easy fixes to it that won't inflict major collateral damage on arena balance as a whole. In my opinion, one of the only reasons that Rogues (PvE geared rogues in particular) are so common in arenas right now is due to the extreme popularity of resto druids in team makeups. Back in the earlier days of arenas, you didn't see much of rogues because they didn't really counter any popular comps well enough to justify a slot and the gear simply wasn't there. This is also an obvious factor in the huge hit taken by warlocks this season, since a typical rogue can curbstomp a warlock even without the benefit of 4pct6.

Now that the ladder is older, people all have access to max resilience/high stam, and a lot of rogues have access to warglaives and 8pct6, it's an entirely different ballgame - the only effective and reliable way of killing a resto druid in 2s or 3s without taking out his partners first is to put a 4pct6 shadowstep glaive rogue on him. There are plenty of other classes that can be played well in a comp designed to beat druid teams, but properly geared rogues simply outshine those classes.

As a side note I also believe that this is partly responsible for the new popularity of hunters: A well-played and properly specced hunter is capable of keeping a rogue under control mostly unassisted, and can also do significant damage to a rogue since hunter ranged attacks bypass basically every defensive mechanism a rogue has (except Evasion). Despite the fact that Hunters are hardly the best DPS class in arenas, the fact that they can almost completely lock out a rogue makes them a strong option right now.

However, the gear is at least half of the problem. If you nerf rogues across the board to counter the PvE gear related issues, you'll probably mostly fix their representation, but rogues *without* t6 and warglaives will probably end up much lower in effectiveness than they need to be to effectively counter druids. There's a good chance that as a result, druids would become even more popular on the ladder, which isn't really any better of a situation than the one we're in now - comp variety in the 2s and 3s ladders would stagnate even more. We could hope that Blizzard would rebalance *all* the classes for PvP, but historically this is a pretty unlikely proposition.

One other commonly proposed solution is just to disable PvE gear in arenas. This would solve most of the rogue issues (though you'd probably need some talent adjustments to go with it), but it would also completely cripple a lot of succesful teams, simply because almost every melee DPSer or hunter is wearing a few pieces of PvE gear (if not more). This might not be a bad thing overall, but every rogue/warrior wearing the exact same set of equipment isn't something I look forward to.

Off the top of my head, I want to see Blizzard scaling back the influence gear has on Subtlety damage output and also reducing the viability of Combat talents in PvP. I think careful, slow changes in those two directions would be enough to discourage the stupid number of PvE-geared rogues in arenas, if combined with the New Improved Cheat Death (Now With Less Cheat). Rogues simply shouldn't be able to be viable in arenas as Combat at this point, and Shadowstep specs gain altogether too much damage generation from gear and stats when they should really be more dependent on talents and player skill.

An obvious example would be reducing the weapon damage multiplier on Hemorrhage and replacing it with a smaller flat +x damage bonus, like sinister strike, with the goal of 'equalizing' Hemo damage somewhere around a full S3 damage output level. Mind you, I haven't worked out math on this or thought about it in depth, but I think you get the idea. Hemo with a MH glaive and buffs up simply hits too hard.

However, just changing rogues isn't going to be enough - they need to take another look at druid balance, and finally find a way to actually *tune* druids so that they interact correctly with all the other classes in the metagame, instead of just arbitrarily fucking around with mechanics and skill variables. Simple changes like adjusting Cyclone range or putting more aggressive DR on entangling roots aren't going to be adequate - the actual mechanics (like no-cooldown shifting and travel forms/mounts in arenas) that contribute to the success of rogues, druids, and other 'overpowered' classes need to be tuned. Otherwise, we're going to spend the next year or two watching blizzard go through an infinite cycle of adjusting classes up and down over and over again in response to the latest PvP gimmick.

Also, on a vaguely related incessant bitching note, they could finally fix melee mechanics in general (LoS, pillar humping, swinging through pillars, tauren hitboxes, instant attack latency, etc...), and doing that would probably provide a near-instant boost to the popularity of enhance shamans, feral druids, ret paladins, rogues and warriors in arenas - which, if combined with a nerf to the strength of pve geared rogues, would be a good thing for everyone.

We play rogue/druid/warrior and we have played literaly 120 games in 3v3.

Out of 120 games we have seen

3 teams with warlocks(r/l/d, h/l/d and w/l/pl) for 4 games(they quit after seeing us)

3 teams with hunters (pr/d/h for 3 games and another 1 for 1 game(they quit after a loss) and the above h/l/d)

60ish games vs pmr of varying skills and specs(shadow/frost/human mut rogue is nasty for our lineup)

30ish games vs pal/war/sham of varying specs

a couple r/pr/d and d/pr/l teams

5 mirror teams(human ones are nasty as well, but usually easy to beat) there was actually one that all 3 members had s4 shoulders and weapons with 2 humans that we beat for 24. quite satisfying.

and a warlock/shaman/shadow priest that we actually lost to in a 10 minute game.

and sundry other less common comps such as feral/pally/warrior and rogue/enhance/druid.

we are about 1900. yes we are bad. yes we dont know how to play. yes we are a couple of orcs just trying to make our way in a world ruled by humans and gnomes. yes our druid is traveling and plays on a notebook with satellite internet.

but seriously, 90 percent of our games as r/d/w seems like its against a team that is especially designed to beat it or are against pmr. guess that is what we get for playing a flavor of the month we made the first day of season 3.

want to own double melee? find a good frost mage and marks hunter and get a shaman. auto win.

my plan for fun is to find the counter comp of the teams that counter comp the flavor of the month and run that with alts.

and I definately wish they could fix queue dodging of all aspects. make the queue room a special room that only gives you the city it is and shows you as that location when you are in arena. have to be 70 to enter, et al. sick of getting who'd by people and having them only queue when we enter arena.

Oh yeah, fuck pve gear for rogues. Good lord they hit hard. Who thought having random drop assrape weapons from an easy boss was a good idea? I would love to smack that guy in the head, thx.

Honestly, speaking from the perspective of a Gnome Warrior whose Escape Artist fails 80% of the time, I don't even think Druids are the problem. At the moment, PvE Rogues are the most powerful class in WoW by far. Druids, I think, are "meant" to be countered at high levels by Paladins. I think DPS/Paladin teams do pretty well versus DPS/Druid teams, mainly because JoJ + Hammer of Justice is often enough to kill a Druid.

Druids are fairly overpowered compared to other healers, but in relation to other DPS, numerous classes have pretty solid success against them. Warlocks can do heavy damage to every Druid Partner but a Rogue, Frost Mages can kite Warrior/Druid indefinitely (but not Rogues), Hunters destroy them, Priests nullify a lot of their effectiveness as both Shadow and Disc, Paladins can LOS/out mana/JoJ them, Shamans can Ground/Shock/Purge them, and such. But they all fall to Rogues .

I think the metagame has always been melee classes should fall prey to kiting. Warriors> Fear-dependent CC classes while falling prey to Kiting. Min-maxed Rogues were historically weak to kiting as well, while also being weak to fear. Now, of course, they're Undead with impunity against Frost Mage kiting. And their damage has scaled to the point where five seconds of alone time= 50% health or more. While my Warrior doesn't have as many problems peeling a Rogue (although even that is extremely hard, far harder than it should be with Vanish, Shadowstep, Sprint, and Deadly Throw/Blind/Trinket), my Mage often has to Ice Block within a few seconds. It goes Opener- eat, Kidney Shot Blink, Shadow Step and then I have to Ice Block or Opener- Blink, Shadowstep Kidney Shot- Trinket, and then that leaves me open to Blind or even the Rogue trinketing/Cloaking and getting within melee range. Then, any Sheep or hard cast I make is interrupted with Deadly Throw.

Rogues basically have no counter class and can destroy any armor type in one Kidney Shot. If that KS is trinketed, the Rogue can Blind the target, swap to partner, and have another Blind up within the minute and thirty seconds it takes for the other team to stabilize. This is without PvE gear, throw that in and it's seriously ridiculous.

Also, it's a shame that many top Holy Paladins have quit healing on their toons. Most Paladins, even in 5's, that I've seen are Ret now. And I think Paladins are one of the few classes that can actually counter Rogues decently, now that Warlocks are gone.

Warriors were overpowered but you could always blow up the bad ones and the good ones when RNGed from something like Blackout. But Rogues are immune to such blow-up tactics, have unlimited ways to ensure drinks for their partners, and when min-maxed can stop all weaknesses.

No Arena in S4, but plenty of druid and rogue experience out in the world and in battlegrounds.

Both classes are absolutely broken at this point. Rogues with full S3 or better (nevermind Glaives) literally attack anything in sight, including warriors and paladins in very good gear. They won't necessarily win, at least against a skilled warrior, but they certainly seem to know that they *can* win, and this overconfidence has spilled over into lesser levels of gear. That has amusing results sometimes, but it's indicative of the problem. Rogues fully understand that they are tremendously overpowered. They do way too much damage, and they have enough emergency buttons that they can survive most retaliation long enough to eliminate the target or get healed.

And I say this as a MS/Concussion Blow Stormhearld warrior that can still beat most rogues short of 4/4/Glaives 1v1. It's way harder than it used to be, or should be considering I'm supposedly the hardest of hard counters to rogues (other than maybe a Prot paladin) and specced for fighting anything that walks with minimal or no support.

The Cheat Death nerf is one step in the right direction. Removing that talent or nerfing it back to the original version no one wanted would be better, as would be reverting Shadowstep. Rogues are supposed to be glass cannons. Blizzard seems to be attempting to address this in Wrath with a horridly painful Warrior hard counter in 2 second cooldown Overpowers, but that doesn't do much good now. Rogues should be vulnerable to being blown up. Period. They do not need all the "you can't kill me, you can't stop me" talents when they are so potent with widely available gear, nevermind the top-of-the-line stuff.

Nerf the benefit from gear - A LOT - or nerf/eliminate the mobility and survivability buffs in Sub. Best damage, best survivability, best mobility is just garbage and there is no other way to slice it.

Druids...short of the addition of the sledgehammer counter of Death Knights, I don't know how to fix them short of mutilating the scaling of their HOT's or adding a cast time. The problem is that they simply can't be killed in most circumstances. They are too hard to DPS because of their mobility, and with the amount of +healing that is basically standard at this point, what you do manage to land on them is easily healed through, even if it's coming from multiple people. Either mobility or healing need a massive global nerf that somehow wouldn't destroy the class for PvE purposes.

With the aforementioned hard counters Blizzard currently has in place for Wrath, it seems that they understand the problems, but such extreme measures (Chained Overpowers, corruption of one HOT and elimination of the rest) are about as crude as a thermonuclear weapon and a remote way of addressing what no player is going to honestly deny are serious current problems.

I agree with most of your sentiments, save one.

I see Warriors time and time post about 1v1 against a Rogue, priding themselves on beating them. I highly doubt any PvP-geared Warrior except perhaps a Dwarf or Gnome who can clear Escape Artist to Intercept and RNGwin can beat a Rogue consistently in a duel. Whether the Rogue is in full PvP gear or not, top Rogues will not lose to a Warrior in a 1v1 situation, unless they're out of cooldowns.

I don't really think Rogues are confident they can "at least go toe to toe." I think good Rogues are by now well aware of the execution and plan to kill an equally geared Warrior, and rush for the kill any time we present ourselves.

Oh, I agree with this. I'm using Last Stand and Intimidating Shout ---> Concussion Blow all the time now in 1v1 fights against rogues with comperable or better gear, and I'm also burning Super Health Pots and wishing Lifegiving Gem still worked. None of that used to be necessary. I am still rehabilitating my gear from a 8-month law school-related break from the game, but a few stats here and there don't matter that much. I'm not having trouble because I'm around a S2.3 or so gear average. You are saying the same things I am, and you're full Vengeful.

I also have Furious Gizmatic Goggles that I Hide Helm on, so that tends to get an awful lot of rogues opened on or destealthed and killed, or lead to botched restealths because they don't know I have them.

Waaaay too difficult and too much specialized equipment and skills (everything short of grenades) to put down what should be, and certainly used to be, my squishy class.

Since when did the EJ forums turn into such a QQ fest? If you want to whine about how overpowered X class is go to the official WoW forums, this place is for intelligent discussion of game mechanics and strategies, not useless whining. Nobody gives a shit about how hard of a time you have with class X and that you think it's overpowered, even if it may be true. But they may be interested in feedback and advice on techniques that do and don't work well against class X, that would actually be useful.

Personally I still find rogues very squishy and have procced their Cheat Death numerous times within a single Intercept or HoJ stun. A focused rogue goes down just as easily as any other target. And PVE gear is already being addressed with Cheat Death scaling with resilience, so seriously, quit with the fucking crying. This game hasn't been balanced for a single day since it came out, so instead of whining so much, learn to adapt to the constantly changing balance between classes. Pre-TBC druids were the joke of WoW, now they're considered the most OPed class. S1 and S2 locks and SPriests were dominating, S3 it was druids, now it's rogues, get used to it. There will always be a FoTM class, and yet there will always be people in every class that will dominate regardless of what that FoTM class is.

Warrior damage is pretty ridiculous in a 3 healer setup, due to massive dispels and windfury. I'm running 2 war/3 healer 5v5 this season, and in one match that lasted just under 1 minute, we each did over 20k damage. This was more than the other teams damage combined, since they were mostly trying to peel both of us off their priest. Full sunder + armor pen gear on cloth is just getting out of hand, not to mention mace stun (which I myself and every other warrior I know hates, but uses anyway because it's so overpowered).

Rogues have Cheat Death, locks have +26% healing, priests have Pain Supression and +30% healing, and they all have comparable armor except a lock has an additional 20% (or 30% physical with VW) dmg reduction. Vanish? Demo/PHowl. ShS? Intercept. Couple of season ago Rogues were almost non-existant in 5s because they were so easily trained, now all of a sudden they're immortal? I don't buy it. I think their abilities are being blown way out of proportion. They're just as squishy as they always were, they just have a few tricks up their sleave now to save them from being instagibbed. And like I said already, Cheat Death is getting nerfed significantly with PVE gear, and yes it will make a big difference. The damage output of a full PVP geared vs heavily PVE geared rogue does differ greatly, and not just due to stats but due to T6 set bonuses as well. Over the last few months more and more guilds have been accessing T6 content which has resulted in more and more T6 geared rogues appearing in arena, and I think that's where most of the QQ is coming from. The main reason they've been able to get away with that is due to Cheat Death being unaffected by personal stats. With that issue being addressed I don't really see a problem with rogues anymore.

And the thread may be about discussing what's popular in arena atm, effective counter setups, strats, etc, not QQing about rogues for a page and a half. A single frost mage can pretty much completely shut down a melee heavy team on his own, should we QQ about that too for 2 pages now? It would be just as useless to everyone coming here looking for actual useful information.

Fact is at the highest level of every bracket in PvP or PvE gear (as displayed on tournaments) blowing up rogues right through cheat death is entirely possible, their damage is outhealable and peeling them is still a clear possibility. You'll still see rogues in full PvP gear getting destroyed by a warrior in 3 seconds during a mace stun, you'll still see a rogue being CC chained by any sort of ranged DPS class and you'll still see all our utility being dispelled because we couldn't catch up.

The simple fact is that rogues are not a secure winning class. We're no RNG timebombs like warriors or the ticking death warlocks were. We can be outplayed, destroyed or simply just can't get the kill in. For this reason, warriors and warlocks dominated S1 and 2, warriors remained dominant in 3 and warriors will be dominant in 4.

That said, they should fix PvE gear use, but they probably just can't.

Except, you know, that cheat death is on a one minute cool down and in smaller brackets rogues have a plethora of ways to escape and avoid combat with a competent healer for over one minute. Cheat death isn't the problem, cheat death itself is balanced with how "squishy" rogues are, you're right. The problem with cheat death is its ridiculously low cool down.

Nearly anything else thats used in the game as a "save your ass" button or skill has at least a 2 minute cool down. I agree with your sentiment that rogues aren't "overpowered" beyond measure, however, the class right now lacks balance and could use a few well placed adjustments downward. It's kind of silly that out of all the arena classes, rogue is one of the last we ever focus fire, ever. Even paladins are a better target in most cases because their bubble can be MDd.

However, that being said..I'm not of the opinion that they need massive changes. The change to cheat death to make it a consistent 10% health on activation and the requirement of at least 400ish resil to make it as powerful as it is now is a good change, the only other thing that I could see needing a change is the blind--->Sap combo, other than that, all of the rogues "movement" and "survivability" and "damage" isn't a lot different then other classes, in fact, I would say its balanced. The problem with rogues right now is their ability to do PvE damage and maintain better than average PvP survivability, which, isn't balanced.

Like I said. I'm not advocating rogue nerfs here, thats not what this board is about, but lets not exagerate. Rogues have more CC breaks and CC prevention than any other class. There is also no way a warrior is going to "blow" a rogue up during a mace stun unless he is enraged, with full rage and his 2 instant attacks and his white swing all crit, which, even then, is only going to be about 9k ish damage. However, any class, including rogues, can be just as explosive if they get lucky, so displaying that rogues "can" die to that luck isn't necessarily a well rounded view of balance. Technically, as a warrior, I have killed druids in the 3 second intercept stun, I have also been killed in defensive stance with a shatter combo+pet+fireblast before, too (Over 9kish damage in 3-4 seconds.)..The odds of it happening are so low though that the times I have done it or had it done to me can be counted on one hand.

As a primarily PvE rogue (3 M'uru kills, working on KJ) who is certainly taking advantage of the current situation, I wanted to chime in here and offer my opinions. I'll start with this point:
While I completely agree that our 2pc and 4pc T6 bonuses are quite nice, I disagree with your second statement. Yes, more rogues are getting into T6 content - however they're getting into the BT/Hyjal stuff, NOT Sunwell. I would think it ill advised to go into an arena game with 4pc T6 which doesn't include 3 sunwell pieces. Ideally a rogue would have 3 pieces of sunwell, 1 from BT/Hyjal and 4 pieces of S3/4 arena gear (which include the gloves).

Personally, I'm using T6 Shoulder, Boot, Bracer, Belt. I got to 1700 rating in ~45 games and picked up the S4 Chest, Gloves and Helm with the 5k arena points I had saved from S3. I already had the S3 legs from last season (other 3 pieces were S2). Using a S3 MH sword and Warglaive OH. I had ~40k honour saved up, which got me a S3 and S4 ring (I previously had never owned any pvp rings), I had the S3 thrown weapon and neck along with the 2-min, 20-res trinket and a Dory's Embrace. Basically, I have some minimal-skill, minimal-effort gear which ~300 Res and a good chunk of dps.

I'm still vulnerable to kiting somewhat. I'm still vulnerable to warriors burst. Disarm me, burst dps with a Mace (or Sword even), switch to Sword/Board the rest of the time. I don't have a hope at escaping a warrior for more than a few seconds and I just can't do much dps to a ~16k+ armor warrior. Mage/Rogue combo can still kill me in 2-3 globals.

Should a highly pve-oriented rogue be able to switch into arena mode and have a semi-easy time getting to 1700? No. Is it idiot-proof or to the point where you don't require a solid partner or strategy? No.

I have to say as a priest I prefer the way rogues are now over how they were when HARP was in full swing. It's much much harder to keep a rogue away from me once he's peeled but it's also very rare I get burst the hell down by a rogue nowdays. Even glaive rogues. Rogues now remind me of the slow grinding death warriors bring but with the advantage of being more easily fearable. I can't imagine other clothies are as happy, but for a healer it's much better as those heals tick up my life while ShS is on cooldown.

The irony is that the worst victim of these cleave teams are, in fact, rogues. If indeed cheat death would not allow the rogue a semi reliable escape option you have to be a complete kite master to live through a warrior/ret paladin/enhancement shaman for longer than 10 seconds, far more a free frag than a priest or warlock in 3's. Think the poor soul playing mutilate without a good mage now.

Considering the strategy against every rogue team we play is 'train the rogue' and the strategy every team has against us is 'train the rogue' I dont see how people think rogues are some uber survivable class that cant be killed.

I wear 434 resilience in arena. I get killed inside of 2 seconds by pmr and rdw teams on occasion.

We have killed a rogue in under 2 seconds, literaly. Is it lucky? Probably. But when we dont get lucky we kill a rogue in under 4 seconds. The cheat death nerf 'should' be enough to handle pve gear in arena for rogues. Rogues have zero defenses when stunned, zero armor when exposed with armor pen gear and vanish literaly never works.

Rogues were previously by far the easiest class to train down. Now they are about the second easiest after shadow priests.

Maybe we just do it wrong or we dont know how to play. But I get killed much faster at the 1900-2k bracket this season then any warlock, mage, druid, pally, warrior or hunter we try and kill. Want to look at classes that should be fixed for wearing pve gear? Try mages.

I don't understand how dense you can be. We're not "QQing" about Rogues, we're trying to discuss our impressions of Season 4 and a glaring hole in WoW's top level arena class balance at the moment. Have you leveled a 2v2 or 3v3 team past 1900? Even at 1700+ (the equivalent of about 2000-2100 last season on most servers), the influx of Rogues can only speak to one thing. Class balance.

There's a huge difference between 1300-1400 rated idiots blindly crying about any class and Duelists/Gladiators on a good resource like EJ rationally discussing the problem with Rogues. The fact you think they're fine at the moment, and you "trigger Cheat Death in one Intercept Stun" just speaks to your lack of experience with good Rogue teams in Arena. So you can do 11k damage in 3 seconds? Please enlighten us.

Hey Latito, I'm not sure if you were implying you didn't have much experience with arena at all and were starting this season as an arena beginner, but your team is already at 1823 and that is not a standard result this early in the season. I would say 1823 is probably 2100+ from season 3, and if you're putting out those kinds of numbers as a starter who has never seriously done arena before (not sure if this was the case or what you implied, apologies if it isn't), that obviously speaks to Rogue power levels a bit. Other classes cannot just step in as a green neophyte even with PvE gear and hit 1800.

I these are about the dumbest comment I've ever seen a player make on these forums. And you're in the 1900-2000 bracket this season as a Rogue?

I'll explain my situation a bit further. Season 1 I didn't arena at all. Season 2 I lost enough games to get a MH/OH weapon for PvE. Season 3 I worked with a 2300-ranked Disc priest friend to barely hit 1850 for a S3 MH Sword (which I still use in PvE and PvP today). My Priest partner was 2300 in his RMP 3s on Bloodlust BG9. It took us about ~6 weeks total (playing *maybe* 40 games a week), never topped 1900. Between that and some random "Its monday night, anyone wanna make a 5s team and do 10 games in full T6 PvE gear for free points?" I got the few S3 pieces I had, along with the 5k saved points. This season I'm working with Deep, a fairly well recognized druid on the arena scene (from what I understand). We did about 100 games the first weekend and another 100 this weekend. He played as PvE-feral (no 15% stun/fear resist). First weekend I was 11-43-7 combat, this weekend I went 20/0/41 for the first time (hadn't spec'd ShStep before).

I'm playing a completely new spec (knowing when to ShStep, remembering to use it, etc). I haven't done more than ~6 weeks of arena PvP before this, at the start of S3. I haven't played this comp before (Rogue / Feral). I have pretty decent gear (300 resil is a bit low though) and I'm playing with a *really* good partner with a class composition that is fairly decent. Not sure how all of those factors balance out. I realize most rogues with little arena experience will not jump up this fast in rating. Should it be possible with a well geared and talented partner? I'm not sure..


Also, as to class makeup that I've run into.. a LARGE portion of the teams have been Warrior/Druid. Most are gnomes with maces. There's a few Shaman/Paladin/Priest + Warrior teams, but most are with druids. Next most popular I would guess to be Rogue + Priest, followed by Rogue + Caster-druid (mix of boomkin + resto.. not sure what the name is for it). There have been a few Mage + Rogue teams. Very few Hunters, not a lot of warlocks or shaman.

While rogues are probably the most prevalent *class* that I've seen so far in the 1700-1890 range, Warrior + Resto Druid is by far the most popular *team*.

How are you liking that spec, by the way? I might try to talk my Warrior into trying it. The toughest teams for us right now are Druid/Rogue and SPriest/Rogue, both of which focus on me and don't give him a lot of Enrage uptime. Sweeping Strikes is huge vs Warlock teams, but we haven't exactly seen many of those this season. How bad is it to lose Piercing Howl? Can Conc Blow be dodged/parried, or just resisted? What do Conc Blow and Revenge stuns share DR with, if anything?