• thevidon

I hope this thread doesn't devolve, and if it does then please just close it.

My question is what does everyone think the top arena classes in wrath will be? Will there be any shakeup, or will druids/rogues/warlocks continue their domination?


Druids dont seem to have lost a step in resto form, and HOTs as a mechanic are suprior in arena so I see them remaining the top healers.

Priests have gotten some really intersting stuff in the disc tree, but Ill leave it to the priests to tell me how good the changes really are......shields are dispellable after all.

Shaman look pretty damn mediocre in resto form still, well have to see how much of a difference hex makes. Enhance gets ghost wolf freedom talent, but still no MS. Elemental is who the f knows at this point.

Rogues got mostly arena talents added so they will remain very strong as a dps option.

Warriors seem to have lost a step with the changes to WF.....correct me if I am wrong here but they seem to have fallen a full step behind rogues now.

Hunters are interesting....how good are the changes? I really have no idea so Ill rely on others here.

Deathknights seemed good at first, but they lack the essential things that make melee dps strong in arena - a way to constantly stay on your target and an MS effect. Maybe their burst will make up for it - we'll see.

Paladins I have no interest in but they will probably remain pretty mediocre in arenas just like shaman due to needing to get casted heals off constantly.


I am really only asking because I need to know which of my alts to bring up as my arena character.....and I want to give myself the best base possible. I'm leaning towards levelling my rogue or druid right now - but I also have a priest and a hunter sitting at 60 so I'd really like to get this figured out so I can start levelling in earnest.

Please keep it constructive!

Thanks.

 

Suesse

I'd suggest delaying this thread until the beta is finishing up. I don't think we know enough about endgame pvp itemization yet, and talents will change a lot as the game is balanced in beta.

 

• thevidon

Agreed, but I need to figure out which alt to level right now instead of right before release! :-P

We can make intelligent guesses right now with what we know already.

 

• Amera

There are some interesting meta-game possibilities if what we have seen now comes to fruition. Death Knights are really going to be the variable here, since they haven't had four seasons of strategy refinements and play-testing to figure out all the minutiae. Still, it seems as though Degeneration is pretty much the ultimate druid counter, so DKs may play as population control. The thing is, priests are almost certainly going to hard counter DKs (via abolish disease). So you counter one dominant class but get dominated by another - hard to see how that will work out in the end. Otherwise I don't really see the healer metagame changing a whole lot. Paladins are still a one-dimensional healer (albeit with several nice new toys), priests can still win games by getting off a few short casts, and druids hots and CC are still dominating. I've read and thought the least about shaman, so I'm not really going to comment.

Just like at the start of TBC, casters and ranged in general really look amazing. Mages being able to stun a target themselves and wreck them with a shatter is pretty insane. Warlocks getting more mobility and survivability, plus some talent flexibility with 11 point soul link, is likewise pretty scary. At this point, warriors really don't look impressive at all; they seem to be the same MS monkeys they have always been, but by 80 their gear scaling will drop.

I don't think wotlk season 1 will have nearly the "noob" factor that season 1 TBC did (since we at least have an idea how to play now), but I'm still pretty sure it will be a huge adjustment with an intense metagame evolving around all these new abilities and mechanics.

 

• Maligne

I'm kind of under the impression that you can say this about everything at this point. Not only are the class changes not finished, but we have yet to hear anything about changes to arena maps and gameplay. It's fun to speculate but unfortunately that's all it is right now until we find out a lot more about where the game is going at 80.

Also good luck leveling an alt - I've found that it's almost impossible to predict with any sort of success what classes will or will not be "good" at any given time. Play what you enjoy and hope that you're viable.

What better cc is there for a druid than polymorph?

 

Vodrin

Death Knights really will hard counter resto druids:
Death Grip
Degeneration
Strangulate

The way Degeneration works at the moment you have to wait for lifebloom to drop off before recasting a lifebloom or you extend the effect. Other hots you can just replace. Pulling the druid back into your melee group and silencing him for 5 seconds for any nature swiftness defensive moves seems to leave him with few options other than to turtle for 5seconds and hope theres not another melee next to the DK for further control. However they do seem reasonably kiteable so 1v1 shouldn't be too bad.

Nourish should work extremely well though for when a bit more throughput is needed than regrowth can give.
Feral Charge moving down the feral tree prevents one 'out' for a resto druid

 

Sumie

I don't know about that. Lowering the cooldown and beefing up the power of Holy Shock, and changing it so Holy Shock crits give you an instant Holy Light, is a pretty huge improvement to Paladin arena healing.

If your Holy Shock crits, you can nearly full heal someone with only 2 GCD's, neither of which is interruptable. That's arguably stronger than a HoT.


As for hunters and locks, the changes look nice on paper, but I really don't see either moving up or down in position. Warlocks will still be relatively strong but easy to train, even with a pseudo-blink. They'll find more use in burst setups though since Destruction now has access to a much needed Soul Link. As for hunters, since they removed Camouflage from beta, they still lack a reliable way to escape a focus; and will still suffer from LoS issues.

 

• Calantus

This early nobody can predict anything at all as to how exactly balance will end up. I think your only options for planning a reroll are to roll whats powerful now and hope it's still powerful in WotLK, rolling something that's a relatively safe bet, or to wait (or roll everything so you're ready for whatever, which is what I'm doing). The first option is easy: rogue, warrior, druid. Pick one and go with it. The third option there's nothing to say yet. The second options is the most interesting I think.

For healers I think druids are something to stay away from if you're looking for a safe choice. While it's very possible they will still be kings of the lower brackets, there's just so many questions being asked of druids that we can't answer yet. Will DKs be a hard enough counter to drop druids down? How badly will an indoor arena affect druid performance? We don't know. Paladins and shaman have potential, especially paladins, but I don't think you could call it a safe call at this point to go for either of them and hoping their buffs are enough. Priests are probably the safest healer choice right now. They're not getting a whole lot of changes to how they play, and the new class is heavy on disease and magic debuffs which plays right into their hands. They've also been best or second best healer choice since the beginning of arena for virtually every bracket. They're never been the star player hogging up all the nerf cries but they've always been solid, safe.

For DPS I don't think you can go wrong with rogue/warrior. Both have been solid in the lower brackets since day one. At the height of rogue whining and warrior OP calls rogues were still solid in 2s. Ultimately I don't think either will be bad unless melee itself is hurting. Warlock have been okay for a long time and only with heavy nerfs and melee dominance have we seen them fall down in power since the days of s1/s2. Even now they're still the best DPS caster. They're also getting chaos magic and a teleport which both sound like solid additions. Mages, hunters, and the DPS specs of healers are pretty unsafe because right now they're underperforming and you'd be betting on changes to class balance bring them up. It's an option, but it's definitely nto safe. DKs are just rolling the dice at this point.

So yeah I'd say go priest for healer, warrior/rogue for melee, warlock for caster. Fairly obvious choices outside of the healer slot but the safe option is often the easiest to spot. :P

 

mdokane

While everything is down to speculation, I don't think paladins will be classified as mediocre once you see one chaining instant holy shock/holy light combos and then dancing back around a pillar. They will still be insanely unattractive targets to focus with the purpose of killing, and specced correctly (I can't access a talent calculator at work but something like 48 holy 23 ret) gives you ~16% crit to holy light (a bit less to holy shock but still significant), instant holy lights off critical holy shocks and a HoT attached to our heals for troubling ourselves speccing into ret. While you give up a lot of the bennefits of 20 in prot, namely kings and imp BoP, this could be the jumping off point for the playstyle of the sneaky armored heal-turret popping out from behind a pillar and almost instantly complete healing his team mate. If that doesn't sound scary then mediocrity or bust.

 

resuemae

Abolish disease seems like a pretty hard counter to DK's, judging by their mechanics so far. Not sure if priests will be the best DK counter... but whatever class that ends up being, they will climb the ladder with ease- eating points off the legions and legions of DK rerollers atleast for the first season. On paper it looks like priests have a huge lead in surviving them, but who knows.

 

◊ Vain

A melee class (in this case, warrior or rogue) is always a safe bet, not just because they are gear dependent (good if you have access to endgame loot) and mana free damage, but because game designers will never let melee become irrelevant.

 

• thevidon

How would this really impact them? Roots are now useable indoors.....I cant think of anything else that would change for them.

 

Snailz

One can only use travel form outside, which would have two significant impacts in an indoor arena: slower movement speed when kiting and increased mana cost to shift out of snares/roots/frost novas.

 

Moof

Indoor arenas would severely hinder druids (ferals in particular) due to not being able to use travel form, as well as losing a significant mobility boost from Feral Swiftness and the pvp set bonus. Also shamans would be hurt pretty badly since instant ghost wolf is almost integral to a pvp spec as well as the new enhancement talent.

 

Hildegard

Rogues look quite strong. The standart ShS-spec will have insane mobility with Fleet Footed combined with the burst of the much better scaling Eviscerate and Envenom, Cold Blood, poison application like todays Mutilate and 20% more healing with quick recovery. 25+X-0+X-41+X sounds very interesting.

Mutilate looks really nasty but seems to be to squishy, just like Unstable Affliction Locks right now. They can cause hard pressure through keeping three (or with weapons switches maybe more) poisons active combined with very strong burst, The old version of Turn the tables (15% chance to reflect melee effects) could have been strong, but most classes will be able to kite any Mutilate rogue way to easy. Mutilate could work in certain setups and especially in the new small arena very well, but will be destroyed in Lordaeron.

Combat with murder spree and immunity to execute looks also quite interesting, Murder spree with blade flurry sounds quite strong but when controlled during the important cooldowns it lacks the damage and has very few mobility.

The new Sublety 51 seems to promote playing with daggers, but I just don't see it working because of the lack of combo points. Although Shadow dance could provide interesting options for crowd control when combining the effects of the new ambush (prevents item usage for some seconds), cheap shot (stun), garotte (silence) and perhabs a sap.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

Siddown

I think the main problem with what you are asking is that over the life of an expansion you can expect a variety of classes to move up and down the food chain. Look at TBC, Rogues, Druids and Warlocks were all "bad" early on and well into S1. I remember back when Spoh and Fodus (Druid and Warlock respectively) were definitely the exception as opposed to the rule with their top rated teams.

It wasn't until S2 that Druids and Warlocks became so powerful, while Rogues had to wait a bit longer than that. During S4 we're seeing some weird sort of resurgence of Paladins, but this time as Ret whereas S1 was dominated by Holy Paladins.

Etc., etc.

The problem with your question is that it's too opened ended to answer, although it's still fun to guess about though.

I think with the radically new playstyle, the Holy Paladin might make a bit of a comback. The hybrid spec mentioned has a ridiculous amount of crit and the DF + Holy Shock = free Instant Holy Light. Not to mention Sheath of Light, which will likely shine in PvP more so than it does in PvE (where it is quickly overwritten). A Holy Sheathadin (ugh, that's an ugly nickname) will have a ridiculous amount of Spell Power too, meaning Judging Righteousness with Justice will also be a nasty surprise for Druids as well.

I just wonder if Ret's perks will be enough to give up 30 seconds off of HoJ and imp BoP from the Prot Tree.

 

Shakes

I think it's impossible to tell, but there's probably a couple of safe bets from history. Firstly, melee will scale better than casters, because of the weapon factor and they still seem to scale with more stats to spread the item budget. Secondly, if you're planning on playing a DPS spec of a healing class, you'll likely have an uphill battle. Blizzard look at class not spec representation. If you make the DPS specs up to par you're basically ensuring an over-represented class, since healers will always have a place and there's only 4/10 classes that can do it.

The other interesting factor is whether 5v5 will end up mattering. If you look at the armory now, it seems like there are vastly more people playing 2v2 and 3v3. There was always a leaning towards the smaller brackets, but it's much more pronounced now. If you're trying to guess at which class will be the flavor of the month, it's probably best to guess towards the smaller brackets. Which judging by this expansion, says the original poster's choice between rogue and druid is a good choice to have.

 

Nitz

The Holy Paladins are gonna be the direct healers that won't need to stand still and cast. I think some sort of Holy/Prot will be the best healing spec (Divine Guardian, Imp. HoJ are looking really hot) where Sheath will be the equivalent of Dreamstate for druids right now.

 

Lanlaorn

I believe Death Knights will be a top class simply because they will work so well with other melee in future cleave scenarios and they bring massive counters to casters. Having a 30% target other melee damage buff and an ability that lowers the target's max HP by 20% also works right into this style of gameplay. In addition to being able to teleport a kiting caster back into the melee zerg and silence as mentioned already in this thread, a DK has impressive frost based roots/snares and some very interesting survival abilities. They can heal themselves in a multitude of ways and increase their armor by 45% without having to actaully put on a shield.

Also, while Priests will undoubtedly rise in power now that there is more than one disease in all of PvP, Abolish Disease is not a hard counter to DKs simply because it is a lot worse than Abolish Poison.

Abolish Disease
Abolish Poison

As you can see Abolish Disease only ticks once every 5 seconds rather than once every 2 seconds, which really is a dramatic difference. It's the same strength as Disease Cleansing Totem, weaker if the shaman is spamming the totem on a 1 second GCD vs. spamming Abolish Disease on a 1.5.

 

• thevidon

Have they specifically stated whether there will be indoor arenas?

I like what calantus said about priests - they are pretty solid in all brackets which is nice. I mostly care about 2's and 3's since 5's is pretty dead and I dont see it coming back for a variety of reasons.

 

Stolidus

I know they said they were disallowing mounts in one or two of the arenas they previewed at WWI, and I'm guessing people took this to mean they were also indoor, but I'm not sure it was explicitly stated they would be outdoor.

 

Pyralissa

I think Calantus has the right of it. There's a lot of possibilities for some classes and then there are fairly solid choices. Considering that certain classes have "what if" options and "most likely quite solid" options (like Warlocks, Destruction or Affliction might work, but Demonology is a pretty safe bet) those are probably the classes to stick with.

Shaman, Mages, Paladins, Hunters and Death Knights seem to be the outliers at the moment. Considering you can't even preroll a DK that's not even really an issue for this discussion. Paladins and probably the most likely of that list to become valid, either through Holy or Retribution. While Holy Shock combos look attractive for mobility, something that a lot of people are overlooking is 30 yard judgments which will be an excellent counter to Druids. While the current Retribution talents are obviously going to be toned down, it seems like Ret Paladins are getting even more burst which could make them competitive. Both flavors of Paladins can also keep Blessings actives over the new hand spells which is also a nice bonus.

Too many what ifs at the moment to say for sure.

 

Shakes

The interesting thing about the DK is that it's another plate class, which on the surface appears to hurt melee: less likelihood of encountering a squishy team. However, DKs are also supposed to be an anti-magic class, so they could hurt casters too.

Given there will surely be many DK rerollers, whether DKs are harder for casters or melee to take down will be a fascinating thing to see early on.

 

Aldur

It's very hard to predict what will happen in WotLK regarding balance. I mean, even now skill plays a major role in determining a winner, even slight changes in talents and skills may shift who's "best". And it's also important to note, it's not a class that's good in PvP, but setup - unless you're referring to soloing explicitly or going into PuG BG's in which case it's all random roulette.

It's a definite yes that underperforming specs and classes are getting buffs - holy paladins getting more instant options; retri paladins more scaling, burst and strategic tricks; enh shamans less kiteability, locks easy-to-get soullink and more mobility and so on. The best performing classes seem to get very little on the other hand, namely rogues and warriors - mostly things that will help with their pvp offspecs like mutilate or fury. This leans toward assumptions that while best will remain good, worst will become good also. What works now should work in future, but a lot that doesn't now - just might.

If I may suggest, play a class that: a) you like to play; b) will fit in setups you may make with your friends, c) is performing at least decently in those setups today. And if you don't arena with friends, well take a rogue. I doubt scaling for them will be any less than it already is and so you will fit in abundance of different setups should higher end gear kick in.

 

Hildegard

Exactly. But some things change and will shift the balance. Holy Paladins and Death Knights look like hard counters to resto druids and this will affect balance. Warriors will lose Windfury and ShS rogues won't scale really well with the first PVP sets, as they lack most likely in hit and huge ammounts of attack power and agility. So some points may still be discussed.

We will still have huge amounts of resilience right from the start, whereas offensive stats only start to grow over the seasons.

Death Knight, Mage, Holy Paladin looks strong for example.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard