Monday, January 7, 2008

Affliction, where have you gone?

Are any Non-soul link builds popular at high ratings anymore anywhere? I really can't remember the last time I've seen a UA lock anywhere. Even on burn teams, I've typically been seeing warlocks as some sort of SL/SL or Felguard variant lately.

I have a couple ideas to sort of ease the reliance on soul link for group play for affliction, but I've given up hope on the destro side.

For affliction, I'm still convinced that moving soul siphon down to deep affliction would be the best way to go, but improving it more than it currently is. It's a pretty potent talent, but I think adding soul siphon to benefit siphon life the same way it does drain life would be a fantastic start, especially on a build that also contains Contagion. You could also possibly put mana drain scaling back into this talent as well if it's that deep, and deep enough so that even level 80 builds can't have both this and Soul Link.

In addition, I think that malediction could also be used to improve Curse of Tongues and Exhaustion by, say, 3/6/9% to improve their effectiveness in PvP as well.

That would provide a blanket of extra HP regen through better siphon life scaling, and more effective debuffs all around, which is what affliction is all about.

I think that with the proper pet resilience scaling (which is needed no matter what), this could probably put affliction back on the map for viable specs in any format.

Friday, January 4, 2008

Hunter Arena Performance thus far.

Looking at our battlegroup alone,

I'm watching closely as to how many warlocks vs hunters there are in top-rated 5s teams that SK-Gaming website is picking up.

I'm not sure why I'm not showing up on the 5s list, as our 5s team is rated pretty high @ 1919 currently. That would put me in 9th place on SK gamings website for hunters in 5s for BG9. That isn't too shabby, considering my gear really isn't all that great yet as about half of it is from kara/heroics, and I'm at about 276 resil, 10800 hp, and only 6400 armor with a crappy bow.

Keep in mind that I hit 70 on Dec1, 07, and I've been on break since my gf is here visiting me for winter break, so I haven't had much time to improve my gear that much.

It does seem, based on this data, that warlocks are far more popular (or at least common) of an arena class than hunters. Does this mean that most hunters don't like PVP? I really can't answer that, but from what I've experienced so far, this does not mean that hunters are not arena viable. Even with 3 of us on the team being undergeared, we went 2-3 against Neilyo's SK gaming 5s team who are in full s2/s3 gear with mostly s3 weapons.

I'm fairly satisfied with my pvp/arena performance, aside from a few gripes about minor things such as pet mechanics and how expensive it is to play one. I still, however, feel weak against magic-heavy burn teams. I really have no escape options vs this. I often become conflicted, because often the best way to disrupt magic dps is to LOS it as best as you can, however, doing so severely limits my own physical dps, thus limiting the knockback I could be causing which would slow the offending magic DPS. I don't have clos/vanish/etc, and I don't have intervene/defensive/spell reflect. I really have to just either stand there and eat the incoming magic dps while I try to plink away slowing one attacker (usually a spriest or ele shaman), or just LoS as best as I can and hope that my healers don't get CS'd while winding up a heal to keep me alive. That's really when I feel the weakest out of any matchup, which is odd, since I felt hunters are good counters to casters. (And they usually are)

I don't really mind getting rocked by warriors that I can't get away from. If I played a warrior, I wouldn't want to get kited all damn day either. I think our ability to deal with melee (and especially rogues) is pretty good.

The ONLY thing I think we need improvement on in this area is a ranged "peel" to get a melee off of not necessarily me, but my teammates. Other than scatter shot, I don't really have any way of doing this, and even that isn't reliable in a lot of situations. I would kill for a frost arrow that would deploy a frost trap from range, but I don't think it would be enough to warrant giving up silencing or scatter shot.

Other than that, I feel the class is very solid. I really like the (hunter/druid) duo's ability to counter warrior/druid in 2s as well, which is a very popular setup. Also, I've found that as a hunter/lock/druid setup in 3s, we can easily snore our way to victory against RMP. We took down happyminty's team with relative ease.