2.3 is Upon Us!

It's the night before 2.3 and all through the server all the arena teams were stirring, to get all their points.

It doesn't rhyme, eat it. We find ourselves on 2.3s Eve without much to do. You've still got another week to bank arena points. If you're not at honor cap then what the hell have you been doing for the last 2 months? I farmed some gold and actually did my dailies. Besides that we can all just dream of 15% run speed and 6 second CS. However, it's easy to get caught up in what we didn't get instead of what we did. Here's a recap of everything we did end up getting in 2.3

• Cleanse range 40 yards.
• 6 second Crusader Strike.
• 30% threat reductions tacked onto Fanaticism.
  
• HoW mana cost reduced.
• Precision gets 3% spell hit
• Pursuit of Justice is now 15% run speed and 3% reduction on spells landing on your for 3 points.
• Sanctified Crusader for undispellable seals and 3% melee and spell crit.
• Vengeance increased to 30 seconds.
• Vindication reduces ALL stats.
• Weapon Expertise grants 10% stamina also.
• Resilience on Vindicator's gear.
  

So yeah, mostly ret buffs. There's some ret "nerfs" too, but hey, let's see how it all pans out before we all go jumping off the deep end. I'm going to be doing my best to run my decent 3s rating into the ground this coming week so I can give an honest report on how we're doing in there. Next week I'll let you know what it's like with 250+ resil (and no spelldmg lol). Also, I'll get some meters and WWS posted from my guilds ZA runs this coming weekend. All in all I feel this will be a strong standing for ret, both pve and pvp. Going forward it can only get better... right?

So, you can't kill a healer

Healers seem to be getting everyone's goat these days. With resilience capping out and stamina easily over 10k, healers are the new pvp tanks. Ret can have problems when dealing with them but here's some tips to help you kill a healer (most of the time).

1) Don't go all out early on. Let your seal and white swings do the work for awhile so you stack vengeance or just wear away at their mana pool. Don't worry about CCs right off the bat, let them happen if they're intent on doing it.
2) CS every time it's up. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
3) If they're spam dispelling you, use rank 1 seals. Not an issue in a week. Priests will use [i]much[/i] more mana trying to remove your seal than you will sealing up rank 1.
4) Once you have them at about 50% from just swinging and CSing it's time to blow them up. If you're reasonably sure you won't be CCd in the next 6 seconds throw your HoJ right before your next swing, trinket, judge, CS. This should get them relatively low if they haven't pvp trinketed out. If they're not dead and just really low it's time to use your next interrupt before they heal. Wait until the very end of whatever they're trying to cast and use repentance. Now you have 6 seconds. Heal, reseal, dance, and then judge command. If they're STILL not finished off then if you're lucky enough to be BE, arcane torrent and HoW. During this whole HoJ/repentance cycle it's important to be very fast on the defensive abilities. Trinket out of fears/stuns, bubble if you really have to.

Here's some class specific tips.
Druid) JoJ. JoJ. JoJ. Catch them out of form with your hammer. If they're in bear form they're not healing anyone so put pressure on someone else while they waddle around. If they're your only target then keep on them and don't burn too much mana on judgements. If they pop frenzied regen (especially if they had no rage to begin with) stop attacking them. Hell, sit down and drink if they'll let you. Chances are good they'll freak out and burn stuff they really shouldn't if you do that, like feral charge and bash.
Priest) Just let the seal and swings do the talking. Don't trinket out of the first fear unless you're positive you can get back on them and finish them off in that time. Let them spam dispel you, it costs them a GCD and plenty of mana. If they mana burn you jump around like a madman. Healers aren't always used to people getting behind them while they cast because they rarely need to cast offensively.
Shaman) Rank 1 seals because purge is cheap, but not as cheap as rank 1. Judge something on them, whatever you like, because they can't remove it from themselves. Watch for grounding totems that will eat your HoJ and repentance. Use HoJ when their earth shield is down or on another target.
Paladin) lol You should know exactly what it takes here. If they're stacking resilience to the heavens they really have no serious healing power and you can just stand there auto attacking waiting for vengeance to stack. Once you get some lucky crits drop the hammer and let them have it. If they choose to use BoP remember that you can keep them locked down for the entire duration of it with repentance and HoJ, also judgements and HoW aren't affected by BoP.

In a situation where a healer doesn't have to be your main target it's often a better strategy to just remove them with your stuns and interrupts and kill the person they're supporting.

Mana Regen or "The Stat That Never Was"

Mp5. Stack it, lack it, love it, hate it. It's a stat that's been put all over our gear for all of our specs. Holy, prot and ret have all had or have gear that is loaded with MP5.

Holy’s >t5 stuff is stuffed something fierce with spell crit which I believe was a shortsighted mistake when the illumination nerf hit. All that gear was probably designed just before the devs decided that holy was just too damn good. The fact that they keep sticking us with overstuffed crit rating on fresh gear is beyond me (ala S3 Redemption). However, there’s a lot to be said about spell crit for the holy tree but the consensus is still mp5 > crit. Here is a recent discussion about it. Mp5 = good for holy. End of story. The other specs it’s not so cut and dry.

Prot hates mp5. Or does it? Initially all of our new tiered prot gear was given some amount of mp5. The community bitched and moaned until it was removed. Why was it so bad for the tiered sets? Spiritual Attunement. SA is probably the single best ability we received with the advent of 2.0 and yet it seems like it was totally overlooked by Blizzard at first. Holy was getting too much of a buff from it via Vampiric Embrace and Vampiric Touch. Prot paladins everywhere cried. They removed the ability of SA to regenerate mana if the paladin’s health was full. In general a huge nerf for the ability but prot felt it the most. Mp5 such a bad idea still? Yes. There’s never a time that the miniscule amount of mana regenerated through that stat on gear would benefit a prot paladin enough to make it worth its extremely high budget cost. Except on the Righteous gear. On Righteous I propose that it is actually better to have mp5 because often times in 5 mans the tank isn’t taking enough damage for SA to have an effect. Had they never nerfed SA then who cares? But they did and so Righteous is budgeted properly for this, although it could serve to lose some int for stam. Then you realize you’re supposed to walk into Karazhan and tank in the blues you’ve collected in instance. Righteous now sucks. Luckily the tiered gear was remedied of this paradox but it still makes the gap between blue mp5 stat'd prot gear to heavy stam epic gear a difficult one. There’s no reason that deep in the prot tree there shouldn’t be an improved SA talent to revert it back to its old function or simply increase the amount of mana gained from the base effect.

Ret hates mp5. Even more than prot. It’s just not enough bang for the buck on the gear. It simply does not have the value of pure dps stats and it cannot compensate for simply chain potting. Mp5 talent? No. In complete exposition here, ret doesn’t have mana problems. As long as you’ve specced properly there’s no reason to run into mana issues. These mana issues ret encounters are primarily in pvp and that’s the same place plenty of other low-int high-dps geared classes run into problems. Mages have a paltry amount of int on their arena gear and are able to kill/support just as long as we are. Sure, they’ve got things like mana gems and evocate, but in the end everybody can sit and drink. In an arena any larger than 2s you should be getting plenty of mana back from SA, certainly enough to compensate for the (currently) shit poor evo and 1 or 2 mana gems a mage can use. SA is a godsend for ret and anybody grouping with a healer that has at least a taco sized brain will know that you get mana back from their heals, prolonging not only your life but their own. The answer to ret’s mana problems are not in a new or piggy back talent (although I’ll welcome one with open arms if Blizz ever decides they’re feeling generous), it’s in intelligent play and cooperation between team members.

Tips for keeping your mana up in pvp as ret:

1) Use rank 1 consecration. Unless you’re sitting on a phat mana pool that leaves room for a 660 mana dot, then there’s no need to use top rank. The extra DPS simply isn’t enough to make a difference. Even with 300+ spell damage it’s just not going to make or break your fight. Use consecration for breaking stealth, preventing bandaging or anything else you need a dot effect for, just don’t use it for its sick deeps.

2) Have your partner heal you. If you’re grouping with someone who can heal, hybrid or not, let them heal you and you can heal them. It’s not necessarily mana efficient but its mana conserving. That little extra you get could be enough to get off a finishing judgement. If you’re with a dedicated healer then better still. Make sure they know how SA works and keep your blue rage up.

3) Sit and drink. I can’t count how many times people have just continued to fight a losing battle when they could have saved themselves and the others they were fighting with just by running around a corner and drinking. Arena water isn’t expensive, in fact it’s cheap. Uncap that honor you’re saving for next season and pick up a couple stacks; it’ll save your life.

4) Pot. It’s frowned upon, I know, but it’s perfectly ok to use a token purchased pot in a BG. Sure, you can’t rely on them in the arena, but it’s sure nice to have them in a clutch.

5) Use rank 1 SoC. If you don’t plan on judging it, why seal up top tank? Or, if you’re getting spam dispelled then you can burn the other person’s mana by using the lowest rank. Whatever version of dispel they may be using on you I guarantee it costs more mana than rank 1 SoC. This is a moot point come next patch, but hell, it’s always good to know now.

If ret receives an mp5 talent, so be it. If it doesn’t, I won’t be crying. I’d much rather see the ap to sd talent implemented before mp5. I can understand that Alliance paladins might have more issues with mana in a raid because of the difference in SoC and SoB costs and function, but there’s always Dark Runes, right? Maybe we’ll get both (yeah right, neither is more likely) but if we do, hurray. If not, learn2drink.