Jon623 shares a video of a 5-Man Moonkin Arena Team from the Public Test Realms. While the music accompanying the fights is well suited, the opposing team voice chat would have been even better: “Guys, I think I’m bugged. All I see are 5 dancing Moonkin…”
Season 2 Gloves Lackluster
Items and Equipment, PvP 
Comments Off The start of Season 2 Arena brought with it new sets of Merciless Gladiator armor, modelled after Tier 5 armor graphics in presumably more intimidating color schemes. As with Season 1, the Merciless Gladiator Gloves each have a special effect that — at least for many classes — make them a “must have” for PvP. This is not the case for druids, however.
As a frame of reference, here are some of the effects available to the various classes:
Going down the list, hunters get a 4% damage boost to one of their primary PvP abilities (Multi-Shot), mages get a 25% range increase to an insta-cast nuke (albeit, the benefit is less to Arcane and Frost mages), paladins get a nice crit boost to their primary heal (crit > all for paladin healers), priests get a 12.5% duration increase to their CC ability, rogues get an amazing anti-caster addition to Deadly Throw, shamans get a 25% range increase to all shocks, warriors get a 30% cost reduction to their anti-caster Hamstring, and warlocks get either 50% chance to avoid damage interruption to Fear or Searing Pain.
What do druids get?
That’s a 6.67% casting time decrease on the recently nerfed spell, Cyclone. And this lackluster, practically insulting set bonus is the same for all three sets, including ferals who can’t cast Cyclone in the form they rely upon to PvP.
To address this problem, each of the three druid spec-specific sets should have a clearly delineated gloves bonus that is more in line with the potency of that available to other classes. It should be obvious from the gloves bonus alone which spec the item is intended to best serve. Here are some possibilities:
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| 0.1 seconds?! |
The above suggestions are in line with those bonuses available to other classes and would improve the arena performance of druids from all specs. On the other hand, if our set bonus remains as it is, it will only reiterate the idea that Blizzard expects all druids (feral included) to be little more than Cyclone-spam bots in Arena.
Caster of the Sisters of Elune server is known for posting weekly statistics for the three arena brackets, data which helps demonstrate gross inbalances among the various classes in small (2v2), medium (3v3), and large (5v5) PvP settings. Because this data is generally posted via the General forums, it’s easy to lose among the clutter. Luckily, someone has created line graphs of class populations over each week of Season 1:
According to the data above, druids consistently underperform almost all other classes. In fact, only hunters fare worse than we do and only in the 3v3 and 5v5 brackets. With today’s change to Cyclone so that it can be dispelled by the PvP trinket, things are likely to get worse.
Forum Watch: Mookysolo’s Resto PvP Guide
Community, PvP
Comments Off Mookysolo of Ner’zhul posted an extensive guide to PvPing as a Restoration-specced druid (Resto4Death?) on the official forums. He addresses several different aspects, including:
Decked out in Mooky’s Best
The guide focuses primarily upon gear recommendations, although it looks like he’s setting up to respond to individual questions in his F.A.Q. section. Definitely worth a look.
Patch 2.12 will include the start of Arena Season 2. Along with reduced costs for the currently available Arena armor sets, new class armor sets will be made available at the old costs. Just as the Season 1 set was modelled after Tier 4 armor, the Season 2 set is modelled after Tier 5 (sans kilt) with new textures decidedly less “sunny” than their PvE counterparts:
Image courtesy of MMO-Champion.com
Set bonuses for Season 2 will remain the same with the 2-piece set bonus for all three druid sets being +35 Resilience. The 4-piece set bonuses are:
