I’m planning this combo with my RL friend as a partner in TBC.
There are some videos on Youtube and so, but information on general are pretty much scarce. Is there any higher level player ,who has experience and who can give some insight or pros and cons about this composition.
My main questions are :
How much arena rating one can expect (medium/pro gameplay)
Which are their counters and which popular combos they counter
Most important question for me:
Is there specific races you have to play to achieve higher goals, or they are more/less good with anything.
Just to mention, personally I’m not into Gladiator stuff (too old for that ) , but something around 2k+ would be nice.
For starters, nobody even knows what the rating inflation will be like. If they’ll use refail’s rating system, or burning crusade’s rating system (they’re very different things, and the rating progression speed is also very different with the TBC system being the slower one). And nobody knows how many characters will end up in the system to inflate it, although you can pretty much assume at this point that it’ll be one giant battlegroup matchmaking like with Classic BGs.
You don’t counter much. Almost none at all, actually. You lose vs. any healer with a brain, and vs. any dps that can dispel blind, almost by default. Tremor counters you, druids counter you, hpalas counters you, so on and so forth.
Since sitting a stun is bad, you’ll have more success as an orc and luck with RNG. But the impact on win rate isn’t significant.
Uh… What? You’ll get the full set at 2k if they go with TBC’s arena system. Weapons 1850 or so, with shoulders at 2k. 2.2k took forever to reach in a lot of battlegroups back then, with the Elo rating system.
They separated the MMR from the CR in wotlk, and made it faster to reach high ratings as long as you kept winning. Which is when they increased rating requirements. You also started on 0 rating in wotlk, while in TBC you started on 1500. Because that CR was the MMR in TBC.
If you’re curious about the differences in the rating systems, you can check out the Elo rating system and the Glicko RD system. Glicko RD has been the model for wotlk onwards, when they introduced the rating deviation value (which is the separated MMR from the CR).
Blizzard have always changed a few things to make it specifically adjusted to WoW, but the core concepts have always been pretty much the same as the actual rating systems.
I know. Still the best out there though. You could go dwarves for stoneform as a 2nd alternative, but the comp itself is too bad for it to have any impact on win rate.
It becomes better when played together with a healer in 3s though. But for 2s, then mage+rogue is a lot better.
It’s impossible to speculate how easy or how hard it’ll be to reach certain ratings though. Since nobody knows yet what the inflation will look like, both because of the system they’ll use still being unknown, and because of the unknown number of characters that’ll participate.
Strange…i’v seen and heard many times (though without specifics) that they are in very viable category and just by looking at some footage it seems that it is very potent combo. There was one comment i found from well know private server gladiator Rogue called Mir (you can find him on Youtube) sayin’ : …“one of the strongest comps early seasons in TBC, meaning it can fight for the top spots of the ladder. As season progresses it gets worse and worse, but still a contender for top ranks even later”.
Taking as a reference private servers data and info’s kinda seems better then info’s from OG TBC, since people are more much more into meta stuff these days …i could be wrong though.
Pservers aren’t reliable. Not just because the inflation itself looks very different, but also because Classic should’ve shown you by now how much pservers have guessed throughout the years.
As for rogue+lock, even in “early season” (meaning the time before people have geared up), they lose to mechanical differences. Even by forcing out as much CC as you can with shadowstep and death coil, even with a succubus on top of it, the lock+rogue will lose to anyone breaking anything prematurely.
Even a blind will force the rogue to get a sap out of it, but that isn’t reliable all the time, and the target being killed will have time to either kill the lock or run away if it’s a healer during that time.
It’s a comp that lose vs. anyone with a brain.
You can probably have some fun pubstomping beginners, but it’s not gonna cut it for the higher ratings. And you’re gonna have to be much better than the beginners just to make it viable for that.
Mage+rogue is better overall because that polymorph makes a big difference in how viable it is.
Well~ that’s not really why it’s bad. It’s not like locks can’t do a talent build that bursts, and the strong point of the comp would be that it has more CC than with a mage. But the downside is that the positioning becomes too awkward to make it work, and basically lose vs. any opponents that positions themselves properly (countering shadowstep range makes a huge difference, as an example) and breaks CC when they should.
Mages synergizes better with rogues, than locks do with rogues, in 2s.
RLx and RMx are both viable in 3s though. Adding a healer makes a big difference to both of those types of comps.
That isn’t what more CC refers to. It’s that warlocks can throw out death coil with fear and spread it out better than a mage can do with poly. On top of seduction on one with fear on the other, and so on. There’s a lot they can do.
Seduction is DRed with fear even in Classic rn btw.
Well, it basically goes down as I described it earlier:
Only watched a few, but basically the lock is aiming to position himself where he can get CC out on the healer. Was a match I saw where the lock was on the other side of the pillar in nagrand while the rest were on the opposite side, but when he got into LoS then the lock+rogue won.
It’s just targeting+positioning errors by every single one I saw. Cba to look through 90 minutes of that crap.
But ok, to give a few examples:
The warriors I saw, started targeting the rogue sometimes for some inexplicable reason. Which left the lock to freecast right in front of them.
The healer is supposed to be max range from the lock at all times, which also prevents instant shadowsteps with the dpser on the lock, and targeting the lock limits the rogue to target the dpser most of the time. Which just leaves the ability to fake the interrupts from the lock, which is entirely up to the healer.
Adjusting the positioning is necessary as well, since the lock will move closer to the healer every time the rogue stuns the dpser for peeling purposes.
You also never stand out in the open as a healer vs. locks like that, if the fear isn’t going to be interrupted.
No. Mage+rogue if you wanna go double dps. Otherwise you’re better off playing healer+dps.
Alright, watched a few more of those matches now, and they were just a mix of either horrible openers, or just general targeting/positioning errors as mentioned earlier.
And how tf does a warr get sapped in the opener? Like, wtf?
Suffers the same positional weakness as lock/rogue though.
That depends entirely on the amount of units in the ladder. It was just that in TBC, battlegroups were much smaller than the giant one we’ve got now. I suspect we’ll get the giant battlegroup for TBC as well.
So even if they do end up using the Elo rating system like they did back then, for TBC Classic, then the rating inflation would be much greater than back then.
Doesn’t really matter since SP/rogue can put out SIGNIFICANTLY higher pressure than warlock/rogue, to the point that it’s not even remotely comparable.
That is true, but it’s still going to have lower ratings than on retail, highest rating last season was 3600ish, while the highest rating ever acheived in TBC (not counting wintraders that eventually got banned) was just below 2700 or so, and while it’ll probably be higher than that with a single battlegroup, it’ll still be nowhere near the numbers we’re at in retail.
And that was just for 2v2, in 3v3, rank 1 was like 2250-2300.
But the rating inflation is impossible to predict, especially when you still don’t know how many units will inflate the ladder, and don’t even know which system they’ll use.
Also, just so you know, the ladder in refail is under more “control” by Blizzard than the Elo rating system was. Because the Elo rating system was directly increased with the exact same amount for each new unit introduced to the ladder, while refail’s rating system is more convoluted where characters aren’t really “locked” to the same unit as in TBC’s team system, and each character is one unit while in TBC then one team was one unit.
Then there’s also the matter of rating deviation, where the MMR is separate from the CR, which also introduces another huge influence on the ladder inflation. Which is where the “control” occurs, where Blizzard changed the matchmaking and the reward values, to make it possible to both inflate the ladder from a single match (in other words, it creates “new” rating points from a match, when a team wins more than the opponents lose), but it can also deflate the ladder from a single match (where a team lose more than the opponents win).
So Blizzard have more control “under the hood” in refail’s system, than they do in a more transparent and straightforward system like in TBC.
Not really, no. I don’t think anyone ever broke 2700 in TBC, aside from wintraders. The ratings people were able to get in 3v3 and 5v5 were also much lower due to the much lower participation numbers.
But yes, I’m fully aware that it’s a completely different system.
