10Jun

Arena Shape-Up — Redux!

I’ve been horribly remiss. Back in May I described in Arena Shape-Up! the staple Discipline Arena build, which coupled the Discipline tree’s high survivability with some of the pertinent talents of the Holy tree that would allow an Arena healer to perform well, even under pressure. At the same time, however, I also mentioned that this was actually one of two builds I was considering in my glorious return to lackluster performance on the battlefield. Time passed and I never actually got around to describing that build.

I’d like to take the opportunity this afternoon to rectify that mistake.

45/16/0: Variation on a Theme

If you compare this build with the 42/19/0 Arena build mentioned in Arena Shape-Up!, you’d find a lot of similarities. It has the core survivability talents, such as Unbreakable Will and Improved Power Word: Shield, as well as keeping both Power Infusion and Pain Suppression, which are — of course — the crux of any Discipline Arena build. It also retained those fluff buffs¹ such as Blessed Recovery and even Martyrdom to some extent. And, of course, we still kept that dreaded Holy Nova so that we can spam rank 1 Holy Nova to break stealth, interrupt cast times, and prevent people from drinking or bandaging.

In fact, unless you look very carefully the two builds might even look identical.

There are, however, a few major changes to this build. First off, the entire point of this build is to pick up Reflective Shield. This talent allows 50% of the damage absorbed by Power Word: Shield to be reflected back onto your opponent. Prior to 2.4, this talent was almost entirely avoided by most Arena playing priests. The main problem lay in the fact that Reflective Shield had the nasty side effect of breaking those forms of crowd control that could be broken by damage. For example, if a warrior managed to get Rend on the priest just before her magely companion sheeped him, the first tick of the bleed effect would reflect half of the damage to the warrior and break the crowd control.

This was often considered a bad thing. We want to avoid breaking crowd control. This was especially a problem in 3v3 and 5v5, where teams are often built around select forms of crowd control.

This all changed in 2.4, when various changes were made to talents that in the past would break crowd control. If we take a moment to read the patch notes, we see:

Reflective Shield: The reflective damage from this talent no longer breaks crowd control effects which break on taking damage.

Problem resolved! Suddenly numerous priests considered picking up Reflective Shield as a way of providing somewhat significant damage to their opponents without ever casting a spell on them. How significant? Let’s take a moment to examine that. A rank 12 Power Word: Shield is capable of absorbing 1,315 damage while benefiting from 30% of our Bonus Healing stat²; with three points in Improved Power Word: Shield, we can further increase the amount absorbed by Power Word: Shield by 15%.

Now in my admittedly subpar Arena set, I currently have around 1,750 Bonus Healing unbuffed. How much damage absorbed does that translate to?

[1,315 + (0.30 × 1,750)] × 1.15 = 2,116 damage absorbed.

And half of that would be reflected back when Reflective Shield is applied, meaning that our target could reflect up to 1,058 damage to the person doing damage to him. Now, this isn’t like something to raise our collective nose at. In a fight where we’re playing a predominately healing role, even that little bit of damage could be enough to help us secure a win. That is a good thing. We like good things.

The problem with Reflective Shield, however, is the fact that the added damage has the nasty result of generating more rage for warriors, which those same warriors then use to smear our pancreases into the dusty floor. My hope with this build, however, is that the number of warriors that I come up against in the 2v2 bracket aren’t so overwhelmingly numerous that I run back to my friendly neighborhood priestly trainer for a quick — and costly — respec. Looking at the real time Arena ranking stats at SK Gaming, I see that warriors are pretty popular in my Battlegroup³, with the greatest percentage of players over a 2,200 rating favoring the classic Warrior-Druid combination with a grand total of 17.9%.

Fortunately, I’m an extremely casual Arena combatant and would be enough if I finally managed to break an 1,750 rating. This is in no way I’d ever find the time⁴ to make it to the 2,200 tier.

Another concern with this particular build is that I dropped the five points I invested for rank 5 Silent Resolve for a paltry rank 1 Silent Resolve. While many people tend to consider the ability as a strictly raiding talent and having little effect on player versus player combat, the 20% spell resistance can be a huge factor. As I noted before, any spell removal that is resisted means that your opponents have to spend more mana to remove it, sometimes resulting in them spending valuable mana that would have otherwise been spent on healing allies or damaging opponents. Furthermore, it may mean that an important ability stays up longer. We like that.

If I really felt the need I could snag those points out of Enlightenment and place them back into Silent Resolve where they rightfully belong. However, in speaking with others who have considerably more talent, experience, and knowledge than I possess, I have the suspicion that Silent Resolve is a larger factor post-1,750 and in larger brackets, when dispelings and purgings become more frequent. From my limited experience, I don’t recall running into it too much prior to 1,600; in fact, the main time I saw it was when we ended up against teams in Season 3 gear who — as my Arena partner and I guessed — we most likely either selling Arena points or blasting through the lower brackets to sell another high-ranked Arena team.

What’s the Verdict?

Overall, I’m leaning towards the 42/19/0 build I described in Arena Shape-Up! I think that it will serve me better and that overall I’ll be more successful with it. I might take an after or even a week to explore this other build just to get my grubby paws on Reflective Shield; I know that personally I’ve been eying the talent for quite some time now but hesitant to snag it due to the fact that in the past it would break crowd control.

And, no, I haven’t quite leveled my Discipline priest up to 70 yet. She’s languishing around 62 or so, which is so close to 70 that there’s no excuse why I haven’t gotten off of my butt to get the job done. I guess Rahel Isera’duna is doing what she does best — being a recalcitrant, cantankerous bitch.

Which, if you may recall, are buffs that exist to be dispelled and purged ↩
As of patch 2.3 ↩
Cycle, for those who care! ↩
Or, I admit, the skill! ↩

Responses

The Disc Priest I usually play with dropped Reflect Shield as soon as it critted back on a Warrior, letting him Enrage and eat through the Shield faster.

Once he found that the damage could crit and therefore trigger other enemy abilities/reaction talents, he said hell no.

megans last blog post..Help Mail

megan said,

11 June 2008 at 11:53 am

I find this highly interesting because I have been looking starting to arena with my priest. You appear to have some experience with this, my question is, is there a build that will allow my priest to both raid and be viable for PvP?

The nice thing about my hunter is I just run a BM spec which is viable in both. Not to mention it makes warlocks cry which is always fun.

Knurds last blog post..Changing a Main.

Knurd said,

11 June 2008 at 12:19 pm

Megan - I’d heard as much and I’m glad to have someone give personal experience to confirm it. I made the right choice in planning to stick with my original build!

Knurd - The problem with builds designed for a specific aspect of the game (in this case, high sustained damage for raiding) is that they’re usually not as viable as other builds for that second role (Arena). And while I may agree that Beast Mastery hunters can perform in the Arenas, I’d argue that the typical 41/20/0 raiding build is not the best suited build for Arena — you could easily be much more effective with a Marksmanship build that favors high burst damage, which is actually more favorable for Arena combat. It’s a matter of specialization.

That said, my Holy priest is currently 23/38/0 and performs adequately in the Arena (when I do get time for matches, mind you!). I could do better if I respecced, which was the entire point of this exercise. However, since I’m raid more again, I just don’t have the time or gold to justify respeccing Csilla on a regular basis. Instead, I’ll have to level that Discipline priest to 70 one day and really see how a kal’dorei Discipline priest fairs on the field of battle.

And, theoretically, many of the talents used in the Discipline Arena build are suited to end-game encounters where survivability often becomes a larger factor than pure unadulterated healing prowess. However, I’ve found that a Discipline tree favors an entirely different style of healing and somewhat different gemming in order to counter the decline in overall healing. That’s one possibility, if you’ve got the gear to compensate for that loss.

Cynra said,

11 June 2008 at 5:13 pm

Y Halo Thar!