Keep in mind you don’t get both spell hit and melee hit from the Draenei racial, its dependant on your class.
If I remember right Draenei Paladin get spell hit which is unfortunate because Paladin is very unlikely to be in a caster group inside of a 25man raid and would of made use of the melee hit nicely.
Blood elf + Undead pvp > everything else
Gnome 4 life
Plus no dampening means some fights can become endless slogs. I remember sometimes doing vanilla TBC 2v2’s (3v3’s and especially 5v5’s aren’t nearly as bad with this), where good teams just turtle and play super defensive until their CD’s are back and it can make matches go on for 30+ minutes. To the point where I almost wanted to just throw the match just because I was sick of it and getting a headache at that point
I don’t recall seeing lots of “boosting”/carrying in arenas in vanilla (although I definitely heard it advertised sometimes), but I remember there was LOTS of account sharing back then among high rated arena teams. Especially back when sites like arenajunkies allowed you to find arena partners from other servers easily
Yeah but a racial isn’t going to make much difference in rating, honestly. Picking BE isn’t going to mean being 2k rather than 1800
I was rank 1 5v5, top 10 3v3, and at one point when I had a good partner did ~2500 2v2 for fun, all with terrible troll racials. It’s not a huge deal, 95/100 the games will be decided by misplays or good plays by a team, and 5/100 will be decided by a superior racial choice (if I had to guess based on how it felt)
Disagree with that. AoE silence is a strong competer especially on a class that doesn’t have an interupt. Also SoV is a pain in the backside to stack without gimping your threat by stacking hit instead of spellpower.
You realize that in Arena, the top 0.5% gets Gladiator.
If racials gives you a 5/100 (5%) edge, that makes a huge difference.
Not when you don’t have a cap on how many games you can play
Look, here’s how it really goes down. It’s all about what’s queuing at the time (as someone who has gotten glad in TBC from 3’s and 5’s)
Certain comps have HUGE advantages against other comps and it has nothing to do about racials. So you would work around what is queueing. If there is a lot of comps queueing that you tend to do well against, you keep queueing. If your counters are queueing, oh well, you STOP, and try again later
Queueing into comps you hard counter and avoiding queueing into comps that counter you will make 1000x more difference than your racial choice
This is at the tops of ladders, it won’t matter at 2k as much because you will see so much variety you won’t be able to work around it as well
I’m very aware of how queue dodging works in TBC. It’s another “issue” of Arena is that your rating may not necessarily be how good you are, but how good you are relative to your opponents (e.g. if you are skillful at picking crappy opponents, you get more rating).
But to say racials don’t matter and then presenting an anecdotal number (5%), is contradictory. BE Paladins with their PbAoE silence is much better than any Alliance Paladin racial. It’s not like it’ll automatically get you Gladiator, but if you’re a high duelist/low gladiator, it will statistically push you into the low gladiator bracket (which is a huge step up from a high duelist).
Yes aka how well you understand the meta. Same as card games. Same as RTS strategy games. Same as literally almost everything
I don’t consider understanding and playing to the meta some sort of exploit or anything
And I might have even overstated how much racials matter. They really won’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things. If you are at duelist and just can’t seem to get in glad range, then changing up when you queue or your micro is what will get you there, not your racial choice
“ but if you’re a high duelist/low gladiator, it will statistically push you into the low gladiator bracket (which is a huge step up from a high duelist)”
No it won’t
Queue dodging may not be considered an exploit. But in TBC, we had plenty of people with multiple accounts win trading their way to R1 or Gladiator. With the amount of try-hards we have in Classic, I imagine the win-trading to be much worse in TBC Classic.
Also in this whole ‘boost’ economy, there’s going to be way more people buying Gladiator boosts than compared to TBC timeframe. Watching that whole Gallywix drama, the admins claimed that >90% of BFA gladiators were boosted.
So you state that racials ‘matter’, but yet you deny the quantification of what ‘matter’ means?
Why would ret even matter in the pvp scene?? They’re literal dog crap in pvp
Blood elf rogue master race. Kick+stuns + aoe silence racial
OP
I do agree I really can’t anticipate what boosting is going to be like. It might be really prevalent. You could be right on that one
Win trading never really happened on my BG (1) that we heard about. We xferred to BG(9) the one with all the sponsored teams for better competition and I didn’t really hear about it all that much there. I do know it was something that got you temp banned and your team deleted, which if it was the end of season meant no title
But yeah, people are definitely a lot more sweaty try hard now than back then. There’s still just so many variables that can go wrong in an arena match, that racial choice really isn’t going to translate to as much of a rating difference as you think. Not that they don’t matter, but they certainly aren’t going to be a pre-req for [x] rating
Focusing on your comp (based on what’s meta, which will probably be things like RMP/RLD, melee cleaves, HLD, same stuff as vanilla), your keybindings/macros, and communication and in-fight micro, that’s the stuff that’s going to mean the difference between titles
Almost all paladins will go blood elf. Like, every one of them that wants to play Ret, and that’s a LOT. Anyone serious about PvP will go horde. It’ll be the majority faction on most realms, I’d say, except maybe RP servers?
The only thing horde DOESN’T have is a pretty race, and that is fixed in BC. Of course, like, 70% of the horde ends up as blood elves so that’s pretty funny.
Ret paladins are a lot of fun in pvp and they’re not bad in the right comp.
Orc is still the go to race I assume
Its definitely the easiest because of the passive stun resist.
Didn’t they reduce the effectiveness substantially in TBC though? Maybe I am just remembering incorrectly.
Its a debate. Some servers did it differently. Regardless since stuns are so important for winning most match ups any amount helps.
I think that with the level of try-hard we’ve seen in Classic and the lack of Blizzard care for enforcing policies (e.g. cross faction collusion), we’re going to see a lot shady behavior.
Regarding win-trading, one of my guild-mates win-traded to R1 in the 2’s bracket. Basically 4 people got together for the R1 team. They had alts on different teams to farm rating (obviously you have to be an excellent player to pull this off). Then, their alt teams would match up against their ‘main’ team, where they would do enough damage/healing (and even lose a few games) to make it look legit. Rinse and repeat until you’re R1.
I agree that comp will be #1. Then player skill #2. And then a more distance #3 will be racials. From your previous example, where you win just 5 games out of 100 due to racials, that’s incredible. Winning 5 games at Gladiator is > 100 rating diff (+10-15 rating vs losing 10-15 rating… 20-30 rating diff per win). A difference of 50 rating is easily the ‘comfort buffer’ between Gladiator and Duelist.