We recently made some changes to items that grant stealth detection. We felt these items provided a necessary advantage in competitive PVP and forced players to use lower level equipment even when more powerful items were available to them.

This item can no longer be used in the Arena:

* Ultra-Spectropic Detection Goggles


We have removed stealth detection from the following items:

* All epic engineering goggles


We have reduced the stealth detection of the following items:

* Catseye Ultra Goggles
* Blood Guard's Dragonhide Gauntlets
* Marshal's Dragonhide Gauntlets
* Knight-Lieutenant's Dragonhide Gloves
* General's Dragonhide Gloves
* Bloodvine Lens
* Knight-Lieutenant's Dragonhide Grips
* Blood Guard's Dragonhide Grips
* The Night Watchman



All of these changes are already active and the tooltips will be updated with the next minor patch. (source)


Well, that wasn't the engineering nerf I was expecting to see, but it might actually help a little bit against other engineer rogues. However, I lose my ability to see rogues... time to get a real PvP helm, I suppose.

Anywace, we climbed to 2055 yesterday. We beat a couple of rogue+priest teams, a couple of dk+pally teams (including a random dk+ret which we rofl-stomped if you ignore the fact that guntir hit 100 hp at one point... some people just can't figure out how to interrupt Tranquility... also Cycloning a pally with wings up while you're busting Tranquility and he has Pain Suppression can SOMETIMES win fights), and a couple warrior+healer teams. We lost to a druid+rogue team... which we will NEVER be able to beat no matter what. We also go curbstomped by a hunter+shamang team... there's just not much we can do against that damage. We faced the hunter+shamang team 3 times in a row, and the third time we gave up all hope of winning and I tried to bust the shamang... ended up killing him at the same time I died, then Guntir solo'd the hunter.

Hunters are STILL bullshit. Their damage output is insane, their control is insane, and their mobility is insane... and they have an MS effect. We would have likely won a bit quicker against any other healer than shamang, but this comp is just nasty, and there is next to nothing we can do against Bloodlust except "run like hell" and hope not to get gibbed.

Another bullshit team we faced (and lost to) was Resto Shammy and a Prot Pally. Essentially, the prot pally doesn't do anything except Shield of Righteousness the entire fight and the shammy sits there purging and healing what little damage I can do to a prot pally. If we face this team again (and I suspect we will), I'm just going to Cyclone the Prot pally, tell Guntir to pillar-kite him, and I'll go and train his healer. If the pally comes after me, I'll just cyclone-spam him and Guntir can come in for fears. Essentially, this team should ONLY work against rogue+healer teams, since the damage output of the prot pally is magic instead of physical and neither the prot pally nor the shammy will ever run out of mana.

Anyway, it was a pretty good run. We fought a 2200 druid+warrior team and barely made it out by the skin of our teeth... we might need Guntir to go engineering to get the boots to get away from Bladestorm... but we'll see. This warrior was pretty good too, he made sure that MS was up, made sure Rend was up, interrupted with Overpower, hit hamstring, got a lucky imp hammy proc, and popped bladestorm. If it weren't for the fact that the warrior was ALSO low on HP and his druid was at 3k trying to drink on the other side of the match, we would have likely lost. I ended up popping my CDs and trying to out-dps the warrior while bladestorm was up and killed the warrior on the last tick of BS and Guntir had something like 200 hp left... TRANQUILITY (the druid was running over ready to hit moonfire, I'm sure, and if it's me versus a resto druid, all he has to do is put up Thorns, and stay in ToL form and he'll win).

We still have a lot of climbing to do... we just broke into the top500 on our bg again. We need to probably hit 2100 this week and hopefully hit 2200 next week.



Holy hell... I completely forgot I was writing this yesterday... or maybe the day before. Work has been getting in my way of writing blog posts... sorry about that. Anyway, that's all the news I've got for now.