The rule#
Every character plays in the gear of WotLK arena's final season, known to players as the 264 meta. Gear is the same for everyone and fixed; builds and play decide matches.
- Any "Wrathful Gladiator's" item, at any item level. That covers the ilvl 264 pieces, the ilvl 270 set pieces and the ilvl 277 weapons.
- Any other item up to item level 264. In practice: PvE pieces, trinkets and off-set items from Trial of the Crusader and Icecrown Citadel that competitive players wore alongside Wrathful gear.
The rule is checked by machine, not by eye: a flat "item level 264 or lower" would reject the Wrathful set pieces, which are ilvl 270 on the server.
A few details follow from the target ruleset:
- One version per item. An item's normal and heroic versions can't be worn together, as in WotLK Classic. Only the highest version under the cap is available; for the Trial of the Crusader and Icecrown trinkets that is usually the normal one.
- WotLK enchants only, plus the older enchants the real meta still used, such as Khorium Scope.
Builds are data#
Each character's spec, talents, glyphs, gems, enchants and gear are a loadout, stored as a data file with the game's IDs and readable names, and checked by a tool against the server's data before use. Agents receive the loadout as an input; nothing about it is built into them. That is what lets one agent, in principle, play several builds, and lets the project add builds later without retraining from scratch.
The first loadouts follow published Season 8 best-in-slot guides for WotLK Classic, read directly from their gear planners, with every item, gem and enchant resolved against the server. Where a guide's choice breaks the gear rule, the closest legal item is substituted and the substitution is recorded.
| Loadout | Spec | Race | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rogue | Subtlety | Human | Defined, checked and applied by test |
| Priest | Discipline | Human | Defined, checked and applied by test |
| Mage | Frost | Human | Defined, checked and applied live |
Meta builds come first. Other builds come later, once the meta ones train reliably.
Open questions#
Some choices have no single right answer yet, and are kept open rather than guessed: hit rating on the rogue and mage, which second profession the rogue takes, and a few PvE-versus-Wrathful choices at item level 264. They will be settled by what wins, once agents can play.