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 started from published Season 8 best-in-slot guides for WotLK Classic. The project's owner, an arena player, now supplies the baseline builds:
- The rogue is the owner's own character on the project's server, read from its database, with a few changes beyond the character's own gear: a run-speed enchant added on the boots, an engineering rocket added on the gloves, jewelcrafting's own gem cut — three Bright Dragon's Eyes — in place of the character's Bright Cardinal Rubies in the gloves and belt, and the pair of poisons the build calls for: Wound Poison on the main-hand weapon, Crippling Poison on the off-hand.
- The priest and the mage follow the owner's pattern: Wrathful gear in every slot except two PvE rings and two PvE trinkets, with at least 4% spell hit and at least 130 spell penetration, each as close to the minimum as the gear allows and the spare points spent on other stats.
Every item, gem and enchant is resolved against the server's data, and a tool totals hit and penetration from every source: items, enchants, gems, socket bonuses, set bonuses and talents.
The starting builds are a Subtlety Rogue, a Discipline Priest and a Frost Mage.
Meta builds come first. Other builds come later, once the meta ones train reliably. Where a choice has no single right answer, it is left open and settled by what wins once agents play.