Blog Posts from "Breaking the Curve" - Gameriot.com

3v3ing as Pally/Warrior/Mage - A Beginning to Intermediate Player's Guide

no.spam@gameriot.com (Tzatziki) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 17:08:51 -0400

Warrior/Mage/Paladin is long out of vogue at the tournament level – it was something like four generations ago, before Pally/Priest/War, Rogue/Mage/Priest, and Rogue/Lock/Spriest, and all the Druid/x/x teams floating around. But for beginning to intermediate to non-top of the game players, it is still a very powerful composition, and it is relatively painless to break 2k rating with it if you are in good gear. So, this article will break down the fights; if you’re breaking 2k with ease already this article is not for you, but for newer players with sketchy knowledge of target selection, this article will hopefully be helpful.

Yes, target selection. Not even strategy, target selection. Strategy is simple. Sheep someone, dps someone, and at a critical moment counterspell a heal and take your focus target down. But who should you focus? This is a surprisingly good predictor of the outcome: pick the wrong focus target and you’ve probably lost, no matter how well you play the rest of the fight. So, here goes. Oh, and regardless of what I said earlier, I will infuse a tad bit of strategy advice too.

Section 1: Healer + 2DPS. You typically have the advantage in these types of fights, because MS lets you outlast your opponent, and 2DPS, unless its’s like Restoshaman/Spriest/Lock or something, will have trouble bursting you if you kite/los properly.

-Pally/Mage/Warrior (Mirror match). This is usually a fight of mage wits, and/or a fight of which warrior has the better 2-hander. All things equal, you will want to be going on the mage in this matchup. Whichever mage can kite better and still put out reasonable dps and CC will usually win this fight for his team. Have your mage practice frost novaing intercepts so he can save his blink for when he really needs it; have your mage practice kiting warriors in general. Make sure that you’re staking as many debuffs as you can afford globals for. When BOP hits the mage, if he catches heals/bursting him with magic looks like it won’t work, juggle sheeps between the mage and warrior instead of focusing on the warrior, to take as much pressure off your pally as you can. Also, if you manage to make the pally bubble before you burn through the mage’s defensives (2 iceblocks + bop), it may be worth switching to the Pally and sheep juggling the war/mage. Just make sure the mage doesn’t go off and drink/get an evo. Also, when the mage iceblocks, do one of two things. If your mage has CS up, CS a heal NOW. If he doesn’t and your healing is looking fine, he can sheep the paladin; if you’re feeling pressure, intercept the paladin’s heal, and then pummel his next one; the idea is to make the block as ineffective as you can. If a CS is off or the pally is otherwise incapacitated, kill the WE. A note about this: Depending on the pressure you’re feeling, you should kill the WE whenever you see it up. But don’t try if you have 0 rage and are fighting to catch up to the mage. Definitely go for it if you have enough for a HS>MS>Whirl though.

-Pally/Warlock/Warrior. This is a tad bit more annoying than it seems like the comp should be, but you’ll want to be going on the warlock here. If he’s affliction, focus on pummeling as many UAs as you can (it may even be worth having your mage CS one off the bat, and wait to burn CS offensively until its second cooldown). If he’s drain tank, you better hope you’re pally’s good at getting drinks off -,-. Either way, if he has a felguard out, try to whirlwind/sweeping strikes it down – it helps a LOT to get rid of the locks and dispels. If you’re Baller (© Radikal), you can time this to incorporate Victory Rush into your burst. Again, if the Pally bubbles and you’re nowhere near taking the lock down, it may be worth it to switch to him.

-Pally/Elemental Shaman/Warrior. This one’s one of the easier fights IMO, although it can be long. Your focus should be the shaman. Try to make sure you have the rage to be pummeling every cooldown. Control the warrior. This is an easy fight because you really have only one defensive cooldown thing to deal with – BoP. Also, keep detect magic up on the Shaman, because since this team has only Pally Buff + Commanding (which wears off pretty fast, and a lot of wars forget to reapply it), it can actually be viable and worth the mana to spellsteal BoP off. In the endgame, if it lasts that long (once the shaman is oom) it is VERY effective to switch to the paladin; oom shamans are much less of a threat than oom mages/locks.

-Priest/Mage/Rogue. Ah, the holy trinity. This can either be easy or hard, and target selection is really something you have to feel out. Against most teams pre-1900ish, go on the priest. Usually he’s not good enough at kiting, and the mage isn’t good enough at controlling, to stop you from zerging him down – lots of rmp teams are actually really bad, and just rely on their class composition rather than their skill to get them points. However, at higher levels this simply doesn’t work. It’s not really possible to keep the mage from CCing the living hell out of you. Your best bet is to go on the mage and try to keep him from CCing as much as possible, while throwing out hamstring and disarm (if it works) on the rogue whenever he gets near you. Now, they will typically either go on the warrior or the paladin in my experience. If they go on the warrior it may be worth switching to the rogue, since you’re not really going to get kited by him – if you are, great, switch to something else and he has to run way over to you. If he’s on the pally, it’s a race that often times you lose. The unfortunate part of 3s is that sometimes you get hard countered. RMP is by no means a true hard-counter (we’ll get to those later), but there isn’t really a dominating strategy against them, you really just have to feel them out over a series and figure out who the most effective focus target is. Side note – if the rogue has burned cloak and evasion, he’s a great option no matter how you swing it.

Two Healer Teams – these teams can be annoying, but if you stick it out you can USUALLY pull wins out against these teams (i.e. do better than split games with them)

-Pally/Priest/Warrior. Not quite the pinnacle of annoying, but it’s getting there. Go for the priest. Control the warrior, but try to CC the paladin a bit more than you usually would – take the risk of getting hit by the war a few times if it means you can get good sheeps off on the pally (assuming he hasn’t bosaced, of course), If you can get him to bubble, then switch to him as soon as he’s out; otherwise just keep the priest running, and pummel all the manaburns you can. It’s a pretty straightforward fight that just lasts a long time.

-Pally/Druid/Warrior. Again not quite the pinnacle of annoying, but we’re getting closer. Some people would say go on the druid, some say on the pally. I personally like to try to force the pally to bubble, but we have a constant debate about this on our team. Definitely go for the druid if you can get a stun off on him in human form, but a druid in bear is annoying to deal with when no defensive cooldowns are off the table (plus good druids can roll the kite). If you decide to focus the pally, when he bubbles switch to the druid and stop cyclones, and then you can either switch back to the pally, or if you managed to get the druid low you can sheep the pally now, since he doesn’t have bubble anymore.

-Pally/Druid/Warlock or Priest/Druid/Warlock – Okay this really is the pinnacle of annoying. My goodness it’s a pain to deal with, especially if it’s a drain tank lock. I can’t express to you how annoying it is to deal with. If it’s the pally variant, hope to god the druid’s bad at kiting and go on him. If it’s the priest variant, go on the priest and try to CS a cyclone. In either comp, definitely go on the druid if you can get a stun off on him in humanform (chaining intercept stun with pally stun is amazing, and in some cases if you coordinate right you can actually take a druid down in this window). We’ve had like 15 minute or longer matches with teams like this almost every time we play them, it’s ridiculous.

Three DPS Teams – okay, you have to go into these knowing that unless you outgear or outskill them by a large margin, you’re probably going to lose more than half the time. Sorry, can’t help rock/paper/scissors.

What comp it is doesn’t really matter. If there’s a shadwpriest, go on him. If not, go on the rogue. If you get a full row of dots on you, intervene your pally and los (it helps if he positions himself near a pillar/grave/whatever. Spell reflect often early, and 2hander in defensive in between reflects. Once they run through their burst though, switch to zerker and get one down before their dots overwhelm your pally.

Weird Comps (the ones you don’t see two often but still can get pretty high)

-Restoshaman/Warrior/Hunter. I’m not quite sure how this one works, but I’ve seen it a lot in the upper 1900s and some people seem to be good at it. The hunter is often BM in this comp, but not always. Either way, go on him. Your entire team should focus on staying in his deadzone – BM hunter with rapidfire + heroism is SCARY if you’re not. Make sure your warrior is staying on top of him, and give him freedom so he’s not fazed by big red.

-Mage/Hunter/Priest or Rogue/Hunter/Priest. Go on the hunter and try to deadzone or LOS him. This is usually an easy fight, but somehow teams manage to get up there. I obviously have never played Hamchook and I’m sure he’d destroy us though, so don’t take the comp too lightly. If the hunter is stupid and sends his pet out of LOS, gib the pet to prevent viper covering. If you’re consistently losing because of drain (which you shouldn’t unless they’re really good kiters), then it’s worth it to try to burst the pet first either way.

-Rogue/Druid/Mage or Rogue/Druid/Lock. This can be an annoying team to play, but you should typically go on the druid. With no defensive dispel (well, felhunter but that doesn’t count :P) your mage should be able to control the other two pretty well. Good rogue/druid/lock can counter your lineup pretty well, so don’t be disappointed if you drop a series to them.

-Restoshaman/Shadowpriest/Rogue. This is a very interesting comp to play against because they can put out enormous offensive pressure even as a 2DPS comp, but typically we win series against this comp. Go on the shadowpriest. Depending on your mana situation it may be worth it to spellsteal here, because every buff you can get is nice – Shadow Protection, Fort, or Heroism.

If there are any common compositions I missed, let me know and I’ll try to put them up. Also, as I experiment around with different comps of my own, I'll try to write something like this for some other popular class compositions.

So You Want To Arena (The Comprehensive 5v5 Starter)

no.spam@gameriot.com (Tzatziki) — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 06:45:46 -0400

So You Want To Arena (The Comprehensive 5v5 Starter)
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Table of Contents
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Introduction
Part One: What composition should I play?
Part Two: How should I gear up/spec?
Part Three: Do I need any mods?
Part Four: Is there anything else before hopping in?
Part Five: So queue just popped...
A: Playing as the Plate Outlast Team
B: Playing as the Manaburun Outlast Team
C: Playing as the Coordinated CC Team
D: Playing as the 2.5 Healer Team
E: Playing as the 4DPS Spriest/Lock Team
F: Playing as the 4DPS Gib Team
G: Dealing with Nonstandard Compositions on Either Side
Part Six: How do I get better?
Part Seven: Conclusion
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Maybe you and your friends want a more competetive way to play together than instancing. Maybe you've PvPed a while, fancy yourself good at it, and want to prove it. Maybe you just want the gear. But you've never arenaed before, and you have little clue what to do. You might join a pug team that gets destroyed at 1500, your friends might be unsure who to listen to, you might not know what to say...the list goes on. So here's some tips on getting together a workable 5v5 arena team, and calling in games.

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Part One: What composition should I play?
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This question depends a lot on why you're arenaing. If you're looking to start a team with randoms, or you have more than five friends who play, this section is more important; if you know exactly who you want to play with your options are obviously more limited.

First, lets look at the types of teams that are typically successful.

Plate/Outlast Teams: These teams, typically pallyX2/warriorX2/(insert class - usually shaman, druid, or frost mage), have players that put out consistent damage for a long time. Although they have little to no CC, the healing potential of double pally and the damage mitigation of plate means that this comp presents no attractive target (except maybe the shaman, but he still won't drop quickly). Often called a "scrub friendly" team, the stereotype has merit - for beginners who don't have too much coordination or knowledge of arena play this comp will probably net you the highest rating. Its weakness comes against teams that are good enough at locking their dps down to get a kill off or drain the pallies. If you want to get a high rating fast, this is my recommendation. If you want to learn good coordination and arena play, with the intent to get a higher rating (1800+), I recommend a different comp.

Manaburn/Outlast Teams: While these teams are somewhat rare these days, and definitely rare at lower levels, they are incredibly effective if they can work their magic. These teams have at least two of the three following classes: warlock, hunter, priest (common comps are pally/warrior/mage/priest/hunter and pally/warrior/warlock/priest/hunter). Their strategy is to minimize incoming damage long enough for their manadraining classes to drain mana, manaburn, and viper sting the opposing healers out of mana. Once that happens, they win. Its weakness comes from a modification of the previous sentence: if that happens, they win. This is quite difficult to do; the hunter and warlock in particular have to be very skilled, and your priest has to be well geared and godly at kiting. This is one of two compositions my team plays, and it's very fun to play, along with being great los and kiting practice.

Coordinated CC Teams: The most typical composition here is pally/warrior/priest/lock/mage. This team will pressure one or two targets, throwing CCs around healers and dps to keep them burning defensive cooldowns. Once they decide it's time, they create a window of fears and sheeps on the healers, and burn all their offensive cooldowns to take a target down. The weakness of this composition is that the CCs have to go just right, and the team has to be coordinated enough to get someone down. Of all the compositions to run, imo, this one requires the most teamwork and practice. It is our standard composition, and we love it, but even at 2k+, we are still working on our strategies and our coordination.

2.5 Healer Teams: This team is built around pally/warrior/priest/shaman, with the 5th being either mage (the notorious "2345" or warlock. This team just goes on targets and kills them. No really, they have everything. Good cc, bloodlusted priest manaburns, good burst dps. They can focus a target from the beginning, or they can pull fast burst target switches. There's really no good way to tell. They have a lot of dispel, so you're buffless and can't rely on bop. If you are really serious about arena, you should probably run this composition - for now anyways.

4DPS Spriest/Lock: This team is built around the shadowpriest/affliction lock synergy. The actual composition can vary wildly, but this composition is usually warriorless. Pally/shadowpriest/afflock/afflock/mage is popular, as is pally/shadowpriest/afflock/mage/shaman. A new composition that is seeing success is druid/afflock/afflock/shadowpriest/rogue. These teams use overwhelming CC and dot damage, combined with the anti-dispel of unstable affliction, to put simply outrageous pressure on healers. Almost always they'll focus the warrior down first, so that mortal strike doesn't put too much pressure on their one healer. Its weakness is that they only have one healer - if he's properly locked down, whoever their focus is had better be good at avoiding damage. Both this comp and the "gib" variant are looked down upon as requiring no strategy - "cc stuff, kill the warrior". Not going to spark controversy by agreeing or disagreeing, but either way, it's a powerful comp.

4DPS "Gib" Team: The different between this composition and the one above is that the damage is more direct rather than dot damage. A typical composition is pally/shaman/afflock/mage/warrior, though rogues are often featured in this composition too. They will bounce CC around, and rather than putting out massive pressure, they'll just coordinate burst and drop a target. Once they decide to kill a target, it will drop FAST. Sometimes playing against this team our warrior will be like "cheap shotted...wtf i just died". If you're playing with your friends and one of your friends is a rogue, imo this is the comp you should run. This comp's weakness is that it relies on lots of cooldowns. Once cloak of shadows, water elemental, heroism, etc. are gone, if they haven't gotten a target down they have to work a lot harder to win.

Well, those are all the most popular compositions. Hopefully you can find one that suits your playing style, friends' classes, etc. If you have a group of classes you can choose from and are still wondering how to build a team, feel free to comment or send a message. Now that we've gotten past composition, let's move on to the next step.

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Part 2: How should I gear up/spec?
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Ah, the not-so-fun part of preparing for arena. Okay, first step, if you are really serious about arena: farm out all of the latest honor gear, including the two-minute pvp trinket. You could even farm the grand marshal set too if you don't mind grinding a lot. If you aren't quite so serious about getting up fast, and are willing to wait for gear from arena, you want to be stacking as much stamina and resilience as you can. Resilience is somewhat hard to come by outside of arena/honor pieces, but it's there if you look. Try to break 10,000 hp unbuffed, and get as much resilience as you can manage (hp is more important until you get to around 1700).

As for spec, this is a more complicated question to answer. There are most certainly very particular specs that are better than others, but which you spec depends on the composition, and a tiny bit of personal preference. Here are some links to the most popular specs:

Feral Druid: Smilyfun of Dejthstoneegslyfunecima
Resto Druid: Secretive of The Owls That Fly At Dawn

Beast Mastery Hunter (Please don't spec this for 5s, but if you must :P): Swarez of The Kraken
Marksmanship Hunter: Hamchook of Yea We Lift

17/44 Mage: Ecilam of Team Pandemic
5/56 Mage: Papashlapa of Trounce
For an in-depth look at these specs and how they differ, Radikal's Blog on Arena Specs has a good breakdown.

Paladin (Holy, there's really only one spec for them): Sck of Team Pandemic

Holy Priest: Brazetina of Rag Dolled (for those of you who wonder, the 1 pt in blessed recovery is for a dispel buffer)
Shadow Priest: Unbalance of The Fallen Angels

Combat Mace Rogue (you should probably be this spec): Xecks of The Owls That Fly At Dawn
Mutilate Daggers Rogue (he must be God to pull this off, but linked just the same): Baloth of Tapout

Elemental Shaman (with 2345 this is the spec you use): Kollektiv of Rag Dolled
Resto Shaman: Allard of Yea We Lift

Affliction Warlock (w/ Unstable Affliction): Saosinned of Trounce
Drain Tank Warlock (Siphon + Soul Link): Oldmanmcgee of The Owls That Fly At Dawn
Felguard Warlock: Streygo of Pewp Machine

Warrior (you spec 35/23/3. or else.): Noktyn of Team Pandemic

Again, feel free to ask questions in comment or through messaging.

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Part 3: Do I need any mods?
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You don't "need" mods, but trust me, you want them. There is no excuse not to have them, and you can count on any sort of good competition you will face online to be against teams using at least the standard arena mods. So here they are.

"ArenaMaster" Type Mods. This is the most important mod to have. It has a little box on your screen that displays your opponents name and class, and clicking on it targets that player. That way you don't have to spend time looking all over the place for people. The three most popular ones are ArenaMaster, Gladiator, and Proximo. I recommend Arena Master - it's very easy to use. Lots of people like Proximo, but its features are more advanced and its not really something a new team would take advantage of. They can all be found at http://files.wowace.com/

Unitframes mod with focus castbar. This is also very useful, albeit more difficult to set up. YOU can set a target as a "focus" target, and use a macro to cast a spell on that target without switching your current target. (/focus on your target sets that target to be focus, /cast [target=focus] Spell casts (Spell) on your focus target). For example, a mage could set the paladin to be his focus target, be DPSing the priest, and when he sees the paladin start to heal, press a macro that casts counterspell on the paladin. That way he can keep dpsing the priest without having to worry about targeting the pally and waiting for him to heal, and then switching back. My unitframes mod of choise is X-Perl, but lots of people like PitBull as well. Again, they can both be found at http://files.wowace.com

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Part 4: Is there anything else to do before hopping in?
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Depends. I recommend getting together and doing something that works on your coordination outside of the context of a rated match. Skirmish matches can work sometimes, but I personally suggest that you just get the 5 of you and queue up for WSG or AB. Just roam around in a group and kill things, making sure that you're on the same target. Communicate with each other what you are doing, and if someone emerges as a natural leader, make sure everyone else on the team listens to him/her. If no-one on your team particularly enjoys leading, then the target caller should typically be the rogue or affliction lock in 4dps, or the warrior in everything else. This is because the warlock decides who gets UA, the rogue has limited mobility so whoever he is on pretty much needs to be the focus, and the warrior is the one putting MS up. So decide on a leader, and have fun practicing under the 5 in your lineup. If you want a humorous, dastardly way to practice, go fun Setthek Halls together, and try burst down whoever gets mind controlled. Just get used to playing with your team. As individually skilled as you may be at PvP, in duels, BGs, whatever, it is ultimately teamwork and coordination that win you games.

Make sure you buy plenty of arena water (Stars' Tears) to use during your fights. It's not usually possible to get full drinks off, but even just a tick of a drink when you can afford to go out of combat can mean the difference between winning and losing.

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Part 5: So Queue Just Popped...
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Now you're in the game. You're all geared. You're all buffed up. You're ready. The door opens. What now? Well, that depends on your group composition. Here I'll break down some common strategies at low to medium rating levels for each of the popular group compositions.

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Part 5A: The Plate/Outlast Team
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Okay, this one's easy. As long as you keep your people from getting burst early in the game, you have a tremendous advantage. Depending on whether or not you're running with a shaman, your disadvantage here is that you have no offensive dispel (shamans can purge). Regardless, you have no mass dispel, so enemy pallies and mages make poor targets. If you have a shaman, you should go on the squishiest class you can find (Affliction Warlocks, Fire Mages, Hunters, Priests). Make sure your shaman is pre-purging it, so that when it gets boped, the next purge gets it off. Since you can take bop off with a shaman, you shouldn't have to switch targets at all. If you don't have a shaman, you should have a class that can CC; your CC should go on the paladin at this level. You can't get bop off and you have mostly physical damage, so you want to go on a target where attacking him keeps him from doing his job. Pretty much attack anything but frost mages (who can Ice Block) and Priests (priest gets boped and healed, you accomplished nothing). As SOON as the bop hits, everyone on your team switch to a different target: the priest if there is one, otherwise anyone who has no defensive outs like Ice Block or Bubble. On either team, if the paladin bubbles and the bubble wears off before you get someone close to down, everyone switch to the paladin - a pally without bubble is very limited in his options.

Now for the exceptions. Against 4DPS teams, you will always want to be going on the shadowpriest (yes I know affliction locks are often better targets once resil gets high, but we're talking 1600s here for those of you on high ranked teams reading this - shadowpriests here typically have worse gear). Against other plate/outlast teams, it is a viable strategy to force a pally to bubble, go into damage mitigation mode when he does (CC the dps if you have a mage/druid, pressure their 5th if you have a shaman), and then switch back to the pally when he's out of bubble.

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Part 5B: The Manaburn/Outlast Team
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(NOTE: I've only played the traditional pally/war/priest/mage/hunter matrix of this, so this is written from that perspective, not that of a team with a warlock burn; nevertheless the strategy should carry over)
Against Plate/Outlast Teams, you should have the advantage. You'll want to be making sure frost trap is always up, and your priest (and shaman if you have one) should be getting everything off the warriors so that when pallies freedom them you can get the freedom off right away. As long as your offensive dispel can keep freedom off and your hunter can conc/frost trap/scattershot, you should be able to kite the warriors fairly effectively (run around the pillars so they can't intercept, just stay out of their melee range as much as you can). You'll probably want to start by draining their 5th, unless its a druid (in which case you should be draining one of the pallies). Your warrior should be pressuring the 5th with dps, your mage should be chain sheeping the warriors, and if you have a warlock he should be coordinating fears with hunter's silence shots on the pallies. Continue to pressure the 5th until you can get him oom; after that, your warrior should stay on him while the rest of you switch to draining one of the pallies, keeping CC up the entire time on as much as you can. Especially once you get the 5th oom, your pally should use bop very late - there is incredibly little dps that can be put out by a plate/outlast team that isn't physical, so bop is very very effective if you start feeling too much pressure. One VERY IMPORTANT thing against this team - make SURE your paladin, priest, or mage, or anyone who happens to pass by, gets rid of windfury totems as SOON as they come up. They're an absolutely massive dps increase for the plate/outlast team, so taking them out saves you a LOT of healing.

Against other Manaburn/Outlast Teams, you can have some interesting fights. Often times it can be worth it to surprise them and just all-out dps their hunter or priest. In a more traditional fight, though, you want your warrior to be keeping pressure on their hunter, your drains on their priest, your CC on their dps, and your DPS on whatever CC you can prevent through pushbacks (i.e. well-timed dps on mages keeps them from effectively polying). Often these fights will come down to who is better at keeping the warrior CCed or slowed or kited, so make sure your mage is sheeping, slowing, and frost novaing the warrior as much as he can afford to do. Manaburn teams rely on mitigating incoming damage, so if you can do enough damage to them to get a chance to get a focus down before they get your healers oom, you're in very good shape.

Against Coordinated CC teams, you are at a bit of a disadvantage. You do not have the burst to reliably kill any one player on this team (because their CC is so strong), so you will want to be doing as much as you can to limit their incoming damage while you wear them down. It is often effective to kill the water elemental (multishot+arcane+fireblast should take care of it easy) against this comp, just because that cuts down a large amount of incoming dps, and you don't have the dps to bring someone down under their CC this early. Winning this fight often includes pulling cheesy tricks on the pally (silence + scatter + noninterrupting (silence) counterspell) to force him to bubble early. Your biggest challenge will be keeping their warrior off of your team; if you can pull this off while keeping the mage CCed, you just cut out an enormous amount of their dps (the warlock on this team is usually CCing most of the fight, until the burst). You have to be religious about keeping tongues off your pally, and your healers should be religious about trying to los the lock (put something in between you and him so he can't cast on you, but you can still heal your teammates). Your warrior should probably be on their priest along with your priest/hunter drains, so that they don't manaburn, but once the pally is out of bubble (if you forced an early one) it is often better to switch drains to him. The hunter should be dpsing the mage whenever he's not CCed; hunters can annoy mages and keep them from polying more than any other class. If you feel confident collapsing on a target (most likely the priest), go for it, but most likely you will have to wait until you get at least one healer oom before you have a chance at killing anything.

Against 4DPS warlock/spriest teams, you will want to be bursting on the priest. Viper the healer if you'd like, but you don't have time for manadraining here, and the amount of CC they can throw out really makes it negligible unless your entire team is amazing at los kitng to avoid damage. Just train on the priest, counterspell (I'll call it CS from now on) a pally heal as soon as you can, and scatter>silencing shot out of the CS. Make sure your priest knows when your hunter does this combo, because he has to be ready to mass dispel the bubble quickly - ideally before a heal goes off. Then the mage can sheep out of the MD and by then the shadowpriest should be dead. Don't forget to dispel the shadowpriest as much as you can - dispelled shadowpriests go down very, very quickly.

Against 4DPS gib teams, you're again at a bit of a disadvantage due to lack of very good CC. But if you can survive their cooldowns, you have a good chance of winning. Throw burns/viper up on the elemental shaman, if there is one, the pally if there isn't. Every one of your teammates should be ready to go into "defensive" mode - pally ready to bubble, priest ready to fear/get another shield up, warlock ready to healthstone, hunter ready to deterrence + monkey, mage ready to iceblock, warrior ready to go into defensive 1h/shield and spell reflect, etc. You can't really predict who they will kill, although warriors are a likely target. If you do this quick mitigation and burn through your defensive cooldowns (scattershot the rogue, silence the mage, CS the shaman's elemental tree even, burn aoe fears) early, you will hopefully make them burn all their offensive cooldowns and be unsuccessful at their burst attempt. If you survived, good job, you have a chance. After the f the rogue pops cloak of shadows, train onto him if you don't have something low, keeping the pally CCed. Until then, get on the shadowpriest if there is one, shaman if there isn't. Make sure whoever is getting focused is running to your mage, so that he can burn his personal nova to help you kite. Your mage should be using sheeps as interrupts rather than CCs here - throwing them around on the shaman and mage to keep them from open casting - until you're close to getting a target down, or your healers are feeling less pressure. This is really about surviving the first 10-15 seconds. These teams can get an unprepared, full buffed warrior down in about 5 seconds, so you REALLY have to be prepared for it.

Ah, 2.5 healer teams. I saved this for last because it is probably the biggest anticomp of the manaburn team. It's annoying as hell to play against, and imo evenly matched teams the 2.5 will win every time. Still, here's the best you can do. Your warrior should always be on either their priest or shaman, preventing as much open casting as possible. If one starts kiting/gets freedom, go on the other, it doesn't matter because both of them have just as deadly casts to your team. Your drains/viper should be on the priest, and your silence should be on priest to prevent burns. Your mage should get slows on the warrior and then switch between sheeping the warrior and mage. Your priest should predispel everyone so that when heroism goes off he can dispel it off the shaman, mage, and warrior quickly. Ultimately your goal is to drop either the priest or the shaman, but often times you can get a minute or two into the battle before this happens. If you aren't feeling a ridiculous amount of pressure, make sure your healers are getting drinks off - not full ones mind you, just dip out of combat and get a tick of arena water off.

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Part 5C: The Coordinated CC Team
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Against plate/outlast teams, your goal is to survive the warriors long enough to get a target down. Your Mage should be playing almost completely defensively this fight, juggling sheeps on the two warriors and using personal nova, rank 1 cone of cold/frostbolt, etc. to keep the warriors off whoever their targets are. Your priest needs to keep freedom off of the two warriors or you're dead, so make sure they're predispelled. Against this composition we like to burst a paladin down through bubble. Sick your warrior on a paladin, but don't burn any of your burst abilities off the bat, just pressure him down. Mage CSes the first pally heal, warlock fears the 5th. When the CS is off, warlock fears the 2nd pally, and the 5th when its on diminishing returns. Your priest has to be quick on the mass dispels here; if either pally bubbles it needs to come off fast, preferably before they get a heal (you can mass dispel->scream to stop a heal if noone else has a CC up). Take the bubble off of your focus, when it gets to 40ish% mage switches to sheeping the other pally (which should be on fear diminishing returns by now) while warlock fears the 5th. By now CS should be up, sheep one of the warriors again or burn your personal nova. CS the pally heal when the other pally gets low, and make sure your warrior/warlock are coordinating intercept/pummel/spelllock or pet intercepts on the pally that's getting dpsed. Pallies typically don't have the hp or resil to take a beating outside of bubble, so you should be able to get him down inside the 2nd CS. This should be a pretty easy fight as long as you are mitigating the warrior damage; make SURE that your pally gives freedom to whoever the warriors are targeting, and again make sure your priest gets it off their warriors.

Against manaburn/outlast teams, you have the advantage because of the enormous CC at your disposal. Your target should almost always be your opponent's priest. Have your mage get a sheep off on the warrior at the start so people can start kiting, then tab sheep between the warrior and the mage. Your warlock should be fearing their paladin and hunter/lock. Here it helps to have good coordination with the mage, because when diminishing returns hit your warlock can start fearing their mage and your mage can start sheeping their hunter/lock. Your pally/priest should be making sure to keep cleansing each other - make sure scorpid poison is off quickly, so that viper sting doesn't stay on anyone for too long. This shouldn't really be a healing intensive fight, so you can afford to spend more globals cleansing and dispelling. Their priest has no escape options, especially if you keep the hunter CCed and unable to properly give support through scatter/traps. So just train on him, get ready to dispel the bop, and kill him. Now, if you do come across a priest that is a god at kiting (they're infrequent, but not rare), you can switch to the hunter - he really has no escape options either, and often times hunters are quite squishy.

Coordinated CC mirror matches are really fun. I can't even give advice on who to target, we do it differently every game, and people do it differently to us all the time. Just remember that your goal is to use your CC to create a window of opportunity to burst someone down. Priests and mages make attractive targets, but sometimes warlocks are worth focusing down too, especially if they have a felguard out and you can kill the pet early. I've even seen people save up all their cooldowns and pull a fast switch to get a warrior down in this mirror comp match. Ultimately the fight isn't won here by who picks the best target, it's won here by who has the more timely (partly luck, partly experience) CC on offensive or defensive classes. In general CC dps enemies when you're taking a lot of damage, and CC healer enemies when you've got a target taking lots of hits. Definitely a fun fight no matter how this turns out.

Against 2.5 healer teams, you're going to be in for some long games. My best advice at the 1500s-1600s level is to go on the priest, but at our level (2k) this isn't always reliable. For now it's effective to go on the priest the whole time, keeping warlock fears on pally/shaman and mage sheeps on warrior/(mage/lock). The warlock variant of this team is much easier to beat imo because they have no mage decurse, so tongues can go up all over the place and their healers are in a bit of a spot. You're going to want to keep constant pressure on them and be ready to dispel stuff very quickly, because if the shaman switches to spot healing its going to be hard to get your focus down. Still, if you can force him to do this it's good, because it will run him oom very quickly, especially if your priest throws a few manaburns out on him as well. Make sure your focus is predispelled so bop/freedom comes off him quickly, and if he's kiting you too well, don't be afraid to switch to the shaman - keeping him from open casting will cut down his dps significantly. This fight really depends on how meticulous your CC is: if you can keep the healers down for long enough, you can get a sneaky burst in, and then your priest is free to burn them to pieces once it's a 5v4. Be careful, though, and try not to let them kill one of you. Any 4 of the 5 classes in a 2345 matrix makes a very strong composition of 4, and if you slack off they might actually surprise you with a comeback.

Against 4DPS spriest/lock teams, you will want to be hitting the shadowpriest or affliction warlock, usually the shadowpriest. Have your warlock fear their paladin and shaman, and have the mage sheep whatever's left. Make sure your warrior is in defensive stance with 1h/shield. He'll want to charge->defensive->mortal strike, dps until he starts feeling pressure, and then intervene to a healer to get out of los. Once you get the shadowpriest low, if your warrior isn't feeling too much pressure (above 70% hp) he can afford to switch to zerk really quickly to throw an intercept>mortal strike>whirlwind>execute, and then go back into defensive. Once the shadowpriest is down, don't stop throwing CCs around. Your healers might want to take the respite to dart out and coordinate drinks/heals. The fight isn't really over yet, as we've lost some annoyingly close 5v4s to a 4dps down a shadowpriest before. If the pally has diminishing returns on one of your CCs, make sure the other gets put on him, so that heals don't come out. The warlock is an attractive next target, as is a rogue or shaman. At this point if they've taken the pressure off the warrior, he can switch back into zerker and 2-handed for extra dps. Just make sure that the next target goes down without them taking one of you with them.

Against 4DPS gibs, it all comes down to preparation. You know one of you is going to start dropping insanely fast. When the rogue comes out of stealth especially, everyone dump their aoe fears in a rotation (priest->warrior->warlock if he can), to get them off while whoever is being burst goes into defensive mode. Your mage and warlock should barely even be putting out damage at this point, favoring chain CCing instead. When diminishing returns hit, have your mage and warlock switch CC targets. Meanwhile your priest is healing like mad or dispelling heroism off of them if you aren't feeling pressure. Throughout this, your warrior (who might be in defensive at this point) should be on their shadowpriest if they have one, their shaman if they don't. Keep MS up from defensive, keep spell reflect up whenever you can, and focus on getting the priest down whenever you have a global to spare. Once water elemental goes down, and heroism is off, etc. you can start switching from CC to dps, and by this point as long as you're CCing the healer, you should have this fight easily.

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Part 5D: The 2.5 Healer Team
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You'll have to forgive any sarcastic comments about strategy in this section; we're currently at the rating where almost every team we play runs this composition, so I suppose I have some hard feelings :P

Against plate outlast teams, you should have no problem. You'll probably want to focus one of the pallies, or the 5th, or even one of the warriors if you do a fast switch. Your mage should be tab sheeping and personal novaing to keep the warriors off of their focus, while your shaman and priest purge/dispel everything, and your priest could start manaburning (manaburn the 5th first, especially if its an elemental shaman). Make sure windfury totems are knocked down right away, and really you should be able to focus whomever you'd like. Killing anyone in this comp is effective, so just split warrior and caster dps and then go for whoever doesn't get heals. Make sure your shaman earthshocks the pally heals, and coupled with mage CS it shouldn't be a problem to get someone down. Just make sure if you go for a warrior that you coordinate your burst (water elemental/es chain lightning/warrior mortal strike whirlwind), or else you'll be giving them plenty of free rage.

Against manaburn outlast teams, you should have no problem (in fact, 2.5 is considered a direct countercomp to them). Your shaman can spot heal if the going gets tough, so you can pretty much always have a healer drinking if they have to. You'll want to be focusing their priest to prevent manaburns, pretty much the only thing you really need to worry about here. Mage should keep CC up on the warrior, as usual, and your shaman should be earth shocking pally heals. If the priest kites you too much, snap bursts on the hunter or warrior can be effective as well, but you should be able to get the priest down with little concern.

Against coordinated CC teams, you should have no...you getting the idea? Actually, this fight can be a bit trickier. The best advice I can give is from the perspective of the other side of the fight; we play a coordinated CC comp against 2345 all the time. When we win, we manage to put enough pressure on the mage to keep him from sheeping our warrior, and as a result we can force the ice-block, bop, and finally get the mage down. This eliminates the CC of the 2345 team, allowing all five of us free reign to CC. When we lose it's because our priest or warlock or mage goes down too fast, before we can get a kill off. So pick any of those three targets and pop heroism early to make SURE that you get someone down early as possible. Make sure you're sheeping/CCing their warrior, too - he is a very large source of earlygame dps (when the mage and lock are throwing CC all over the place), so keeping him locked down potentially takes the pressure off your priest and allows him free dispel/burn reign.

Against other 2.5 comps, anything goes. At high levels of play you typically see many target switches in a match before someone finally gets focused down. The priest is always a good target, but going after the shaman is effective too. Again, if you have the coordination to pull out a quick burst, you can even go for the warrior. IMO these fights come down to the priests and the shamans, and how offensive and defensive they are. Both of them have the ability to switch between dispel/purge/dps and heals, and knowing when to do each makes the difference. In general you want to try to put out enough pressure that your shaman never has to spot heal (because their mage is being defensive, for example), but if you start taking serious damage he should be ready to throw out a few for good measure.

Against 4DPS spriest/lock teams, you should be focusing on either the shadowpriest or the affliction warlock. Make sure whoever it is gets their buffs stripped, because you really want bop off as fast as possible. I know I emphasize this always, but against 4DPS teams it is even more crucial that you not let it interrupt your dps. Other than that, this fight is pretty simple, just kill stuff.

Against 4DPS gib teams, you actually have to be a little careful. It's the closest thing to a countercomp, but you should still be pulling at least 50/50 against them. Your shaman should be ready to spot heal, maybe even burn nature's swiftness to keep someone up. You'll want to pick whoever the squishiest target is, typically the shaman or shadowpriest, to focus. Again if you can survive the initial burst you should have minimal difficulties, but your priest/shaman should always be ready to switch from dispelling/burning to healing, just in case.

Gee, those were short, I can almost fit an extra paragraph in. 2.5 teams are very "unstrategic", so to speak, until you get to higher levels of play. The reason for this is that unless you're facing teams that really know how to take advantage of mistakes, you can afford to have less than perfect technical play and execution. Why am I mouthing off about this? Because we play these teams every day and I hate them :P. But really, the key to playing against teams with this comp is to take advantage of how quickly you can switch between defensive and offensive modes through the multiple roles of your priest, and to a lesser extent shaman.

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Part 5E: The 4DPS Shadowpriest/Warlock Team
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I'll go into a bit of detail with each comp, but there is a mantra you should follow here. Kill That Warrior. He is almost always your first burst target, and the only thing that changes from comp to comp is how you CC the healers. Your objective is not necessarily to burst him down, your objective is to put overwhelming pressure on their healers through dots and CC. In fact, the longer the match goes, the more powerful your warlock dots are going to be. Ideally you want to be killing the warrior before their healers are on diminishing returns. Oh, and in case you didn't know, the warlock should ALWAYS keep unstable affliction up on whatever target your dots are on. That is what makes this composition effective.

Against plate outlast teams, you'll want to pick a warrior to dot up. Your shadowpriest should be ready to kite his ass off, and if you have a mage he should be sheeping the other warrior as much as humanly possible. Your shadowpriest should get a silence off on one of the pallies if he is in range, and your warlock should be getting a fear off on the other. Mage CS should be up on the pally that got silenced, with the priest prepping a mass dispel in case he bubbles the silence. If you have a rogue he should be stunlocking the warrior you're dpsing so that he can't los, and be ready to pop sprint if he intervenes back to a healer. If you can keep the shadowpriest from getting killed past the 5th's interrupt (CS, 1st Earthshock, etc) on your pally (who, by the way, may want to bubble offensively if you think you can get the warrior down inside of it), then you should be in good shape. Just remember that your power comes from keeping CC up as long as you can while your dots do their work.

Against manaburn outlast teams, you want to get your silence early on the paladin coupled with a fear from the warlock. The idea here is to make him bubble fast, so that you can get a mass dispel and another fear off; once the pally is dispelled you should have no trouble controlling him. Your mage, if you have one, should have CS on the priest; if not, earth shock him. Again you should be focusing the warrior down with the rogue locking him down. This fight should go pretty smoothly, you just want to make it end pretty quickly before their stings/burns take down your mana pool.

Against coordinated CC teams, you have to be very careful. Basically you have to ensure that you get your CCs off before they do. Silence the pally, put fears/sheeps up on the priest/mage. If you don't have another CC available, you may want to keep a little pressure on the warlock - this is where you might want the rogue to stunlock the lock instead of your dps target, the warrior as always. Just let the dots do their work, and the rogue will destroy the warlock's ability to CC. Remember that they rely on CC to create a kill window and you only have one healer, so you have to be really good at damage mitigation in case he gets CCed. Be ready to throw fears, sheeps, whatever out on the DPS if you have to.

Against 2.5 healer teams, you have too many targets to CC, this is the challenge in fighting this team. Your best bet is to force a pally bubble (again through silence + fear). If you dot up the warrior and put your rogue (if you have one) on the shaman, CC on him if you don't have a rogue, then you'll keep him from spot healing and keep the priest in healing mode. Getting interrupts off on him and the pally should guarantee that you keep the pressure up long enough to get their warrior down. Basically the way this fight goes you want to be throwing CC up all over the place, keeping constant pressure on the warrior. He'll probably be in defensive the whole time you're doing this, so he won't be putting out the dps. If you can keep this team from putting out too much dps, you can probably dispatch them with little trouble.

Against other 4DPS teams of any kind, my advice is this. Go for the healer. It's the surefire way to win a 4DPS vs 4DPS, if you kill their healer and they don't kill yours. So spam all the AOE fears and CC and everything that you possibly can on the DPS, and train yourselves on the opponent's healer. Make sure you're ready to mass dispel QUICK, this is essential - you cannot spare a second in this fight, especially if they're racing to get your healer down too. Once their healer is down, just go for targets in order of squishiness (shadowpriests, warlocks, mages), although if you are facing a shaman, you'll want to kill him after the main healer so that he can't spot heal. These fights are hard to predict; if both teams play it the same way it really comes down to who has luckier crits/fear resists/etc.

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Part 5F: The 4DPS Gib Team
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I can't really lay out strategy for each individual composition here. The best advice I can give is to practice your burst in a non-competitive environment first. Go into an instance, give a countdown, and try to "condense" your burst - that is, try to time your largest sources of damage to land in as short a time frame as possible. The idea is to eventually be able to kill someone in between heals landing, so the more damage that lands simultaneously, the better. Your target doesn't have to necessarily be the warrior here, although it is probably still your best option. But soft targets with no escape options are viable too - Hunters, Priests, and Shamans can all be your first burst target.

The rogue is very important on this team; his role is to keep the focus locked down where the fighting starts, so that he can't use los to avoid a kill long enough for his team to pull one out. Once your rogue gets cheap shot off and a few damage spells/dots have landed, unload your burst accompanied by a silence, CS, or some form of interrupt/CC on the enemy healers. If your technical play is flawless, i.e. your timing goes exactly the way you want it, you should be able to kill someone very quickly. If the target gets BOPed, you need to get it off as fast as you can, but don't forget that your magic damage can go through it, so you don't have to stop DPS until it's off. If you haven't burned your AOE fears yet, when BOP goes up on the target you probably want to use one.

The only composition that's worth mentioning is the 2.5 healer composition. Because the shaman could possibly spot heal, it is not always the best idea to focus the warrior first unless you are very comfortable with your CC. You might want to go for the priest or the shaman first. The shaman is an especially attractive target here because rogues can effectively lock them down (prevent heals/dps) because of lack of pushback resistance. Not only do you kill someone who could potentially be healing, you are also cutting down their largest source of burst damage, making a 4v4 much less likely. However, if you are a practiced team (not necessarily likely at this point) and can coordinate your CCs very well, taking down the warrior first is probably the surest path to victory.

It is also worth mentioning that, since this composition is much more burst-reliant and less dot-reliant than the spriest/warlock variant, you have to be worried about the warrior spell-reflecting a big crit. There isn't really anything you can do (you should NOT stop dps for the 5 seconds its up), but your paladin should be prepared to heal someone that might not necessarily be focused at the time, and you should be ready to pop your healthstones, or burn AOE fears if you get too low.

Remember, your job is to kill someone as fast as you possibly can, before you go through your cooldowns, and DEFINITELY before someone on your team goes down.

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Part 5G: Dealing with Nonstandard Compositions on Either Side
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You won't always have the luxury of a perfect matchup, especially at low ratings. So what happens if you come up against a random composition not listed here? Well, you have to analyze them and determine who to focus first. Ask yourself these questions, in this order:

1. Is this a 4DPS, 3DPS, or 2.5 DPS team? Count the number of DPS classes, noting whether or not the priest is shadow, and determine this. If the team is 4DPS and you are 3/2.5, you will want to be going for a DPS; if you are 4DPS as well, you will want to be going for the healer probably. If the team is 3 or 2.5 DPS, you can't always tell who you should go on yet. Just keep it in the back of your mind.
2. Okay, you've come up against a 3 or 2.5 DPS team. If you are 4DPS team, you have to determine what the biggest DPS threat to your team is. Usually this is the warrior, but if their comp doesn't have a warrior it may be the fire mage or the rogue or the elemental shaman (all large sources of burst). You will want to kill whoever poses the biggest threat to you DPS-wise first. If you are a 3 or 2.5 DPS team, read on.
3. Okay, you're a 3 or 2.5 DPS team coming up against another one. I can't tell you who necessarily to go on. All I can say is that Paladins and Warriors make bad first burst targets, because hitting either one of them does NOT affect the job that they do (it actually makes a warrior's job easier). Take this reasoning and apply it backwards: you want to be hitting someone where putting them under the pressure of being focused makes it difficult for them to do their job. This is what makes priests and shamans nice bursts here, because neither of them can play offensively when they are focused. Just develop a good sense for what classes your team can shut down (e.g. rogues can shut down casters with pushback resistance, unlike other classes), and target those classes first.

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Part 6: How do I get better?
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Now this is the nebulous one. You start to get coordinated, you start performing well, you start gearing up. Unless you're the next Power Trip, you'll likely rise to a rating at which you'll start losing games and not know why. Maybe it seems like you have fairly equal gear, or maybe you're outgeared but it seems like that isn't the problem, or maybe you're losing to mirror comps that outplay you. How do you find out what you're doing wrong? How do you find out how to get better? Here are a few tips:

1. Gear is a lot more important than you think it is. Our warrior upgrading from Thunder to Deep Thunder (which EVERY serious arena warrior should get, btw) resulted in a 200 point rating bump in our 2v2 and 5v5 teams THAT WEEK. His 2v2 jumped some 240 points in a single day of play. You might think skill should be able to beat gear, and this is true, but given equal skill, better gear wins, so get some. You may say, "but I can't do that...I have to wait to get more points". But do you have the best enchants you can get on the gear you have? Do you have all your gems socketed? Do you have all your honor gear? Make sure you get your head enchant and shoulder enchant and boar's speed and all of the expensive things you might think don't make a difference. They do, and it will pay off to get them (though obviously I wouldn't put the 90g head enchant on a piece you will be replacing that Tuesday; work with me here :P).

2. Teamwork is usually the problem, not individual skill. When it is individual skill it is painfully, painfully obvious, trust me. It will be a universal thing felt by every other member of your team. If the team is arguing after a loss and accusations get thrown around and argued about, it is most likely NOT the fault of personal skill (though it may be a mistake, which is different - you fix your mistakes). Most likely, you need to develop better teamwork, become more coordinated, and develop better plans for dealing with situations in the match. This is where having a good leader really helps.

3. While personal skill does not usually lose matches (again, unless it's painfully obvious to everyone on your team), that is not at ALL to say that you as an individual player cannot improve. Watch arena videos of your class, if they're available. I am not familiar with every class, so if people would like to suggest good movies to watch to learn each class, I will gladly include them in this post. For the moment I can say Noktyn's video for warriors, Sck's video for pallies, and Kollektiv's video for elemental shamans are pretty good examples to see someone at the top of the game playing their respective classes. In future articles I may fraps some footage from our own team and do some analysis on what we're doing right and wrong, just in case people might be doing the same thing, but for now, and still then, I recommend getting a good PvPer's video footage to look at.

4. Speaking of fraps, if your computer can handle it, frapsing your matches is a very, very good practice. Watch over the match in hindsight and critique your play. Not only does this let you know what really happened (the "WTF I DID NOT MISS THAT CS" can be proven/disproven), it allows you to see the plays you make without personal bias in your reflection. Trust me, I've made a lot of mistake before that I would swear I would never make, but there they are in the fraps, so now that I see that **** I did do that, I can work on fixing it. I'll even say that I've gotten offers to have my fraps footage looked at by members of top teams before. I'm not suggesting that you pester them to look, but a lot of them are really cool guys and if you catch them at a good time, and have some webspace to host the file on, who knows, maybe they'll critique your play for you.

5. Small bracket play improves coordination amongst your players. This is also a tip I gave in another article; if you 2v2 and 3v3 with your 5v5 teammates, then you'll start to develop teamwork at a much more intricate level, because you're dealing with play at a much less confusing level (4 people to keep track of instead of 10). If your mage and warlock play together, for example, they might start to develop a sheep/fear rotation that they call out in vent, and so when they 5v5 they'll be calling their rotation just like in 2s, leading to much more effective CC. Not only that, but in the rare occasion that the 5v5 is whittled down into a 3vx or 2vx situation and you're with your partner(s), you'll be prepared for how to deal with it ("ah, it's pally/lock, you know what to do".

On the topic of my other article, if you check my blog I have another article written. If you've gotten everything you can get out of this one, you might want to check it out, it has some tips in there intended for slightly more experienced arena players.

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Part 7: Conclusion
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Conclusion, WTF? I don't know why I even had this as a category, other than that there isn't anywhere else to put this: if you have any questions, feel free to msg/ask them here. I've been arenaing a while, so it's quite possible I assumed knowledge of something (acronyms especially) that you don't know, and I would appreciate feedback on how easy this is to take in from a new player's perspective. Of course I'm also happy to clear up any confusion you might have.

Tzatziki

28 Arena Tips for people in the middle (1700s or so) of the experience spectrum.

no.spam@gameriot.com (Tzatziki) — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 23:27:38 -0400

As a sort of warning to those on high-ranked teams, this article is aimed at people who are having trouble breaking 1700-1800ish, and those much higher will likely find most of it obvious.

I got the idea for this article from our own rise to somewhat-skill. We floated around 1700 for a while, and then again around 1800. Finally we shot up to our current rating above 2000 just tonight. Along the way, as our ingame leader, I was struggling to figure out how to critique my teammates, and they were having difficulty critiquing my strat calling. One of the problems at low levels was that we would hardly ever play series against the same group composition, much less team, so if we had an idea about how we could play a match better, we couldn't just try it the next game. I got what advice I could by talking on IRC with some of the best in the game (much <3 to Reznap especially), but a lot of the advice they could give relied on already being at the top, with amazing coordination and teamwork and gear and everything. We had to learn how to climb the hard way, and while I suppose it can be argued that the hard way is good, part of the difficulty lies in the matchmaking system and the abundance of teams you will play in the lower brackets. Here are some tips we think could help those teams struggling to figure out what they're doing wrong. These are the things that we changed, things we did wrong where when we fixed them our rating clearly went up, or things that simply helped us get better.

General
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1. 2v2 and 3v3 with your 5v5 teammates. You can't always, sometimes you want to do smaller brackets with friends, but this is one thing that everyone on our team emphasized. Our 5v5 rating jumps were predicted by jumps in our 2v2 and 3v3 ratings amongst our team members. There are two reasons for this, in my opinion. First, you don't have nearly as much information overload; with not as much going on, you can focus on really making each of your actions count. If you're a priest in 5s, juggling renews and poms with dispels and fears can be a daunting task, and often times inexperienced priests will make the wrong choice. 2v2ing with someone will put you in the same situation, just on a smaller scale. Second, the more obvious rock-paper-scissors and the more class to class fighting lets you explore and understand class synergy more. This seems like a nebulous thing, but when you can beat a shadowpriest/warlock with hunter/priest, it is because you understand what that team has to do to win, so when you come up against pally/2Xwarlock/spriest/x, you will be applying those concepts on a larger scale automatically.

2. If you have interrupts, learn to use focus macros. Search any good blog site for information on how. Set focuses on healers, or whoever you want to interrupt but not dps. This is huge. Yes, it really does make that big of a difference.

3. Don't waste global cooldowns. Where my teammates and I were often catching ourselves doing this was right after we called a target switch. Just because you are repositioning yourself doesn't mean you can't be doing something. If you're a warrior running to a target and there's a target in between, hit him and put a hamstring up, or pummel him if its up. If you're a priest, dispel dispel dispel. If you're a pally make sure blessings are up. There isn't one class in the game that doesn't have something instant cast, and if you're going to be moving for more than a global, there's a good chance you can be using it.

4. Grind out the honor for the two minute trinket. It's huge. It wins games. And especially if you're not on the top end of 1700s yet, it's a much better investment than whatever piece of pvp gear you'd have gotten instead.

5. Use Arena Water. A lot. As we started playing 2k+ teams, one of the things we noticed was that they were almost religious about getting drinks off. Our warlock was impressed by one team, whose pally stunned him, and warrior intercepted him, so that their priest could get a full drink off. This type of coordination is not necessary at lower levels, but burst in low level arenas doesn't come as hard, so as long as you aren't feeling too much pressure you can afford to take a few seconds out of combat and drink. Most often it helps more than it hurts.

Strategy
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1. Against the ever-popular 4 dps comp, focus the shadowpriest or warlock. At low levels, shadowpriests will be incredibly low-hp/resil targets, and they should always, always be your first priority. Despite their health, if they're left alone they can make life miserable for your team. As your rating and skill goes up, you can start focusing affliction warlocks more; they actually put out more hurt, and are less easily shut down than shadowpriests. Try throwing up CCs on the priest and dpsing the lock.

2. Don't focus druids, just have your dps put enough pressure on them to keep them in bear form. It doesn't take much, their humanform is squishy, and if they're in any other form, they're the least dangerous class in the arena. There's no need to kill them first (although boomkin druids are very attractive gib targets).

3. When there are no attractive targets, pressure the healers through dps and by forcing the opposing team to use their defensive cooldowns. The popular 2345 (Pally/Warrior/Priest/Shaman/Mage) comp presents no true attractive targets, especially when freedom hasn't been thrown up yet. Hitting the mage prevents him from polying, allowing your war to pressure either him or your priest. Once you force the bop, force the iceblock, and dispel either or both, you have your pick of the litter between shaman, mage, and priest for bursts. Or, alternatively, hitting the priest forces him to kite, leaving him unable to manaburn, allowing your team to hopefully win the manawar in a longer, pressure-style game.

4. Don't waste global cooldowns. Almost every class has something they can be doing every global. Just because you're running switching position doesn't mean you can't do something. This is especially true for mages, but it holds true for other classes as well. One of the common mistakes you see is warriors who have no intercept or charge walking towards their focus right through 3 enemies, without hitting anything or using any cooldowns. All you have to do is right click! and you've forced at least 1k, if not more healing. Throw a pummel in there and you've really made a difference. And at no cost; if you're running to the focus you couldn't do anything to him in that time anyways!

5. Don't let your games degenerate into a focus race. This is perhaps the biggest mistake we see in low-ranked teams, and the biggest change we made on our way up. Don't be single minded and pour all of your effort into bringing the opponent down as fast as you can. Throw CC out in the beginning of fights, hell throw it out all the time obviously. But focus on CC rather than dps when your healers are feeling pressure and your target isn't really that low. Being able to switch quickly from offense to defense to offense is a very valuable skill to learn.

Hunter
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1. Get a cooldown mod, or get good eyes, so that you can keep viper up all the time. It's very easy to throw viper sting up at the beginning of a match and then in the heat of battle forget to reapply it. Not only do you increase the amount of mana you drain if you make sure it's always up, but you force the pally to make gcd decisions more often.
2. Coordinate your scattershot with your teammates' pvp trinkets. Scattershot is very powerful because, like deathcoil, you have to trinket if you simply must get it off. Most warriors like to save their trinkets for when their target gets low, so early in the kite, throw up a scatter on the warrior and have its target use pvp trinket. This buys 4 seconds without hamstring to get behind LOS and avoid an intercept.
3. Avoid excessive use of multishot and arcane shot early in the battle, favoring tab stinging and steadyshot dps. Multishot->arcane shot is the miniscule amount of instant burst hunters get, so it's not wise to burn it every cooldown (plus, it's mana-intensive to do so). Make SURE viper is up, try to keep scorpid on the warrior, and keep serpent on the focus while you steadyshot it down. If your opponents focus you obviously you can't be using steady as often, but otherwise that 4k burst can be the difference.

Paladin
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1. Macro in librams to spells. If you have librams that give you bonuses when you holy light, flash of light, and cleanse, you can macro /cast x /equip libram so that you're always getting the right libram bonus. As long as you change the libram during the spell global you're not losing a global cooldown.
2. Cast Blessing of Sacrifice something that's getting hit as soon as combat starts, especially an off-focus with dots or deep wounds. This ensures that you won't be blinded or sheeped, and gives you a little more chance to break fears than you'd usually have.
3. Blessing of Freedom is more important on the target getting burst than on the warrior doing the bursting. You can easily wait 5 extra seconds for that intercept/hamstring. It's much harder to win if your priest is dead.

Priest
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1. Keep up prayer of mending every cooldown - its almost always your priority, along with shield. You will be moving a LOT, so use all your globals with instant casts.
2. Make sure you're dispelling fast and effectively. Dispelling is huge. You can dispel freedom and bop, you can significantly classes damage potential, hp, and mana pools. Dispel is incredibly powerful. Use it a LOT. The focus should be dispelled whenever you have a free global. That way when bop gets put up you can almost guarantee you'll hit it off.
3. Make SURE you're specced correctly - 41+ holy is not nearly as effective as 28/33, and you can really tell the difference.

Warlock
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1. Take pets spells off autocast, if you haven't. Being able to control when you intercept, spell lock, etc. is essential.
2. Have a good balance between fears and dps, fear far more often than throwing dps - fear, throw dots, fear the rest of the time until burst.
3. Develop good coordination with your mage - call out EVERYTHING you are fearing when you're doing it, same for the mage.

Mage
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1. Learn to debuff stack when you polymorph. Rank 1 frostbolt, Sheep, then Detect Magic (and optionally Hunter's Mark). This creates up to 3 dispel buffers that could be dispelled instead of the poly, giving you a much longer, more effective sheep. Don't overuse this, though, just use it in times like when the diminishing returns on a target just wore off, so you know that if you debuff stack you can get a full-duration sheep.
2. Control warriors. You're the best at it, and good mages can gimp warriors to an incredible extent. Constantly be throwing out sheep/detects on them, and even mix in a full poly combo whenever you have the time. The less the warrior is up, the easier it is on your healers, moreso than for any class other than warrior.
3. Control the flow of the match through CCing or DPSing. The mage really controls whether the team is on offense or defense. He chooses whether to CC with his globals or DPS with his globals. Learn to tell when you should be doing one or the other. This is an experience thing, but in general when you have a target that's low you should be dpsing/ccing healers, and when you have a player that's low you should be personal novaing to help them kite and ccing dps. Save your personal nova for situations like this - helping the focus kite a warrior, for example.

Warrior
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1. Switch into defensive stance and shield/1hander against 4-dps teams. This might seem like a no-brainer to some, but it's surprising how many warriors just stay in zerk stance while they're being dotted or gibbed to pieces by a 4-dps team. Your job is to keep mortal strike up against a team like this. That's it; don't worry about dps. Get mortal strike up and then focus on limiting the damage they can do to you. Intervene around corners to your healers to get our of the enemy los, etc.
2. Don't overextend yourself. One mistake our warrior made a couple times was charging way ahead, before the healers could get set up. We quickly fixed this, but we still ran into a lot of teams whose warriors had this problem. If you charge out of healing range, a good team will quickly focus/gib you before the healers can really get set up correctly, and at the least they'll force an early bubble that will easily turn the battle in their favor. So make sure your team is ready for you to charge.
3. You control, and should call, the offense. The warrior is the most important element of a 3dps team's dps pressure - MS is hands down the most effective debuff in the game. You know whether or not you are putting enough pressure on a particular target. If its getting lots of heals and ms wore off, call a target switch! Tell your team what target you are going to focus, and make sure your team knows to listen to you, and follow suit.

Hopefully you've learned something from these tips; if you feel there are any major ones I've left out, please do mention them - maybe my team has left them out too :P. On that subject, for those who'd ask:

Team: http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/team-info.xml?r=Gorgonnash&ts=5&t=Teen+Girl+Squad&select=Teen+Girl+Squad

Current Roster:
Wofl - Paladin
Noriyasu - Warrior
Dromar - Mage
Tzatziki - Hunter
Tinan - Warlock
Ruie - Priest

Questions, comments, and criticisms are all welcome.