Week 3 recap and berserker stance evaluation

Week 3 of this new arena season has been quite a busy week with its ups and downs, showcasing pretty stiff competition from BG9 veterans and transfers alike (as expected). As of this morning's arena update, our current teams are:

2v2: 2234 (rank 1; up from rank 4)

3v3: 2273 (rank 1; up from rank 3)

5v5: 2086 (rank 4; down from rank 2)

I'll cover what's basically been going on for us in each bracket, as well as discuss the current state of berserker stance and my feelings on it.

2v2: This week was pretty interesting, to say the least. I hadn't touched this bracket very much at all really without a reliable partner and due to the obscene 2v2 queue times on BG9 (upwards 15 minutes during primetime and Mondays). I was actually quite suprised to be rank 4 last week considering the minimal amount of time I've put into this bracket. This week, I changed it up a bit.

Wojo, merciless gladiator druid from Ruin battlegroup (Mannoroth server), and I decided to team up and see how things went. Interestingly enough, when we decided to randomly play one day, we ran into the previous rank 1 team of Deep and Shinta (Trukilla) druid/rogue, and the current rank 4 (I think?) team of Shazovv and Zhakar priest/rogue. We also fought a transferred merciless gladiator warrior named Relay partnered with Timberwolff (druid) and Factionn (priest); not sure what battlegroup he's from, but the games were rather unimpressive on their part due to various reasons. Anyhow, recap of each series.

Deep/Shinta Team Boolak dru/rog): Deep had a very interesting spec that I was unaware of the first game. He's recently respec'd feral so I can't get exact numbers, but I believe it was http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=0tjrzbcsRuZZVMIxcq or close to it. Having dreamstate, intensity, and lunar guidance allows Deep to maintain a ridiculous 215 mp5 while casting with his arena gear which also sports around 1900 healing and 340 resilience. But the kicker here is that his rogue partner (who sports both Warglaives of Azzinoth) can effectively tank a warrior while requiring minimum healing allowing Deep to literally spam Wrath, Moonfire, and Insect Swarm at will. They actually stole the first game we played against them from us since we really underestimated the amount of damage that Deep could put out with his spells.

After adjusting our strategy accordingly, we came back to beat them 5-0 in a row by applying much more pressure on Deep and either outright killing him due to his lack of feral charge, or quick swapping to Shinta once he's out of cooldowns and dropping him while we cc lock his partner. Despite all of this, I give props to Shinta and Deep for excelling so well with this less-played comp and even moreso with this unique spec that I've yet to see a druid run with. I believe the only 2 weaknesses of the spec are lack of feral charge and swiftmend, but if played properly, can be worked around.

The last game against these two is also the reason why we took a break from 2v2 for the night:

Nerf Deep's healing, seriously.

Shazovv/Zhakar Team Slayer's Crest (disc priest/rog): Shazovv, their disc/holy priest, runs an interesting disc spec with reflective shield, allowing them to do considerably more damage than your average priest/rogue teams. Despite taking the first game from them, they actually stole the second one against us by having Shazovv play very aggressively on Wojo while Zhakar chased me around doing literally nothing but spamming shiv on me non-stop while off-handing wound poison and main-handing cripple poison. It was a unique approach that I'd never seen before, and quite effective when you think about it. This allows the rogue to still do respectable damage with wound poison procs along with the shivs, but more importantly, allows the wound poison stack to stay at five, greatly reducing the effectiveness of HoTs and the chance for cripple to be abolished.

Again, after adjusting our strategy to compensate, we came back to beat them 6-0 (I think) in a row by employing a similar strategy that we did against Boolak. This time, I would stick to the priest with a 1h/shield on stacking sunders and maintaining mortal strike until their rogue's cooldowns were all up in order to mitigate the damage taken from two adrenaline rushes. After the rogue is out of cooldowns, he would either be CC'd while I finish off the priest un-harassed, or once again quick swap to the rogue to kill him without cooldowns while the priest gets CC locked. Again, props to Shazovv and Zhakar for running their comp at the level they're at and creating unique, yet effective strategies to counter the fotm comps.

3v3: This week in 3v3 was centered around us playing rogue/mage/priest, druid/warlock/warrior, and rogue/warlock/priest with our druid/rogue/warrior comp. The main teams we fought were Neilyo/Mattyo/Mykke from Tichondrius (team SK gaming is Believing), Vorrent/some warlock/Xahlior from Blackrock (team fight music on), and Qazdia/Yog/Cayley from Tichondrius team PURPLE DRANK).

Neilyo/Mattyo/Mykke (rogue/mage/priest): I won't say we have RMP on farm status quite yet because every RMP we fight, we can't approach the same way. It all basically depends on how the other team plays, who they go after, how aggressive their priest is, and everything in between. That basically determines how we handle the fight in response. Against Neilyo's team, they tried pretty much everything. Burst the warrior, train the rogue, quick swap the druid, everything.

While we all know that Neilyo is definitely one of the most talented rogues out there, I have to also state the obvious that Mattyo is no Ohnoes/Ecilam, and Mykke is no Kintt/Brazetina. It may be due to lack of escape artist, but it just felt that Mattyo couldn't kite Xecks anywhere close to as well as Ecilam has in the past, and I felt that Mykke needs to play much more aggressive in order to beat a comp like ours. We ended up going 14-2 against them this week, with a few close games; however, most ended very quickly with a couple having Neilyo leave the game before anyone was dead because he knew it was over.

Vorrent/some bad warlock/Xahlior (druid/warlock/warrior): Another one of the fotm s2 comps for 3v3, we initially had trouble with this team. Originally for dru/lock/war, we would split DPS with myself on their druid and Xecks on the warlock (keeping MS on 2 targets and not allowing the druid to heal much). However, the way this comp played with their warrior training Xecks, the strategy wasn't quite as effective as we were splitting games with them early trying to figure out how to best deal with this.

Ultimately, we came to the conclusion that the druid has one huge weakness against our comp and it's the fact that we have intimidating shout and blind to blow on him. He can only trinket one and the other is guaranteed to shut him down for a minimum of 8 seconds, at which point, something else can lock him down as well (sap or cyclone). This all allows us ample time to utterly destroy their warlock with 5x sunder stacks, death wish, adrenaline rush, sweeping strikes, and blade flurry while our druid is free to CC their warrior because the warlock has to run a voidwalker (meaning no spell lock) or he would die even faster.

There were also times when their druid would open in a bad position and we would basically just do a mundane assist train dpszerg on him and drop him before the fight even really starts. Nothing is more scary for a druid than a prep mace rogue with cooldowns to avoid cc and a mace warrior that can't be feared all over them. Overall, we took this series about 7-3 as far as I can remember.

Qazdia/Yog/Cayley (rogue/warlock/disc priest): A slightly more unique comp with a warlock in place of the typical mage RMP setup, this is another example of a team that can't be played the same way against different people. Previously when playing this comp, we would split DPS with me on the priest and Xecks on the warlock to have MS on 2 targets and preventing fears and mana burns in the process. This was initially countered by them pressuring Xecks and not allowing him to sufficiently lock down the warlock. So, once again, we needed to adjust the strategy.

After some deliberating, the Golden Child said with words of wisdom, "dude, we should just train the **** out of yog." And so it came to be. With Yog coming out with a voidwalker each game, it would allow us to land an easy sap on their priest without paranoia to detect Xecks, and the assist train was all aboard after that. With full sunder stacks and massive cooldowns to drop on Yog, he would go down faster than Pwyff in a prison shower. There was simply no way Cayley could keep up with the heals on Yog, especially with blinds, cyclones, kicks, and 5.5 second gouges at our disposal on him. We ended up about 18-5 overall against them.

5v5: An interesting turn of events this week happened when our 5v5 priest informed me that he would be transferring off Tichondrius after being removed from his guild and new work schedule not allowing him to raid on EST hours. Our team once again had to search for a new priest, but luckily for us, Ghwrin (our warlock) found us one when he asked Vhell if he wanted to play. Vhell, while a very good player, had to basically come out of retirement, and is obviously not used to the current state of the game (especially with disc priests and cooldown usage, etc).

We started off well playing with Vhell beating some standard teams. Then we played against Trance/Chicane (on a warlock named Stexx)/Medz/Moochi/Kenchow (team We R Godzilla U R Japan). We actually stole the first 2 games from them, but it went downhill after that with them taking several from us. Their team, while realistically 3dps, has a playstyle of a 4dps team, pushing really aggressively for an early kill. Their priest would often help with an early burst tossing out smites and mind blast and our healers really wern't prepared for the damage when we played them, underestimating how much curse of tongues makes you fall behind, especially without heroism.

We eventually made most of the rating back by playing against Slackers (Swarm's team) and a few others, but it's definitely been a learning process for us all, with Vhell having to adjust his playstyle from the old s1/s2 ways to the "new and improved" s3 style.

On a final note, since I just mentioned our 5v5 this week, I would be lieing if I said I didn't get disgustingly RNG'd some games by silly burst damage from other teams. I'm not complaining about double shatter crits, double lightning overload crits off elemental mastery, or even those awesome 4.5k half-cast soulfire crits, but moreso the sweet thing warriors have to deal with known as Berserker Stance. Warriors are almost obligated to fight 90% of the time in this stance because it's our only means of spell interrupt without activating a GCD from stance and weapon/shield swaps, it allows us to break fears and incapacitates, and has the lovely whirlwind rage dump to use when needed. But at what cost?

Let's see, we gain 3% crit using this stance and in return, are punished with taking 10% more incoming damage. Maybe Blizzard is a little behind on the times, because while this was an acceptable trade-off pre-BC in PvP and still is acceptable in terms of just PvE, the fact that this hasn't changed yet going into the third season of arena is asinine. Let's put this in perspective. I have 374 resilience right now in my standard gear and that mitigates damage over time (DoT) effects by 9.49%. In short, my resilience does not even negate the damage penalty from berserker stance alone done by DoT's. Oh oh, but in return, I get 3% crit, right!!! Right...? Yeah, didn't think so. It's a stupid and out-dated trade-off that needs to be re-worked.

If Blizzard wants to maintain the bonus at simply 3% crit, I think a fair trade-off would be 10% armor reduction instead of damage taken, similar to the old death wish side-effect. Hell, I'd take an increased chance to be crit by 3% instead of the current state of 10% increased damage taken. At least this would curb some of the "lol zerg the warrior" strategies (if you can even call them that) some teams are employing. But don't get me wrong, I don't really even fault them for it, considering it's an effective strategy because honestly, if a 2345 or 2346 (warlock variant) team has their warrior spending too much time in defensive stance, you won't win the game because of lack of pressure you're putting out.

Just remember, the next time your warrior gets intercepted or HoJ'd, trinkets that into a death coil or mace stun followed by a 4.5k soul fire, 2k shadowburn, 4k chain lightning, 1.5k earth shock, and 2k mind blast/swd all in the same 3 seconds, you can thank Blizzard for giving him 3% crit in return.

THANKS BLIZ!

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