Archive for the ‘PvP’ Category
So I haven’t posted for a while, again, due to RL kicking in, again, and the launch of patch 4.0.1, something a lot of people have been looking forward to, me included, and also has caused a lot of drama, me included… So where to begin?
Let’s start pre patch. I still raid on my warrior almost every night and as a lot of other warriors I was used to being in top 3 damage on a lot of fights, especially Saurfang and Festergut. I did decently in PvP as prot and arms and had nothing to complain about really (except for that damned Baron Rivendare mount DAMN U BARON!).
Then was the day of patch 4.0.1, a day that will stick to me like a nasty fly because it was the day Blizzard killed Warriors, Ferals, Retri’s, MM hunters and Combat rogues and boosted Shadowpriests, Mages and Warlocks beyond belief. When I had to raid on my warrior the night of that famous patch I almost cried. My warrior damage was GONE. I barely hit 9k on saurfang, a fight where I was used to pulling 16k DPS. I had lost 7k DPS due to Blizzard making a mistake with scaling ArP dependant classes. Soon the forums were flooded with complaints which led Blizzard to create an emergency patch, boosting Retridins, Warriors and Ferals and nerfing SP’s, Warlocks and Mages. Although that emergency patch saved warrior dps it came with a price:
TO BE VIABLE AS FURY WARRIOR IN RAIDS ON LEVEL 80 REACHING THE WHITE HITCAP IS REQUIRED!!!!!!!
What this basically means is that every fury warrior, albeit 1handed fury, needs to have 27% hit from gear. The last 3% they need (30% hit is currently the white cap) comes from the specc. Why do warriors need this kind of hit you ask? Well this is due to the new rage mechanic. Warriors only generate rage when they hit a target. The more they hit, the more rage they generate. This is not influenced by critical strikes, however it can be influenced by haste. Because the more you hit the more rage you generate you can’t really afford to miss any attack because this will lead to rage starvation (something I experienced firsthand). This means that Warriors had to, and have to, reforge all their gear to HIT especially when they’re not lucky enough to dualwield Cryptmaker (mace with hit and crit). And then they probably still have to gem or enchant a little to get to the cap.
For me this change was extra dramatic seeing as I was running around with (previous) best in slot Leather gear. Due to Plate specialization those gearpieces went from BiS to utterly useless and the only gear I had to replace my Leather pieces with was PvP gear. At the moment I ticketed Blizzard if they could be so kind to give me back my old plate bracers which had hit but which I sold (silly me). And I’m currently working on the pattern ICC boots to replace my PvP boots with. All in all my warrior has dropped about 1.5k attack power and 20% crit due to all these massive changes and I’m not liking it one bit. So far I’m as far as not playing my warrior at all when I don’t have to because every time I do I feel gimped beyond belief. Don’t get me wrong, the damage boost was quite nice, but seeing your heroic Deathbringers Will trinket reforged to hit makes you wanna die a little on the inside. So I mostly log on my warrior to raid nowadays and for the Headless Horseman mount which is available these few weeks.
For PvP the situation is much much worse. Due to PvP being heavily unbalanced, although Blizzard said they fixed it, it’s nigh impossible to play Arms correctly. After a few Battlegrounds I gave up because playing as Arms Warrior now equals free kills. Even Fury is better of now, especially as 1 handed, because the damage output is insane and they too have a healing debuff if they specc for it. I have yet to try Fury in the battlegrounds though because I’m still a free kill if there’s no healer to cover my lovely troll ass. I feel nerfed, underpowered and sad about the current state the Warrior is in. I really do hope it sorts out by the time we all hit 85 but for now I rather not set foot in BG’s on my warrior… Which brings me to scrape the 25k honorable kills achievement from my Cataclysm “to do” list and change it to something else…
That something else being my mage. I rolled her horde (I was really sick of being so small :<) and am doing BG’s untill my fingers bleed on her. I recently discovered the joy of being a Frost Mage and so far I’m loving it to bits and pieces. I literally can own ANYONE in the battlegrounds. It’s so nice and the total opposite of playing my warrior. Especially now that you can get full Wrathful gear (except for the shoulders) I’ve been farming honor like crazy trying to deck her out in decent PvP gear. With every upgraded piece I can actually see my survivability and damage going up and up. So far I picked up the Wrathful head, Relentless Chest, Wrathful Haste Neck, Wrathful Haste Offhand and Wrathful Haste Bracers. Next up on the list are the Wrathful Haste boots. After that it’s probably the pants but we’ll see. For now I’m killing Alliance like a real killing machine and am up to 2.2k Honorable Kills in less than a week (not bad for someone that has to go to school and stuff right? :D). I also managed to get the Headless Horseman mount on her (I rather see it on my warrior though) so I’m riding around on that making some people very very jealous.
I actually have much much more to tell but atm I wanted to get the ranty part of my chest and let you guys read what I’m doing (I had to shutdown WoW when writing this because I don’t want to miss a single BG queue on my mage hehe). Another post is on the way on the situation of my other blog and the current status of my baby druid. See you all later!
Warsong Gulch. Probably the battleground I love the most next to Eye of the Storm. I like the “cap the flag” nature of the game and the epic battles you can have on the midfield trying to kill the one carrying a flag, or maybe protect the one carrying your flag.
Especially as warrior, with some healers on your ass, you can be very deadly there. No one is happy having a relentlessly assaulting Arms Warrior on their ass. Especially one that Just. Won’t. Die. So when it was Warsong Gulch weekend this weekend I was really happy. 4 days of happily queueing for that battleground, upping my rep, my WSG Veteran achievement (currently on 47/100 wins) and some other achievements I still lacked.
However, that dream was shortlived. I think I’ve experienced one of the worst Warsong Gulch Weekends ever. Not only were the Horde teams disappointingly bad, 9 out of 10 games I was faced against an Alliance premade. Often one from my own server even. The most fun where the games where the Horde team saw it was a premade and actually gave up from the start. Comments like “it’s a premade so just lose fast” weren’t rare and made me kind of angry. I don’t get the people that don’t even want to try. I think they shouldn’t belong in a Battleground to start with. Another common thing seemed to be just fighting in the midfield without even attempting to grab the opponent’s flag. I mean, without capping flags, there is no WSG win. But people forget that sometimes and apparently only want to see either their Honorable Kills go up, or their rank in the Battleground itself. Whatever the reason is, they’re not helping the Battleground at all. And when they could be useful, aka kill the Enemy Flag Carrier, they aren’t able to do so which means the opposite teams scores and we lose… Again. After a weekend of this, your hopes of a normal Battleground are kind of gone.
Anyhow, I think from all the games I’ve played this weekend I maybe won 3. 
I did get an achievement done tho and now I only need Veteran and Quick Cap. So it hasn’t been entirely fruitless. But very very disappointing. I hope this trend won’t persist into the other BG weekends. Since I do want my Veterans and, in the case of WSG and AB, my rep. I guess only time can tell…
One of the most sought after and despised weapons in the game: Bryntroll, the Bone Arbiter. This 2-handed weapon drops from the first boss in Icecrown Citadel 25 man mode and has, as you can see, no stats other than a lifestealing procc. I’m linking the heroic one, because that’s the one I have obtained.
Why is it loved and despised? Well to be fair, the droprate of that thing has been insane for our guild. It dropped almost every week when we raided Icecrown and I think it’s getting disenchanted or given to offspeccs currently because they have no clue what to do with it. Some people tend to whine that it drops over more usefull items, something to which I agree partly. For our guild’s paladins and DK tank this thing is almost best in slot and so they didn’t have any problems with needing it. There’s only one more class that can do something with this weapon: the Warrior. And there is where my focus lies.
I needed this weapon over my 251 weapon that I picked up in a pug or an altrun once, Ramaladni’s Blade of Culling. As you can see that weapon has quite some expertise on it and the moment I replaced it, I knew I would be in trouble. My expertise fell down to 15 where it should be 26 and so I had to switch some gear around, downgrade a ring and eat expertise food to stay on that cap. Apart from the extra socket I recieved, I hoped that the lifesteal would come in handy aswell. I was unfortunately very very wrong. The lifesteal proccs like shit for a fury warrior. Not only that, I really resented giving up stats for a procc that sucked in PvE. The first chance I got to replace the thing was on a Lich King kill where he dropped his shiny sword which solved all my expertise problems and some more. The guild couldn’t understand why I would downgrade my heroic Bryntroll to a normal Glorenzelg. I kindly explained that it wasn’t only a DPS increase, but it also fixed my immediate stats problem that had arised with replacing Ramaladni. Afterwards I got told that that particular sword is practially Best in Slot as Mainhand and if you get a beter mainhand as Offhand for a warrior. Bryntroll however is almost number one on the sucky list. Well it is for fury, because for Arms PvP…
THIS WEAPON IS GOD! GOD I TELL YOU! HELL YEAH BABY. I might have to switch my specc around again, because my boyfriend recently found out that if you spam hamstring, the lifesteal proccs like an insane thing. What can you possibly wish for more than a weapon that heals you as warrior? Not only is it awesome in Arena, when used properly you can even survive in a Battleground a bit longer without getting healed. In that regard, Bryntroll is Best in Slot for warriors pvp wise. Not only because of it’s high damage and 3 socket spots, but because of the lifesteal that is so worthless in PvE. So where it’s a big thumbs down for a fury warrior, it’s a big thumbs up for Arms pvp.
Bryntroll is a weapon with two faces. Hated by fury warriors because it’s the last resort you take for your dps, but loved by arms warriors to pvp with because it’s the same lifesteal that is useless for fury that makes it the cutting edge for arms. I’m very happy I obtained this weapon. And I have to admit, the Battlegrounds look ever more luring if you know that you have that awesome weapon to kill people with…
We are all thrilled when our beloved character dings level 80 and we can start collecting gear and do shiny dungeons and raids. After a while tho, you find out that there is more than doing dungeons and raids and when you can’t gear up anymore often you look for something else to do. One of these “something elses” is PvP!
Now, correct me if I’m wrong, the average new player will not commence in PvP activity during levelling (a lot), since it’s not the easiest way to level up and since most people rather just kill animals, murlocs and the like. This is especially so on normal servers where you also do not have to deal with world PvP and ganking. So when you’re 80, and have time to spare, you can turn your attention to PvP and discover an entire new world in the World of Warcraft!
The first things you want to look at:
Speccs.
Every class has atleast one specc to commence in PvP with. To give some examples, for a warrior this is Arms, for a mage it’s Frost and for a priest it can be Discipline. When you start to PvP search on the web what is the most suited specc to play PvP with for you. If you’re unexperienced I say go for the easiest specc or the most common specc since the most advice is given on these speccs. Just find out what specc you want to play in PvP, read up on how it works and specc it. For some classes this will be harder than others, for instance a hunter can PvP with all three speccs whereas a mage is best off as Frost. It’s all about personal preference tho, but again I’d choose for the easiest/most known PvP specc per class.
After you’ve specced your favorite specc, it’s time to get practicing it because no one is a miracle player overnight. It’s taken me 2 years to perfect the play on my own warrior and I still feel that I can improve a whole lot! So don’t be afraid to spam the battlegrounds, the more practise you get in, the easier and more fun it (hopefully) will become to play your class in PvP.
Gear.
Gear is an important issue when starting to PvP. Nowadays you can PvP in your regular gear pretty well, but you will be an easy to kill target since normal gear lacks Resilience. What exactly is this resilience? Resilience is a stat only to be found on PvP gear. What it essentially does is reduce the chance you will get critically hit and reduce all damage taken by a certain amount. The more resilience you stack, the less damage you take sorta speak. This is important because if you ever encounter an Elemental shaman who’s popped all his cooldowns and casts Lava Burst at your face you know that it will hurt a lot. As in up to 17k crits a lot. When you have resilience this damage will go down together with the chance that they crit on you as a whole!
The way to obtain this PvP gear is, yet again, by doing battlegrounds. There are currently multiple PvP sets with Furious Gladiator being the lowest and Wrathful Gladiator being the highest. The difference between these sets is if you choose to play Arena or not. But since this is a Basics guide I will stick to doing battlegrounds only so that means you can get a full Furious Gladiator mainset with some Relentless and Wrathful offparts. The difference between mainparts and offparts will be shown below!
Sidenote! All of the parts below are bought with honor or emblems in the mainset case, if you click on the links you will see how much honor/emblems the parts are. The honor cap per character is atm 75k so decide wisely what gear you purchase!
The Main Set
The main set consists of a headpiece, shoulders, gloves, chest and pants. This is currently the Furious Gladiator set. For convenience I’ll link the warrior set below.
As you can see, the main set consists of five parts. If you obtain two parts you will get a setbonus just like on PvE gear and on four parts you will also obtain a setbonus. The gloves have an additional bonus that is different for every class and is class based.
The Offset
The offset is in fact all other parts that do not belong to the mainset. So that’s neck, cloak, bracers, belt, boots and rings. Trinkets and weapons are a category of their own since most PvPers have a PvE weapon and one or more PvE trinkets.
The offset obtainable for a warrior who only does Battlegrounds will look a little something like this:
As you can see, some of the items called Victory have hit on them instead of crit. This is because as a warrior you need 5% hit in PvP. This goes for all melee, I’m not sure about the spellhit tho so you have to look it up for yourself. Apart from the belt/boots/bracers there are many variations with stats on the cloaks, rings and necks. You have to look for yourself which of these will suit your character best or which ones are recommended to take. When you are unsure, you can alway ask a more experienced PvPer what he or she would do.
Trinkets and Weapons
Unfortunately good PvP weapons are only available to those that play arena on high rankings. Therefore your PvE weapon will do just fine in PvP. As for trinkets, the only trinket I recommend that you take is Medallion of the Horde/Alliance. This trinket will let you escape from stuns, polymorphs, cyclones and the like. The only two races that essentially can do without the trinket are Humans due to their “Every Man For Himself” racial which provides the same escape or as Undead who have “Will Of The Forsaken”.
Gemming and Enchanting
Unfortunatly I can’t say anything useful about this either since it differs per class. Again, look it up for yourself and see what other people say or what the community says to gem and enchant on your gear. You can always experiment later, but at the start it’s better to go with the mainstream.
Is a full PvP set that necessary?
Well, some people don’t have to have a full PvP set. When you raid endgame content, you can swap out some PvP stuff for PvE stuff for increased damage and healing and the like. However if you do not have the chance to obtain these items I strongly advise to take a full PvP set. It will make you tougher but will also keep your damage at a decent level.
The PvP itself!
Now that we’ve discussed the gear and specc section, let’s talk about the actual PvPing that takes place. If you press your “H” button a PvP screen will pop up and you can select battlegrounds. If you want diversity, just select “random battleground” and join the queue! It will put you in a random battleground, so you never know where you will end up.
Now let’s discuss some important and basic stuff for PvPing:
Practice, practice, practice!
When you first walk into a Battleground you can’t expect everyone to just drop dead on when they see you. No, most likely you will be the one facing the floor for the majority of time. This is ok, since hey, you’re just a newbie who’s learning to play his or her class for the first time in PvP. Just remember not to give up because you will get there, you will get better and you will be able to eat people’s faces if you just practice enough!
Stick with the group.
Especially when you don’t have enough gear yet, stick with a group of people. You are less vulnerable in a group than when you are singled out. It’s most likely that you will get singled out anyway since the trained PvP eye can scout bad gear, but still your chances are higher, especially if your group has a healer with them who can heal you up while you spam your frostbolt button at that warrior who wants to eat your face. So really, just stick with the group!
Figure out what you need to do to win the Battleground.
At this point I would like to refer to the lovely Cynwise from Cynwise’s Battlefield Manual who has made marvelous in depth battleground guides. For almost all the Battlegrounds it’s really obvious what to do to win. If you obtain better gear you can go for the flag in Warsong Gulch yourself or you can defend a base in Arathi Basin, a tower in Alterac Valley or a wall in Strand of the Ancients. If anything, just go with the flow. Cap bases if you have to cap bases, and kill flagcarriers to obtain that flag. Once you figured out how it works and what you need to do to win everything becomes a lot easier. And ofcourse the best way to find out, is just by heading out and doing it!
And most importantly….
Have fun!! If you are not having fun while PvPing, ok ok some frustrations are allowed, you shouldn’t PvP. Just go do something else for a while or choose not to PvP at all anymore. It’s about the game you want to play and have fun with, so try to do so. Losing can be stupid, but if you fought the hardest you could or was the only one that managed to steal bases back and had fun doing it, you’ll see that it’s not so bad after all.
I hope to see all of you in a Battleground someday. Go out and punch faces!
So, my warlock Fiorentin dinged 20 and got her Succubus quest done and now has a succubus!
The first thing that I saw and made me go “NOES!” was that I didn’t have Seduce. I want seduce, give me seduce! NOAW!
The other problem I was faced with that after dominating lowbies in WSG at level 18 and 19, I’d be at the bottom of the foodchain again. A level 20 warlock versus level 29 say hunters has no survival chances at all. So basically both of my warlocks are dangling at the bottom (Nuriko still being level 12) and I’m largely dependant on other people to drag me through it all.
Something that did delight me was the fact that I can now join AB. Even tho I am getting raped on every possible location, it’s why being a level 20 sucks no?
A solution to getting owned I found in my voidwalker. Sacrifice is a delightful ability, and will give me a bit more survival chances. That being said, level 29 folk still hurt… A lot… A whole damn lot. I miss the fact that I don’t have any higher rank lifedrain or corruption yet, so I’m still ticking 13 of someone with 800 health (leveling gear ftl :<). So largely I”m dependant on others to drag me through it all. Not that I’m not having fun, it’s just not as fun.
I’ll be looking forward to spending most of my time like this on both my chars untill I reach the *7-*9 level brackets:
Also notice the comment from the hunter on rogue damage đ He got attacked by one and instead of sticking to the rest he ran away, telling us we let him die, to which I replied he shouldn’t have run. After that he complained about rogues doing sick damag (as hunter, complaining about rogues while you’re the most OP class in the 10-19 bracket -.-), to which I replied: they tend to do that… God that was a lovely BG, even tho I was dead most of the times.
Will keep you updated! Now I’m just lying around dead ^^
Today I went to do some 2v2 on my hunter. I’m in a team with a resto shaman (Ptisk) who is the alt of a discipline priest in our guild. He geared up his shaman for PvP and since my hunter has way better gear than my warrior I decided to team up with him and now we’re working our way through the 1200 bracket.
Let’s just say that I found out that MM Hunter/Resto Shaman 2v2 is very, very overpowered. In our first week we did 20 games and won 13, even tho we were only just playing together and this week we did 13 games so far and won 11.
While doing the games today I noticed we had won 6 games in a row, and mentioned this to my partner. He said that he would turn on the tracking for Hot Streak and I immediatly thought that that would jinx us and made us lose the game after. Fortunately it didn’t. It actually went so well, that we did win 10 games in a row and that provided us both with the achievement Hot Streak! An achievement I’ve wanted on my warrior for ages and am very proud of that I got it on my hunter.
I would like to share with you 2 games of that Hot streak. The first one being against an Arms Warrior/ Holy Paladin combination. Usually warriors scare me on my hunter. Next to rogues and feral druids they’re the ones that can reach me easily and hurt me… A lot. This particular team had their eyes set on killing my healer, giving me the advantage of free movement and thus nuking them down. In response the warrior turned his attention to me and I needed to figure out a way to get that reversed. So I went after the paladin, causing the warrior to turn his attention to my healer again. At some point (it was in Blade’s Edge Arena, you know the one with the bridge) we were under the bridge, the warrior for some reason having popped his defensive cooldowns, when an idea came to mind. I asked my dear shaman healer to do what shaman healers do best, kite the warrior around! I asked him to run around a pole, the warrior followed him, the paladin followed the warrior in an attempt to heal him and I stood at 1 side of the pole, shooting at the warrior everytime they passed by.
Now imagine this. A ghostwolf running around a pole, chased by a warrior in turn chased by a paladin. It was a ridiculous sight, but it proved to be our victory. In 3 laps around that pole I shot the warrior down to 10%. He panicked and tried to move away when he got hit by my Killshot, and had only 1% HP left. My healer popped his lava burst and killed the warrior, leaving his paladin healer at the mercy of a Hunter and a Resto Shaman. I laughed when he decided to leave the arena and wished I could’ve taped the entire arena game because it was so hilarious.
The other game is the game which has gotten us our Hot Streak achievement. Anxiously waiting in the same Blade’s Edge Arena I told my healer that we were definately going to lose this because of my bad luck. When we entered the Arena we saw a very squishy PvE geared hunter with a resto druid, a combination we had encountered 2 times before and conquered 2 times before. My healer popped Bloodlust as we stormed over the bridge to nuke down the hunter. He died in 3 seconds, the druid giving up immediatly. We couldn’t believe it, we had gotten our Hot Streak thanks to this amazingly sucky team, or well maybe just some pure luck with the Blizzard Matchmaking System.
All in all a quite productive arena day. We went up from 1100 to 1200 rating, only 100 more to go for Wrathful Belt eh?
When I step into the lowbie WSG on Fiorentin I always get this little kick of excitement. I know I will be melting faces, fearing, life draining and dotting peo
ple up. That is what a warlock is supposed to do right?
Usually just before the battle everyone buffs up, I summon my imp (imp > voidwalker, seriously… I found that out the hard way -.-) and hope to get 400 health. Due to my warlock not having level gear or any other nice gear my health is quite low. However I did get the WSG ring and staff so that makes me a happy lock đ
Anyway back to the start of the fight. Most of the times you run as a group over the graveyard and down into the midfield. No mounts, only classes that can cheat (druids, hunters, rogues, shamans) on speed and you really do feel like an army of soldiers ready to battle the enemy.
When you see the Silverwing Sentinels running, your job, your only job as lowbie warlock is to do them all up. All of them. Dot, Dot, Dot, Dot! Make them all burn with your shadowy goodness. Let them die a slow and painful death. It doesn’t matter if you get killed in the process, as long as you dot them all up. When you get the time, lifedrain one to keep yourself up to par and to be able to lifetap. Other than that just run around dotting. When you see a flag carrier, run at it, dot it, fear it, rinse and repeat. Your only job is to maim that lowbie level 15 flagcarriers face. And possible every other player in the BG.
As lowbie warlock it’s wise if you stick with the group, especially if you have no leveling gear or any other statboosting gear. Sticking with the group means you don’t stand out and will not get picked out by an overpowered level 12 hunter and damn they are stupidly OP. It also means that they are forced to spread their attention, giving YOU more time to tab and dot. Nothing more fun than a group in chaos while you laugh at your dots slowly eating away their HP. There is no running away far enough to mount in lowbie WSG, you can follow them around eternally, dotting them, lifedraining them, untill they die.
The only silly position I find myself often in is that everyone around me is dead, and then you’re an open target. And even tho some people might only be level 13, they hit hard. Especially as paladins with leveling gear… Or hunters with leveling gear… Or well anything that is physical damage with leveling gear. Pallies hit me: warlock goes SQUISH! One of the only disadvantages up till now in lowbie WSG. I’m still enjoying myself tho. Melting faces, inciting fear, and all without the use of a mount! And watching people run away dieing to your dots is the biggest satisfaction there is… Even on lvl 17.
When I started a char on Argent Dawn-EU for the Single Abstract Noun guild I chose a Warlock. Simply due to the fact that I had just read Cynwise’s post about Draintanking and wanted to try it out myself.
Now my little warlock Fiorentin is level 17, has almost 700 honorable kills and is terrorizing lowbie WSG. I enjoy playing a warlock in PvP so much (I feel so evil fearing and dotting people up and watch them die while I do an evil laugh) that I decided to start another warlock on my home server Vashj-EU. This one is a female human (since I didn’t have any anymore after faction changing my warrior) and goes by the name Nuriko. She is level 10 and already has more than 100 honorable kills on her name.
In this series of posts which will be called Reign of Terror I’ll fill you in on how I pretend to be all pro and evil in lowbie battlegrounds on both a horde and an alliance warlock. I hope you will enjoy the series. The first post is coming up this afternoon when I get home!
Today I would like to cover the first 2v2 team of the new series I’m starting about Arena Setups with you: Holy Paladin & Arms Warrior.
Paladin/Warrior has been an ancient Arena Combo dating back to the times of early TBC when Arena first came out. It’s the combo I’ve played from the start with my boyfriend in TBC and in WotLK. We have gotten as far as reaching 14** rating which earned us both the title: Challenger. Now that we’ve both faction changed to troll and bloodelf we’re starting to arena again after a season’s break.
Team Pro’s and Cons
Pro’s: A Warrior/Paladin team has a lot going for them. The biggest advantage they have is the fact that both characters wear Plate. Plate mitigates the most damage and therefore requires more damage output to get shut down. Usually an Arms warrior will walk around with about 14/15K armor in Furious/Relentless gear. A paladin will have even more due to the fact that they wear a shield.
Another big pro for the team is that Arms Warriors potentially have the biggest burst damage in Arena ingame at this very moment. They have very powerful attacks like Overpower (which is triggered on a tick from Rend or when the opponent dodges), Execute (always available below 20% health but also available after a crit due to talents), Mortal Strike which not only does massive damage but also applies a 50% healing reducement on the target and Bladestorm, probably one of the most hated abilities out there. Especially Bladestorm deals a lot of damage, but it’s also easy to avoid. Most skilled warriors will not use Bladestorm untill their opponent is about to die, or as opener when multiple people are standing together so they can do damage to all of them and force the healer to heal.
This team also has enormous survivability. Paladins can ofcourse bubble, but can also make themselves or their warrior partners very mobile. Warriors are essentially the most mobile melee there are at this moment, but Blessing of Freedom from a paladin helps them overcome many many obstacles.
Not to mention the fact that Paladins have the biggest mana pool ingame and are less likely to go oom soon and when they do they can activate Divine Plea and get all their mana back in no time. They can dispell diseases, magic and poison and can save their partners with Blessing of Protection or Hand of Sacrifice. Their heals are fast and cost hardly any mana and they can put up a shield without cooldown on their partners to protect them from incoming damage (Sacred Shield). Beacon of Light is a tool for them to heal both themselves and their partners and that makes them a very viable class in Arena.
Con’s: There are also some downsides to Warrior/Paladin teams. One of the major struggles of the team is opponents with lots of CC opportunity. You can literally chaincc a Warrior/Paladin team to death. Just chaincc 1 and nuke down the other. Warriors are very squishy without their healer so the strategy most CC teams use is CC the paladin and nuke the warrior as fast as they can.
Another weakness of the warrior/paladin team is spellcaster teams. Both classes are very fragile when it comes to spellcasters and most of the times mage/priest, mage/warlock, warlock/priest and any other combination of that will kill the Warrior/Paladin team. The reason I’m not mentioning Moonkin Druids and Elemental Shamans is because the first is hardly seen in Arena due to their squishyness and the latter’s damage is easy avoidable by a well timed spellreflect of a warrior. It also helps that neither can steal mana from the paladin or dispell magic.
Something that is a Pro aswell as a Con in Warrior/Paladin teams that a lot depends on the gear and weapon of a warrior. Warriors have the hightest scaling when it comes to obtaining new gear and especially new weapons. Upgrading from a ilevel 232 weapon to an ilevel 251 weapon can mean 300-400 damage increase per white swing which doesn’t crit. These numbers are quite high, higher than any other class in game. This makes a warrior with a really good weapon a feared opponent, but also makes a warrior with a shitty weapon easier to kill and avoid damage from. For a paladin gear is much less of an issue than for a warrior seeing as they don’t do the majority of the damage in Arena.
Warrior/Paladin Behavior in Arena
A sidenote: I can only say this out of my own experience, please comment me on it if I say it wrong.
Warrior/Paladin teams rely heavily on the melee damage of the warrior. They will always try to be on their opponents ass and usually will drag the fight into the open where they can stay in eachothers line of sight. The best distance kept between them is the distance a warrior can still use Intervene on the paladin. This is needed to get out of tough situations like 2 melee pounding on the warrior or another warrior that is bladestorming.
Warriors/Paladins are best to fight close to eachother on a spot where there is no LoS and the warrior can pound while the paladin can still heal him. The only time they benefit from LoS is when they get a caster team and when they’re smart enough to kite them around. Separation is something a warrior/paladin team fears and so it’s best if they stick together so that they can get eachother out of trouble. Mostly they will go after the melee in a melee/caster team. If not it’s just pray on the weakest and drag it out into the open. Due to the mobility of the team it’s most likely that they can get into melee range quite easily and the only way to possibly avoid this is running around in circles around an obstacle kiting the warrior around. Some warriors will follow you till the ends of the earth, other’s will decide to stop chasing something they can’t catch and bash the other’s face in. When you’re in charge range of a Warrior be sure that you will get charged/rended and possible eaten alive. It’s hard to avoid but the warrior will take full advantage of his mobility and therefore he will less likely get into trouble when people run away from him.
All in all warrior/paladin teams are very very strong. But they can also very easily be countered by smart teams. It still stands that in the top 20 at Arenajunkies, there are atleast 7 or 8 warrior/paladin teams. That is how strong they are and that is why they should not be underestimated.
So today I had an exam which was VERY early this morning. I completed my questions in half an hour and took the subway home. I kinda felt bummed to come such a long way through the cold (yes it’s cold here) and complete everything within 30 minutes. However this gave me some time to chat up with some people in the guild, seeing as I could actually go home now instead of staying at school and using the school computers.
Raidingwise it has been a calm week for me. Due to lots of schoolwork (2 papers, internet assignment and the exam from this morning) I had to cancel almost all raids on my hunter. Kinda bumming but hey, school still beats WoW when it comes to setting priorities. The only raid I did do this week was fridaynight on my paladin. My boyfriend has started up a little 10 man on friday, for alts of the guild that he’s in and where I’m invited to join on my pala to tank as well. It was a bit of a couples raid (3 couples haha) and actually it went quite well. We downed ICC’s first wing without any problems and had some nice tries on Dreamwalker, a boss we really wanted to do. It was fun and casual and it made me feel happy.
Leveling was an activity I could finally do again, my mage is now level 73 and after rediscovering her spells and abilities again (some things were a bit vague for me after not playing her for a while) I got into leveling again. I even joined a succesful random dungeon group to Azjol’Nerub which gave me a new belt and some quest rewards I could sell for monies. As my school is getting less stressful I hope to be able to level my mage a bit more and finally ding 80.
Achievements were something my attention was and still is focused on at the moment. I want the Violet Proto Drake on my hunter, she will be my 3rd char to acquire it, and last week Fool for Love ended and the Lunar Festival started. After struggling I managed to get the Fool for Love achievement on sunday, gathering bracelets really sucked, and I made a start on gathering Elders for the Lunar festival. One downside to the silly Lunar festival is the fact that your mailbox gets spammed with mail from Elders. I don’t even open the silly red envelopes anymore but just insta delete it. It’s junk and I just want to get rid of it.
Most of my time was spended on PvP the past week and weekend. I’m trying to do the BG daily everyday to gather arenapoints for my warrior and honor ofcourse and am now also PvPing on my hunter a lot. Even tho it takes getting used to (I always played Melee PvP), my hunter turns out to be a real killing machine and currently I’m on 4k honorable kills, shooting my way through varios battlegrounds.
As a closer I would like to introduce you to a lovely blog I found through Blog Azeroth. It’s a mage blog which I really love to read, the layout is very pretty and it teaches me stuff as upcoming mage! http://mischiefmagicandrocketscience.blogspot.com/
It makes me laugh and think over stuff as a starting mage, I really recommend reading it!
Blasting Away 