3.2 Arena - Can't tell a difference
Finally got my paladin online and was anxious to do arenas with all the new changes.
Last week we finally broke 1700, with an MMR of around 1900 which put us against some more competitive teams. We were still moving up but I called it at 1708 because I wanted to get the pants (not expecting to ever hit 1750). Was looking to easily hit 1750, and maybe 1850 if we're lucky with this new patch.
Unfortunately, I can't tell any difference at all. It's still the same aoe, fan of knives, fear bombing spam fest it was before. Ret paladins are still putting out insane amounts of damage, as are warriors, DK's and pretty much any other melee. Any team with a fan of knives rogue is still a guaranteed loss. Surprisingly, a lot of DK's are still PVP'ing as frost, in frost presence, and pump out a lot of damage and simply.. wont... die.
Then there are the geared destro warlocks. Get a team down to 2 people (druid/priest and warlock), and watch your team get picked off 1 by 1 by an unkillable clothy who can eat 4x lava burst, 4x CL, 4x frost shock and still be at 40% hp. Chaos bolt, incinerate, and conflag are bursting about as hard as 3 of your shaman at the same time.
The gimmick teams between 1500-2100 still rock multiboxers by taking advantage of "aoe everything" in wrath. It's embarassing to even have the priests spamming holy nova because they don't even need to heal - not like your shaman are casting anything due to spam aoe CC + fan of knives silence.
The top 20 teams (which we had the "privilege" of playing against when we hit 1900 MMR) aren't willing to risk a game to gimmick tactics - but they are so geared and so coordinated you will likely still lose, just not in 7 seconds like a aoe spamming fok team.
Reckoning is probably not the best battlegorup to multibox in, considering the incredibly small pool of teams (it's 1. 1400-2000 MMR teams we destroy and get 2 points for, 2. any rating gimmick team that destroys us, or 3. 2500+ mmr that outgears us), but I'm starting to feel like there's an anti-multibox guide or chat room for our BG - anyone who has played us one time before comes back with new specs, fok rogues, etc., and even people who we've never seen default to "just spam every aoe you have" strategy - which works very well.
Have put in 519 games this season, quite a learning experience and have had some great times, but I'm out of fresh ideas. Rush tactics, mouse-button cast sequences for the insta-gib, defensive strategies, rotations for thunderstorm/fire nova/earthbind, etc. have failed to give us significant advantages. Have actually found that I do better by forgetting all about TS,fire nova and earthbind and just trying to nuke old school style like Aelli's videos at level 70 where you could just stand in one place and spam lightning bolt. But I've got all kinds of strategies that would work if I wasn't aoe CC'd the entire game, but it seems that aoe everything is now a commodity that Blizzard felt fit to give to nearly every class in the game. I can see why 5v5 just isn't very popular anymore.
