Kill order

[Vicker]

My three death knights are 80 now, so I will be running 3v3 arenas with them. I was just wondering what kill order people use when multiboxing. Do you go for healers first or dps?

[lans83]

I haven't run Arena yet, neither solo nor multiboxing, but I would assume to plow down their healer first. Then their dps, then tank if they brought one along. Just hope that tank doesn't turn out to be a Tankidin. With your 3xDKs, you should be fine. What spec are you goin for with them btw?

[algol]

I use a weighted approach based on how easy a target is to kill and how much its death will hurt the other side.

Sometimes I kill people just because it will be really, really funny.

[Vicker]

I haven't run Arena yet, neither solo nor multiboxing, but I would assume to plow down their healer first. Then their dps, then tank if they brought one along. Just hope that tank doesn't turn out to be a Tankidin. With your 3xDKs, you should be fine. What spec are you goin for with them btw?

I don't mean to be a dick, but if you haven't run arena yet then why are you giving advise about arenas? Any team that brings a tankadin or any other sort of tank to an arena battle is not a threat and would be the first sign of an easy win. Tank specs do not belong in hardcore pvp.

I use a weighted approach based on how easy a target is to kill and how much its death will hurt the other side.

Sometimes I kill people just because it will be really, really funny.

This sounds like a good tactic, and is pretty much what I've been doing, but sometimes it's hard for me to make this call on the fly. Does it hurt the team more to lose a squishy healer or a squishy dps?

[slash]

I'd say try and burst down a squishy dps first. Will reduce the chance of losing any of your chars a lot. Then if you have enough burst, take out another dps. If they only have a healer left up then you've won.

If you take out the healer first, they still have two dps left which could beat your team once your initial co-ordinated burst is over.

Of course it really depends on what classes you are facing and will vary between different combinations, every time you lose, think about what you could have done better and whether a different kill order would have more chance of success. The more you play, the more experienced you become and you'll instinctively know which class to kill first.

[puppychow]

There are classes that have a lot of "save me" cooldowns, once they blow those they become much easier to kill. So for example if you were fighting a RMP (rogue mage priest) all 3 have some great cooldowns, like cloak/vanish/blind, iceblock/nova/blink, pain-supression. So you may want to open up on the mage to force heals/PS/iceblock, quickly switch to the rogue when mage blocks, then try and switch quickly to the priest and get a kill in when the rogue vanishes.

Remember that most teams you face are gonna be on vent so they are gonna be yelling at each other, the more you switch targets around the more confusing it is going to be for them.

I'm running 3 DKs on the arena test realm, I am absolutely horrible in PVP/arenas but yesterday I won 4 games (out of 10) using the "1 button DK macro". Its a ridiculous macro that combines all the DK skills into a single /castrandom button, funny as hell. I'm just playing 200 games to get the murloc pet, but DKs are pretty OP in arena. Sadly they are getting nerfed quite a bit in 3.1

Oh and in my games I'd just start attacking whoever happened to come out first (usually hunter or warrior), then quickly switch to the healer after a few seconds and burn them down a bit, then switch to whoever seems the weakest (druid, hunter, shaman, mage) and try to get a kill in. Obviously only worked 4 times but I had fun

[heyaz]

On double healer teams I always went for a healer.. usually after a thunder storm or some fire nova totems that put eveyrone's health down a bit. even with cross healing it was an instant kill on the healer. Those teams don't have enough dps to burst me down without their healers.

On 4 dps teams (or 2dps in the case of 3's, i guess) it's easy to take out the most threatening dps.. usually a boomkin or mage. A single healer just couldn't keep them up.

[Kaynin]

It all depends on your own ability to nuke and survivability.

For example, if you are low on healers or you have no healer. Your main concern is incapacitating their DPS.

If you have sufficient burst, you kill DPS first. If you have CC but not enough burst. You cc the DPS (Just try your best to avoid getting damage through any means) as you kill the healer. The very start of the fight. (Not start of arena, but the very moment you or they engage in the arena). Also can mean a change of strategy is required. Sometimes you would find yourself into a position to momentarily move any one char out of sight of any other char. These mistakes are rarely made on high rated but can be regularly seen on low-average rating. If you play 3 dk's. I think a good 'start' position would be behind or inbetween any objects. Lure them to one side of the object by posing on that side of the object and be prepared to pull and move out of line of sight if they're ranged and have burst dps, for example. But I'm guessing now, never played 3 dk's. It's up to you to find strats that work for you best.

The key to success in arena is quite simple. (The execution is the hard part.)

1. Patience. Never rush a game. And try to learn from every fight. (Not what you did wrong, but what you could have done to prevent it.)
2. Quantity over quality. Play games, many games, many many games. The more games you play, the more experience you will get. If that means you will drop all the way to 1200 at first, don't bother your head about it. If you only play 10 games a week, chances are you won't improve quickly. Play a 100 a week and you will most definatly see improvement.

When I did 5v5's in TBC (quad shammy), I pretty much sucked at the beginning. First week, 1 win 9 losses. I didn't feel like continueing and stopped. Second week it started the same, but I was like, argh, I can do this. Kept playing games and more games. Eventually I ended that week with approximatly 70 losses and 40 wins. But the last 40 games had like a 80% win chance and got me back to 1600 rating in my second week. Anyhow, I kept that up for a few weeks. Just playing, studying, learning. I haven't stopped climbing since. My aim was always to end at least 50 rating above my last weeks rating. I was still gearing up so didn't want to aim too high. Some weeks I easily got 100 rating more. I was 1900+ rating when Patch 3.0 started and screwed up arena, but the very last week before the patch I still climbed 85 rating. I've no doubt I would've reached 2k+ rating soon enough had the patch come a little later. :P What I'm saying is. Don't give up. Working out strategies and learning to play your characters in dynamic situations takes time. Find out why other teams beat you and devise strategies that would prevent them from doing just that. Work on perfecting those strategies and I'm sure you will be able to see success.

I'm not sure how high 3 dk's can potentially go. But I've no doubt you should be able to hold your own at 1500's/1600's, which is respectable enough as a multiboxer. :P

[Vicker]

Thanks very much for all the advice. It's encouraging to hear that you did so poorly in the beginning, Kaynin. Hopefully I can figure out how to get this to work well enough to see the kind of success you've had.