Step into the Arena - First thoughts (tbc...)

[Deekhay]

So I finally did it, I stepped into the Arena yesterday night with my 4 shaman and another person player Druid or Paladin (same person).
They're all 18-20k hp, around 2.2 - 2.5k sp self buffed, although also high variations in terms of resilience (938-850-580-460).
Only two of them are fully pvp geared with all you can buy without doing arena (honor, emblems, wg gear,...).

I did a 9-18, which was positively surprising. I really expected to be totally destroyed. The big contrast here is that either I faced teams that totally destroyed me in a few seconds or teams that I totally owned pretty fast (well, at least 3-4 of them, turning the rest of the match to be some pursuit thing....).

I haven't read much of the new system, I have to, I don't understand it really well as far as I've seen it, but one thing that comes to my mind from the S4 which I played for a couple of months is that I find the matchmaking system to be friendlier to newcoming teams and the notion of not losing rating points (although a much slower climb) is quite nice at least from a psychological point of view.

With this little experience I still don't figure out much how to handle Dalaran and Orgrimmar Arenas since I never knew them, so I'd appreciate some feedback on how you do it.

We did much better when my friend played the paladin (7-11) which might be related to the fact that he can survive longer (better gear too).
I intend to, during this week, try also two other healers, a Priest and a Shaman, both friends of mine too and try to figure out what the best compo might be for me. I also have a huge learning curve ahead of me. AoE is less a problem in Arena than what I usually face in AV (because there's less people doing it ) but the group stuns are still my worst enemy.
Some teams I lost against earned 2 to 5 points and it was (naturally) impossible to down at least one of them.

I have a big problem with my display setup and I can't seem to find an optimized way of doing it. I run with two computers, two monitors (main on one, alts on the other) and everytime I lose my main it's really disturbing the drastic change of view as well as passing to a smaller (much) window.

I hope to keep updating this post sharing my experiences, since they're utterly basic so far and would also appreciate any kind of feedback from the community.

Cheers and have a great day!

[Extreme]

i think without a mortal strike debuff int won't work very well cause the dmg of "only" 3 elementalshamans is "very" low, so you can't oneshot somebody.
play with 4 shamans or pick up a class with a mortal strike debuff,i think hunters might be the best to play with a 3boxing shaman cause they have a lot of defensive abilitys and an instant range ms-effect.
5 dps(3 or 4 boxing+individual player(s)) will also work if you heal a little bit and if you have enough focus/burstdmg.

[Deekhay]

i think without a mortal strike debuff int won't work very well cause the dmg of "only" 3 elementalshamans is "very" low, so you can't oneshot somebody.
play with 4 shamans or pick up a class with a mortal strike debuff,i think hunters might be the best to play with a 3boxing shaman cause they have a lot of defensive abilitys and an instant range ms-effect.
5 dps(3 or 4 boxing+individual player(s)) will also work if you heal a little bit and if you have enough focus/burstdmg.

I play with elemental 4 shaman as stated in my post .

[Dominian]

A skilled healer is always better no matter class tbh!

Ive played with a paladin and the main problem is that mass dispell + purge pwns you hard, the paladin was realy bad however so this vary. It should be pretty easy vs teams without offensive dispellers, they are rare however.

Priests feels better for me atm with PW:shield and lots of buffs + aoe fear wich should be used right. I never played with a decent paladin imafraid and they seem to be rather rare!

Misery contains lots of multiboxers so most knows how to counter you effective.

Dalaran sewers is a realy good arena if you turn the positioning into your favour and orgrimmar arena is superb since most teams dont have a clue how to position themselfs. Ive seen one team using orgrimmar to the fullest and im extremley suprised how good the pillars/fire can be taken advantage off.

[Deekhay]

Dalaran sewers is a realy good arena if you turn the positioning into your favour and orgrimmar arena is superb since most teams dont have a clue how to position themselfs. Ive seen one team using orgrimmar to the fullest and im extremley suprised how good the pillars/fire can be taken advantage off.

Dalaran - I have a issue here. If they just charge, it's ok, either fast loss or fast victory but if they hide, it's kinda delicate. Standing on top of the platform is still the best place I found, but vulnerable to the hide and seek game behind the boxes. Standing near the platform but in the water, just makes you too vulnerable to every ranged aoer standing on it and you don't have los to them. How do you guys do it?

Orgrimmar - Most teams I faced (again, very small amount of experience) either hid behind the first pillar or just made some kind of square/triangle around my team with melees in the middle. How do you handle your positioning here?

Thanks again!

[Dominian]

Dalaran sewers is a realy good arena if you turn the positioning into your favour and orgrimmar arena is superb since most teams dont have a clue how to position themselfs. Ive seen one team using orgrimmar to the fullest and im extremley suprised how good the pillars/fire can be taken advantage off.

Dalaran - I have a issue here. If they just charge, it's ok, either fast loss or fast victory but if they hide, it's kinda delicate. Standing on top of the platform is still the best place I found, but vulnerable to the hide and seek game behind the boxes. Standing near the platform but in the water, just makes you too vulnerable to every ranged aoer standing on it and you don't have los to them. How do you guys do it?

Orgrimmar - Most teams I faced (again, very small amount of experience) either hid behind the first pillar or just made some kind of square/triangle around my team with melees in the middle. How do you handle your positioning here?

Thanks again!

I always consider what the enemy team consists of and if they got a DK and you notice that theyr starting to take down grounding totems i always go agressive, getting death griped out of my totem farm makes me lose. Aka stay close to the DK and you cant be death gripped that far atleast.

Just purge purge purge purge if they play the los game, it makes bad teams do ton of mistakes and getting thoose kills is easy when all the buffs are gone.

You can also go around the box and thunderstorm them all down, lots of teams uses the same strategy everytime and if you can screw it up the cant adapt. (yes im refering to thoose brainless cleave teams) :P

Orgrimmar arena is a hard issue, since spreading out do wonders against cleave but fear makes your slaves run even longer off! We ususaly drop a fear on the enemy team in the start, it brings the trinket of cooldown and we got a new fear in 30 seconds. (unless there is a tremor totem though)

[Deekhay]

Some update on my progress:

Actually 1249 rating, 96 matches played (37-59). Doing much better than I expected, so I'm happy with it.
95% of the matches are either too easy or too hard, so what I'm saying here is that 5% are fun .

Can't say that I'm having particular problems with this or that comp, lost with all kinds, won to all kinds, still lack experience to really judge this. I know that I faced and extremely low ranked 5 rogue team and it was sad... combat itself lasted something like 5s... This one button class must be nerfed lol

I have lots of trouble with Dalaran arena, I still don't know how to play it... where to start, where to progress, etc... I feel damn vulnerable there and I lose most of the games there even against teams I beat on every other... I have a problem here...

The arena unit frames Gladius is so bug it's killing me... If someone knows of a good option and some kind of spell alerter, please say so...

Besides some live streams, are there any current season 4 boxers+healer movies around? I need a lot of info, please share your experiences.

I make a lot of mistakes, really a lot, being the main using the BIG EXPLOSION too early or wrong target and so on... I fail Well, things can only get better ^^

Cheers!

[merujo]

I dunno, perhaps it's just me but, normaly i just get rush'd and stomped to death. The only kill i get is the instagib (sometimes), the rest is just retarded how they fill up the HP
Anyways, im going to do the same i did on S4, gear up the max i can, and start to blame me for loosing, instead of the gear.

[heyaz]

So I finally did it, I stepped into the Arena yesterday night with my 4 shaman and another person player Druid or Paladin (same person).
They're all 18-20k hp, around 2.2 - 2.5k sp self buffed, although also high variations in terms of resilience (938-850-580-460).
Only two of them are fully pvp geared with all you can buy without doing arena (honor, emblems, wg gear,...).

I did a 9-18, which was positively surprising. I really expected to be totally destroyed. The big contrast here is that either I faced teams that totally destroyed me in a few seconds or teams that I totally owned pretty fast (well, at least 3-4 of them, turning the rest of the match to be some pursuit thing....).

I haven't read much of the new system, I have to, I don't understand it really well as far as I've seen it, but one thing that comes to my mind from the S4 which I played for a couple of months is that I find the matchmaking system to be friendlier to newcoming teams and the notion of not losing rating points (although a much slower climb) is quite nice at least from a psychological point of view.

With this little experience I still don't figure out much how to handle Dalaran and Orgrimmar Arenas since I never knew them, so I'd appreciate some feedback on how you do it.

We did much better when my friend played the paladin (7-11) which might be related to the fact that he can survive longer (better gear too).
I intend to, during this week, try also two other healers, a Priest and a Shaman, both friends of mine too and try to figure out what the best compo might be for me. I also have a huge learning curve ahead of me. AoE is less a problem in Arena than what I usually face in AV (because there's less people doing it ) but the group stuns are still my worst enemy.
Some teams I lost against earned 2 to 5 points and it was (naturally) impossible to down at least one of them.

I have a big problem with my display setup and I can't seem to find an optimized way of doing it. I run with two computers, two monitors (main on one, alts on the other) and everytime I lose my main it's really disturbing the drastic change of view as well as passing to a smaller (much) window.

I hope to keep updating this post sharing my experiences, since they're utterly basic so far and would also appreciate any kind of feedback from the community.

Cheers and have a great day!

Dalaran I still don't quite have a strategy for. I did learn very fast that the stairs strategy is bad... with a few AOE cc's, fears, etc. you have shaman on the sides, out of LoS, and pretty much just a disaster. if teams want to rush, I run back to the corner. For box humpers, I get on the sides and have had decent luck there. We have wrecked a few 1900+ teams who wanted to hide behind boxes the whole time. We ghost wolved over to their box, set up totems, and drew them out. The angles for them are a bit funny until they all get situated so I have been able to easily blow up a couple warriors and DK's that get in my LoS a few seconds before their healers can react.

For orgrimmar arena... I'm not sure what that is, I'm assuming you mean ring of valor? That one, I'm still not sure. I have tried:

1. Standing near the back, popping bloodlust, and going after it. Unfortunately most of the time we get a warrior charge + aoe fear, and it's a bloodbath from there. if they don't react quite that fast, I can do a bit better. However, if you're still playing <1300 teams, this strategy is probably the best. You can wreck entire teams in about 12 seconds. Then it just quits working

2. Running to the side. This worked a few times until we noticed my back shaman was always getting chared or HoJ'd. Three shaman free to nuke just wasn't enough to take down geared teams (around 2k rating).

And what we're using now, with decent results:
3. Paladin runs to the side alone, I charge straight in and thunderstorm + earthbind the team. This throws them off a bit, but it also throws me off as I have to find where my target went (since they all go different directions). if I can get a good lock on my target, we can win. We have also noticed when the paladin runs to the side he often gets targeted and they run over there or at least 1-2 DPS will. That's a guaranteed win... my paladin can stay alive for ages, and with no CC or distractions I can nuke like there's no tomorrow.

This is just what I've learned so far, we're only 1515 but still learning. Our battlegroup is fairly dead most of the teams we play are at least 1900, and even monday nights we'll get the same 2100+ teams over and over.

[Deekhay]

Just a small update without many matches played so far this week.

Dalaran is still a pain, I lose there with teams I win against elsewhere. Don't really know how to address this arena, I have the feeling that I'm extremely vulnerable or/and innefective it really doesn't matter where I place myself. If I hide behind any of the boxes, they just squeeze me attacking from both sides and even aoeing from the lower part.

High geared pve teams are troublesome. Their healers are stringer than any pvp healer and their mana last forever :/.