[DK+4xRet] Freshies and Arena Strat

[Boylston]

Well, as expected, I went 0-10 as my freshly 80 team stepped into the arena last night before the weekly reset. They have their Savage Saronite set, but only 2 of the team has L219 Garfrost Hammers, with the rest of them wielding Amphitheatre of Anguish quest reward axes. I have a few questions/requests for confirmation:

1.) Just to refresh my memory, since I haven't played arena for a while... In the newest ratings/points system, I get the same number of arena points for any rating 0->1500, correct? A 10-loss week is still worthwhile playing and I'll get as many points as a 1499 team, right?

2.) My gear-up strategy is going to be a.) Get 219 weapons for everyone, b.) Gear up my tank a bit for PvE heroic purposes (mostly done), c.) Run heroics each night to get some L232/245 Triumph badge gear, d.) Sneak into a few BGs each night in order to accumulate honor. Can anyone recommend a better order for gearing up? (Forgot VoA, looks like I should at least try to get my gang through there individually each week, yes?)

3.) As for arena strategy, I was basically mounting up and going for broke with AW + top DPS buffs going in a hope to kill someone, anyone at first and maybe win a match against some bad players. Didn't work out too well, I killed 1-2 people tops in a match before getting rolled. I know this is crummy strategy if I had gear, but I was curious what tactics people tried out with fresh, undergeared characters.

I assume that the best to hope for is some 10-loss weeks for a few weeks until I can get some decent gear? Has anyone had any kind of upward rating climb with freshies??

Thanks in advance for your thoughtful replies!

Boyl

[Zappy]

1) At 1500 or less for 10 games played and each member has at least 30% of the games played, they'll receive 344 points.

2) Heroic grinding is a good way to get at least furious pvp gear on them, along with some nice gold.

3) I've only played 3-4 weeks now on my DK/Rets and am finally starting to win some. Gear definitely helps, however mass CC is the difference breaker. Sometimes I forget to hit my mass CC button (repentance, followed by HoJ) on the first 4 arena targets, along with hungering cold. Other matches, I feel like things are going okay, but don't follow through with the DS/DS rotation. Once I remember both of those, it seems like I actually have a chance.

On a funny note, my paladins are dual-spec'd (slight changes between SoC and SoJ specs/glyphs). The first couple of weeks playing, I was so used to heroic grinding, that I rarely refresh SoC, so I ran into these matches and couldn't figure out why my burst seemed very low. I faced another DK/Ret team, and he had two of his guys stuck on the other side of a pillar, yet he still destroyed me. Once I remembered to turn on the seal, the matches were a lot closer.

Right now, I'm working on #3. Gotta play a lot more to get the rotations down in memory better so that I actually use them all. I should finally hit 1300 tonight. lol

[Stealthy]

Honor grinding will be a lot easier after patch...Shodokhan was reporting 4-6K from AV per match on the PTR.

Cheers,
S.

[Ualaa]

I'd recommend Wintergrasp, once a week as well.
Do the quests there, its pretty good honor.
And Wintergrasp marks have some fairly decent pieces when gearing up.

[Zugdud]

I would skip BGs all together, unless you enjoy playing them. Personally I haven't stepped foot into a BG on my current team ((I typically only run them with friends for fun)). In my experience, chain farming heroics to buy the 5/5 furious armor with emblems while using stonekeeper shards to buy accessories is far,far more efficient. Wintergrasp is also good to run when possible in between as the marks can be used on some good placeholder gear , and the honor per hour ratio is pretty good if your faction tends to win most of them

[Boylston]

Peeking over at Ellay's team, it looks like he's gearing them out with PvE stuff (or he's got dual sets and is logging out in PvE gear).

Ellay, if you're lurking--- Are you doing this because it's cheaper to buy that gear with Badges and hoping to earn arena upgrades through actual arena play? Or is it a matter of being able to more efficiently badge farm with some starter PvE gear?

Inquiring minds want to know...

[Dorffo]

He could just be collecting both sets =p

[remanz]

DK can probably cheat with PVE gears. Paladins, not. Low resilience, you die too quickly and you don't have time to react with bubble. Damage wise, PVE provides minor minor improvement over PVP gears (unless you got 2 pieces of t10).

Blizzard has pretty much separated PVP and PVE paths in this game. The 2 rarely cross now. Damage is too high without resilience. a warlock can kill my 5800 GS PVE restore shaman within a fear duration without even trying (some random bolts crit me for 18k per hit).

[Littleburst]

Honor grinding will be a lot easier after patch...Shodokhan was reporting 4-6K from AV per match on the PTR.

Cheers,
S.

According to patch notes honor would double at max, so good luck at farming AV while getting more then 4k for an AV? I'd asume 4,5k should be max or i'm missing out on something.

[Mokoi]

when we force a resource win on Bloodlust we get 2000-2500 honor from sheer kills and stuff, especially easy with multiple boxers in the same game. takes longer, but it has the advantage of being RIDICULOUSLY fun (which is why we play the game) and good honor. so that would be 4k-5k honor now.