Hey guys,

I just started doing Arena's with my 4 Shamans a week and a half ago. I've read a few new posts by people and I'm having the same experiences overall.

My first week my holy pally partner and I went something like 6-12. We dropped to a 1420 rating. My partner has another paladin friend that couldn't believe I was 4 boxing, so he joined the team. After just a couple wins and losses he decided it was really interesting and he was excited to try again as I gear up. I had really crappy gear at the time, barely over 400 spell dmg. I spent a whole week gearing up with honor and badge gear. My guys are hovering around 700 spell dmg with my lead at 800. Close to 300 res with everyone too. The 2nd week we climbed back to 1500. Just last night i noticed the 2nd paladin left my team, but my original partner (a co-worker) and I played and we're 18-9 for the week. We peaked at around 1570 but go knocked down to 1549. I bought my S4 pants before we got pushed under 1550 though. 8)

Some things I've noticed:

Teams with 2 or 3 healers are tough. They stagger their healers so that one is in range of their DPS while the other is floating out of my LOS but in LOS to heal the original healer. The floating healer will bounce in and out helping heal their DPSers or their main healer. I've noticed a tremendous difference on how much pressure I can put on a healer heavy team by upping my overall teams dmg from 400 to 700.

Resing sucks so much ass. There were a few games taht I just didn't pay attention to them resing people right in front of me. I blame that on my newbness. I'm keeping calmer now as I play and my increased resilience has alllowed me to keep my head up and scan the environment more. But last night we were up against a team with 2 paladins, 2 warriors and a resto shaman. They had S3 gear on and were REALLY patient. The game went on for like 20 minutes. They would send a warrior (sometimes both) in with shields up and spell reflect ready. Sometimes I'd pew pew them and sometiems i'd ignore them and reset totems, but this little send-the-dwarf in game got old really fast. Finally one of the warriors hung in too long and i busted his ass and ran out to camp the body. The 3 res'ers broke up into a triangular position and pillar humped trying to get res's out. FINALLY i messed up and they resd the warrior and we started the match over. After another long mini-game of yoyo dwarf warrior I busted his ass again. Same thing... they were REALLY patient and res'd the bastard. My partner and I about lost it when he was res'd. I rushed to the spot and tried to kill him but a heal landed right when i shocked, he was at like 5% again but i couldn't put him away. Another round of heals landed on him and I tried to bust the shaman down with my em/ns but his resilience was too much to one shot without opening up with lightning bolts. ARGH. Anyway, instead of restarting the battle I was chasing the shaman down, got seperated from my healer and they nailed my paladin. After he went down i heard the blood lust pop up and the warriors made short work outta my shamans with their twohanders.

But yeah, lots of games against good opponents are these LOS games. I'm starting to not want to kill anyone unless they are standing someplace that i can easily protect.

Teams that are easy to beat are typically the ones that get ancy and rush. Although there are the over-geared teams that rush and waste a shaman in less than 5 seconds. That's hard to stop too.

My best was a 9-2 run with that paladin that left the team. He's in a 3v3 team that was 2000+ last season, so he had really good gear and experience. My current healer and I have much better communication. He's in all PVE gear though. Some Black Temple gear. I feel pretty good about having well geared healers, so I hope to break 1600 next week.