Meanwhile, in the Arena…
Great evening again, albeit we lost one more than the previous week, we gained 65 points in rating.
Some low lights:
- Now that we’re above 1600, every single shadow priest knows that they have to burn the pallie down to mana dry in order to win. I just haven’t found a way around this, except to delay the inevitable by bubbling.
- My stamina is still way too low. We faced a mirror of ourselves, pallie + warlock. The opposing pallie’s 3k more health made all the difference in the world.
- Wait, that’s it for the low stuff.
Highlights:
- We still get quite a few shadow priests who forget they have healing and stay in shadow form the whole match. Steptoe eats these for breakfast
- We are starting being able to withstand a pallie / warrior duo, which had been troublesome for us since we started out.
- Due to our battlegroups emptiness, we faced, twice in a row, a team with a shadow priest and a rogue. The latter had a rating of 2026, fully epixed out including 3/5 merciless glad and one glad piece, and, get this, 2 Merciless Gladiator’s Slicers and a Merciless Gladiator’s War Edge. While it does seem odd that he would have two slow swords instead of a slow and a fast one to my level 52 rogue eyes, he was wearing a damn powerful setup. Fortunately for us, his shadow priest buddy was of the “never pop out of shadow form” sort, and, to me, rather unskilled. Steptoe really put a huge pressure one the pure guy, I stunned and arcane torrented at the right time. At one point, the rogue had me down to 200 HP when I finally fumbled my way to my bubble button. The priest was close to death himself, so I holy shocked and hammer of wrathed him to cinders (Steptoe complained I stole his kill) then healed myself up. And then it became funny. Energized by the loss of his partner, the rogue went berzerk (you know, like those furbolgs you can kill just NW of Astranaar), finished me off, and then started to exact revenge upon Steptoe. It became quite worrisome: When I died Steptoe was at 15% health and close to OoM, the rogue at 8%… and his health was dropping about half as fast as Steptoe. My awesome arena partner finally delivered the coup de grace, propulsing our team beyond a third rematch.
- A game with a shadow priest and a shammie, Steptoe for some reason didn’t want to focus on the priest first. I got mana dried within seconds and bit it, so he had to finish off the priest at half health and the shammie by himself. Afterwards he claimed he needed a bit of a challenge (while I was close to a heart attack the whole time).
- Remember how I stated that mages were severly gimped in 2v2 in my Dummy’s Guide to Arena? Well, having a warlock in our team surely didn’t help the two we faced. Both teams found themselves devoid of their light-blue coloured member faster than I can type this sentence, and we made short work of the priest respecitvely warrior they were being paired up with. Fun for us, not for them I suspect.
All in all, a great evening. The best part of it, no matter how we perform next week I’ll be able to get the purple arena shoulders and get rid of the final green piece in my kit. After that, chestpiece and helm will need some serious work.
On the weapon side, I’ve decided to stick to my Essence Focuser for the time being, I’ll get the Season 2 healing mace after price drops next season.
Finally, if we keep where we are or just climb a tiny bit more, we might even end up Season 2 with the equivalent of a Rival title, something quite beyond my expectations when starting Arena.
Essence Focuser? :p STA STA STA! I’m still using the Blade’s Edge “Ring of Blood” 1H Mace on my Pally over Essence Focuser.
Learn how to dodge Mana Burns early on. Learn how to use Bubble in order to get Shadow Priests who “play by the book” to try and spend time and mana on Mass Dispel. You can be amazed at how many times I’ve bubbled at 60-70% and pillar LOS, using the time to dodge 2-3 Mass Dispels instead of standing there stationary healing like every other Pally does—and had the Priest keep trying while his partner went down.
Good point. I still need to work massively on my own mobility, for that matter.
Great post. And the comment thereby Megan made me think of how things look on paper, about the tactics we use.
What we do is all well and good, we get good results and are improving but we should look properly at the reasons for our losses and in our wins, what could we have done to win faster,
For example, that lock+pally, although the pally was much better geared, and they seemed experienced, we still made too many mistakes, I used too few fears and I didn’t drain enough. I’m not used to the imba drain build especially in arena and I most definitely do not drain enough, that in turn would lift some pressure from you.
And the priest+rogue, the priest might as well not have been there
but once he was down (speaking for myself here) I got complacent and was not expecting how strong the rogue was and they almost won despite the advantage, again because I figured, ’2v1? lol nerf this’ll be np’.
Bit of a ramble there but they are things I will develop further at a later stage when some free time finds itself on my street.
Well, about the priest + rogue team, remember, that was our second match against them and the first one we had killed them fast and clean without too much trouble.
Just checked arena ladders.
We’re exatly 5 rating short of the “Rival” title. LOL.
Still there was no reason to assume it would be easy. crazy things happen in that there arena