Utility vs Damage, Thoughts & opinions going into Arena S2

Well, after trying some PvP with the new trinket changes and gear, as a fire mage its interesting to say the least.

I'm trying to keep a balanced mix between crit/sta/resilience, despite resilience hurting your crit allot as we creep towards 400 resil being the norm for most characters, I've been selfish and gone with the silk instead of dread, either way i think I'm going to put 12sta in my gladiator gear.

Part of me regrets not taking the stamina Dreadweave, as this is what I consider the perfect item to help you survive and win the game as a TEAM, its kind of like sword vs mace for warrior, IMO sword is for yourself and mace is for teamplay, same with rogues. I'm a mess at the moment, no money to respec to W/E utility even though I think its the stronger option for me to take

Doing heavy damage is alright as a mage, but utility wins them the game in my eyes, its easy to see why AP/Frost is the best combination for 'coordinated nukes' but i don't know, theres always been something about it that deters me away from it, mage is there for utility, and being AP Frost gives it that one big burst that can change the game, however I still prefer water elemental spec for Arena, so I really cant decide what to go with.

My current plan is to make a 5v5 team and for the time being stick with fire/DB, its still a nice spec for taking enemy DPS off your healers and giving them some breathing space, surprisingly enough in most of the games I've played I haven't been targeted as much as I thought I would. I think most of the teams just automatically presume I have IB. I'm thinking heavy stamina route with nice resilience, utility fire mage, the trinket is a nice boost for survivability, for example if the other team has insane maceproc deepthunder warriors x2 (that thing procs all the time), then that trinket could be a savior at times, I'll see how it goes.

I bet I'll end up going water elemental again, but for now, I need to get some arena games going whatever the spec, and up until 2100 I don't think it will matter that much anyway

heh, Drake & Gladiator Title, just!

After transferring to Stormscale I didnt have much time to establish myself in a 5v5 team, like I said it wasnt even a plan for me to play Arena again, I was going to stop play, but I got the itch again.

The Drake & Title was a dead cert for me in my Vashj team, but ofcourse I like to do things the hard way, seems I scraped it by the skin of my teeth, with 1 game being enough to put me below the 20% played rule, it dosent come much closer than that, does it? Gonna go and see what setup to go with now in Area 52, i'll post how it goes later :)

I'm well aware many others can achieve this and its not hard, but I consider it quite an achievement for someone who has only been on the server a few weeks, i'm more than pleased with it

Reclaiming the Arena title, is it worth it? 4 days left

My new 5v5 arena team isn't the #1 of teams, but I think we have potential. The main problem is that we're never in sync so we need to get online times sorted, if people can be online at the same time, then perhaps we can get some good games going. As it stands we're only 2044, but considering the amount of time we've been playing I class that as alright, i'm hoping we can carry on climbing, but like I said, online times have been very bad and we've not been in sync at all this week (i've not had the chance to get any games going with the rest). Hopefully we can play tonight, ideally im hoping for a late charge at the drake, it wouldve been a free course meal had I stayed on Vashj with my old team, but ofcourse I like to do things the hard way!

I have 4/5 gladiator, the 2 hander and some random BoE's from Hall of Legends and Battlecast Pants, I've been in the same EQ for the last month or two since I transferred from Vashj. I didn't bother with the Gladiator legs because I wasnt in any serious Arena team at the time and my point income wasnt that significant, luckily I had huge point gains early season 1 so I was able to get most of the equip early in the season.

So what do I have to lose if we do go for a late charge in the top 0.5% of battlegroup? Nothing really, I have 5k banked and around 60k honor banked, if I wanted to go all or nothing with the team, be it 2300 or 1900 from some losing streak I could do it and there would be absolutely nothing to lose, so if we get some good games going tonight then hopefully we will be in with a chance.

The only downfall is though, our paladin is actually really good but he's mostly blues, his manapool is hurting, other than this most of the team is pretty much decked out, for a quickly built, or arguably PuG arena team, thats not so bad.

We run best with the same setup that my Vashj team had. Like I said. Pala/War/War/Priest/Mage. I might respec 17/0/44 for the last few days and play mostly utility Mage

I like how Ming claims you're a scrub if you don't have XXXX arena rating, no doubt in my mind my previous team could have been 2500 with ease, but not everyone plays PURELY for a arena rating, so circumstances change, you have to take this into account too...

Rebuilding a 5v5 team, hunger to reclaim the 2400+

After being out of an arena team for quite some time, it gave me the itch to want to start playing again, one of the perfect comparisons I can think of would be Jay Z claiming he was retiring from rap at the 'top of his game', his status was at an all time high, and he had nothing more to prove, but once he stepped down from his throne of being the King of New York he started to get the itch again and so similar it was for me after being in a 2400+ team on Vashj, I started to feel like it was becoming more of a chore than fun. I kind of regret not playing in the EU event finals with my Vashj team, as we didn’t even get to see what our team could have achieved, we had a great setup that worked well for us. It wasn’t your typical assist target > nuke specced team, it was a 'built to last' team.

(Frein,Dassantwo,Grimtung,Hubris and myself) -> War/War/Priest/Pala/Mage is one of the best setups I work with, we had some great players and occasionally switched to rogue instead of war (Bartkn), but for the bulk of our rated-play times it was the dual Warrior combo, some of our lategames ended as Pala/War/War standing, and we could still pull back in 3v4 situations, Warrior is just so strong in certain situations lategame with the rage buildup and buffs packs an insane punch towards the end and offers extreme lastable dps that dosent need any downtime, even if we didn’t have the pala standing endgame our 2 tauren warriors took one hell of a beating in the dying moments

So after I went to Stormscale I wasn’t intent on searching for a team, it wasn’t the original plan I had, but I started to get the itch again, its not like you can find competitive world pvp currently in this game and I needed a gap to fill. So I joined a Shamans 5v5 team on the server, we had unlucky logging times so hadn’t been in sync much, a few days back we started playing our first games, we ended up going without the shaman and with a similar setup to my Vashj team, War/War/Priest/Pala/Mage

Only difference though, I’m Dragon's Breathe Spec instead of my Vashj spec 17/0/44 (Water Elemental) - Many people would argue that AP Frost is a much more viable spec to take since you get the coordinated nuke off with the 2x Warr's DPS on a focused target and it could be deadly, however I disagree, its not all about combinations or tactics, its about what works best for YOUR team, and this for me was 17/0/44 at the time

Anyway, I stuck with DB (mainly because i don't have the gold to respec anymore) we climbed up to a 2k rating with my Stormscale team of Orcgo, Yrly, Galla Shaden and myself, and me as this heavy fire spec, i'm hoping we get more time to play this week so hopefully we can get some more good results, i'll admit though I was missing the role of utility in arena badly, full on sheeping/detect magic, easy icelance debuffs and taking targets off the healer can seem boring, but believe me its equally as usefull if not moreso than just doing plain old DPS with the occasional sheep/CS thrown in, not to mention the winters proc off icelance is free debuffs to mess with their paladins

If you get focused by the other team and they don't manage to nuke you down as a blazing speed mage it can be very beneficial lategame for us (as we saw in oldtimes vs Madbaal from Jacklins old team, a blazing speed mage with Manky giving him a trap to run around), its a huge plus BS kiting 2 or more targets from the other team and being able to pull a sheep off, although we lack the awesome BoF rotation that my previous Pala from Testify had, but it still has potential, i hope we can get some more GG's in before tuesday