Entrapment cheese is definitely something that needs to be looked at, why is it that entrapment seems forever broken one way or the other? As a rogue, at first I loved Blade's Edge arena. Until every team with a hunter rushes to the middle, entraps the center and uses the pillars as advantage. Not being able to sprint, clos or vanish over is pretty imbalanced. And staying back and not engaging is going to cost you some offensive ground, just don't agree with that being fair gameplay.

My 5v5 is mostly physical damage based, with MS and Wound not stacking anymore and the nature of healing in most teams I've found that using Slice N Dice is my best first initial use of combo points, unless there's no Paladin on the offense (we never push for the Paladin bubble, we push for the BoP first if needed, but that's the nature of our team) Keeping several members of their team crippled and wounded is usually what I do if we aren't pushing for a cloth kill in the initial zerg.

I run a mutilate build with as much snare resist as possible (fleet footed, surefooted, meta gem) in order to compliment a dagger build (just never liked always being in the global cooldown with SS builds), it's actually kinda funny going against frost mages due to the nature of frost/snare spells. I'd really like to see both Fleet Footed and Quick Recovery lowered or even moved to lower tier trees, these are much needed talents for end game PvP but they are so deep into the "Dagger" tree, which most will argue is harder to PvP with due to its need of non-facing, non-latency melee range.

I wish the druids known for PvP on our server would get their act together and learn how the class was meant to be played. They do amazingly well in the hybrid role with root, cyclone, shifting to bear, heal, poison clear, back to bear, but ours just want to go full resto and try to shift into bear when targeted or they're full feral and try to dps and attempt to land a heal with their 3k mana pool. I've seen a few druids from PvP servers really shine on the battlefied, elusive and useful in nearly every way.

Could that not be Gri'lek's Charm of Might (warrior ZG trinket, 30 rage I think) along with Bloodrage?

He mentions Bloodrage and Anger Management later on in the thread.

Btw, have people noticed the "disconnect on zoning" bug being fixed nowadays? I haven't seen it happen in weeks, but I didn't notice any comments about a fix either.

Soulwells still seem to cost a soul shard though.

Never mind this, I am dumb. Bloodrage to get in combat, spam Battle Shout while in combat from blood rage, costs no rage because of prep buff and keeps you in combat since you are buffing someone in combat.

edit - above poster beat me to it.

Here are a couple thoughts about playing 5s at the 2050~~ bracket and listening to our 2500 team.

1. Elemental Shaman are amazing underrated, there burst is insane along with good earthshocks(especially good with CoTongues) and windfury for ur ms warrior, as well as Heroism/lust, they are quite possible the most valuable "nonwarrior dps" slot. I have yet to be impressed by a earthshield shaman, they offer the utility but having to switch between playing defensivly and offensivly via shocks and purge make a hard class even harder to pilot.

2. Warlocks are underrated because they are hard to play effectively, CoT alone can wreak havoc on every team, even if they have decursers both mages and druids are constantly getting pressed first making it very, very hard to keep it off. If you don't pressure a good warlock you will probably lose, fear is amazing.

3. Druids - Druids started very viable at the beginning of the season, before people really knew how to counter them, now there not very hard to beat imo. Have your warriors make a focus frame with a portrait(to show forms) for the druid and just keep swapping back to him via 15s intercept, if you manage to catch him in cat or caster (which you should via stun) you can deal serious damage to him, and if you proc mace stun/deep thunder he will flat out die.

4. Warriors - Warriors are overpowered, MS needs a nerf. However the nerf to MS doesn't need to be that big, it just needs to make it something like 25% base with the Improved MS talent adding 5% +cooldown per point to it. This would take away the redicioulous(sp?) 15s intercept which is the absolute bane of rogues.

5. Priests - Priests are very, very, very strong and are about were they should be for 5's. Good defense, good offense (mana burn). Bloodlust+manaburn is amazingly stupid if left open.

6. Paladins - Freedom needs a duration nerf, otherwise i think they are still a little overpowred being the only class with a targetable immunity in such a melee heavy metagame.

7. Hunters - Hunters get raped way to hard by blessing of freedom, there mail doesn't do as much for them as it did @ 60, hunters really need a peeler (mage) on the team to be effective, otherwise they just get overrun, as they have no outs (stuns>deterence) once people are on them.

8. Rogues - Rogues die to fast to melee heavy groups with alot of stuns, period. They only have so many outs before they become the squishiest target in the game, and even there outs can't be used while stuned (see 15s intercept/deep thunder/mace proc, this is our bgs current metagame).

9. Mages - very strong yet very hard to play effectively, have to balance peeling with nukes and absolutey have to use a focus cs macro because it is so stupidly overpowered. My only complaint about mage is that focus cs macro is way to good and makes a game changing (although highly resisted ability... stupid neck+aura) easy to land.

so THAT's how it works

If by "full mitigation gear" you mean 8x leather, then yes - at that point you have more armor than we do.
I don't see how you sacrifice healing then, so do we when not wearing plate

There's a whole list of things people can do to gain an advantage due to the "Arena Preparation" business...

ie:

Warlock Void Sac - free 30 second shield and they get to summon another pet, essentially losing nothing, not even shards.

Warrior Rage bar - stated above

Combat Log spying - Seeing people "Gain Arena Preparation" and scouting them on the Armory.

Are there more I forgot?

The whole bubble thing gives paladins a taaaad more survivability. 6 second instant stun is a bonus too.

Shamans as a whole need a buff I think. Elemental shaman are not overrated - they literally cannot do anything if you put any type of pressure on them. They can get off one NS EM Chain Lightning, and then a shock on CD, but neither of those are really game winners since you can play around both pretty easily at the higher levels. The only times they really work is if you can trick the other team into thinking that your shaman is resto, and then they can go Bloodlust + Lightning Bolt turret for 10 seconds or so before the other team realizes what's going on, and by then, somebody's dead if you leave a shaman alone for that long.


Rogues need some type of survivability buff. At the moment when any melee close in on rogues (mostly, warriors) they just cannot do much about it. The rogue on our team runs around with 14k hp buffed and still explodes on occassion since they just cannot escape the inevitable damage a lot of other classes can.


Hunter frost trap is cheesy as hell in 5v5, especially on Blade's Edge. Unfortunately, it doesn't help them too much, as BOF completely shuts a hunter down. Especially weak on Nagrand, when people can just constantly LOS Hunters as an effective CC.