There is no thread on this so I figure it is time to start one. What classes do people kill first in arena?

For example, when playing warrior/healer in 2v2 and faced with SL warlock/pally, which one do you try to kill?

Another one that puzzles me was what happened several times last weekend. My team sports several juiciy targets, such as a priest and a resto druid. Yet several teams focus fired our hunter, who has 14.5k HP arena buffed. And those were not total scrub teams either. Do people generally go for DPS or healers first in 5v5? How does the answer change when the opposing team has 3 instead of 2 healers?

Did the new arena gear change the answer to any of the questions above? Because it seems it did for us. I am focus fired significantly less these days now that I am all stacked in defensive gear. Is that just a coincidence? Because obviously the rest of my team got tougher, too, and we did not change our lineup.

Pretty much everytime I've left a Hunter alone in 5vs5 they usually end up being the top 1/2 damage, so generally rather kill them first unless we can gib another target very quickly and then get the Hunter.

Unless you have someone spamming Purge/Dispel on a Priest they generally are a pain to kill due to Blessed Resilience, and Druids are typically not worth the hassle when you have to deal with Hunter trap snares and such.

Interesting. I have always figured hunters to be low on the priority list. Sure they can do a lot of damage but even pressured they are still useful as not all of your team will congregate in their dead zone. A resto druid under pressure on the other hand does very little. Yeah we are hard to kill but our usefulness in survival mode is minimal. When not pressured though, rotating cyclones will massively cut your DPS.

Same goes for priests. Yes a priest is tough to kill, but unmolested a bloodlusted holy/disc priest will own your mana pool.

In general, do people go for the easiest targets to kill first, or for the targets that are least useful under pressure?

Resto Druids do very well under pressure compared to Priests or Paladins, if you're spending time kiting you can usually get a few HoTs off or an NS where as everyone else has to stand still and get a 1.5s cast off, which isn't really easy to do, and unless you're using a heavly magic focused group you still have to deal with armor.

Cyclone is annoying, but unless you're running a gib team I don't really consider it to be that much of a threat that I'd shift priority to a Druid first, but that mainly depends on the rest of the team, if it's 2 healers followed by 3 magic classes I'd probably go for a Druid first still.

It depends on the entire team, if I think we can kill someone in 10-15s I'd go for the easiest target, but if you're spending 30s+ on them you may as well go for the target that does the worse under pressure.

Hunters are one of the classes most vulnerable to disruption via assist train, since keeping us under pressure prevents us from being able to effective manuver to DPS/disrupt our intended targets, and we can't use the vast majority of our abilities on any in melee range. We also have no real escape skills, outside of frost trap, but frost trap doesn't cut it as an escape tool if we're slowed ourselves. Hunter DPS is a lot like caster DPS - if we're getting hit, we're a ton less effective, since steady shot is actually a huge part of our damage output and the only mana-efficient way for us to DPS outside of autoshot.

The most important thing in choosing targets really isn't who's the easiest to kill, but who's the most dangerous to leave alone and the easiest to disrupt. Warlocks have a ton of HP and defensive abilities, but letting a warlock cast unhindered is just asking to lose. Hunters aren't necessarily as dangerous as an unmolested warlock, since we can't chain fear or anything, but we're easier to keep locked down since we don't have escape tools like howl or death coil.

Ignore the rogue. He is no threat to you. Just ignore him and he'll go away. I swear.

I am curious why you put shamans first in the second batch. Does that apply to both resto and elemental shamans? I agree on elemental shamans because they hurt, but I found resto shamans to have almost paladin-like toughness these days so I figure they are better to be interrupted while killing someone else.

We always go for a healer first. The way our team is setup, 2 warriors, we WW, Cleave and try and keep as many of our 5 near each other to maximise AoE DPS, while still FF my target. Doing this while on a healer makes it near impossible for 1 person to heal. Shamans in general go down really fast, especially when there is no BOP.

2 warriors with Lust, WF, and Deathwish on a tight nit group are going to tear through most targets quickly.

Kill orders are so difficult to define since it always comes down to specific team makeups with countless exceptions. What we've tended to do lately is identify the weakest aspect of their lineup and go from there.

Only 2 healers? Kill one of them first (priest>shaman>druid>pally).
Only 2 dedicated dps? Kill one of them first - they tend not to expect focus firing down the warrior, and removing MS from their toolbox is of course incredibly helpful.

It's totally subjective depending on who you are near, what they are doing, what their gear is like, if anyone makes a mistake (falls off, is standing too far forward or away from team mates etc) and so on.

Obviously you have to assume equal gear and skill and flawless play to minimize the variables.

..and the answer is!!! Ready?

It depends.

Depends on situations but generally, and this is my thought process for all brackets:

Warlocks in the arena devastate unless they're disrupted/killed in a short amount of time, you can't allow a Warlock any time to do anything in the arena, it's just frustrating when they're up and allowed to do whatever they want. >_>

Shadow Priests after Warlocks, because they're vulnerable target with low defensive capabilities.

Hunters/Mages are good targets as well, because you lower their damage potential by applying alot of pressure.

Rogues are killable, but generally you don't want to target one until they've burned through a few of their cooldowns, you however DON'T want a Rogue lingering over a long match, like Warriors they don't need mana to survive, and can find time to restealth when you're at the end of a match.

Warriors are probably awesome targets if you're a caster heavy team, switching to a Warrior who's in Zerker and popped Death Wish and taking 115.5% extra damage could be golden. When it comes to crunch time and both teams are low on mana, you HAVE to kill a Warrior, it's too much unchecked damage with no limitation to allow to live.

Resto Shaman are amazingly annoying to kill nowadays, a geared to the teeth arena shaman is no joke to get down and kill, they take a very low priority on the kill list, though I will admit in 2vs2 under the right circumstances it's probably worth it to try and get an early kill on one.

Paladins are easier targets in 2vs2 or 3vs3 if you have a Warlock or a Mage to lock out their healing tree and they have no additional healing help. In 5vs5, a good one will find ways to delay the usage of that shield, and hide until Forbearance wears off.

Druids are insanely difficult to focus on in any bracket, if you can catch one at half health and in leather-form, you might be able to ninja kill them, but good teams keep that Druid topped off and running around on cyclone duty.

In my pretty low ranked team we tend to go either for a healer (mostly priest, if not availible the paladin, forcing the bubble and keeping pressure up) or for squishy DPS (Firemage, Non SL Lock, Rogue). We need to kill something pretty quickly because some of our teammembers are just not geared enough for an outlast fight.

I agree that resto shamans are a pain in the butt to kill and often we just tend to ignore or CC them, I really think that killing a paladin is often easier due to mass dispel and their vulnerability to counterspell. On the other hand I can imagine that a team with enough offensive dispell might want to got for a shaman first.

In our 5v5 we go for spriests and rogues because we have 2 warriors. The off times we have 1 war, lock and mage in our 5v5, we always do hunters/'
spriests, although I feel it is easy to LoS a hunter when they are ready to "unleash the fury".

3v3 I play with a spriest, so we go for the healer first because we can effectively stop all heals for 10+ seconds.

So it depends on what our team makeup is.

Still haven't been doing 5v5 for too long, but these are the observations I've seen so far:

Hunters are pretty easy to kill and we can't let them keep Viper sting up. Our problem so far is a Paladin casting Blessing of Freedom on them.

Rogues. I love going for opposing rogues first. Get one stun on them, and they're losing a lot of life. We ended up facing one team 5 times last week. The first three times they got us, then we stuck hard to "wait for the Rogue, then target him" and easily won it the next two.

Elemental Shamans have caused us plenty of grief because we don't have enough PvP gear yet, and they're much easier to kill then Restoration shamans.

There are other observations, but besides those three sticking out it's been very fluid.

Ironically, in 2v2 (Me and a Holy/Disc priest) our best success has been getting into mana wars every time. Even when it's Warrior/Healer, our win rate is the best with the Warrior and I just duking it out.

If you have another Rogue they're easy to kill, I'll just focus a Rogue as soon as I see them, stun and can usually burst them before they get a chance to pop cooldowns, or if they do they'll typically be low enough it doesn't matter.

Word brother

In a more serious answer, the biggest difference in S2 that I have noticed is that putting at least 1 spell interrupter on enemy locks and priests is mandatory now. You can't afford to leave them alone free to cast.

Having your healers entire mana pool burnt at the start is an instant loss. Even worse locks with their glove bonus + pally aura have 100% chance to avoid pushback on fear. A lock can literally lock down 2 healers with CoT, spell lock and chain fears very very easily unless constantly interrupted.

It's not really anything new, it happened in S1 but imo it's deadlier than ever because with high stm and res it's hard to zerg down anyone now without double cc/lockout on the enemy healers.

Problem with focusing Warriors is - if you don´t manage to down them very fast they´ll be more than happy about the free rage you give them. This is especially dangerous in 3 healer teams where it´s even harder to kill a warrior.

All in all unfortunatly I have to agree with Elendril about how vulnerable hunters are to disruption. Unless I skill BM (which serverly lacks in other regards) I´ve got no viable escape methods if I´m in focus and I figure every other class will outdamage me when I´m in a deadzone situation too. So unless there´s a bigger threat (e.g. Warlock) hunters make for good primary targets.

Our kill order is usually priests first, then locks, and after that it completely depends. Mana burn + BL/Heroism is way too good to be left untouched.

Not quite. Warriors are only happy about getting focused if the opposing team makes a half-assed attempt at it, like putting one or two physical DPSers on us. If you put up a full-blown attack including magical damage you will force us to Defensive Stance, and if you fail to get it done right, we're still back at 25 rage (if specced into Tactical Mastery) after switching back to Berserker Stance. Sure, the enrage can be nice and helpful, but it's rarely anything that lasts long enough to get put to use after getting focused.

I'd rather say the problem with focusing warriors is that you have to have a group for it, and do it swiftly ("HIT IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT!").

That leaves 3 DPS to freely disrupt your DPS or they will simply kill your healer resulting in an even trade.

High level play is about disruption and controll. Especially warlocks and mages need to be under pressure or they will easily dominate the game with fears/sheeps and counterspells.