My one alt is on a very bad team (dropped below 1300 today). Part of the problem was bringing in too many different alts to get points but now we are going to go with more of a set lineup. We aren't and won't be pvp speced and our pvp gear is mostly lacking (no pvp trinket ftw!).

Our team is:
Mage (53 arcane with slow). Has decent pvp gear.
Rogue (combat dagger build). PVE gear with some stam/pvp gear.
Priest (Disc/Holy). Non-raiding pve gear.
Pally (Holy/Ret). Non-raiding pve gear.
Hunter (Marksman). Has decent pvp gear.

Often sub in rogue, icemage, or healing shammy all without pvp gear.

Given the gearage situation won't change that much what should our basic strat be?

We've been trying to focus fire one enemy down using the Hunter's target while the mage ccs a healer then assists with POM pyro. But generally one of us goes down first (usually the mage or the priest). We have made some bad mistakes about being seperated and out of los but now we are trying to stick together.

Apart from staying together and assisting is there other basic strategic advice? We seem to suck even beyond our gear level.

What type of poisons is the rogue using? If he isn't using wound poison you're going to have a hard time focus firing anyone down given the lack of burst your PvE specs have.

The mage "assisting" with POM pyro is a really noobish move in most cases. POM pyro should only be used as a kill condition most the time, not blown right at the start when it's very likely to be healed through. Tell your mage not to use POM pyro unless he knows for certain it's going to finish the person he hits with it (wait for them to be around 50% life and have a 5 stack of wound poison). Having it force the healer to do 6000 more points of healing isn't that significant, as one priest mana burn will take off the equivalent mana of 6000 points of healing, however having it drop someone before a critical heal lands is.

Your hunter and rogue should be playing defensively with their cooldowns if your mage/priest are constantly being dropped. Without ice block your mage is very weak to being beat down, although I'm not sure why your priest is dropping since disc/holy is a very solid PvP setup for survivability and you have a paladin who should be healing and throwing out blessing of protection. Basically tell your hunter/rogue to save blind/scattershot/frost traps for clothie protection.

Short of that, you guys could just pony up 40g each and reform your alt team with a fresh 1500 rating and collect points of it until it hits 1300 again in a few weeks and then reset it again.

Your teams spec in general aren't really focused for PvP, the only person with really a PvP spec is your Hunter, you'll have issues in general because you're playing a non-standard setup on top of your specs.

If your goal is just to get arena epics, your best bet is what tristantio suggested play 10 games a week, reform the next.

Coordition of your CC and Big cooldowns are key to winning, which takes practice.


I also agree with the team reforming idea, the 40g fee every 3-4 weeks is cheaper than respecing every week.

This is not always 100% true, I play my alt arcane mage on a 1700 rated team, we run with mage, holy/disc priest, elemental shaman, MM hunter, resto shaman (sometimes a holy paladin). As you can see we have no healing debuff at all, which is probably the biggest factor holding us back besides our generally retarded class makeup.

Anyways, there are some situations where you want to blow PoM pyro right away - namely if the other team has only 1 or 2 healers, especially if one is a paladin. If the other team has a paladin, the key is to hit someone other than the paladin at first, wait on the inevitable heal and CS him - then everyone nuke the paladin into the ground (insert PoM pyro here). Most teams don't expect this, and due to the lack of MS or wound poison, most of the games we win are because we take someone out in the first 10-15 seconds of a match.

Also, what is usually a lot better than just tossing out the POM Pyro alone is to start out with an arcane blast, then pyro, then follow up with fireblast. Even without crits I can pump out about 7k-8k damage worth of burst in this short window, with crits the damage is pretty much unhealable on anyone other than a SL lock.

You are much better off with a warrior instead of a rogue. (Rogue is very squishy against both physical damage and spell damage)

And if you are going to use a priest instead of shammy (for purge and WF), your priest needs to stack up resillence.

You may also want slow the rating-decay as much as possible by playing three games and just queue'ing up for the other seven. Worst case scenario it would take you a month and a half to get to 1300.

In terms of strategy though I don't really know what to say. From personal experience, a Priest that isn't PvP spec'd and doesn't have at least 9k Health unbuffed and 200 Resil is a liability. Get as much health as you can (probably more important then anything up until 10k) and once the Priest can survive an initial burst, you should see a huge improvement.

Also, if they're not in T4, they really should be working on getting the Veteran's pieces in the first place for PvE as well.

The team makeup is set with what we have. We will reset this week. But generally the teams we are playing are pretty bad (gear, play and odd makeups) and most seem beatable if we got our act together. I suspect with the right strategy and better play we could hang in around 1400-1500 even with our specs and gear.

The rogue generally runs with antihealing poison and crippling on the offhand. She did mention trying out mind numbing yesterday.

Regarding the rogue and hunter playing more defensively and the priest as a stamina target... Do you think the rogue should hang back and we ff whatever melee is on our priest? Right now she is out on our primary target (usually a clothie) and out of range to blind whoever is on the priest.

Also which of the two ice-based traps should we use?

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Currently, we generally win if we get somebody down in the first fifteen seconds and lose if we don't.

I should add our priest is working on stam gear, He also changed his spec to include blessed resilience.

Playing more defensively doesn't necessarily mean foregoing all attack, it just implies keeping an open view of the entire fight, which means you have to at all costs avoid gaining the "tunnel vision" that often occurs in a heated PvP battle.

If you guys are keeping a healer extremely pressured, it's unlikely that they will easily cleanse blind or other CC as quickly, so when a rogue or enemy warrior beings pounding on your priest, throw out the blind/scattershot/hammer of justice on him.

Also I'd just toss up a freezing (not frost) trap on top of your priest near the start of the fight, so if a rogue pops out to attack him, he's instantly got the rogue CC'ed.

Make sure the mage uses counterspell at a critical moment also. What was mentioned a few posts ago about dropping the paladin (or any healer really) is a very powerful tactic for a lot of fights. Begin to focus on one target, cause the healer to use a casted heal, lock that school of magic with your mage's counterspell and begin to rock that healer. A paladin with his holy school locked is unable to bubble or do anything really.

Also I think you are going to have to see the other team's lineup and decide at the start of the fight, are you going to win by insta-gibbing someone, or by outlasting them?

If your goal is to insta-gib then you have to make sure the guy you drop is a key player for their team setup and will ensure your win, even if you have to sacrifice your priest/mage. If your goal is to outlast, then you want to make sure none of your guys die (thus playing way more defensively)

Edit: This is also a very important question to find the answer to; do you have any clickers in your party? I have a paladin friend who was duoing with my warrior in 2v2's, and he would constantly die before he bubbled, or otherwise miss critical timings. My rating with him as my healer went from around 1600 to 1400, and given that his gear was a lot better than my previous paladin partner's I couldn't figure out the reason why. Turns out he doesn't use any hotkeys and simply clicks ALL his spells/abilities, and uses his keyboard to move. While this is fine for most PvE encounters, it is unacceptable for PvP/arena, if you have a clicker in your setup tell them to learn how to use hotkeys immediately.

No one mentioned this yet, perhaps because it's assumed that everyone does it, but if your not already using "voice" (TeamSpeak/Vent/Skype) for your arena games then do. Call what your doing, and what the other team are doing, where your going, target switches, etc. It makes a huge difference. You just can't expect to type / read chat in arenas, things move too fast.

It surprises me a bit that you intend to do better on PvP but refuse to spec for it. Right now, with your mage and possibly priest speccing PvP would give you a significant boost in survival. I know, not very constructive, but that's my view on this.

Could you elaborate on this?

I'm going to healthily agree with running EotS. I only recently went back to pvping and for the first couple days, I was just running ABs like we used to do. Then, I popped into some EotS's because I'll need the tokens. The honor/hour was significantly better. I don't know if it was the 4-5 minute queues or if the game just rewards better honor, but I did 6k honor in what seemed like 3k honor's worth of effort. That's a piece of gear every 2-3 days. My PVE gear is decent but centered around fury dps or tanking. I plan on using the BGs to pick up a few accessories so that my arena performance improves (or, rather, that I am capable of contributing on a level worth placing on a decent team). This, in turn, leads to more arena points and faster gladiator gear.

Between the trinket, neck, a ring, and the 3 decent epics, you should be able to stack on some decent stamina and get a start on your resilience. Once your priest can survive that extra 2 shots, healing him/keeping him up becomes exponentially easier. If he lives 5-10 extra seconds as the focus target, that gives you that much time to down one for a trade or, better yet, down one and bail him out.

Eye of the Storm is only for the necklace and boots. Arathi Basin is needed for the Belt, while WSG has the bracers and Alterac Valley the ring. As for the blue sets they're from a mix of AV (gloves, hat), AB (chest, shoulders) and WSG (legs) marks. Unless you're running a premade if you are alliance than by far the best way to get honor is running AV.

In the 1300-1500 rating, zerg the squishiest enemy healer is a relatively standard tactic. As far as Priest survivability goes, an easy way to improve this is to control melee DPS. I would recommend asking your mage to spend some time early on Warrior control as a few sheeps/frost novas will slow up their assist train considerably. If Priest survivability continues to be an issue, then you can try using Blessing of Freedom defensively to help with Priest kiting. Also, make sure the Priest recognizes when enemies use certain abilities and responds accordingly. Some good ones to understand are cloak of shadows & the cooldown on pummel & counterspell.

On the offensive side, I feel that assisting off the Rogue may be more advantageous than assisting off the Hunter. In general I think that Rogues would prefer not to switch targets, and the Marks hunter must play a more dynamic role.

I am new to the arenas, but as a combat dagger rogue myself, I think going to the arenas or even to the battlegrounds without a respec just makes me a liability. I don't really have burst damage, and I don't have the combo-point generation for stunlocking.

If you are just going to the arenas for gear, then maybe you could focus your efforts on the weekends and respec each week. It's not hard to scrounge up 100g a week, and having a more arena-oriented spec will help enormously. If that's not an option, ask your rogue to try out mutilate. It is still respectable in PVE for the most part, and it is viable for pvp/arenas.