I run a SPriest, Mage (frost or fire depending on the day in question) and affliction warlock 3on3 team. Games are as you might imagine incredibly stressfull. This does take its toll over time, especially if you chain queue without breaks. Small breaks when something needs to be dicussed strategywise is ofcourse given but besides this what are peoples experience with breaks in between games?

Short and frequent or long and rare?
After losses or wins?

I personally think short breaks (like 30 seconds) are decent regardless of wins and losses since you can always refine your strategy despite winning the match or not.

For losses, its better to go over the flawed strategy as well as poor play so that should you run into the same team again, you can alter your strategy accordingly and have a better shot at winning

I play 5v5 predominately so after every game is over we'll take a look at Recount and ask "Okay, so what happened here?" I think it's incredibly important to do so after your wins as well as your loses so you have a decent chance at learning from all your games. (Also since I tend to hard on people at times, I make a point of calling out clutch play or just general good execution after the game.)

Outside of discussing the games and teams queuing, we pause for a bit when someone gets a drink, etc. probably every 10 games or so.

If there's nothing serious to discuss, we'll just queue back up and talk about it while waiting/buffing.

We BS on Vent during wins and discuss opponent vulnerabilities on losses. We take small random breaks if we're constantly queueing against a team we're losing to (so that we might get a different team) or when people want to grab a smoke or take a leak.

You discuss things after/before games? If we lose vent is silent, if we win vent is all He-Man and stuff. My arena ranking is justified after all!

In my 3v3 we don't talk much because we know our composition is bad and we only do it to get the shaman points (EDIT: the shaman is also the warrior, so we have shaman+healer+mage or shaman+healer+healer). In my 2v2 it depends on why we lost. Shaman+warrior loss is /shrug /queue /pray, but if we lose something like rogue+X or warlock+X or mage+X we talk about how to do it better next time because chances are we could beat them if we executed or planned better. In 5v5 we hardly talk because we only just started. I want everyone used to the dynamics of 5v5 and their place in it before we knuckle down and talk too much strat.

As for breaks... I always wait for everyone to be out and then another 10 seconds or so then say "queueing" over vent and queue up. If anyone wants a break they just say something before then or cancel their queue and speak up. I don't see a need to have specific breaks, just if someone wants to grab a drink or talk about something then we break as needed.

Alt+tab and post on whatever official class forum you just lost to, of course!

I'm usually just stalking armory while we talk over strategy of losses and wins. And going, "zomg this guy doesn't have disarm immunity."

After noticing a big trend of going up a great deal of points then down half as many in an arena session, we never play for more than about 3 hours at a time in 5's now. Before we would play up to 6 or 7 hours at a time and the pattern was we played really well, then we'd go into zombie mode and start missing counterspells or just plain doing the wrong thing. A lot of our rating we'd gained was lost, and people started getting emo and/or tired.

Only playing a few hours at a time has definitely helped us finally get our rating over 2k. I'm sure not every team would be the same, but small and frequent play sessions really helped us - we're a pure casual/arena guild though, so this may not be possible for raiders.

Just rush through the games as fast as possible. I and my team hate arenas but play the 10 games a week just for the easy epix. Even without any real tactics or ventrilo or such, we are hovering around at 2000 points, on good weeks even getting closer to 2100.

yeah i find the same, when playing wow and something else pops up like a phone call or its time to eat or something, then that means its time for arena. I just pick up randoms as you would a pug for an instance and we go in, sometimes undermanned. We don't use vent and its pretty much just random - playing one handed too because I might be eating or on the phone. Week to week I can go from 1800 - 2100, so yeah its all good...???

seriously, no vent or any tactics and you get close to 2100... wow... /whatever

Discuss tactics, talk and annoy other teams in og by playing PoM-Ball - you need: 1 Priest 2+ fires and prayer of mending = fun).

An "easy" 2k also can depend on your battlegroup. Each one varies, but batlegroups like bloodlust aren't a walk in the park.

I was going to bring up the same point. I'm not trying to brag, but it really seems to be the case that there are no true "easy matches" on our battlegroup, or at least they are few and far between.

Last night did 3v3. We were 1565 going into the week and went 4-6. In some of those games we lost never had a chance. One game had a rogue with 400 resil and merciless weapons. Another with a 400 resilience fully epiced Paladin. One team we played only had a couple pieces of arena gear each, but all the rest of their gear was SSC/TK stuff (was a nasty shaman, warrior, hunter team) and they just blew through our priests near 300 resilience/12k health in seconds, purged the BoP of course and dropped her. If this is what we're fighting at mid 1500s in 3v3 than god knows what is at mid 1700s. Perhaps part of the issue is we play a team setup with little CC (either warrior/priest/pally or shaman/priest/pally) but we can't burst people down well and thus its endurance fights. And in endurance fights if their pally has 400 more healing and 3k more mana than my Pally than we're sort of screwed.

To stay on topic. Basically we just go over the stuff that happened. Well I talk with my wife about it. Our third guy is pretty quiet. Try to make sure I find out where I screwed up. Or in some cases to recover after a fight take a bit longer off. Like one game last night where it was me vs a resto druid and we had a 10 minute epic duel in BE arena before I finally drained him of mana and dropped him (as a warrior). That fight just left me shaking for a few minutes dropping F words. Of course we then still went on and had a losing record, but at least that helped a bit.

This is basically the stuff I run into as well. 7 weeks after starting our 5v5 team, we're still sitting directly at 1500. We're not bad PvPers...we all play on PvP servers, and out in the world, we'll crush even numbers of foes, and occasionally best outnumbered odds as well. Our gear is pretty darned good for PvP, several pieces of BG loot on each character, then a lot of instance blues/purples. We're significantly better geared than the "Average" player, and yet we run 5's vs shaman with 11.5khp that are just nigh impossible to burst down. Warriors with Merciless maces and several pieces of s2 gear, and the rogues are pretty harsh as well.

Almost exactly, half the groups we fight are total scrubs and we could win down a man, and the other half we wouldn't have any chance vs if we had an extra man. I just don't get it. I figured we'd be able to go to at least 1600ish, but we haven't even gotta close.

to stay on topic too

My 3v3 team is with too long time friends in RL, all long time players so we are sometimes no holds barred on critque. But its all good and after wins we are wow'ing over various parts of the match - for instance I got a double kill from a execute crit whilst I had sweeping strikes up

5v5 they are randoms, I don't know them that well, so its just really on a basic level what we did in the last game. I don't even know the rest of the teams specs (in detail), if they have the mods, macros etc for pvp. I would really like to step our 5v5 game up.

2v2 the guy does'nt have vent, we mainly just go over the previous game.

We started going 2v2. Its about 3-6 MINUTES between each fight, so we have time to talk over what happened and try to make it better, go bring some drink, and generally waste some time. We started to get better, and then my priest decided to move to another realm.

are 2v2 always so slow in all battlegroups? I rather like the intense feel of the 2v2, and the free spirit of fighting with just one more guys, not a full group. But I think to move to 3v3 just as not to wait so long.

2v2 has long queues on most realms. A bottleneck in Blizzard's arena system screws up queue times when too many people queue.

Are you saying, that due to TOO many 2v2 the queues are slow? How do you know that?

That is definitely the case, try playing 2's on the night before maintenance or a sunday night, the queues are about 6 or 7 minutes. It's actually the one time that being in an oceanic time zone is helpful...during our primetime (USA offpeak) our queues are < 1 min.

Not so helpful if you're on a battlegroup with a bunch of other Oceanic servers. :P

Well, currently my 3v3 is broken, and my 2v2 is a Hunter/Rogue (leveling my druid to go Druid/Rogue), but we never wait in between matches. Usually queues are 10 minutes + for 2v2, so we discuss strategy during that time. And we always comment on the matches, as with Hunter/Rogue, we have to have a strategy going in and play flawlessly to win. :p

Edit: Yes, slow queues are due to too *many* teams queuing, not too few. I think it was on an interview at Blizzcon, but someone released that when too many teams queue, the queuing system creates a backlog, since it stops when it creates games...essentially, if you want faster queues, queue at later (or earlier) times.