Thoughts on the Arena

One thing I think I've learned is that as more people get involved in the fight the more gear starts to matter. I can overcome some pretty huge gear discrepencies 1v1. But it gets harder to overcome gear imbalance in 2v2 and even harder in 3v3.

It's been pretty rough going for myself and my friends in the Arena. Even at our low rating we are constantly being placed against people with significantly better gear than we have. A lot of people seem to be "playing down" to help their friends get points/gear. Hell, I've even heard of some high rated people from season 1 selling their services to help low rated teams get more points.

First of all let me give you our basic line-ups and armories:

2v2: Shadowpriest & Destruction Warlock

Iwl

I still have a couple green pieces and a few blues, but overall my gear isn't that bad. As far as the L70 honor pieces I still need the ring and the trinket (I'm a sucker for teh purplez).

Benign

A lot of Benign's gear is green and blue but IMO he's done a great job of doing work outside the PvP enviroment to get some fairly decent stats considering his gear level. He has over 10K HP buffed, but only has two of the L70 honor pieces. The trinket and the cape. IRL Benign has a fairly demanding job, a family, and a young daughter. He does not have a lot of time to grind honor in the BGs. It would probably take him 3/4ths a year to get all the pieces. But, we'll keep plugging away until Warhammer arrives. :)

3v3:

We have two basic line-ups here:

Shadowpriest, shadowpriest, and destruction warlock. Zinn is the second shadowpriest.

Zinn

Zinn is a freshly levelled shadowpriest. As such, all of his gear was green and low blues when we first did Arena with him. I believe he had something like 7K BUFFED HP in our first arena matches! We went in anyway, because a week without arena is lost points. With Zinn, we went 13-16. Pretty ugly, but not too bad considering our overall gear I suppose.

I would not recommend SP, SP, Warlock to anyone. I try to tell Zinn that he needs to hotkey shadowform so he can slip out and heal easily if needed but he refuses to do so. He hates healing. :P

I've known Zinn for a long time. He's a good online friend. Like Benign, IRL he has a demanding job (in fact - his job has kept him from playing this whole week so he won't get any arena points). He has a family and children to care for. He can't grind honor either. It would probably take Zinn over a full year to grind the L70 honor pieces. He currently has none of those pieces.

Now, did I go out looking for a new team member after our horrible start with Zinn? No, the next day I spent on Oozo farming water motes so Zinn could work on his Frozenshadow set. We pretty much have no choice but to try to gear Zinn and Benign as much as we can outside of the PvP enviroment. That's why you don't see me in any Frozen Shadoweave. I knew I could get gear grinding PvP honor, and I knew they couldn't. So, even though I'm a tailor I've tried to help funnel those resources their way so they can get some decent gear.

Our second line-up is shadowpriest, warlock, and resto shaman. Gundy is the shaman.

Gundy

Gundy did some arena last season so he has a gladiator piece, but he's done little in the way of BGs only having two of those pieces. He also has some decent healing gear from being in a semi-casual raiding guild. Gundy also has a family with two children, one a newborn. So, he is somewhat deprived of time as well but is able to play a little more than Benign and Zinn, in general.

This is actually a pretty strong line-up classwise IMO. We've gone 12-8 overall with this line-up and a couple of those matches we really got robbed on. As in an enemy with 2% health getting feared behind a wall allowing their paladin to close distance and save their ass when they should have otherwise been dead. This line-up holds the most promise, but so much depends on gear and the gear is simply not going to accumulate fast enough for us to really do anything.

Now, on to some of our opponents. As mentioned before we have run into some teams where the people just massively outgear us. Yesterday, we fought a team with two challenger rated opponents PLing some shaman. They lost, but only because one of the challenger rated people was a hunter. Hunters = easy kills for our shadowpriest&warlock combo. We had a 2v2 where this guy was on the opposing side...

http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Azgalor&n=Dumbledwarf

I know, it's not incredible gear, but it's vastly superior to ours. I mean, he had 250+ resilience. Why are we matched against a team with someone like that? And this kind of thing is common. I'd say about 70% of our matches are tainted by gear.

There are a lot of people playing down, hopping teams, PLing friends. It's extremely difficult for a team of fresh players to enter into this system. I mean, it's going to take 4-5 weeks before I even get my first piece of gladiator gear so I can start competing?

Well, at least I can always smack these people around 1v1.