As a rogue who is a diehard fan of PVP and arena both, I find that with each week brings peaks and valleys to my arena career. Now I know that I’m no professional myself, but I take arena seriously. When I group up with my partner and we get into the spirit of arena, there really are no interruptions. To me arena is a constant learning experience whether its learning how a specific team works against you or learning the counter that you need against certain match ups. My partner and I try and always learn something from arena and the different comps we face each day. A lot of times many people will rely on an alternate website to find strategies and plans for what to do against specific set ups. I try to stay away from this because in all reality there isn’t one way of defeating a specific set up. I find that most of the time when I’m in an arena I subconsciously take mental notes on what a team will do and when, as well as how my partner and I must counter act the opposing teams moves.
A Little History
When Wrath of the Lich King came out, an awesome day IMO, it brought new arenas and new strategies to go with them. As a rogue who has seen many changes in the arena system and overall PVP, I find that the new arena ranking system is very flawed at the moment. It has become apparent that there really is no specific way or equation that is in use to determine how many points a team will win or lose at any given rank in arena. From what I can see, the only obvious characteristic that is shown by the point system is that it works on a sort of momentum principle. This meaning that with each win comes more points, the same can be said with losses.
As a rouge who runs a set up of nothing more than a mage friend that happens to be in the same guild (Malice of Haomarush) I am often stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to a wide spread question among rogues…PVE or PVP gear? I have gone about this question many different ways in my experience however, it is how you as a rogue play. That is what arena is mostly about…play style, and how you work as a team. Different strategies call for different types of gear. For instance, if you run a more burst oriented team such as mage rogue you should lean more towards PVE gear, for this will allow you to gain the extra attack power and critical strike chance to allow your burst damage to be affective. Since the expansion, resilience is in a sense…BROKE!!! The whole idea behind resilience is to give everyone with it a higher survivability rate against opponents. When introduced in BC it was a glorious thing that everyone was going crazy over. In times more recent however, resilience has played a very miniscule part in arena teams everywhere. This is especially true with rogues on 2 DPS 2’s teams. With reduced ratings on resilience and no ability to ensure our survival for a short time, we find as a class that the extra AP and crit are a far better choice when partnering with another DPS class in a 2’s match up simply because the burst damage gained is far superior to survivability. I typically never go into an arena match with little more than 250 resilience at the most, this is only because I try to keep a benchmark health of >20k
This brings me back to a question I have received from many friends and just folks I’ve seen on my server before…Why a mage??? And the answer to this is a fairly simple one…old habits die hard. Back in the days of BC, I ran many different teams just trying to find my place in the world of arena and PVP in general. As I progressed and improved upon my skills in the arena and BG, my friends noticed that I was actually fairly talented when it came to PVP on my rogue. With this little extra confidence boost, I went and looked for some sort of starting point as to which I could get a feel for the arena world, it was then that I found my idol….Akrios (now Akrioss, his website is http://www.roguerogue.com/). It was also because of him that I began running a mage rogue set up. When run correctly, mage/rogue is nearly unbeatable. But that’s just it, it has to be run correctly in order for it to be effective.
There are many teams that can be seen played wrong yet still win just because of the makeup of the team. Mage/Rogue is most surely not one of these teams, it takes more finesse and skill, in my opinion, to run this team properly. A typical arena match for my partner and I runs just like every other Mage/Rogue team would approach an arena, CC the healer and burst down the other DPS, or in some cases find the weaker of the 2 DPS classes that you are up against should it be a 2 DPS team. Now I know that not everyone approaches a match exactly alike, however it is all once again just how well you and your partner mesh together as teammates and as friends, as well as personal skill should your match ever become a 1v2 battle with one opposing DPS being low on health of course.
All in all, the new and revised arena system is still in great need of improvement. I feel that with time issues such as resilience scaling and point system flaws will be fixed, however this will all take time. As with all great things that come in time, it will be a great path of trial and error on behalf of Blizzard.
Roll with the punches, thaboush OUT!!
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