Week 1 Recap

Queues have been atrocious all week; it sounds like this is a persistent problem across all battlegroups, but we're spending 5-10 minutes in queues even for 2v2 games. That being said, it's been an awesome week, and probably about as much as I've had in WoW. The Shadow Gaming crew are awesome to have around and are going to really elevate the play level on Stormstrike.

The goal was to hit 2k in all 3 arena sizes, but with queues so slow, it's going to just be 5s. As 5s is my main interest, I can't complain too much. I think most of us mages are going to hold off on buying set gear till we see the changes and instead hoard points, so it isn't like I'm in a huge rush to start earning serious points.

I've really moved away from survivability oriented play into a more aggressive style; I've replaced nearly every Elune with Nightseyes or Rubies and have moved away from the pretty typical 10.5khp/350resil/850 damage setup most ran last season into 9.2k/300/960 with a fair amount more crit. My goal is to probably turn it into a 9.5k/300/1000+ which looks very simple if one sockets for damage and picks up the season 2 honor gear. (NO PVE NEEDED!) As a player on a 4DPS team, I'm an awful target for opposing teams when compared to our elemental shaman, UA lock, or shadow priest even with the damage oriented gear. I run DPS lineups even in the small arenas, and on each team, I'm the least squishy regardless.

We've seen some pretty solid teams throughout the week in 5s though haven't run into our main competitors from last season when they were running their best five. There are a pretty large number of 4DPS teams in the higher range of rankings right now; I'm not sure 4DPS is "too strong" but I definitely see the frustration from classic teams who even if they play well can still lose to lucky big crits or resisted CC. As a player on a 4DPS team, the perspective is quite different and you really feel the dependence on gaining early momentum, protecting your lone healer, and executing strong CC on opposing healing (especially on the 3-4 healer setups). We're definitely able to recover from failures to do early damage, and despite the whole stigma that the DPS teams "have to" get an early kill, I think the strength of a lot of the 4DPS teams is not only their damage but abundant CC, and medium length games need not be brushed off as automatic losses.

For 5s, looking forward I see other 4DPS teams, classic+lock, and the 3-4 healer teams as are our main challenges and fortunately our battlegroup is almost entirely these compositions; it isn't going to be a coast at all. ^^

For 2s, druid/lock, priest/lock and rogue/druid have been seriously frustrating. (Though not surprisingly frustrating) My skill at these matches is not sufficient to overcome the matchups yet, but I'm sure as the season goes on, we'll at least do well against the mid-tier teams of these matrices. Fortunately, warrior/pally feels like such a free win and is relatively common so we can at least collect back a lot of what we lose to the Warlock/X teams.

For 3s, I've only played a very small number of games, but it's been awesome. I forgot how I much I missed playing with a rogue in arenas; Yecal is as good as it gets and a ridiculous team player, it's a shame rogues suck too much to use in 5s. =p Actually, I think 3s is probably the most fun to play and create strategies for, WSVG looks fun as hell. I think I'm still really bad at 3s compared to 5s as the pacing is very different, so I hope to zerg games in the upcoming weeks to learn to counter some of the harder matches.

Evertras is creating a new site dedicated to mage PvP, check it out. It's still very new and under construction but I'd be remiss to not point it out to those interested.

I've been watching the Zizek and Loganz 2v2 video a ton this past week hoping to both learn from it and get some background beyond what I saw at WSVG. It's probably my favorite arena video in BC, so if 2s doesn't sicken you, watch it!!