Feb 25, 2009

The daring adventures of The Muscleteers!


Start of week two for our spanking tanking 2v2 arena team, and the first points started trickling in. Oh and if you look at the honor tab.. 14 wins 16 losses total and down by 208 points, what's up with that !?

Our rating got destroyed a bit by 7 losses from 10 played in the first week, but having played a bunch of games today the rating has climbed up if just a little. We made some slight changes and the performance difference was plain as day!

Gear:
We changed from wearing whatever resilience and dps gear we had, to our shiny tanking sets, with just the odd few 80 epic pvp pieces we got thrown in. With all the str and hit/expertise on tanking sets now, the raw difference in dps stats was disturbingly small compared to using gemmed and enchanted dps epics+savage and up pvp gear. Big plus with all that health against caster dps and well, melee dps hate us for obvious reasons.

Spec:
Last week I went in with a pvp oriented prot spec, with stuff like improved disarm, safeguard, the whole shebang. I respecced last night back to proper tanking spec for Malygos 25 and figured I'd give it a spin in arena as well and surprise surprise.. I didnt notice any difference, at all. So basically your typical raid tanking spec.

Opsidius however changed his spec more dramatically, going from unholy tanking, to blood tanking, and this was the big big difference we noticed, the amount of self healing and whatever it is he does to heal me was just huge!

Tactic:
Everything here is subject to change, remember we're playing at rather low rating atm.

Double DPS teams are easy as pie, really. Using our oh shit cooldowns as they open their burst we just brute force our way through it while Opsi provides moderate but steady healing.

Any team with a mage we kill whatever the other player is first. Mages are a nightmare to get down, no matter what spec they pack. I dread the day we'll run into double mage teams. The good thing is that if we make it through all their cooldown abilities, all they do is kite, which they do well enough mind but they're not really killing us either.

Healer+DPS teams are still as expected the hardest, decent dps as tanks do now it still lacks a bit on really forcing the healer into panic mode and wasting mana or even going oom eventually. However, something that works is having the DK start wearing the DPS down while I glue myself to the healer, this usually made the healer try to kite me and run around corners, and as soon as they do that I join on the dps. We managed a few times to kill the DPS then if he wasnt at full hp before the healer could help him with the DK plus me throwing in the lovely but short burst dps that is Concussion blow+Shield slam+Shockwave+heroic throw. :) Tiny bit of luck on the crits there and we're talking 7-8k damage in a 3 sec or so.

Verdict:
Of the 10 matches I played today we won 8 of them! Tables turned completely from the results we had last week, and I can't wait to go back in for more. Arena tanking might be cheesy, but it is also darn good fun! :D

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