So a Prot Warrior and a Death Knight walk into an arena...

Time for another PVP update!

The Muscleteers 2v2 tank team is still at large, boldly shield slamming away despite impossible odds. Hidden rating, how I loathe thee!

Last week I suffered a bit of big numbers envy, and decided to give Fury PVP a spin. It's not the first time I embark on the ship of fail that is PVP'ing on anything that isn't protection spec, but I figure as my pvp gear has improved to well above average now I can't do that bad no? Well, wrong.

We did a number of games and while I of course didn't expect to live long with a death knight partner instead of a healer, the pure humiliation any kind of setup put me through was just appalling. Being easier to bring down I can live with, but nibbling away like a toothless kitten while one Hiroshima nuke after the other gets dropped on my head.. Well, it didnt go well. I did some practice rounds before our rated games started and after those were done I landed at 4 wins, 5 losses.

What really threw me off was how easily any class in any spec shrugged me off, and even healer classes were rarely stressed despite bringing the fury 50% heal reduction. The only thing I can think of that might have worked would be to go in PVE dps gear, but being a tank in raids, my kit is far from good and seeing how ridiculously fast my 26k hp while sporting 812 resilience gets blown away, I can't imagine surviving even a mean stare in PVE gear. I saw several 6-8k instant cast crits taking solid chunks of hp at a time, while I was returning fire with 800 max white hits, and in rare cases up to 3k crits. With weapons so slow most casters can get a couple spells off between the pushbacks..

I have always liked the Fury play style, but this is just.. meh.


So, today it was back to Protection pvp spec 2v2. It was nothing short of a night and day experience let me tell you, compared to the fury fails last week. We went off on a 5 win streak before running into a Ret Pala+Blood DK comp that gave us trouble. We won the first match where they tried to focus me down but kept running into them and they quickly learned, focusing down my DK partner first and winning the next two encounters, before we finally landed a second win by managing to separate them and chew up our respective targets.

There are few things sweeter than reflecting hammer of justice in a paladin's own face. Except sending a warlock running from his own death coil.. or watching a mage instantly combust from a pyro+fireball reflect. Ok reflecting things get me all giddy quite often.

Bonus tip: If you PVP with a Death Knight, make damned sure they do their best to raise you as a ghoul if a team member dies! We have won a good number of games now where I tanked for as long as possible while nuke teams burn their CD's, only to have me raised as ghoul to quickly dispatch the enemies. As a ghoul, you keep your stat bonuses and if you happen to be a melee, you're looking at 1.7k non crit spam, a heavy finisher and of course the stun finisher.