A Case of the Mondays
Monday is a pretty emo day. Tuesday has been my least favorite day of the week since I was in middle school, but I usually feel pretty down on Mondays as I drive into work in the morning. So in keeping with the theme of /wrist-ing I'm going to have a little "woe is me" moment here.
This weekend I played the most arena matches in a given week since I started playing in the second week of S1. Since none of the people on my 3v3 team were "on all the time" including myself, we would usually have to schedule a time to play our 10 games and then maybe if we were lucky we would get an extra day to try and get our rating up. We usually never played more than 20 games a week. Now that I'm focusing on my priest and the 2v2 team I have with my brother it's a little easier to coordinate. We had been using our 2v2 team to get my brother some points on his terribly geared warrior but have decided to focus exclusively on getting our rating with this team up. Because we lost almost every game we played with myself and the warrior we started the week off at a dismal 1461 rating.
We played about 30 matches on Saturday and gained about 110 points to finish at 1575. With 1600 within our reach we decided to play again on Sunday, reach 1600 and stop for the week. It didn't go so well.
We started off the day losing four in a row and then winning one which put us at around 1530. We obviously were not content to stop before we lost anymore points and we started to sound like two guys with a gambling problem on vent. "If we can just get back up to 1570 we can break even, maybe the next team won't have a warlock. See how much you can get for your watch". Long story short we went as low as 1470 and then finally called it quits when we got back up to 1530. Certainly a depressing finish to a very stressful weekend of arena play.
At the risk of sounding like a tear factory, I'm going to whine about some of the problems we faced. First off, my gear is a problem. Some fights are simply a gear check for me and I fail miserably. There's nothing I can really do about this except continue to gear and hope that I manage to close the gap on some of the damage dealing classes that we come across. Right now rogues in general pose a pretty serious problem. If a rogue is geared out I have a very tough time outhealing an Adrenaline Rush barrage especially once you throw mind numbing poison into the mix. There were several fights where it was either a double rogue or rogue/druid where I just got fucked up bad. Right now I'm sitting at a measly 129 resilience with about 8800 unbuffed hp and it simply isn't cutting it. Did I mention I only have 670 healing? Yea, it's that bad.
The second major problem was definitely the more infuriating of the two. I know how popular it is to bitch about warlocks, and I hate to blame my shortcomings on a particular class, but seriously, what the fuck is up with warlocks? I used to think that affliction warlocks were the more menacing of the two, but here's a little fun fact about affliction warlocks: You can kill them.
Playing 2v2 you expect to see a lot of warlocks. Since demonology/affliction locks are so hard to kill, especially with magical based DPS, we usually opt for the other opponent as our first target. This is usually either a shadow priest or mage, but we also faced some lock/hunter teams as well. In each of these situations the non-warlock team member (or NW as I will now call them) is the easier of the two to kill. On three separate occasions yesterday, we took the NW out which left us in a 2v1 situation against the warlock. In each of these situations both myself and my brother were in good positions mana-wise. Unfortunately, by this time my brother had already "blown his load" so to speak, and his dps was simply not enough to take the guy down. Between siphon life, drain life, drain mana, and the goddamned felhunter going chomp chomp chomp he just outlasted us. The lock runs me out of mana from dispelling siphon life so many times. I was even able to drink in one of the fights and it still wasn't enough. After my experience this week I will definitely be dropping my three points in Mental Strength into Absolution. Lock fights are our hardest ones by far and with the amount of dispelling I do in these fights I can't afford not to have that talent. Losing a 2v1 is a really demoralizing experience and after the losses my brother was saying things along the lines of "I don't want to play arena anymore" and I can't say that I blame him. I felt like I needed a hug or something. Even with those losses and the depressing performance this week we still managed to end it on relatively high spirits and will take another shot at it next week, so wish me luck.
This weekend I played the most arena matches in a given week since I started playing in the second week of S1. Since none of the people on my 3v3 team were "on all the time" including myself, we would usually have to schedule a time to play our 10 games and then maybe if we were lucky we would get an extra day to try and get our rating up. We usually never played more than 20 games a week. Now that I'm focusing on my priest and the 2v2 team I have with my brother it's a little easier to coordinate. We had been using our 2v2 team to get my brother some points on his terribly geared warrior but have decided to focus exclusively on getting our rating with this team up. Because we lost almost every game we played with myself and the warrior we started the week off at a dismal 1461 rating.
We played about 30 matches on Saturday and gained about 110 points to finish at 1575. With 1600 within our reach we decided to play again on Sunday, reach 1600 and stop for the week. It didn't go so well.
We started off the day losing four in a row and then winning one which put us at around 1530. We obviously were not content to stop before we lost anymore points and we started to sound like two guys with a gambling problem on vent. "If we can just get back up to 1570 we can break even, maybe the next team won't have a warlock. See how much you can get for your watch". Long story short we went as low as 1470 and then finally called it quits when we got back up to 1530. Certainly a depressing finish to a very stressful weekend of arena play.
At the risk of sounding like a tear factory, I'm going to whine about some of the problems we faced. First off, my gear is a problem. Some fights are simply a gear check for me and I fail miserably. There's nothing I can really do about this except continue to gear and hope that I manage to close the gap on some of the damage dealing classes that we come across. Right now rogues in general pose a pretty serious problem. If a rogue is geared out I have a very tough time outhealing an Adrenaline Rush barrage especially once you throw mind numbing poison into the mix. There were several fights where it was either a double rogue or rogue/druid where I just got fucked up bad. Right now I'm sitting at a measly 129 resilience with about 8800 unbuffed hp and it simply isn't cutting it. Did I mention I only have 670 healing? Yea, it's that bad.
The second major problem was definitely the more infuriating of the two. I know how popular it is to bitch about warlocks, and I hate to blame my shortcomings on a particular class, but seriously, what the fuck is up with warlocks? I used to think that affliction warlocks were the more menacing of the two, but here's a little fun fact about affliction warlocks: You can kill them.
Playing 2v2 you expect to see a lot of warlocks. Since demonology/affliction locks are so hard to kill, especially with magical based DPS, we usually opt for the other opponent as our first target. This is usually either a shadow priest or mage, but we also faced some lock/hunter teams as well. In each of these situations the non-warlock team member (or NW as I will now call them) is the easier of the two to kill. On three separate occasions yesterday, we took the NW out which left us in a 2v1 situation against the warlock. In each of these situations both myself and my brother were in good positions mana-wise. Unfortunately, by this time my brother had already "blown his load" so to speak, and his dps was simply not enough to take the guy down. Between siphon life, drain life, drain mana, and the goddamned felhunter going chomp chomp chomp he just outlasted us. The lock runs me out of mana from dispelling siphon life so many times. I was even able to drink in one of the fights and it still wasn't enough. After my experience this week I will definitely be dropping my three points in Mental Strength into Absolution. Lock fights are our hardest ones by far and with the amount of dispelling I do in these fights I can't afford not to have that talent. Losing a 2v1 is a really demoralizing experience and after the losses my brother was saying things along the lines of "I don't want to play arena anymore" and I can't say that I blame him. I felt like I needed a hug or something. Even with those losses and the depressing performance this week we still managed to end it on relatively high spirits and will take another shot at it next week, so wish me luck.
posted by Elbows at 10:00 AM
8 Comments:
Good luck this week!
and BG up that honor gear!!!
-Ryn
Thanks! I'm trying. I should have the belt tomorrow and I get my first piece of gladiator gear either this tuesday or for sure the next. I'm supossed to play enough games with my 5v5 team to get some points tonight so that might put me over the top but more likely it will be next week.
Out of curiosity are you getting your arena points from your 2s, 3s or 5s?
-Ryn
After this week I'll have done 5 weeks of arena on my priest. The first 3 weeks were all 2v2 but we were also getting my brother's newly 70 warrior points, and as I'm sure you know, nothing is more depressing than an undergeared warrior. Plus, war/priest isn't that hot a combo to begin with.
Two weeks ago I got invited to a 5s team and even though we finished at 1486 I still got more points than I have from any week of my 2v2 team. Last night we were supposed to queue 5s again but those guys were a no show. I saw that I had a letter from one of them in my mailbox today asking when a good time for me to play 5s is, so I guess they're still interested. I'm still not thrilled about being the only healer on the team given my current gear situation, but the other guys are decently geared and it's hard to argue with the points.
I'm going to continue to focus on my 2v2 team with my brother's mage. Oh and I missed the belt by about 400 honor today 8(
Ahhh I see. 5s are the best way to get the most bang for your buck, but getting everyone together can be a challenge. The 5s team I play with has a "guaranteed" (barring RL stuff) hour that we play daily and if people are able to play longer that's bonus.
I've got to say solo healer on a team is brutal. When my 5s started It was 1.5 healers w/ myself and an enh shammy. Granted we were just starting arenas but mainly it was either getting focused down in 3 seconds or poly/feared the whole match. Although with the popularity of the 4 dps teams I guess it can be done, although usually it's w/ a pali. :P
So your brother is switching from war to mage for your 2s?
and sorry to hear about missing your belt! :(
-Ryn
Yes, we were getting points for both of my brother's characters on the same 2v2 team which is one of the reasons our rating hasn't really changed since we formed the team.
We'd win maybe anywhere from 3-5 out of 7 and then lose 3 in a row with the warrior. I mostly play with about 5-6 RL friends, with characters that range in gear from decent/mediocre to terrible. We have 2 2v2 teams and a 3v3 team and we use a combination of these teams to try and make sure that everyone gets points. In S1, we were mostly concerned with our 3v3 team and my 2v2 team which was my warrior + resto druid. We decided that my brother would get his points from my old 2v2 team and would no longer touch the team that my priest is on.
It can just be a little tricky making sure everyone gets their points, as was the case last night where we had to play 10 2v2 matches with 10 minute queues. This resulted in me not being able to farm for my belt.
LOL yeah, juggling teams, members and the 30% games played is a lot of work.
Out of the 3 team formats which have you enjoyed most so far? and which class matracies?
-Ryn
Well, I have to say that I find 2v2 a little more enjoyable than 3v3, but in 2v2 I run into the situation where you say "Oh, it's class x and y, we probably can't win". This is just a characteristic of the bracket and there's nothing you can do about it. I just find that the fights in 2v2 are more about control and that there's more opportunity for your individual actions to make a difference. My favority matrix for this bracket has been mage/priest so far although I do have a lot of fun smashing faces on my warrior/druid team.
I have to say that even though I've only played a handful of 5v5 matches they were _seriously_ fun and I think that it could become my favorite bracket if I was to gain a little more experience. The hectic feel of so many things going on at once is really exciting.
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