Friday PvP - a change of tactic

Every time Shab, Sev and I come across a team with another mage/lock we look to see what they do that's different to what we do.  I often likened our matches to chess - there are some standard opening moves we use, and a certain kind of style to the way we play.

Here are examples of some opening moves:
  • Shab going invisible and then frost nova the other team to force trinkets.
  • Sev putting a gateway and we all port over when it's charged
  • Poly a team member, open on another, and when that team member pops trinket, cyclone them.
We did tend to try the cc way and whittle down one member.  And a sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't it depends on burst and diminishing returns and how the other team breaks cc etc.  The problem we often have is that with a dot class and a poly it will either break poly, or the poly wipes all the dots and heals people up.

So the other day we had a mage/lock team (with a shaman healer) and Sev noticed that the warlock just dotted EVERYONE up and the mage did not use poly at all.  And we discussed it and there was a lot of merit to that - it put a lot of pressure on the healer to remove/heal through the dots, so we thought we would try that (we lost to that team).

One thing I've decided is that I would rather take iceblock than the teleport portal.  When Sev dies I can't use his ability anymore, but I can still use iceblock if Shab dies.  And I often am out of range of portal when I actually want to use it.  Also iceblock gives me a cc breaker as well as protects me if I am being focussed.

On Friday, we decided to give it a try and it worked very well.  There are still fears to use and silences but I think the two of them enjoyed it because it allowed more time for them to DPS.  However, I still have to chase them a lot to heal so I still get smashed every now and then.  One of the games, I had died and the two of them took out the rest of the team, including a rogue - I think it was a hunter priest rogue team and it was actually a very good win.  I remember telling them to heal up but it was mostly entertaining to be able to watch them do their thing.  Sev and Shab have been doing a lot of 2s and I think that doing that has made them play better as a duo if I'm down.

However, vent was being stupid after that, and I did have odd lag.  I could not heal Sev for some reason, even though he was right next to me so I thought perhaps it was bugged so I did a tranq and Sev did not receive any of it.  And it wasn't like he was in a cyclone or a smoke cloud either - maybe he was being strangled, but I don't think that would affect him getting any heals. A lot of the time I heard the two of them saying "Nav can you hear me?" and I was replying but it had a few minutes delay - pointless when we're trying to arena where communication between us is vital.  So after that we decided to just do a battleground. I think we won that one - it might have been Strand - which was nice, as the previous day we had a whole bunch of stupid BGs where people all played like idiots and ran around doing their own thing.

Sigh, because I am away this weekend, I don't think I will be able to cap conquest.  That would have to be the first time in a long time I haven't capped arena/bg conquest.  Maybe I can sneak in some tonight.


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