Arena season 4 has now officially begun on all servers, and with it the new Brutal and Guardian PvP items are now available. The big twist this season however, is that team selling has truly been stamped out and most items now require a player to have a high enough personal rating to purchase them.

The quality of the items available however is extraordinarily high; high enough to match or exceed the power of loot obtained from heroic badges and so it is well worth players to look at entering the arena in order to gear up.

Most of the items available require a personal rating of 1700 and this should be an achievable goal for many players if you enter with a favorable team setup and a solid plan. Outlined here are some basic pointers in assembling your own arena team to help you hit that 1700 target.

Which Bracket?

The first question you should ask yourself is if you want to be playing 2v2, 3v3 or 5v5 arena. It is much easier to assemble a 2v2 team but your team setup is critical to success here and this bracket allows for few mistakes. 5v5 allows a much broader range of successful team setups since each player can compensate for their teammate’s weaknesses -  but it can be a large hassle to schedule times when your whole team can play.

3v3 is a comfortable medium between each bracket being both relatively simple to organize a team and allowing a reasonable variety in class composition. If you are fairly new to the arena, I would highly recommend the 3v3 bracket to you.

Forming the Team

The first thing you need to keep in mind first and foremost when forming your team is each individual’s survivability since this will have a huge impact on your tactics.

As an example, having a subtlety rogue in your team allows you to play rather offensively since he is difficult to directly attack and highly mobile, as such he will require little healing which allows him to successfully partner with a DPS class stacked team or a more offensive hybrid healer such as a moonkin or shadow priest.

In contrast a warrior has little in the way of escape measures but hits like a freight train to compensate, if he went with a fully offensive team he could easily be burned down and as such a warrior is best accompanied by a healing teammate.

By keeping in mind the survivability of your teammates you can ensure that your team composition supports each other to counter your weaknesses rather than just compounding the problems.

Making a Plan

The second most important thing in arena is to have an overall plan as to what the team strategy is to win and select classes that will accomplish that. There are several highly successful strategies common place in the arena that will work well for newcomers.

The first basic strategy is a drain team, this relies on having mana draining abilities available and in order  to accomplish this you require a hunter, priest or warlock present. The main idea is to have steady damage on the opposing team to wear them down while directly attacking the enemy healers’ mana. If you can make the enemy healers run out of mana before yours do then you can easily start killing off his team mates.

A similar strategy to this is a grind style team. These teams tend to have a high number of healers accompanied by a dps class whose damage does not ever “run dry” - usually a warrior. The goal here is to be so survivable that nobody in your team can easily be killed while slowly chipping away at the enemy team until something gives way, usually the enemy healers running out of mana.

The final basic strategy is the burst team. This style of team is very risky but can be quite effective due to its instant shock value. The trick is to take 3 dps classes that can dish out horrendous damage while supporting this with a high amount of crowd control and silences. What the plan entails is to hit one person as hard as you possibly can while stopping him from being healed.

The big risk however is that if your burst does not succeed then without a healer your team will gradually be picked off, as such it is vital to pick the correct target. Attacking someone who has an escape measure such as a paladins bubble or a mages iceblock will cause your attack to fail.

Attacking a class such as a warrior or shaman however yields a high success rate.

With these simple tips you should be able to construct a strong backbone to your arena team and be ready to dominate your way to that 1700 rating target.

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