Arena Tips - Forcing a Kill
Posted on July 26th, 2008 by Lithanial under Efficiency Tips, General Tips, World of Warcraft
If all has gone well with your arena preparation, and your opening tactics have put your opponent on the back foot, it becomes time to hunt for your first arena kill of the match.
There are many ways in which you can force a kill against the other team, each with their own complexities of execution, ranging from the simple to the devious, listed here are just a few of the most popular ways of squeezing that kill in past the enemy healers.
Drain them dry
By far the simplest method of winning an arena match is to outlast your opponents’ mana pool; while lacking any particular flair it is effective. Through a mixture of mana drains and healing efficiency de buffs such as wounding poison you can ensure that your target can no longer be healed simply because of a lack of mana.
Many an even fight in which no team can tactically gain the upper hand comes down to a mana war such as this; particularly with defensive orientated teams accompanied by many healers. It is important to ensure you are capable of winning in the outlasting game to prevent a slow and frustrating loss.
Control the healers
This method is generally the standard way a kill is earned in the arena. It relies on your team having moderate burst capabilities and crowd control skills.
Simply use a crowd control ability on an opposing healer when your designated kill target is moderately low on health to prevent heals from landing. Typically your kill target will be another healer if present allowing you to easily interrupt further heals.
This method is simple to execute and the one most teams utilise when starting out so as a healer it is important to learn how to defend yourself from enemy crowd control by attempting to stay out of line of sight from enemy crowd controllers.
Split DPS
Slightly more complex is a split DPS method, most healers have emergency healing measures that can rapidly heal one target or mitigate large amounts of damage to one target. Many healers however struggle to heal multiple people efficiently.
As such, by splitting your DPS between two targets when the opposing team has a low amount of healing power can cause them to rapidly be overloaded when concentrated damage could be countered.
Target switching
Reliant on fast reactions from your team to voice communicated information, target switching is by far one of the most effective methods of claiming a kill and is commonly how tournaments level teams win matches.
The premise is that your DPS can switch target faster than the enemy healers can react. With enough burst damage you can have a target down to low health before the opposite team get a chance to react. Coupled with well timed crowd control or preliminary damage from a split DPS tactic and kills can come thick and fast.
This is the tactic that all teams should aspire to learn, but it does require your team to have competent leadership as timing is everything.
The almighty Cyclone
This tactic is only available if you have a Druid in your team and requires precise timing to work. The plan is to hit your target with a large burst of damage to get him low on health, normally he would then be healed up but by landing a cyclone you prevent him being healed.
From there you have 6 seconds to line up a killing burst of damage as soon as cyclone breaks so timing is everything; time your attack too late and heals will land preventing the kill, time it too soon and your attack will do no damage.
While complex, this is my favourite personal tactic for 5v5 arena and is a fantastic way of stealing a kill from under the noses of teams with a high amount of healers.
Using the right tactic at the right time is pivotal to success in the arena, but now fully informed, you should be able to put them into practice with your own teams as you prepare to dominate all who stand before you.
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you forgot one CHARGE the healers and dot them up then as you are doing that fear them boom dead
yea thats correct, that is what i usally do
enough on arenas already?
Enough on arenas? You kidding?!
Arena’s are the point of 70 pvp ^^
I’m guessing your lvl 40?
you guess wrong. i have 2 70s and working on my third. yet as i stated in my earlier posts on here under the arena topics, arenas were pretty much wrecked for casual players in the last patch. i think what blizzard fails to realize is that for every team with a 1550 rating their is one with a 1450 rating. so to make gear only available to less than half the population, they forced a lot of people to quit playing arenas altogether. now all that’s left is hard-core pvp’ers who pretty much have their strategies already fine-tuned. that’s why these arena posts get old to me.
OK, Shoof says Arenas is the point of 70 PvP. Ok, let’s break that down. How many people compete in Arenas on Avg, especially since the way thingns are now, a new Arena team is gonna have it tough to break into upper standings, so the rest of the PvPer are actually only doing BG’s, to do dailies, and get marks for Gear. That is still not ALL 70’s. MOST 70’s are doing Instances, and Dailies. So why does he have to be lvl 40? We have over 100 members in our guild, of that, there are about 70 70’s and only about 5 of them do Arena. 5 out of 70? PvP/Arenas is NOT the main focus of BEING 70. Please let’s go back to when it was actually enjoyable to read your articles Gavin & Co. Make like 1 in 5 be Arena or something.
hey man we have more guild members than you. we have 187 guild members we are a 65+ guild only we have well over 140 70s. We have a total of 8 people that do arenas there is a 5s team and a 3s team that is it everyone else is doing dailies getting better gear from our kara runs. and SSC and more. so dont tell me every 70 does arenas.
As a person who recently started a druid (and has no experience in playing a druid) I found these tactics very useful…Especially the one about cyclone, I never thought about that one (and noone has even used it against my main’s team)
Seriously…while this is great and all I still suck and will probably always suck at arena because I just really don’t care that much about arena
Decent stuff, kinda obvious, but still, decent article
warrior/hunter 2s team.
im the warrior and in full pve dps gear around kara level and for some reason we own lol.
we have no method whatsoever, no strategy, the hunter doesnt trap.
we never lose more than 3 games a week
Ok, I am really getting tired of all the arena articles. I used to read all of your articles but they are getting stupid old and and about subjects we don’t care about. Please go back to gold making/powerleveling. Maybe even twink guides.
You my friend, are a f****** loser.
In my opinion, arena is 1/2 of the point of 70. If you on PvP servers, then its probably about 90% the point of level 70. See, you either like pvp, or you like pve. You do battlegrounds to gain honor, no one enjoys grinding BGs all day for 15k honor. You get that honor to obtain better gear. Whats the point of having a full set of s2 gear you ask? well, the answer is simple. To not get DESTROYED in arena. You could probably max out at 1600 with s2 gear and a good team strategy. But anyway, yeah, most of these people DO enjoy these articles about arena, so if you dont, just DONT F****** READ THEM. F***!
What about all of us in countries that usually sit behind a 400+ latency (Australia)
? Timing is very difficult from the get go, and trying to finish off a cyclone with a “timed” hit becomes very difficult.
Rather than use cyclone, casting silence (priest) on the other teams’ healer can prove quite deadly
I’ve noticed from my experience that if you burst damage one guy say the tank for instance, i’m a hunter by the way, and you quickly wyvren sting the healer you can burst damage the tank, then when the healer wakes up to use a heal silence, cyclone or freeze them so they can’t if thought out ahead of time you can easily take down well geared to kara geared players, thats my oppinion (i think i spelt that wrong. idk). Though my current teammate is a healadin he just stuns the healr and it works out fine.
well i have to agree with a lot of the posters here. This used to be my number one stop for getting ahead in WoW. i think you are dropping the standard tbh.
this game is NOT about the arena. Arena of Warcraft. Go back to why we all come here.. making money.. leveling fast.. advice on toons, advice on gear..
after season 4 came out it ruined casual arenas for us casual pvpers. i run in a PvE dominated guild. Arena holds very little attraction to a LARGE amount of us. maybe its time to rethink the strategy on the direction you seem to be taking the website…
Good Grief folks - it’s a SERIES! Sometimes there is just far too much information about a given subject to cover it in a single article. In this case, it took us five or six.
We didn’t want to spread them out over three months or something so far apart that it was of no benefit to anyone, and we sandwiched the arena articles between other topics.
When we do all gold-making stuff we get flamed, when we help out newer players, the L33t(s) get all upset and ask where the high-end content is. We work very hard to plan our article rotation to try to include everyone we can with information from simple to complex, PVE to PVP, AH to farming, and on and on and on.
The direction we are taking the website is to give good solid information on ANY topic related to WoW. There are also a LARGE amount of people who already think they know how to level fast and make lots of gold, so we don’t want to bore them either now do we?
I tell you what, anybody who thinks they really know what everyone really wants can always put together 10 articles for me and let’s see what you’ve got. We pay our contributing authors well. If you want a “hand” in the “direction this site is going” then put your hands on the keyboard and get busy.
Our purpose is to give the very best information in a fun and informative way. With 11 million people playing a game this massive as far as subject matter is concerned you better believe that millions of people will not be interested in every single article we post. But we still have to post articles. For every single article we post, millions of people will find it valuable and informative.
A series of a few articles about arena hardly serves as any sort of “signal” that we have lost our focus on the overall “direction” of the site. You guys watched too many episodes of the X-Files!
If you don’t like reading the arena articles, don’t read them. Wait for a topic that interests you, then read and make a constuctive comment about that.
Tbh its his website so let him take it in which direction he likes, he doesnt have to feel compelled to write about stuff you wanna see, if i was him id just lose you as a loyal subscriber because theres plenty more ppl who i know who would kill for these kind of articles so stop whining about what gav writes about, just be grateful he actually takes the time to try and help some you swineful snobs out there
Keep goin gav
iv got a question thats bugging me in my 2s team me(druid feral) and a frost mage we dont do that well break even most of the time or some times 6 and 4 but not great. but my problem is my friend wont sheep at all no matter how much i bug him to he wont do it he says its a waist of time because the other team just breaks out of it really fast since most people have the pvp trinket but i think that its still worth it. i think we would win more games if he would sheep some people.
was there a question in there somewhere??
I live in Australia so whenever i arena, im handicapped with a 400 ish latency and that pretty much rules out the cyclone tactic. Just gotta remember that you have to CC or at least annoy the healers during the time cyclone is up because those 6 seconds also allow the opposing healer to charge up and time their biggest heal.
Personally i found target switching to be most effective. You start off attacking 1 guy, but dont go all out. Save your cooldowns and if you’re a warrior, use the 1st target to generate rage. The leader should call when the healer is mid heal, then the switch be made, popping all your trinkets and cooldowns in the process.
This tactic is less and less effective as you progress further up the ladder. But by the time you reach that point, you should of developed enough knowledge and experience so you can improvise and not rely on set plays.
To be honest, the reason people complain about the predominace of arena articles is that it means that there are fewer articles of other kinds. Sure, you can just not read them, but when they make up a large portion of the available reading here, of course people will be unhappy. The nice folks are still giving this place a chance to be what they need, the others have left already.
…Arenas…Looks like it’s part of Blizzard’s plan to let the BC players stay, I mean, shouldn’t Wotlk be out already? I’ve lost my faith already…They’re just stalling time, until everyone gets so tired of it, and, KA-BOOM! Wraith of The Lich King is out! Anyways, 5v5 arena fight seems more like a 5v5 Dota match in an undersized-map/lay-out
Please don’t mention DotA D=
And chyeah…I kinda somewhat agree with that. What would be completely crazy and out of the box is and ABSOLUTE seperation of raiding and pvp servers…or servers that are arena/pve only…that way Blizzard wouldn’t keep nerfing people back and forth because they’re “trying to balance PvP.”
Alas…that shall never happen.
pvp is for teh newbs who r teh suck at pve
I play moonkin and resto (depending on my mood). I have found that despite my uber healing (hard to kill a resto druid) I get stunlocked by a rogue, and I’m done for! Help! Suggestions? (useful ones please
)
[can't wait till wotlk when I can be a tree with 350% armor!!!!]
When fighting against rogues you need your partner to “peel” them off you with snares/roots/cc of their own to allow you to escape. If left to fend for yourself a good rogue can wear you down but with a little backup then it becomes alot easier.
It isnt so simple as only having yourself look after your team-mates. they need to look after you as well.
Omg… lol…arena post are good just as almost any other post,
, theres plenty of gold making posts so its all getting evened out so calm down *points at tatsumasa and shoof* 