Wrath of the Lich King will be introducing a new profession to the game upon release that stands to have a very large impact upon the game economy.  There is currently little in the way of comprehensive information available about Inscription but what little we do know puts you in a position to exploit the changes that Inscription implementation will have on the game as a whole.

So what do we know about Inscription?

To begin with, we know Inscription is a crafting style profession that is fueled by the gathering profession herbalism.  All inscriptions seem to be created by a mixture of inks and parchments; parchment is bought from a vendor while inks are created either directly from raw herbs, or from a pommace.

A pommace is created by the process of milling herbs; this works in a similar fashion to a jewelcrafter’s prospecting ability but renders down stacks of 5 herbs rather than ore.

Once an ink is made an inscriber can create a variety of items with them, all of which have the potential for resale. The first items that are created by an inscriber are scrolls such as a scroll of intellect.  Previously these were only found randomly throughout the world to give yourself temporary buffs to your raw stats but will now also be created by an inscriber.  By utilizing scrolls, a player can ensure they remain fully buffed even when soloing.

The second important creation from an inscriber is the combination of Bleached Parchment and Treated Vellum. These two items can be utilized by enchanters to store enchants within.  With an enchant stored within, an enchanter can then place the item on the auction house for use by others to use on their own equipment without needing to directly trade with an enchanter.

Finally an Inscriber can create Glyphs.  Each character in the game will be given 6 Glyph slots of varying power.  A Glyph will act to change the properties of certain spells either cosmetically or through significant increases in power; as such Glyphs will be in demand from all high level players capable of utilizing them.

Minor Glyphs will largely only be cosmetic changes to add more character to spells or slightly increase usability without any real change in a spells’ power; effects will include increasing the duration of buffs or changing of a spells’ graphics.

Lesser Glyphs provide small game play changes to a spell by reducing its costs or providing minor power boosts without massive changes to the ability; examples would be reducing the rage cost of debuffs or increasing the chance of certain attacks hitting.

Greater Glyphs will significantly improve the way in which an ability works and will be the most sought after glyphs.  An inscriber will get an additional Greater Glyph slot compared to other players as a profession advantage.  Examples of Greater Glyph effects will be to improve your spell damage or add secondary effects such as snares or knockback resistance to them.

So, how can you exploit this profession to the fullest?  The answer is simple; when inscription is implemented the demand for herbs is going to skyrocket.  Not only will people need low level herbs to raise their skill level in inscription, but in the long term, Inscription demand for herbs will continue to be high as other players demand Scrolls and Glyphs.

Those who are prepared will be able to stock up on a large variety of herbs and sell them for a fortune on release of the expansion; you won’t even need to be an herbalist to benefit.  Simply scour the auction house to build up a stockpile and seek to dominate the market.

(Keep in mind that the last time Lithanial gave a gold-making tip Lawbringer tested the information on several servers - and made more than 15,000 gold on one toon in less than two weeks.  You have several months before the xpac comes out, if I were you I would follow Lithanial’s advice and buy every herb you can get your hands on for the next couple of months.  The release of the expansion will mean massive profits as demand rises through the roof if you can control the supply of herbs of all levels to the ah!)

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30 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

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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31 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Recently the non disclosure agreement surrounding the next expansion to World of Warcraft was lifted and beta testing has begun. Over the past few days a flood of new information has come forth regarding all aspects of the game and many things have slipped through relatively unnoticed in the excitement.

While it would be entirely possible to run through each class reviewing the upcoming changes in depth, let us instead look at a few of the key changes to game play mechanics that will have a widespread effect throughout the game for a vast majority of classes.

Spell power

Rather than there being separate stats for improving a spells’ damage or healing capability, Blizzard has combined both statistics together into the new spell power stat. In turn the coefficients for all spells have been adjusted, particularly for healing spells since there is no longer a pure healing stat.

The net change of this is that a healer will be receiving a vast increase to their damage capabilities, while offensive hybrid casters will be able to heal far more effectively than before.

Hit/Crit/Haste

All three of the above stats have been consolidated; no longer will there be separate hit, crit or haste stats for melee and spell casters, instead both your melee attacks and spells will benefit at the same time.

This mechanics changes is massive for any hybrid capable of both melee and spell attacks such as paladins and shaman. As an example of how big an impact this may have, enhancement shaman will be able to obtain a decent crit rate to their shocks; this in turn can be combined with the talent elemental devastation for brutal synergy.

Note that this only applies to the raw stats of those individual statistics, critical strike chance increases due to stats such as intelligence or agility will still only apply to either spells or melee.

Threat

Blessing of salvation has been radically changed and so many classes which relied on it for threat reduction may be in a bit of a panic about how threat management could be an issue in WotLK.

Fear not however, tanks in the expansion have had their threat multipliers boosted in compensation; for instance a warrior’s basic defensive stance now boosts threat generated by 45% rather than the current 30%. Equally, threat reduction talents for all dps classes are now present and much easier to access.

Raid Wide Abilities

Many effects which only had an impact on your own group have now been changed to be beneficial to your entire raid. Auras and totems will now be beneficial to all those nearby but the change does not only apply to buffs.

Several healing spells will affect raid members nearby regardless of grouping and many of the new abilities such as a paladin’s Judgement of the Wise talent, will affect raid members too.

The net impact will be a much wider variety of group compositions along with more fluid PvP combat within battlegrounds where groups naturally get split apart and group composition is generally random.

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32 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Patch 2.4.3 has now gone live on all realms, with it came a couple of rogue tweaks. The big change everyone is talking about though is to the subtlety talent, cheat death.

Before 2.4.3, cheat death would absorb the damage from any attack that would kill the rogue and provide 90% damage immunity for three seconds afterward. This effect could only happen once per minute; however when combined with the rogues’ large repertoire of escape maneuvers, it allowed them to survive long enough to either disengage or receive healing.

The overall impact of this talent was that, when supported by a healer, rogues were nigh impossible to kill in arena combat. As such many rogues with access to high damage PvE kit began to sacrifice survivability stats for damage boosts with little to no consequences as to how durable they actually were.

Due to this combination of high damage from PvE kit coupled with massive survivability without any effort, rogues became one of the most dominant arena classes, being present within most of the top team setups along with seeing widespread use throughout tournament play.

However at the start of Burning Crusade, Blizzard made it clear that their aim was to keep PvE and PvP itemization separate to prevent a relapse to original release WoW where players had to be successful within PvE content to have a high enough standard of equipment to compete in PvP. Cheat death was preventing this ideal from coming into effect for the rogue class.

As such, cheat death is now reliant on resilience and has been toned down in effect. Rather than absorbing the full damage of an attack it will instead reduce you to 10% of your health, and instead of automatically providing 90% damage mitigation it will provide four times the absorption that your resilience rating provides against critical strike damage.

Due to this change, cheat death is largely ineffectual without high levels of resilience. In fact, you now require 443 resilience rating in order to achieve the previous level of 90% damage mitigation; an amount only reachable with full PvP itemization coupled with defensive enchanting or gemming.

With this move, PvE itemization no longer has such a powerful advantage over PvP equipment within the arena. This will lead to a reduction in the damage output of rogues in general due to a shift towards survivability. As a side effect however, new or under-equipped players will be struggling to make cheat death effective for them until they boost resilience levels, making them prime targets for attack within lower rated arenas.

At least that is how the change should work in theory. Unfortunately it seems that cheat death has somehow become bugged and is in many cases only activating after death has occurred, leading to many rogues declaring it a waste of talent points. This will likely be fixed quickly however but for now it may be worth steering clear of the talent.

What this change means for top end arena and tournament effectiveness of rogues, however remains to be seen, but chances are, they won’t be anywhere near as dominating as before.

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23 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Back at the release of the arena system and throughout the duration of season 1 there was one rule of thumb, DoTs were king. Resilience never used to reduce DoT damage and as such warlocks and shadow priests dominated almost every bracket due to overwhelming amounts of shadow damage.

A counter however was found as people began to access The Black Temple. Shadow resist kit began to see widespread use throughout top end arena which caused the end of the domination of shadow caster classes.

As time has gone on though it is no longer possible to swap into resist sets mid arena fight and resilience now affects DoTs. But is the same principle still applicable? Can spell resist be just as effective now or in the future for high end PvP?

While it is no longer possible to equip yourself with pure resist kit specifically tailored to the opponent you are fighting, there are a number of options available to you for increasing your spell resist without significantly reducing your combat capability.

The first consideration before thinking of going for a spell resist build is your basic resist level, paladin auras, shaman totems, certain buffs, racial traits and other class abilities all act to provide a good base level to work off when aiming to resist a single spell school. Should you not have access to these skills, it is very hard to reach significant levels of resistance and as such will probably not be worth your while.

The second consideration is just what spell school you would like to become more resistant to. The most potent options are shadow and nature. The other spell schools, while effective in the right situation, only generally apply to mages who have many spell schools to rely upon for damage in an emergency.

Being able to resist shadow spells will give you a degree of protection from mana burns as well as a chance to resist the application of DoTs to yourself and each individual tick of damage, while becoming nature resistant will enable you to resist a druid crowd control along with poisons and a bulk of the damage from elemental shaman or moonkin.

If you have chosen a spell school to aim your spell resist efforts at, and have access to a decent baseline resist, then it is time to work on your equipment. The main way of increasing your resistances is through the resist all stat. This can be found on numerous enchants along with void spheres created by enchanters.

Each void sphere will provide you with 4 spell resist to every spell school and you are able to enchant your cloak or shoulders with a further 7 each with an additional 5 resist to your shield should you have one available. As a blood elf holy Paladin for example it is currently possible to reach a basic 56 resistance to all spell schools with little trouble.

The next step is spell school specific enchants, a glyph on your helm will add 20 resist to any single spell school of your choice. Armour kits with 8 spell resist to a single school are also available for your chest, legs, hands and feet, though your normal leg and hand enchants are more valuable.

By utilizing these single spell school enchants you can reach around 90 spell resist to a single school without buffs or 160 with an aura effect active. This level of spell resist is enough to resist around half of the incoming damage from that spell school and significantly reduce the chance of non damaging effects landing on you, all without using any pure resist equipment. Add the effect of any spell mitigating abilities such as a higher fear resist chance and you can become a formidable opponent for casters which used to be your nemesis.

Unfortunately, with current arena itemization most casters can pickup 74 spell penetration without any real effort severely compromising this tactic for now. With Wrath of the Lich King however, all spell resist abilities will continue to scale and we may see reduced levels of accessibility to spell penetration, possibly allowing for a return of spell resist to competitive PvP.

For now however, the ease of gaining spell penetration prevents its widespread use outside of PvE content.

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6 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

If you have been following my arena guides lately then you should now be entering the arena with a strong team setup coupled with a sophisticated communications setup to enable your team to perform to its best.

But all that planning is for nothing if you cannot execute your attack in the right way, as with the preparations you make before attacking, the way in which you initiate your attack is vital to winning in the arena.

Should your team end up confused and scattered in the attack it is a fast road to a lost match, likewise should you be able to force confusion upon your enemy it can make your wins easier to obtain. The trick is to force the other team to play into your own hands and style; make them dance to your tune and victory is assured.

One basic and effective opening tactic is a rush, this favors high burst dps teams to take advantage of the confusion for an easy first kill. The plan is simple, hit the other team hard and from an unexpected angle before they have a chance to identify what composition they are against.

An example of an effective place to rush is Blades Edge, most teams generally line up at opposite ends of the bridge and spend some time scouting out the other team, an effective rush will instead mount up and ride to the opposing teams ramp up to the bridge to hit them in the side.

The big downside to a rush is that while the other team will not have time to scout you out, neither will you have time to identify an effective target to nuke and so it is easy to end up with your own team confused without proper leadership.

A second effective opening tactic, and my personal favorite is harassment. This generally relies on having dispell classes move forward and purge one or two of the enemy buffs before backing off again quickly. In this manner you can weaken the enemy without fully engaging them and try to make one of their members panic and charge you.

If harassing, remember to land an attack from a distance on warriors in order to put them in combat; this stops them from utilizing charge against you which is the most common way you will be chased down as a harasser.

You can also harass with mana drains such as viper sting and by utilizing low rank DoT spells which cost far more mana to be removed than they do to cast. Further harassment tactics extend to the killing of hunter and warlock pets; these are sometimes left on aggressive stance and will charge out when attacked, enabling them to be killed alone.

The third tactic involves mass AoE crowd control and is effective when combined with a slightly delayed rush.   What it typically involves is a class such as a rogue sapping enemy healers or a mage polymorphing them before/as you charge in. This forces them to trinket in order to begin healing.

It is at this point that you hit the entire team with an AoE fear such as intimidating shout or howl of terror. The healers, having previously trinketed will now be out of control and likely to run out of line of sight of their team mates, causing chaos in the enemy’s organization.

This tactic does however rely on the other team being bunched up and you being the attacker.

The final opening tactic is the stealth hunt, if you know the other team has a stealth class, especially a rogue, then the chances are high that they will be sniffing around your team scouting you out. If you can catch them out with a low rank AoE to detect them or by utilizing the shadow sight gems then you force the other team to attack in order to rescue the stealth member.

This can lead to the opposition lacking organization in their attack making them much easier for you to dominate.

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4 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Hybrid classes form the backbone of many an instance group or PvP team, acting as the essential supporting mesh that pure classes rely on - often being the unsung heroes within the group.

Playing as a hybrid requires a great deal of skill to master compared to a pure class, especially in PvP and as such can take a while to learn for new players; however if you are up to the challenge then a hybrid class can be far more powerful than their pure-bred brethren.

There are two main play styles within the World of Warcraft that each hybrid class fits within which can loosely be described as an offensive style or a defensive style, below is a description of each and pointers to help you get the most out of your hybrid.

Offensive Hybrids

An offensive hybrid is a damage dealing class primarily and a backup healer as its secondary role. Examples of classes that fall within this category are shadow priests, Moonkin and Shockadins.

The trick to mastering these classes is to know when your healing abilities are required.  Far too many new players achieve a state of tunnel vision towards the damage dealing aspect of these classes; which is only a portion of your potential.

Nothing emphasizes the strength of an offensive hybrid more than arena play. At the start of a match an offensive hybrid is able to analyze the other team to assess just how pressured his own healers are going to be; and as such, how much he will need to support his own team as opposed to applying pure damage.

A simple example is the choice a Shockadin must make in 2v2 arena - if he should use avenging wrath or his defensive bubble. By analyzing the other teams’ damage output he can choose to either go all out on the attack with avenging wrath (should the other team lack damage) or play it defensively with his bubble against burst teams to try and simply outlast them.

Options like this simply are not available to pure classes but dramatically increase the range of team compositions with which you can effectively fight within the arena.

Similarly in PvE many late game encounters such as Archimonde can cause raid members to become separated from their healers while taking significant damage; nearby offensive hybrids can act as an emergency response if they are attentive.

Defensive Hybrids

A defensive hybrid is primarily a healer and offensive support is their secondary role. With the introduction of free spell damage on all healing kit each healing class fulfills this role - though some better than others.

Good examples of the most effective defensive hybrids are the Restokin build and holy paladins. In contrast to an offensive hybrid, the defensive hybrids’ challenge is knowing when to put its offensive potential into play.

While an offensive hybrid is more about assessing the overall situation and deciding if you need to play it safe, playing a defensive hybrid to its potential is much more about the timing and reactions needed to exploit a situation.

Similar to an offensive hybrid, many new players focus solely on the healing aspect of a defensive hybrid to the cost of all else, but when they become more comfortable with their class they can begin to bring the offensive aspects into play to push their class potential to the limit.

The arena is, once again, the place where bringing your offensive potential to full effect shines the most. A holy paladin who only focuses on healing may eventually succumb to crowd control or loss of mana when playing it safe; leading to a slow death.

However should that same paladin take to the offense at key times by using his hammer of justice to stun an enemy healer to prevent heals while unleashing supporting damage in the manner of a Shockadin; then he can at the very least put the other team on their back foot, if not force a kill.

By utilizing both the offensive and defensive aspects of your hybrid you ensure a level of unpredictability and adaptability in your actions, becoming much more of a threat to help ensure your domination of others.

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14 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Previously I have covered how to go about creating your arena team to give yourself a good chance of success, however going into an arena match with a strong setup and basic plan is only one small aspect of the battles within.

There are many steps and tactics that you can undertake to improve your teams’ chance of success before you are even engaged with your opponents; indeed many matches are won or lost by the preparation made right at the start.

Arena combat is highly competitive and so you must give yourself every possible advantage to be able to keep up; you can guarantee that your opponents will be utilizing every possible means they can get to improve their game play and so, you must do likewise.

The first thing to work on is improvements to your teams co-ordination and communication. To that end, one of the most important things to have for any serious arena team is voice communication.

The in game voice chat is unfortunately not too great - often having problems with its volume being much too quiet even when set to its maximum output. The two voice chat applications generally used throughout any competitive game play worldwide are Team speak and Ventrillo.

By making sure your entire team is connected to a voice chat server and has working microphones you instantly boost your performance due to being able to watch each others backs far more efficiently.

For example, healers can call out when they are silenced allowing hybrids to provide emergency backup healing as needed, and the DPS classes can co-ordinate their attacks and crowd control with much more speed to put some serious pressure on the opposition.

The second means to boost your team co-ordination is so simple and yet missed by many players. Arena combat can get very hectic and your team can end up scattered leading to confusion as to where the rest of your team is at any one time. This can lead to players becoming isolated from support.

The solution is simple, assign everyone in your team a raid marker. This allows you to easily track exactly where your team mates are at any one time, even through walls; a vital piece of information to ensure that you don’t end up accidentally getting out of line of sight of your healers.

With team communication and co-ordination improved, the next step is to improve the information available to you about your enemy. A fairly standard arena management mod is Proximo ( http://wow.curse.com/downloads/details/8291/ ) and what this lovely little mod does is provide a target status box for every member of the opposing team that you can target them by. But more importantly it shows this information the second anyone in your team with Proximo targets an enemy player.

This allows you to very quickly know at the start of an arena match just what you are up against in order to form an effective plan. And if you don’t manage to target everyone in the opposing team then one of your teams stealth classes, if you have one, can go and “scout out” the other side with ease.

Be warned however that hunters have discovered a nasty way to bug out Proximo. When you target someone via Proximo it targets by name, and hunters have taken to naming their pets after team mates to mess up your targeting.

Now, fully prepared to dominate, it is time to prepare your attack!

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5 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

One of the key skills required for success in a group or raid for any damage dealing class is the capability of the player to manage their own threat levels and this is a skill best learned early on in your gameplay.

When you start out in early instances such as Deadmines and Wailing Caverns, mobs don’t have a huge amount of punch to them and so the penalty for poor threat management is low. However as your progress through higher-end content you will quickly find out one simple fact: if you pull aggro, chances are you will die and in the process may take other players to the graveyard with you; obviously this is something best avoided.

Luckily threat management is a simple skill to pick up, and there are numerous things you can do to ensure you do not pull aggro, ever!

The first measure any player should take is to install a threat meter into their UI, there are several out there but most rely on the other players in your raid or group to have the same meter installed for it to work properly. The best advice here is to ask other players in your guild or server what addon they use and then choose the most common one.

Failing that my personal favorite is Omen, which can be downloaded at http://wow.curse.com/downloads/details/9101/

What a threat meter will do is provide an accurate visual representation as to how close you are to pulling aggro from a mob.

At its most basic, threat management is simply making sure you never exceed the tanks’ threat on your meter but in reality that can cause your DPS to drop should you reach the point where you must stop nuking to avoid the buildup of threat.

As such there are various tips and tricks you can do to give you an easier time of controlling your threat till you feel confident that you don’t even need to look at your threat meter anymore.

The first trick is to think carefully about what spells and abilities you open up with against a mob; using an attack which causes a large amount of instant damage as your opening spell is a very bad idea!

A much better idea is to open up with DoT attacks and debuffs, for instance I tend to open up with insect swarm. This way you can still deal a large amount of damage right from the start of a fight but you delay the threat from it until your tank has had time to build up a decent amount of threat himself.

A second trick is to bring a paladin along with you, they can give you a buff called blessing of salvation that will reduce all threat you produce by 30%, it is quite rare to be able to pull aggro with salvation on unless you are deliberately attempting to do so.

The third trick is to utilize threat reducing talents and skills such as feign. However this measure should only be undertaken after trying a few instances without such threat reduction.

Talent choices for threat reduction or spending time actively reducing your threat will reduce your DPS and so should only be done as a last resort. It is much more preferable to manage your threat through other means.

Finally, certain classes get methods to completely reset their aggro. Mages can ice block or turn invisible, Rogues can Vanish and hunters can feign death. If you find yourself climbing the meters or actually pulling aggro from the tank then do not hesitate to use either one of these skills.

With these simple tricks you can ensure the ability for you to DPS mobs down without fear of reprisal, allowing smooth dominating runs throughout any instance in the game!

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22 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

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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