Arena Mindset

Headaches can be a pain, and last night's arena results weren't great because I had a headpounder a-brewing in my noggin. We went 2-2 before I called it for a night because I was getting outplayed and forgetting to use abilities. While headaches can cause a lapse in concentration, the point is that often, the best time to do arenas is when you're able to put aside kids, pets, spouses, and all other distractions. Playing while hungry or thirsty just won't do either. I'm a firm believer of treating it seriously (y so srs?) and having a positive mindset when doing anything competitive. If youre going to do it, give it your all. Not trying isn't being fair to your teammates and as a corollary, playing while distracted is like running the 100m dash with a sprained ankle. At the same time, if I know we're not playing well, I'll call it early and try to fix the strategies instead of constantly queueing while getting demoralized due to losses.

In short, I don't like going to bed frustrated and pissed off at either my play or my partners'.

As for my mistakes, because I was distracted, I failed to communicate my actions and call out important key events. We lost to a Warlock/rogue team because I wasn't prepared for the damage output of the rogue (good rogues are scary!) and we lost a mirror match to a much more coordinated team that controlled my positioning well.

I also kited like a retard. Shame on me.

The games we did win were against two Warlock/Druid teams. The first team feldom'd out a second felhunter after the first felhunter died and subsequently lost due to ridiculous damage on the now non soul linked Warlock. The second team was able to, through massive cc's on the part of the Druid, hard summon a voidwalker, but their Druid wasn't very good at running to drink as she was moonfire'd/faerie fire'd/throwing weapon'd as she left OR the voidwalker was cycloned and the Warlock was eating lots of damage through a 5 stack of sunder armor. They did play well, linking fear and cyclones on me and then cycloning the Warrior to stop my hots from ticking, but their coordination sorta broke apart a few times, letting us heal back up to full. We swapped to the Druid once she got low on mana and the poor Warlock couldn't peel enough to let her Druid get away.

Poor druid.

In other news, my 3's buddy (other than the warrior) is going to pick up his S3 weapon today. Granted, its not a S4 weapon, but its nice to be able to upgrade while still learning a comp. We play War/EnSham/Druid and zerging stuff has gotten us up to a season high of ~1850 or so. We're still refining our strats and call out cc's, so I can definitely expect something greater than the 1800's.

To be honest, i'm truly scared of melee classes in WotLK. It's not because their damage is so retardedly high on clothy/leather targets, but more that many of them have gotten Beastial Wrath type effects. Kiting a Feral Druid is going to be a difficult prospect if all you have is snares. Kiting an Enhancement Shaman is going to be downright impossible now that they can break snares with Ghost Wolf form a la druid shapeshifting.. and they have mail!

We'll see how things change for class dominance and if the poor Paladins and Hunters will ever be brought forth from their current depths of utterly poor class design.