5v5: Chaos Theory

So I (was) running steady with a 5v5 arena team on the TTR. I use was, because I logged in today to find it, mysteriously, gone. Team Captain must have disbanded it or something. I dunno, I’ve never “captained” one. Ahh, well. Apparently this type of thing happens all the time on the TTR. Team appear, then disappear, than appear again. Apparently, it’s not uncommon to be a part of five or six arena teams… in one day.

Well, assuming you went in there with no friends. Like me… /sniffle

ANYWAYS.

So, here was the group we went with. It’s referred to as a “4DPS” set up, although for us, it was more of a “3.5DPS” set up. We had:

1. Myself, Frost Mage (0/17/44. Molten Shields is sexy)
2. Profundere, Discipline Priest (43/18/0)
3. Vehemence, Elemental/Resto Hybrid Shaman (40/0/21. Ok, that’s not really hybrid, is it? Meh)
4. Pinchy, Marksman Hunter (11/42/8. He had a Scorpid pet named “Pinchypet”. Figure that one out)
5. Arglblarg, SL/SL Warlock (I believe the exact number was 27/34/0. Something like that)

Discipline Priest on main heals, Shaman jumping in when necessary. Our strategy was fairly simplistic, burn the weak, kite the strong, bitch slap the healers. As a group, we had set up /assist macros to our hunter, and he had a macro that would give us “ASSIST” as a raid warning when burst damage was called for. After a few games, we had it down pretty damn well. We’d get the raid warning, and within the next four seconds, the target in question would eat a Shatter combo (if I could, otherwise a frostbolt/fireblast combo), a Shadowbolt, a Lightning Bolt, and probably an Aimed Shot.

Other than that, the team captain (the discipline priest) pretty much allowed us to do whatever, with a few macro’d prompts, along the lines of “assist Vehemence” or “assist Polymorphine”; stuff like that. He pretty much expected us to simply know how to play, and I guess he was right. Since more often than not we all came to the same conclusions anyways. Warrior rushes us? We largely ignore it, root it, sheep it, and go after something else. Our warlock was very DoT happy; usually, CoA, Corruption, and Siphon Life would be ticking on at least three of their team.

Only real confusion came from when we were fighting rogues. My strategy was to keep the rogue controlled while killing healers. Sheeped, rooted, or otherwise, in at least an effort to try and force the rogue to blow valuable cooldowns early to attempt to save his own healer. The hunter thought the opposite, control the healer, kill the rogue… All fine and dandy until he pops Sprint and Vanish atst, and bum rushes our Priest… BUT I DIGRESS. I swear I had a point here…

Oh, yes. The TTR, due to it’s nature of allowing premades, sees some extremely odd teams. Here are some of the strangest, and how these fights went down.

• 5 druids. These team was an exercise in complete and utter frustration. Natch, they had all shifted kitty at the start, so we had most of the team sitting defensively right at the end of the bridge (BEM arena), while Pinchy (the hunter, remember?) moved around attempting to locate them. Track Hidden, I think it’s called? Meanwhile, Flare was going, and I was dropping Rank 1 Blizzards around. This went on for some minutes. So we got aggresive, moving as a squad to their starting area, trying to figure out (in the words of the warlock) “where the eff did these tards go?”. We were tipped off to their presence by a pair of Boomkin suddenly appearing and shooting Moonfire everywhere. As far as I can tell, their team makeup was two balance druids, and three resto druids. Obviously, I had died and gone to hell. Five bloody druids, three of them full on healers, in the BEM arena, where I might as well have brought condoms for the all the pillar humping these druids were doing. Our team eventually did win, but we were probably at it for a long, long time. It felt like each druid took upwards of five minutes to kill. I was doing my darnest best, trying to time my shatters to match with Pinchy’s Aimed Shot to try and force a casted heal out of one of the druids, so we could counterspell/shock them. Other than that, it seemed like we were spamming crowd controls at random, and hoping we could wear down their mana faster than we used up ours. And sure enough, one by one, their mana ran out and we were able to kill them.
• Five Warlocks, all SL/SL. This team scared the bejeesus out of me at first, until I realized “oh, wait a sec. No healer, only two forms of CC between ALL five of them… we’ll be fine”. And we were. Burned them down one by one, throwing interrupts at the rest at random, while I mostly ran around wondering why ALL FIVE BLOODY WARLOCKS SENT THE FELHUNTER AT ME. I’ve never seen my buffs disappear so fast… I was spamming Rank 1 Mana shield in a futile effort to keep my precious buffs safe… it worked a little bit? I managed to keep Ice Barrier active for a good twenty seconds, at least…
• Three warriors, two paladins. Obviously, both paladins were healers. This was one of our early fights, so our ‘lock had put DoTs on all five of them. ALL FIVE. No polymorph for me… this fight fluctuated a lot, from outright panic in the beginning when our shaman was totally and utterly destroyed by these warriors. They went straight for the shaman! So weird! Priest couldn’t heal through, Mortal Strike and all. And of course, poor little Vehemence couldn’t get anything off past the initial NS heal… On the bright side, Pinchy managed to tag everybody with Aimed Shot, and we managed to force the Paladins into bubbling far, far too early in the fight. An easy win at that point, right? Well, it was until all three warriors Intercepted the warlock… warlock went down fast and hard. “Stupid fear immunes”, I believe was the exact quote. We ended up winning, both myself and the hunter were able to rapidly destroy the paladins after they blew their bubbles. Well, mostly me, I guess. Pinchy wasn’t able to do much damage through all that armor… heh… A warrior without a healer doesn’t get to do much.
• Three rogues, a hunter, and a Holy Priest. You know how we could tell it was a Holy Priest? Logic here dictates destroy the healer, then kill off the DPS, right? Well, it didn’t work out so well for us. Priest went down very fast, like, first ten seconds of combat fast. Some lucky crits from myself and the shaman there, I suppose. I had frostbolt, ice lance, and fireblast all crit abnormally high right off the bat. Priest forgot to Dispel magic from himself, I suppose? Didn’t even try to get out of Frost Nova… So yeah. Priest turned into a Spirit of Redemption upon death, and that’s about when everything went to hell… I sit comfortably at 11.5k hitpoints when running with this crew. I went from full to 30% in about 3 seconds. Ice Block! Oh, god, I’m save for now. Excellent. They killed my water elemental instead. Vehemence has died. OH. SHI-Profundere has died. I break Ice Block, gotta recover this! What the… a Big Red Scorpion to the face?! WRYYY! Ok, ok, I can do this, Cold Snap, get the elemental back out. I got it back out, then it was killed again. I got a root, and one lousy cast out if it before it died again. Then the rogues were back, and I was finished long before Hypothermia was up. Then the warlock was torn to pieces, and our hunter made a valiant effort to kill at least one rogue… Which ended abruptly seven seconds later.
• Four Elemental Shaman, and a paladin. All four shaman basically ran to the middle tomb thingy (Lordaeron map) and began casting Chain Lighting and Lightning Bolt in rapid succession. We tried. We really tried. I counterspelled one, sheeped another, tried to get at the paladin. Hunter probably silenced one, and most likely Scattered another. We just couldn’t hold them down… myself, the priest, and the warlock were dead by the 20 second mark. The other two were dead within another five… It was… sickening, how fast our team was utterly destroyed by some shamans. Nerf Shamans.

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