[Paladin] More Thoughts on Season 9 Arena

My paladin is starting to get decently kitted out in PvP gear, especially for an alt I haven't had much time to focus on. (I blame a combination of Dragon Age II and overtime at the day job.) My 2v2 partner and I have designated Thursday nights as arena night and I've since bought my Vicious Gladiator's Gavel as well as a new cloak, ring, wrist, and shoulders. It's kind of funny how quickly these Conquest points are adding up compared to previous seasons.

I love it.

I've realized that I really like Season 9 much more than previous seasons and it's because of the changes that have been made to allow people to buy epic PvP gear.

Back when arenas were first introduced in TBC everyone started at 1500 arena rating and went up or down, but as long as you played your ten games a week you got arena points. Gear had no rating requirements so you played, win or lose, and got your gear after you earned enough points. A lot of casual arena play occurred due to people who had no interest in titles but found it was a nice way to get gear.

Unfortunately, people also played who had no interest in arena itself, titles or no. They just wanted the gear, because it was better than what they could gear raiding Kara every week. I knew several people like that.

Then Blizzard added the rating requirement to get the best gear. Some people I knew stopped arenas altogether, because the gear they wanted (for PvE) was out of reach.

With WotLK, the urge to do arenas for gear largely went away. For certain classes a piece or two of arena gear could be sweet, but by and large PvE gear came from PvE. And arenas themselves changed.

Now players started at 0 rating and moved up. Gear could be purchased at 1100 rating and up, but it would take a good many games before reaching the appropriate rating, and it was frustrating to be accumulating arena points only to cap out at a point where points were coming in but there was no new gear to spend them on because the better gear was inaccessible. Or, perhaps your team got to the appropriate rating, but you didn't have the points to spend and by the time you did you'd lost that ranking and your chance at the gear you wanted.

I did have a good time with arenas in WotLK. I got my Challenger title for 3v3 and 5v5 in Season 6 (both teams were ranked high enough). I loved my teammates.

But after they stopped playing it was hard to get back into arenas again. My one remaining teammate was my hunter friend, and as I've mentioned, hunter/paladin is mocked as "terrible" to put it lightly. While we knew we weren't terribad players, we couldn't get a rating that mattered, and our gear couldn't get any better, which was discouraging.

These days in Cata, we're still playing, and while we aren't at our former Challenger-level glory, we're making progress and having fun. We progress without being concerned about hitting a number.

We're getting conquest points much more efficiently than earning honor points in battlegrounds (working a lot of overtime right now, time is at a premium), and as our gear has improved, we're finding hunter and holy paladin isn't quite the suck it initially appears to be.

That's not to say we don't hate the Dalaran arena anymore, or that my partner doesn't want to punch himself when healers start pillar dancing, but we're durable. We outlast other teams.

My partner loves the double dps groups. If I can keep him alive through the initial burst, we nearly always win. And I have a lot of burst healing. I've had Divine Favor and Aura Mastery up at the same time to let me chain cast a bunch of super fast un-interruptable Divine Lights.

If we fight a healer/dps combo, the fight is often longer, more likely to be dicey, but I have discovered something. Even with only 1600 resilience, I'm pretty durable against a single dps. It's only been these past couple weeks that it's become evident, but apparently my resilience is now at critical mass where I can start feeling comfortable with a dps beating on me while my partner does his business of pew-pewing a target.

After last night's rousing win ratio of 5-2 (only 5 matches needed to cap on conquest for the week), I started reforging some of the spirit off my PvP set to haste.

The reason for that is that I've noticed I haven't been hurting for mana the past two weeks. We had several matches where our opponents are dps (in which case the match is over one way or the other relatively quickly) or the healer goes oom way before I do.

We had one poor team where the disc priest was at 5% mana and I was virtually at full. We can outlast. If we're durable I can keep us both up primarily with Holy Shocks and Word of Glorys, weaving occasional Holy Lights or Divine Lights as necessary. I have kited a rogue in circles in the Lordaeron arena while keeping myself alive with nothing but instants.

I can only see this getting better. I used to be the squishy healer, never mind the plate, but I can only imagine how much the opposing team is going to hate me once I get even more PvP gear. It makes the PvPer in me grin.

[Paladin] Oh My! Arena, How Have You Been?

This post is dedicated to my guild’s bear tank, Buik, for nagging me to update already. ;)

My paladin hit level 85 about a week and a half ago, and since that time I’ve started PvPing. Battlegrounds, then Tol Barad, and finally, last night, arena.

Given the time frame, I didn’t have time to earn honor for a full set of blue PvP gear for myself, and I didn’t want to splurge on crafted blues. I’m not shooting for a title at the moment. I just wanted to get back in the groove of things and do some 2v2 with my long-time arena partner Cursedhoof.

So I entered my first arena match in my PvE blues and greens with a blue PvP honor chest and my old 200 resilience PvP trinket from WotLK. I wanted to be better geared, but as Cursedhoof pointed out, at this point we have no rating to lose and we’ll still be getting Conquest Points, so after some reflection it didn’t sound like a bad idea at all.

Hunter and holy paladin has long been described as one of the worst 2v2 arena combos ever. Seriously, there’s a thread on that topic at Arena Junkies and you will find hunter/holy pally listed on the first page. We made it work in Season 4 (the last season of Burning Crusade) , but it wasn’t as strong for the seasons we played in WotLK (Seasons 6 and 7).

The problem with hunter and holy paladin is a lack of burst and that the hunter is surprisingly squishy. Line of sight issues are absolutely horrible for us. It actually wasn’t too bad for us back in TBC, when Nagrand and Blade’s Edge were the arenas of choice. While a good healer can pillar hump with the best of them, the arenas that kill us are the Dalaran Sewers (boxes hate hunters because they’re so small the hunter is forced into melee range if he has to run around the corner to get on the same side as the kill target) and the Ring of Valor (we haven’t played this one yet in Cata, but throughout WotLK he would have to dismiss his pet or it would bug out while trying to get off the starting elevator).

As part of getting ready for arenas, I decided to sacrifice my paladin’s prot spec to make my first spec completely dedicated to holy PvP.

It might sound a little funny, especially from someone who had previously earned an arena title, but I had never actually specced entirely for PvP. Throughout TBC I used an odd holy spec that allowed me to PvE, PvP, and even tank content up to normal Magister’s Terrace. Unfortunately changes were made to how paladins worked early in WotLK so I lost the holy tanking ability, but with dual specs that wasn’t an issue. I could use my second spec for prot and my holy spec was a good PvE/PvP hybrid. There were a couple points here and there that were sub-optimal for one activity or another, but overall it was decent enough.

So why did I change now?

Well, the reason behind the decision was primarily Light of Dawn, and then it snowballed from there.

Light of Dawn is an AoE cone heal costing Holy Power. No mana would be needed, but it would also mean that I would not be able to use the instant cast Word of Glory heal at the same time, since they both rely on the Holy Power resource. An AoE heal for two people, even three, is a waste. Light of Dawn is not an arena talent.

I also realized that with Pursuit of Justice being on the second tier of the ret tree it was within easy pickings of a PvP spec, should I want it. While running faster is fun in PvE too, really it’s a godsend in PvP. (Few things make me happier than frustrating the warrior or DK who can’t seem to keep up with or kill me.)

So I decided that this season I would try a full PvP spec. Besides, questing with a full PvE holy spec is awful, and I could do dailies in PvP spec but PvE gear.

Our first night in the arena

Our first night of Season 9 was not terribly smooth. I can’t speak for my teammate, but I was in terrible form. I died twice before getting my bubble off in matches where my death most likely cost us the game. I always reminded my Season 7 3v3 ret pally partner that he should never die without having already used his bubble, so I was needless to say kicking myself seven ways to Sunday over it. I think the problem is that I was remembering how long I would live in WotLK, but I have virtually no PvP gear in Cata so I kept underestimating how much longer I could really stay standing.

Bubble early, bubble often, is what I have to tell myself now.

We also encountered one pain-in-the-neck disc priest who, while unable to keep his PvP partner up, was a master at running around boxes in the Dalaran area. We ended up wasting 5-10 minutes chasing him around until he finally gave up and left. If we managed to catch up in the open we could get him to maybe 40- 50% health before he got away again, but his mana regen was so strong he was always able to heal up again while getting mana back. He went from 20% mana when his partner died to full when he only had to maintain himself.

Rebuke is truly something awesome now. As a blood elf paladin I now have three different ways to interrupt a healer, and as a result of that, I had a crowning moment of awesome to redeem myself in one of our matches.

We were fighting a feral druid and a resto shaman. I wasn’t having much trouble keeping teammate up, but the resto shaman was good about ducking behind pillars to avoid being shot at by a hunter. So while my partner stayed on the feral, what I did was run up to the shaman and Arcane Torrent when she was lining up a Healing Wave. She ran away, of course, and when the silence wore off she started winding up a Healing Surge. I ran up to her and hit Rebuke. And if my teammate hadn’t killed the feral by then, I had my Hammer of Justice ready for a third interrupt.

Hammer of Justice is the third interrupt because it’s possible to trinket out of it, but Rebuke and Arcant Torrent prevent spellcasting for a few seconds afterwards, which means the healer just has to eat it.

We ended the night comfortably maxed out on Conquest Points, and to my surprise, epic PvP gear is not all that expensive! I remember having to scrimp for weeks to hope for a piece of arena point gear, but not so much now. I can reasonably expect a new piece every two weeks, starting with my PvP weapon as soon as next week. This is probably old news to some people, but since I hadn’t been PvPing all I knew was that there was a lot of epic arena gear that didn’t require a rating.

Certainly there is 2200 rating arena gear, which I never expect to get, but I should be able to get quite a few pieces of the lower tier epics before the next season starts.

[Paladin] Taunt the Adds while Healing on Saurfang

My guild did its weekly ICC run, but still dealing with holiday absences, we ended up being short two of our three healers. I asked our one attending healer, Valiea, how he felt about two-healing it if I came on my paladin (we would have gone with three if we had to resort to out of guild folks), and ever up to a challenge, he said let's do it!

Now I know it's not uncommon to 25-man guilds to do 10-man runs with only two healers, but being that we're a 10-man I'm always a little hesitant to accept that the content is as easy as some people claim. Valiea is also a paladin, which meant that we'd be two-healing ICC without the benefits of hots, chain heals, or priest shields.

If anything, our run last night was a lesson in how to take an sub-optimal group through Lower Spire (we had four paladins in raid, wtf?), but we did it! And hell, it was a lot of fun with just the two of us healing. There were scary moments and I can't say we never died, but it was a very satisfying run.

Aside from healing Lower Spire with two paladins, the biggest adjustment we had to make was our strategy on Saurfang. Our resto shaman wasn't there, so we had no Earthbind Totem (and no Bloodlust!). I was not on my moonkin, so we had no Entangling Roots. Our hunter was still there with his frost traps, but he was already pulling the right add towards him as soon as it spawned, which meant the left add would still be free, the one that I would aggro with Wrath spam and then root if I was on my druid.

We had a mage, warlock, rogue, ret pally, hunter, and cat druid for our dps. Given that set up, we figured the mage should aggro one and Frost Nova it into place. But this turned out to be tricky, and she got herself squished the first time she tried it. The second time she couldn't pull the add off the melee. The blood counters were stacking up.

Then someone said, "One of the paladins taunt it out."

The only paladins at range were Valiea and myself, the two healers. Valiea's better geared since his paladin is his main, and we'd agreed beforehand that he would focus on the tanks and I would get the raid and the first mark. Figuring I had the bigger bandwidth, I hit the wayward add with a Hand of Reckoning and pulled it out of there. If it got out of the frost trap and into melee range of me before the ranged could kill the first add I'd stun it. By then the first add would be dead and our hunter would taunt the second one off me and pull it away.

Being that I'm still using my hybrid raid/PvP spec I also had a 40 second Hammer of Justice, so I had a stun available almost every spawn, just in case.

For a healer that really likes to make decisions, it can be quite a rush to be healing a party member taking steady ongoing damage from Mark of Blood, raid healing with single target heals the sporadic party members with Boiling Blood, and taunting and stunning adds all in the same battle.

I've always been the kind of person that relished these kinds of assignments, where if you screw up the raid's probably doomed, and to participate in add control as a healer on a fight where you just can't let your target die or it'll probably be a wipe... it's something I haven't done before.

It made healing the VoA 10 pug I did later that night incredibly boring.