by Michael Gray

Last week, we talked about what it takes to kill a healer. While we obviously had a few “be a death knight” jokes, the discussion was pretty good. It’s a clear and obvious point: If you don’t kill the enemy’s healer, you’re in for a long, hard Battleground.

If it’s so important to kill the enemy healer, then the inverse must also be true: Protect your healer. If you’d ever like to experience the life of a rope caught in a tug-of-war between 15 wild dogs, roll a healer in Warsong Gulch. It’s kind of like that.

Without your protection, your healer will soon be enjoying life as a greasy spot of ex-character. This is bad. First, that healer’s your team member. Second, that healer is your own best avenue of survival, since you need healing. If you want healing, protect your healer. Simple stuff.

As a general rule, I’d place protecting your healer among any Battleground’s highest priorities. You can’t let the protection get in the way of things like capturing the flag, but by the same token, you probably won’t capture said flag without your healer.
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by Olivia Grace
One thing I’m asked fairly regularly is the following: What can I do to improve in Arena? My usual response is a slew of questions. First, how much resilience do you have? I’ve spoken about this in past articles, so I won’t harp on about it here. The second question is simply do you practice? Again, as I’ve mentioned, practice makes perfect. That is really the most important thing you can do to make yourself a better player in the Arena, so take every opportunity. Even on my healers, I generally fly around on my non-PvP realm with PvP switched on. I’m not going to be able to kill anyone of my own level, but I might get some practice surviving!

But this week I’m looking to be a little more specific for you, and we’re going to talk about some skills or gameplay styles or whatever you’d prefer to call them. If you can incorporate them into your gameplay, chances are you’ll improve in Arena. Obviously, in order to incorporate them, what are you going to need to do? Practice, of course!
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by Michael Gray

One of the themes that keeps coming up when we talk about PvP is this: Killing a healer is tough. It’s a fundamental part of balancing an MMO. If any single DPSer could simply kill a healer with ease, then there wouldn’t be much point in being a healer. If all factors were truly equal, then a healer’s output should match a damage dealer’s output. It’s just a matter of one equals one. Only superior skill or gear should allow for the death of a healer in any reasonable amount of time.

More importantly, a healer must be able to keep up with the damage from more than oneDPSer for a short period of time. Consider 5-person Arena matches. Commonly, teams are built of four DPSers and one healer. (We’re not looking for comp arguments here, just the basics.) For at least a few seconds, a healer should be able to keep a focus target alive. The same goes for three-person Arena teams. See where this is going? Healers, by nature, need to be able to withstand a huge amount of DPS for a short time.
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by Olivia Grace

Resilience — the 4,000 mark is a good place to be, but remember that people who’ve been gearing up aggressively will likely be in the 4,800 area at the moment, depending on their stat strategy. Resilience scales a bit strangely, but take it from me that 800 resilience is a substantial chunk. If you’re into math (and re-reading posts to properly understand them), check out this official forum post to get a better understanding of resilience scaling.

But it’s OK! The MMR system will save us! Due to the MMR reset at the beginning of this season, you will start with an MMR (Matchmaking Rating) of 1,500. Trust me, that’s quite a lot, especially for complete Arena beginners. An MMR of 1,500 means that the game expects you to win against teams with a rating of 1,500 roughly 50% of the time. That might not sound so bad, sure, but unless you’re a PvP genius, 1,500 MMR is going to result in quite a lot of losses at first. Don’t be disheartened. It’s normal! You’re going to learn to win by losing. I promise.

Such a negative start to a column! But to go back to our normal, positive mood, how can a beginning Arena team improve?
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by Olivia Grace
While derided by some purists, addons are a very useful part of your gameplay. In my opinion, they’re far from being something that only people who don’t know how to play have to use. Addons can help you improve. It should be noted that at top-level Arena tournaments, teams have to play without addons, so if that is your eventual aim, bear that in mind and try to use them to learn rather than becoming dependent on them. I’m not the most technical of ladies, so what you won’t find here is anything that needs coding skill or an intimate knowledge of .lua to edit. And, while basic UI modifications are often pretty straightforward, they can still help you enormously.
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by Olivia Grace

With patch 4.3 imminent and Arena season 10 due to end Nov. 29, it seems reasonable to assume the patch will appear in early December. While you’re racing to get your team into title range, get that last piece of gear, or just running laps of your capital city, you might be thinking forward to the arrival of the patch and wondering what your fate will be in PvP as the nerf bat winds up for another swing. Firstly, let’s deal with some housekeeping.

Conquest points, the PvP equivalent of valor points, will now be far, far easier to earn from ordinary Battlegrounds. The first daily Battleground win will now award 100 conquest points, up from 25, and wins after that will award 50 conquest point, up from, well, none! The conquest cap will remain, so while it will still be far quicker to reach it through Arena, it will also be attainable via Battlegrounds of the non-rated variety. This makes it far easier for solo players to build up the resilience numbers people often demand (fairly or otherwise) for access to Arena and Rated Battleground teams or just to gear for Battlegrounds.
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by Matthew Rossi

This is part 2 of our look at PVPing with a spec mainly thought of by others as a PVE spec. Protection has waxed and waned in popularity as a PVP spec since Wrath of the Lich Kinglaunched. Its mobility, stun potential and kite resistance (as well as some nice spell interrupt utility), combined with excellent survival, weigh against its lack of raw burst potential. Protection can do many things well in PVP, from carrying a flag or protecting a tower or cap point to tanking in Alterac Valley or the Isle of Conquest, but its strengths are balanced by one factor. Compared to other warrior specs, protection in PVP just plain lacks the raw killing throughput of arms or fury.

This doesn’t mean a prot warrior can’t get off a Shield Slam that will make another player cross-eyed, because it can and does. But unlike arms, when prot charges a target and stuns it, even using Shockwave immediately afterwards, it simply isn’t likely to burst out anything close to the raw damage of the non-tanking specs. If you’re prot in PVP, you should be maximizing your strengths, not dwelling on your weaknesses.

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by Daniel Whitcomb

This is about the time in an expansion’s life cycle when PVE content is just getting a little too repetitive, to be frank. With only one instance at the top raid tier and only two dungeons at the top LFD tier, it’s pretty tempting to try out a few battlegrounds or an arena or two just to spice things up. Personally, the RBG reward mount is one of my favorite-looking ones out of the whole bunch, so that’s even more reason to try this PVP stuff out. This week, we’re going to look at some of the most basic stuff you’ll need to know if you plan to do some PVP as a death knight.
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by Matthew Rossi

I do PVP quite a bit. The problem is, I PVP as either protection or fury. I do a lot of battlegrounds, I hit Tol Barad about once a day, and I do rated BGs fairly frequently. What have I learned from all this?

• Fury is a surprisingly viable PVP spec. My raiding spec has room for mobility and versatility talents, so I don’t even have to respec to PVP effectively. If I were a PVPer primarily instead of secondarily, I’d probably tweak my build for Furious Attacks, but I do fine without it.
• I prefer Titan’s Grip to SMF for PVP use. I also raid with TG, but I’ve tried both and I just prefer being able to pop my cooldowns and throw a Bloodthirst/Raging Blow combo on someone after an intercept and get the burst potential of TG.
• Fury does lack some of the tools arms or protection can bring. If you’ve PVPed as arms lately, you’ll know how addictive Charge/Throwdown/Bladestorm can be. Prot has a lot of tools for stunning, silencing, interrupting and otherwise hindering casters. Fury lacks these tools. If you’re doing fury PVP, you’re basically hoping to do as much damage as fast as possible.
• Doing as much damage as fast as possible is ludicrously fun. I’m going to be honest here: The reason I like fury PVP is because it’s all or nothing. In an Arena setting, I expect I would just get burst down every time, but in the mad chaos of group PVP fury has the potential of doing sudden, savage damage to a single target or even a group, interrupt flag capture, hinder base turnover, and in general just be a gigantic prickly ball o’death at the worst possible time for the enemy.

So let’s talk about fury PVP.
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