Our team got rocked last night. Coming out the gate, we faced a full S3 team that rushed us over the tomb in the Ruins of Lordaeron. Quickly scanning targets, our DPS called for focus fire on the Shadow Priest. It wasn't until about five seconds in that I saw our Warrior dropping down to 50%, then 30%, and I had lost him in my Line-of-Sight. By the time he had sprinted out of the starting room, the opposing team had swapped targets to our Feral Druid and dropped him in under ten seconds. We'd been had.

Running triple melee, we were confined to too much of an offensive mindset to notice the fact that we were up against a 4-DPS team who went directly for the Warrior instagib. The only person who saw this early enough was our Warrior, who retreated back into our room to slow down the opposing team's offense. By the time we'd picked up on what was happening, our Druid was dead and our Warrior was running around the coffin with a sword and board Spell Reflecting and trying to stay alive. By then it was too late and in less than two minutes we were handed our first and only loss for the night.

Looking back at the game, we tried to pick apart everything that went wrong about that two minute game in a discussion that lasted well over an hour. I looked at my performance and kicked myself for not picking up on the adjustment fast enough to hole in with our Warrior, who knew what we were up against right away. We were sloppy from the get-go, losing our positioning and -- by the standards against which we were put, a 4-DPS team -- overextended ourselves by moving out of our starting area and LOSing each other. Sure enough, triple melee already has its own problems with 4-DPS, particularly one of that caliber, and we ran through everything that could have been and needed to be done.

From choosing the right target -- Armory revealed that the Priest had 12k health and was sitting on 473 Resilience, hardly the ideal target in that set-up -- to countercomping, we tried to pick apart everything about the game. Maybe the Mage with 10k health and 400 Resilience might have been a wiser choice, considering he'd overextended himself by Blinking into the room with our Warrior. We'd considered going back to our regular 2345 or 2346 and even considered a triple healer countercomp. We ran the scenarios through our heads over and over and over looking at how we could beat that team.

In the end, we called it for the night, content with a 4 point gain from the previous evening. The post-game analysis is one of the most important phases in playing Arenas. After every game, we dissect what we did, even when we win. We look at how we could have played better, from constructive criticism to our team leader's constant (albeit oddly helpful) nerd raging. Personally, it's one of the things I enjoy the most about the game... picking apart our matches and figuring out how we can do better, constantly looking for ways to take our game to the next level. How about you? How does your team dissect your game and play? What teams and comps give your team the most trouble?

Tags: 2345, 2346, 4-dps, Arena, PvP, tri-healer, triple-melee

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, PvP, Arena