Here is Gabriel "DarkFact" Zamudio's views on the arena realm.

For our third round of matches, the TTH team decided to go with a new approach, since we were facing many groups with 1 healer, 1 DPSer and 1 CC, we tried to go the burst route, hoping to bring one or two down before they could heal through the damage.

Our last makeup was Mage, Mage and Shaman - Byron "Messiah" Murdry being a mage just like me, and David "Xerin" Piner being a Shaman, trying to surprise them with a triple ranged DPS combo.

Our first matches were not that great, as people were quick to react to our new strategy and hide after being pyroblasted twice. Fortunately, our subsequent matches were much better - people did not anticipate being triple-nuked by us, this worked well and we won a few matches thanks to our new strategy - resilience works against crits, but not exceedingly amounts of damage, like the ones outputted by 2 pyroblasts and bloodlusts.

With our setup, we defeated a good amount of teams, first of which was a group with a druid, a warlock and a druid. Combining our pyroblasts and bloodlusting onto the Warrior, he hit the ground faster than ever before any druid heal came to his aid. Then came the warlock, while the druid was polymorphed or counterspelled - a simple set of fireballs with our all-crit all-dps specs dropped him fairly quickly. The druid had no chance, and abandoned the battleground after a few seconds later.

Other matches included the typical Priest Mage Rogue, but since we had a lot of DPS now and unexpecting people encroaching on us, our DPS surprised quite a few Priests and it was enough to win a few more matches in this fashion. If we ran out of mana, it was the end of the battle, but this wouldn't be the case for many matches.

The groups that seemed to endure more against us were the ones that had Paladins or Druids, as they used their best heals, or would bubble to avoid counterspells and heal, or would simply tag their friend with Blessing of Freedom to avoid our snares.

Blizzard's Arena System is a great way to find new challenges within the game, you no longer fight against predetermined monsters and encounters, but against other players who will react differently to different tactics you may or may not win all your matches.

In the Arena, if you want to succeed, you will need people who know the ins and outs of their classes perfectly, are willing to devote enough time to learn team tactics, and most importantly, coordination, be it from in-game voicechat or ventrilo is what will make or break a good team.

With all of this taken into account, Blizzard's newest Arena Tournament is a success as it lets people who have organized themselves and played in live servers before a definite advantage over any people who rolled in them for the extra loot and stats - the matches were definitely easier when fighting people who didn't seem to grasp what their class was all about, and often in the cities, general chat would have it so that person X and Y wanted arena groups.

I have no doubt that people who do well in live servers and have climbed up to the top 100 will undoubtedly win this Tournament as well, simply for the fact that gear doesn't mean you will win in the end. Given even matches, as mentioned in previous writeups, skill will shine.

Playing on these servers allowed me to fully appreciate how complex and diverse different arena strategies and makeups are, without the gear coming into the equation, and find a better understanding on how Blizzard envisions this game's PvP for the future - if everyone's got equally powered gear, this game can be quite the challenge still, with no class truly outshining other classes.

The most popular combos we fought were the "current" favorite combo by many, which is Priest, Mage, Rogue, for lots of Crowd Control with a Sap and a Sheep, along with Mass Dispel and solid mana pool. Other favorites were Druid, Warrior, Warlock or Mage. The constant class here being Mage - this class excels at crowd control, better than any other, and has a solid DPS output and survivability with their Water Elemental and multiple ice blocks. Frost Nova and Blink only sweeten the deal, making it extremely hard for a Warrior or Rogue to stay on them for long, as such, making them ideal teammates in a 3's or 5's setting.

All in all, a great event we were all proud to be a part of, and we hope to continue assisting to said Blizzard events in the future, eagerly awaiting the changes Wrath of the Lich King will undoubtedly offer to PvP, PvE and Arena as it comes.

This tournament will allow you to see how your character will do in an equal level with those 'elite' people out there, so if you think you've got the skills and have equally-minded people, it's well worth your money to attempt getting to the top. Good luck!

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