The Arena Tournament has entered phase 3 where the games and scores really matter for all the high end competitors. David "Xerin" Piner, Gabriel "Darkfact" Zamudio and I (Byron "Messiah" Mudry) got together to battle it out with our teams and get some enjoyment from the competition. While we had one team already set from the beginning we took advantage of the fact that you can have multiple characters and had also created a gimmick burst team to play around with. Most of our matches this week were with this fun team made up of two mage's and a shaman. Gabriel and I both played mage's while David picked up the healing, lightning and heroism duties on the shaman.

Having incredible burst damage with two mage's with Presence of Mind (PoM) and Pyroblast tied with a shaman with heroism is a scary combination early in a fight. It is very easy to pick a soft target on the opponents team and blast through them in 3-4 seconds. After that though it starts to become more difficult as essentially our whole team is soft. We battled through a raft of battles, winning and losing, and having a blast playing a very fun team. We knew at the outset that a gimmick team can only go so far, but they are fun.

With the tournament wrapping up soon though, we thought we would explore a bit more and play around. I'll walk you through a few of our memorable wins and then discuss the ton of fun playing a myriad of teams and characters. What did we like about the tournament realms, what didn't we, what would we change, all that and more in this article about the Arena Tournament Realms

Our Matches

We went in with this team knowing that we would never get over a 2000 rating. Mage's are just two soft for that unless they hit perfect class match ups the whole way to the top. We did know that through skill and experience we could probably hold our own for a while and move up the rankings a little. With that knowledge we started our experiment.

One of the very first teams we met was another gimmick team, three hunters. While they had no healing, 3 pets on one target while another is being hammered by 3 hunters, is nothing to sneeze at. Beast Master Hunter pets HURT! Luckily we were ready for them as Gabriel called a target and we all nuked it. The first hunter went down almost before the starting bell finishing ringing. Things got a little rougher after our early glory though as the remaining 2 hunters and their pets triggered bestial wrath and targeted poor little me. Dave did his best, but I dropped a split second before the second hunter fell. Dave and Gabriel quickly mopped up the last one though and we were off to the races on a string of wins.

Ok, the next few wins came about because of opponents disconnects, but they were still wins, right? Seriously though, we had a few back to back wins against several other teams. All was going fairly well until we hit a team with a druid. ARGGG, my arch nemeses. For some reason, I am just never able to beat a well played resto druid team. We dropped one of their players almost immediately with dual PoM/Pyros, but then stalled out against the druid and warrior. No matter what we did, we could not get the warrior down. Roughly 10 minutes later (or at least it seemed like it) with all three of us out of mana, we started dropping off and lost the fight. There is just something about those druids, oh well, my readers are probably all too aware of my aversion to druids in PvP so I'll drop the topic here.

Negatives and Positives

Having played numerous matches with several teams now, I feel qualified to pass on some opinions on the tournament realm implementing.

I'll start with the negative, which luckily isn't all that bad or surprising. There were essentially two main things that stuck out as negative. The first is that in the end the arena tournament realms are really just more of the same as the live servers. By this I mean, if you are not one of the best PvP'ers out there, having cool gear isn't going to suddenly make you a star. Especially since everyone is geared to the same level. While just common sense, I chatted with several players on the tournament realms that were disappointed with losing so many, giving comments like "...But I have great gear now, why can't I win" or "Why can't I find a team that can win". While it can be incredibly fun to battle it out in arena after arena with almost zero queue time, you should not expect to win unless you are a good PvP'er on the main servers to begin with. With everyone's gear being equal the tournament realm is very much about skill.

The second is the number of players that joined without making sure they had a team. The general chat was absolutely FLOODED all the time with players looking for teams. This is in no way Blizzard's fault, players really should have thought about it before joining and ensured that a few friends would join with them. It just got annoying after a while as any time I was on a healer I would get constant tells asking me to join a team to heal for them.

Now onto the positive, of which there are many things to talk about.

One of the things I talked about last time, but have to repeat, is the fun factor of switching it up from your main and picking a completely different class or spec and having a level 70 fully geared. For many players this is the only way they will ever get a chance to play at level 70 in full epics. It is also the only way most players could play every class out there at max level. While you can not expect to pick up a class and be great at it, it does allow you to at least try them all out and get a feel for them. This may lead to a new interest in a main that isn't quite there yet, a forgotten alt, or even creating a new character. It also allows you to get a feel of the strength and weaknesses of a class from the other side of the battlefield. For example, I hate druids, after playing one for a while I know have a better idea how to defeat one. All of these are very positive things.

Queue times are amazing! In my home battle group I am used to waiting 5+ minutes at peak times to get into a 3v3 match. On the tournament realms we signed up and were in the game within 30 seconds almost all the time. With queue times being so short it allows everyone to get the most out of their playing time. We did a huge amount of matches in a very quick timeframe every time we played. With something like this, play time means play experience which over time should translate to skill. After each night of playing you can come away having learned some skills at dealing with your opponents. Playing on a separate realm allows you to advance your skills and learn, without lowering you real servers arena rating.

A very good thing about the tournament realm is that there are many players out there that literally just play in the arenas and battlegrounds. Even the battlegrounds for them are just a means to get gear. They have little or no interest in the rest of the game, and view the grind, gold, instances, and everything else, as a waste of time. For these players this for of PvP is their ideal of a perfect game.

Overall

Overall I had lots of fun on the tournament realm. There are a lot of things to like. In the end though I am a raider and instance player and missed the interaction with others. Also with WoW being primarily a PvE game, PvP is in no way balanced. It gets extremely frustrating when you want to play a class you like, and come up against someone else that you have no hope against. When we happened against one of those teams, we just smiled, took our lumps and moved on.

If / When Blizzard does another round of tournaments, would I sign up? In a heart beat. Despite the normal frustrations, it really is a great way to blast through a few weeks doing something different.

Are you in the Arena Tournament and have your own stories to tell? I would love to hear form you.

Email me ([email protected]) or better yet, post in our PvP forums!