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I’ve recently stepped into the arenas for competition with my friends. My team consists of my friends Nathaniel and Steven, and myself. Nathaniel and Steven have been competing together in the 2v2 bracket for a long time, but when I joined we moved up to the more competitive 3v3 bracket. The arena are ranked deathmatch battles, where the last team with any players left alive wins. You can use any combination of player roles that you want, but we use a healer and two damage dealers, like most other teams. I play a restoration shaman, and am our team’s healer. My job is to keep all three of us alive, while Steven and Nathaniel try to kill the opposing players. Steven plays a feral druid, so he runs around and attacks as a vulnerable cat, but is able to transform into a bear for defense. Nathaniel plays a frost mage, so he freezes our enemies in place and does damage to them. In this battle we played a team consisting of a paladin healer, and two warrior damage dealers. We’re the ones running around with yellow flags over our heads, the enemies have green flags. Our health bars are the boxes over on the left - I’m the top blue one, Nathaniel is the middle light blue one, and Steven is the orange one. The purple and red numbers that pop up are damage that is being dome to me, and the green numbers that pop up are the healing that I’m doing.
In this battle one or both of the enemy warriors follows me around for the majority of the battle, trying to prevent me from being able to heal myself. If I were to die, Nathaniel and Steven would be unable to heal themselves, and would quickly die. Our strategy was to focus on one of their warriors, and instead of preventing their healer from healing at all, we’d just try to do so much damage that their healer would be strained, and at some point cut off their healer and finish the player we’d been focusing on. The team that loses a player first loses almost universally, because even if that player is just a damage dealer, it leaves their team out-numbered, and without enough damage doers to ever kill the other team’s healer. In the end, one of their warriors was foolish enough to run into the starting tunnel, which put him out of the line-of-sight of their healer. We managed to keep the healer out of line-of-sight of the warrior for long enough to kill the warrior, since healing spells require line-of-sight and no more than 40yds between players. We killed one warrior, then mopped up the other two. A good win!
The battles are fast-paced, intense, and require a lot of coordination, so we try to always play in the same room together. We’re steadily winning more matches than we lose, so our team rating keeps climbing, so we always play better and better players. The competition makes it a lot of fun.
