Arena Tips
So it seems to be kinda trendy lately to blog about arena tips for newer and veteran players alike and although a lot of this kind of stuff will just get the "duh" reaction from seasoned players, for everyone person that reacts that way there is someone else that just learned something new. That said, I'm going to write about a few things that I seem to get asked a lot and hopefully some people will get use out of it.
1. Plan of action - In order to be successful at the highest levels, you should always have a plan of action for every possible outcome of a situation planned ahead of time. I touched on this in an interview in the past I believe with Carmack, but this is the best scenario I can give to describe an example of this:
You're a rogue. You have 5 cp's and you're planning a kidney shot. You have a plan for kidney shot landing and a separate one for kidney shot dodging/parrying. You then have a plan for your vanish re-opener and what you'll do if it works successfully or if it gets gayed (for lack of a better term). When blinding someone, you already have planned out how you will react if they trinket the blind or if they sit in the blind (with trinket available).
It's situations such as those that separate good players from great players: planning ahead and anticipation. There are situations like the aforementioned ones for every class, as well, not just a rogue. A death knight faces similar scenarios: if you gnaw a mage, you should have a plan for if they blink it or not, if you miss mind freeze on a paladin you should plan out your follow-up interrupts with gnaw, strangulate, or death grip, etc etc. For a mage, typical situations would be things like RMP mirrors and if the enemy mage locks your arcane or frost and how to react in either situation. I'm sure you get the point by now.
This really just comes with practice but I know a lot of players that simply think one step at a time and I feel that really limits them as opposed to if you plan out all possible outcomes to a situation ahead of time.
2. Proper Fake-Casting - Although this applies a lot more toward paladins than other casters, there are applications of it for any caster class so I felt it worth noting. I constantly see paladins tanking a melee class, casting a flash of light, and faking it by moving or jumping, and then starting the cast again. I see this as an incredible waste of GCD's. Instead of juking your cast by simply breaking the channel and restarting again after (thus wasting a global doing that), you're much better off interrupting the channel to juke with an instant spell such as cleanse. The best scenario of this that comes to mind for me:
Paladin has a DK on him and full diseases on. Paladin begins casting flash of light and interrupts it with a cleanse on himself (instead of just moving) and potentially baits the DK's mind freeze. Not only did the paladin succeed in getting the mind freeze but he also cleanses 1 disease (assuming no resist) which not only removes the damage it was doing but also reduces the damage multiplier for the DK's abilities due to having less diseases on. This works the same way if a mage or rogue were on the paladin, as well, and trying to juke their respective interrupts.
Shamans can do the same thing with their cleanse, druids can do the same thing with a HoT or abolish in place of cleanse, and experienced priests most often fake a penance in order to get several flash heals off typically. I guess you could call this GCD management, but I really see casters doing this all the time when attempting to fake-cast when they could be getting in twice as many spells if they used proper fake-casting techniques.
3. Cooldown Management - Maybe another one of those "duh" sections, but all too often, I see players stagger their important cooldowns and not accomplishing very much of anything out of them. For example, a rogue using an offensive vanish to cheap shot their DPS target but not really chaining anything off of that. Although it's different for some classes, in most situations, it is far better to "put all your eggs in one basket" and drop a huge cooldown chain on your opponent. In the case of going up against a holy paladin team, you generally want to use half of your cooldowns to force all of their outs (emergency buttons) and the other half for finishing the job when they're done with them.
As a death knight in 2v2 or 3v3, you typically want to use 1 or 2 cooldowns in order to force the other healer's emergency buttons (nature's swiftness, divine shield, pain suppression, etc) which ideally will be your less important ones such as gnaw and gargoyle. This allows you to use your devastating ones such as strangulate and empowered rune weapon to score the kill after the other team has used their outs. In the case of death knights, it is also far better to save lichborne for the final rushdown to immune incoming CC rather than using it to prevent a sap (l2petcombat) or even to prevent an initial CC.
Again, this might all seem pretty fundamental to some, the fact that you see these types of players out there at 2500 ratings at least says that there are players that can benefit from reading these types of things... hopefully.
WotF Nerf Enough To Re-balance Factions?
The 3.3 patch nerfing WotF (45 sec shared cooldown with pvp trinkets) has been discussed ad nauseum lately but the question that I haven't really seen answered is will this significant nerf be enough to re-balance the factions and send some of the horde zerg back to alliance? I think it really all depends on the reason why everyone went horde to begin with: was it WotF or was it just "the cool thing to do?"
I think it was fairly obvious how broken WotF is in arena currently, leaving it as far and away the best racial (since WG trinkets replicate human racial). Pretty much every player that faction-changed to horde went Undead if their class allowed for it, so how will they all react now that their precious racial is not-so-game-changing? I actually feel that Undead is one of the weaker horde races now with their other racials not stacking up to the benefits of stun reduction for orcs (as well as racial AP/SP trinket), nor even the snare reduction that trolls get (which is ridiculous when stacked with snare talents and snare meta).
As dumb as it may sound, if I were a DK going horde, I would honestly pick troll at this point and stack it with Toughness and an Enigmatic Skyflare Diamond. Warriors sure are going to love having to hamstring you every 2 gcd's and berserking isn't all too bad either. In any case, there probably won't be any massive return to alliance from all of the horde players (especially the ones on Blackrock) so I don't expect to see too many people going back, but instead possibly race-changing to a different horde race now that Undead are getting the nerf bat.