Hoof's Arena Tactics Thread

[Hoofhurr]

So I decided to devote some of my usually squandered mental capacity at work yesterday towards freeing ourselves of the up and down stagnation that we're experiencing in all three of my arena teams. I isolated one event in particular that seemed to repeat itself over and over in our losses, namely the burning down of one particular target only to have that target escape our dps and be restored to full health. That event, of course, spells doom for a strategy that, in the absence of mass amounts of crowd control, relies on burst dps to even the playing field quickly before settling into sustained dps/healing combination that should seal our wins.

So what needs to happen to prevent our target from escaping imminent doom? Well we do have CC. Including me. But it's very little, easily countered, and often unreliable. But how much CC do we really need to get the job done? It turns out that not much is needed but what is needed is communication and coordination so that we stack the CC on the proper targets at the proper times and not just whenever we have the random opportunity.

Who needs to be CCed and when? Well that's always the same answer. The healer when their target (even if that target is them) has 30-50% health remaining. When you have widdled your target down to that point it's time to pop the dps cooldowns and simultaneously CC the healer. At that juncture all healing needs to stop and every person on the team switches to their CC/dps functionality to drop that target. If you can't drop the target with that level of concerted effort then the game is over anway so might as well save the cooldowns for that match-deciding event eh? Coordinating this is actually quite simple. It just takes one person who is watching the main target's health to gauge the timing and make the call. When the target has dropped our dps/healing strategy can resume and we patiently eliminate the remaining outnumbered opponents. Granted things won't always go as planned but Focus CCing is just as important as focus firing if you hope to win against a team with a competent healer. Yes this does make us more susceptible to those classes that have great abilities against clustered groups but we have to play to our known strengths and not to what may or may not be aweakness depending on the opponents we draw.

Arenas with Hoofhurr

Guess what? I'm a melee dpser! No surprise there eh? But what you might not know about me is that I have a suite of abilities outside of Mortal Strike that are very effective in arenas.

-Demoralizing Shout - Short range AE attack power reduction
-Thunderclap - Pointblank 20% attack speed reduction
-Sweepingstrikes - All my melee attacks hit an adjacent target for 4 swings
-Cleave - Strong 2 target melee attack.
-Intimidating shout - Point blank 4 target fear.

The take home message from the above is that if we want to maximize my abilities I should always be near multiple targets, preferrably melee targets. Most teams have a healer that needs to stand still to heal or a melee class that has to stay close to a target in order to cc/dps. We should be stacking on top of eachother and not running away from chasers or chasing after runners if at all possible.

To sum up the thread:
1) Focus CCing is as critical as Focus Firing
2) The two should be synchronized for maximum effect.
3) Staying clustered helps Hoof help you.

I admittedly know very little about my teammates class abilities. Ya'll should list those abilities that fit into the overall strategy that I've outlined in this thread so that I know a little more about how to incorporate them effecaciously.[/u]