WOW: Arena Success At Last

My warlock's team has finally found what feels like a comfortable class composition in recent weeks and has finally taken over (again) as the strongest team on my server. Oddly enough, the development that has allowed us to jump past 2000 rating has been swapping out our priest for another mage. I don't blame our priest's skills or something, I just think that our old class composition was obsolete. Really, it was obsolete already at the end of season 1. The recent surge in popularity of "Eurocomp" (a.k.a. rogue, mage, disc priest, warlock, resto druid) and "Trifecta" (a.k.a. warrior, enh shaman, rogue, priest, paladin) was really hurting our old composition because both of those compositions exert devastating pressure on warlocks.

Many teams have given up on warlocks, but obviously, I couldn't. Given the selection of players on our team's roster, we theorycrafted that adding another mage instead of a priest would strengthen us against both of those compositions because we'd be adding another anti melee crowd control class as well as significant firepower. The old model of a single priest mana burning the opposing team's casters was simply not powerful enough after the mana burn nerf relative to the offensive firepower the other teams could bring to bear on our team.

Thus, our warrior, warlock, mage, mage, paladin lineup was born and immediately our rating went up. In hindsight, it's been kind of ironic that we spent so long trying to recruit a skilled priest and then in the end, we had to bench him. The personal aspect of maintaining an active arena team roster is the hardest part for me. People become friends as they play together, so it's very hard for me to alter my team's class composition. How do you ask a friend to sit out because your team does better without him without it sounding like you're blaming him for your losses? Luckily our priest offered to bench himself for the good of the team. I mean it was apparent that our team simply didn't perform as well when we ran with him (given that his personal rating had fallen to more than 200 below the team's rating).

While I don't feel like my team is extraordinarily skilled, I am proud of the way we have been playing. We are the most consistently active and now the most successful team on my server and that is definitely something I feel I can be proud of, since I'm the leader.