TWOTHREEFOURFIVE

So there are some pretty stupid nick names for different arena makeups but the comp I've been recently playing really takes the cake. It is really shocking that someone called Warrior / Ele Shaman / Frost Mage / Disc Priest / Holy Paladin 2345 and it stuck. It isn't catchy and its not amusing. But apparently it did stick and even spawned 2 copycat naming conventions 2346 and 2347. Apparently 5 = frost mage, 6 = warlock, and 7 = hunter. Anyway I've been playing that comp recently and doing alright, esepcially considering I had never played my paladin in 5s before. My gear was pretty gross, with only 2 pieces of relentless and 3 furious - and almost no wrathful off pieces. My GS was 5100 compared to the rest of my teams > 5800 so they were definitely carrying me a bit. Of all the people on the team I have one of the least difficult jobs as I mainly spam flash of light with the occasional holy light bomb or cooldown to save someone. That being said my priest is extremely aggressive both on mana burns and offensive pressure so the better I stay on top of healing the more it allows him to control the mana pace of the match.

One thing I am noticing I need to work on a lot more is my positioning. I have played 2k+ in all brackets on my priest as disc before and its amazing the difference in where I need to be as a paladin vs my priest. Priests have a good number of mobile heals and their positioning forces the enemy to react with the threat of mana burns. The difference on the paladin is I am way more effective of a healer when I don't have to move and get to pump out heals. In order to do this I need to almost predict where the fight is going to be so I can be where the action is going to be as well as where it is now. With 2 defensive dispels I don't need to worry too much about polymorphs but I could still improve a lot about deciding when I hide from cc and when I stay in and heal.

The other thing that I have been working on is using my hammer at good times. 2345 has a lot of offensive pressure, which acts like CC in a way by forcing people to line our frost / elemental turrets. Besides that all we really have is polymorph on demand so we really have to use our hex / fear / hammer wisely. I'm still learning but I've had some big stuns that have scored us kills when we didn't have a polymorph or counterspell available to use against one of their healers. My general strategy there is to inch closer to their paladin or druid. If I run up to their paladin early I can usually lure his hammer when it really isn't effective. My team is pretty verbal on swaps so I know when it's time to help out. Most of the time their healer can trinket it right away but that brief interrupt is enough time for our burst to drop someone very low and even if we don't score a kill they are burning cooldowns, mana, and iniative.

The new random BG system is simply amazing compared to the old suffer through isle of conquest strand of the ancients to complete the set. I am at full wrathful off pieces on my rogue and only need to upgrade furious ring to wrathful ring on my paladin after 2 hard weekends of farming. I wish alliance stood a chance in WG on my server, but in the last week we won a total of 3 times. The silver lining is with 9 tenacity I'm going 30-1 soloing on my rogue taking on 3 people at once and winning with under 20% health. I know its not skill but it is fun to break face sometime. We'll see how much the upgrades matter on my paladin tonight, we're hoping to break 2000 team rating this week. We started the team from 0 (ugh) and have kept a ~65% win ratio. Our initial 1800 MMR quickly rose once we started beating a few 2200-2300 teams but we're hanging steady now at about 2200 MMR because we keep running into a really good Euro Comp (Lock/Mage/Rogue/Resto Druid/Disc Priest). That comp was invented in S3 to beat 2345, and while we haven't given up, they have both the comp advantage and 5 really solid players.

I'll try and fraps some matches tonight and see if it is even worth watching from the paladin's perpsective :)