The not so popular arena setups

While I've been busy getting familiar with the top 3vs3 teams of the arena ladder, I've noticed things that have been known in the arena community for ages already: which classes are doing good on the games and so are fotm (flavor of the month), and are so most represented in the high end games. I wanted to know a bit more about the whole deal and decided to talk to Verdisha and Kolori, who know about arena, and of course have multiple gladiator titles from various seasons.

 

The season of warlocks and resto shamans

To make this a bit more educational (and meet the requirements of Arena Pass: Community Challenge achievement), and to give a warning to us pve guys who play pvp casually, I wanted to talk more about which setups are more uncommon.

The whole thing, of course, comes down to class balance. The classes and specs that underperform compared to others are of course then less played. Certainly you can go to Tournament Realm and play with a feral druid, hunter and a holy paladin but that most likely won't get you anywhere, but might cause some serious frustration and greying hair. Still some people play these underperforming classes and less competitive specs just for fun. But to get a better picture of what's not used in hc arena comps, we need to take a look at what's in just now.

Verdisha and Kolori told me what I had found out myself from the 3vs3 ladder. Play a warlock + resto shaman and something and you are good to go. Probably the most popular setups at the moment are mls (mage, lock, shaman) and shadowplay (shadow priest, lock, shaman). With popular setups also rise setups that do good against them, or are in other words their counter comps. For instance, at the moment the comp which does good agains these lock + shaman teams is tsg (dk, warrior, holy paladin).

Ever wondered where the names of setups come from? Names like rmp (rogue, mage, priest) or mls (mage, lock, shaman) are easy enough to understand, but what about tsg then? Some popular comps get names after the teams that do good in the competitions. A team called Teh Super Gosus is behind the name tsg, and it got its name (and became very popular) after Valrath, Cilea and their warrior won MLG tournament.

So what makes a setup uncommon then? Basically a setup ends up less played if it does bad agains other setups. This might be because of an underperforming class/spec, or that the setup has a high skillcap. This means, that to be able to perform good with your setup, everyone needs to play their classe extremely well and also work flawlessly together. I asked Verdisha which setups are that hard to play at the moment, and he mentioned rmp. That's because none of the classes aren't the "best shit" at the moment.

 

The really bad setups - keep out!

I got even more interested to know which setups are the ultimate failures, and asked Verdisha and Kolori to tell me the setups of their nightmares. Verdisha's answer was "any resto druid team". The druid is just so much worse compared to shamans or priests which can be part of various setups. Paladin at least has tsg, but a resto druid has nothing. The spec just doesn't have any survivability. Verdisha also mentioned all hunter comps, simply because "hunters suck". He said, that if a hunter setup gets true to the tournament, there is something weird going on.

I also wanted to know if there is a setup, that is actually played which should be just buried. Kolori said, that retri paladin, dk and a healer (preferably a resto shaman) won't ever make it to the final tournament, but it was popular during the last season. It's basically a healer killer comp which lacks the power to get done with it, a cleave comp that gets outcleaved by others. A warrior just gets the job done so much better than paladin.

When we talked about this with Kolori, Verdisha started laughing and said that he just rememberd a new comp that has been getting more popular, but will die in a week: Christmascleave (mage, priest, dk). The reason for the extinction will be the nerf to the dk. Arx, who had been listening to the conversation and been throwing in stupid comments about his resto druid pvp career in season 1.3 (100 games) bursted out laughing and asked the pvp gods if the name of the comp actually boosts the rating.

The answer came immediately and was clear: of course!