Throw Away(?) Arena Team

As I mentioned in my last post about PvP gear, we did “throw away” arena yesterday just to get some points and get the ball rolling. If you’re not doing this I highly recommend getting it going in your guild; in my opinion it’s always good to have extra arena points.

What is a throw-away team? Get up to 10 people together, create a new 5v5 arena team, make a shtoopit name and a lame team banner and get in the arena with ZERO expectations. Win, lose, whatever, just have fun. One week early in Season 3 we all mounted up and raced around the arenas, whoever was the last one to die was the winner. With 10 people it’s 20g per week, provided you make a new team each week though in my experience even a piss-poor losing team can hold out for 2 weeks and still provide decent points. For the cost of 1.5 dailies you get to accumulate points for gear.

But I digress, we went into arenas last night with that expectation: hey, let’s just have fun, if we win that’s great, if we lose then oh well. I didn’t even try to optimize teams; I just made two groups of 5 based on who had to log early and who could stick around. I was in the first group: Holy Paladin, Arms Warr, 2 hunters, me. We zerged across the bottom of Blade’s Edge and ripped apart some clothies. It was over so fast I didn’t even know what happened. We faced the same team 3 more times and beat them handily each time.

Of course they were focus firing on me—why’s everyone always picking on the shaman? WHY?!? But the Pally did a great job with his heals keeping me up even when I was stun-locked then entire fight. (thanks Audax (the artist formerly known as Farkor)).

We lost 1 match to a 5 DPS team (2 Warr, 2 DK, 1 Ele Shaman, 1 Ret Pally) that simply DPS’d harder than we did, end of story. My group went 4-1.

The next group lost their first match because one of the hunters didn’t get the queue. They won the next four.

It’s worth mentioning that we’re a PvE raiding guild. Most of us do arena for kicks and maybe some gear. A few are solid hardcore PvPers, like Laasthope our MT DK who was arena point and honor point capped on two (three?) toons prior to Wrath’s launch. OK he’s a crazy person. But otherwise we PvP casually so you can understand my surprise when last night we stepped into arena with two ragtag groups of 5 and went 8-2, and by all accounts probably could have gone 9-1 if it wasn’t for Hump the Hunter not getting the queue. *shakes head* Normally, the first week of a new season is brutal as the badass PvP players slash their way through the ranks to fight for domination. Not so last night.

So yeah... It looks like I’m stuck with my arena throwaway team with the dumb name (Mele Kalikimaka) and lame colors (green, red and white) for a while. WTF.

Did anyone do arenas this week? What were your experiences? Did you go in to lose and come out with wins? Did you go all DPS, no heals and own or get owned? Any hardcore arena/PvP players reading this that can comment?