Topic requested by Satisfaction from the Korgarth server.

First off I won't comment to much on the 2v2 bracket.  This season after playing just a few games I decided that it wasn't worth my time to play because this bracket is all about your team composition vs the other team composition.  Casus and myself ran Frost Mage and SL/SL Lock for the previous 2 seasons and finished in Gladiator range both times.  Season 2 we were the 5th team and the top 4 made the Blizzard tournament, we missed the cut on a dropped queue that cost us 18 points.  But basically healer + dps rules this bracket now, most noteably druid + warrior and shaman + warrior.  Neither of these combos give me and casus problems but we have about a 5% chance to beat a resto druid + lock or holy priest + lock.  It doesn't matter how bad they are they will most likey beat us and that really makes it difficult to play when we lose to players that really don't play this game very well and there is nothing we can do about it.  Bottom line if you're not a warrior w/ a healer you probably want to stay away from this bracket.

The first topic I am going to go over mana management. This is one of the most critical skills in arena if the games will last longer duration. Mana is Mage’s lifeblood without it not only you will not do any damage but you will most likely die. Generally speaking unless I am completely dry on mana and I die, I am doing something wrong.

Spells and Abilities

Polymorph

This is fairly common knowledge between Mages but I am still surprised how many Mages still do this. Rank 1 polymorph has the same duration in PvP as Rank 4. Therefore, it is more beneficial to the Mage to always be casting Rank 1. Rank 1 mana cost is 60 and Rank 4 mana cost is 150. Over the duration of an arena fight this will save quite a bit of mana. It is highly possible that this luxury will be taken away from us in WoTLK.

Frost Nova

The same goes for Rank 1 frost nova. Rank 1 frost nova untalented costs 55 mana and Rank 5 is 185 mana. The difference between the two is damage. However, the mana you save from Rank 1 130, which is 2 polymorphs and 10 mana.

Evocation

Thanks to Bunnay for allowing me to post a blog on our guild website.  This blog will mainly be to discuss World of Warcraft with a major focus on pvp more specifically Arena.  I will also use this blog to trash Myrx and his rogue blogs as often as I can.  Also if anyone wants me to put forth my thoughts on a general or specific issue please let me know and i'll see what I can do.  My appologies in advance for bad spelling/grammar but its been a while since I've formally written anything.

I've been asked by many people to put up something about Mutilate. I will preface this by saying that the goal of my recent Mutilate experience was to gauge how it performed vs. an equally geared and skilled combat swords rogue.

First, one intriguing thing that I was hoping to test was a rotation posed by Left at EJ that 3-5s/5r would be a superior rotation to a "3 finisher" cycle. Essentially you end up cutting a lot of SnD time, but your Rupture uptime is pretty high, and all of your Ruptures fall pretty easily under Find Weakness. I ran this cycle on Illidari Council, and Brutallus.

On Brutallus I parsed about 2200 DPS with 1 Bloodlust. I was using WSC and AToL for trinkets. Deadheadd out dpsed me by around 150 dps, and I out dpsed myself the following week as combat swords with the same gear. Perhaps a "3 finisher" cycle could have been better, or perhaps combat swords is really that much better on a stand still fight.

On Illidari Council I got one of my more impressive parses of 2324 DPS. Now I can't really attribute this all to Mutilate spec. I believe that having Fleet Footed upped my DPS by quite a bit on such a movement intensive fight, but honestly I was in a stacked group and got all of the Bloodlusts. I also used the 3-5s/5r cycle here.

Since I get a lot of inquiries as to why my WWS parses show me using Dragonspine Trophy and Ashtongue Talisman of Lethality I thought I would use my first blog post to explain why.

A lot of people assume I do this because I am unlucky and have not gotten a Shard of Contempt. This is not the case as I have a Shard, but opt to use AToL instead. Some people tell me I would do more DPS if I used my SoC because the spreadsheet said so. You have to take the spreadsheet with a grain of salt. It is a useful tool, but you have to know the limitations of it.

As Aldriana, the author of the spreadsheet,  stated at Elitist Jerks (http://www.elitistjerks.com/659643-post2253.html) :

"The AToL model does not currently include any level of energy queuing. I have some ideas on how to do so (basically, keeping track of how much "slack" energy the various cycles have and estimating the number of extra SS you can squeeze in during uptime), but such a thing is beyond the scope of this spreadsheet."