Blizzard
Whether it's counting down the moments until diminishing returns reset, a powerful ability comes off cooldown, or the seconds spiraling into dampening, time management is one of the most important things at the back of any player's mind while in the Arena. Let's take a look at three distinct situations where time plays a big role, and how to optimize for or against them.
Trading Cooldowns
Nearly every Arena strategy revolves around drawing defensive cooldowns from the other team—even if you have to trade them—to ultimately leave your opponent at a disadvantage. Outlaw Rogues are especially good at this thanks to a pair of abilities that can really throw a wrench in the enemy team's plans,
Blind and
Plunder Armor. Both are on two-minute cooldowns, which line up with trinket abilities.“ can either start with
Blind when someone is low HP or swap to their healer with Plunder Armor to force trinket, which causes the trinket cooldown to be desynced from
Blind for a later setup,” says Method Orange's Ryan “Trill” Costello.
Mind GamesTank comps, while sacrificing the raw power of a more focused damage-dealing comp, have the general end-game goal of going into dampening. Their greatest advantage is their larger health pools, or their ability to redirect damage being put into another target.
“People don't lose to tanks, they lose to themselves because they can't do anything to bring the tank down,” says Noble's Andrew “Rubcub” Woods. Trill offers what works for his team's commonly seen combination of Windwalker and
Death Knight: “I use
Tigereye Brew, the
Death Knight who does mostly magic damage, which makes Windwalker damage all magical to prevent
Bodyguard from redirecting damage to a Protection Warrior.” People don't lose to tanks, they lose to themselves because they can't do anything to bring the tank down.
-Rubcub