How to build a 5v5 team - Part 1

Want a sure fire guide on how to make a Top 5v5 team? Well wait no longer that guide is here! Follow these amazing steps and you can have your self a 2000+ rating team, or even a Top 50 US team maybe even be lucky enough to become a prestigious 900 Club team! This guide will help you if you are making a new team or just want to make your current one better.

If you’ve already made your character or don’t plan on re-rolling for any reasons, skip to step 3. The first 2 steps will be for people who don’t even have characters or want to re-roll.

1) FACTION
This first step is simple if you’ve never played WoW before then maybe I can help you in choosing your faction. For the rest of us who made our characters 3+ years ago because It did a “sweet back flip!” or has “cool floppy ears” we wish we could go back in time and guide our younger selves into re-choosing this decision unfortunately we cannot. Since this is a Arena/PvP site I really wont dab into pro’s and con’s with PvE/PvP the simple line is: Horde racials are better for almost every class there is and will be more beneficial to someone who wants to be a top PvPer. So unless you want to run around as a sweet looking Gnome (and yes they are the COOLEST looking class in the game hands down) you should probably choose Horde. Ok so now you got your faction picked lets move on to step #2.

2) RACE/CLASS
But there are so classes and races to choose from! You may be overwhelmed at first to see all the different races you can pick, 5 in total. So what is the best? It all depends on what you want to do in arena, ask your self these questions to figure out what class you want to be:

Do I want to do damage? Yes->(Warrior/Rogue/Hunter/Mage/Warlock)
Do I want to heal? Yes->(Paladin/Shaman/Priest/Druid)
Do I want to support other players and feel more gratifying when we win/lose? Yes->(Everything Except Rogue/Warrior)
Do I want to be the clutch player that changes the tide of the match? Yes->(Any class!)

Once you’ve asked yourself some of those questions the answer is pretty simple. If you really want to be a Druid you can only be Tauren, and if you really want to be a Paladin you’ll have to Blood Elf. Both of these classes have better racials than their Alliance counter parts. What if I want something other then those classes? If you are Warrior do not pick Undead as you will not need the extra fear immunity. Unlike a Warrior a Rogue would benefit the most from picking Undead since you will most likely be attacking cloth targets that can fear you. Other then those two classes pick any race, all of them have nice racials for PvP. Tauren, Undead and Orc are always safe bets for any of the classes not mentioned above.

3) SERVER/BATTLEGROUP
If your goal is to be a top Arena player transfer to a high population Battlegroup which will more than likely not be included with any new servers. Stay away from these as they are often clustered up with other new servers and usually have the lowest populations, which means longer queue times. Any Servers not on Battlegroups: Stormstrike, Emberstorm, Whirlwind and Retaliation will do.

Once you’ve found your Battlegroup you want to roll or transfer to make sure the server you pick is not low population in case you ever have to recruit new teammates you will want the largest pool of players available to pick from.


4) GROUP COMPISITON
Once you’ve figured out where you are going to play, you will want to ask yourself how you want to play. To me there are really only 3 different group compositions you can play that being: ‘4-DPS’, ‘2-Healer’, ‘3-Healer’. Lets take a look at each one and what their play styles are like to see if that would suit the way you want to play your arena match.

‘2-Healer’ – This is pretty much dubbed the ‘cookie cutter’ build, which would consist of Warrior/Mage/Random DPS/Paladin/Priest. Usually with this build you will have medium damage out put, medium crowd control and medium healing. The warrior / random DPS spend the whole arena doing damage to a target, where as the mage just controls the other team. Usually you want a Paladin as the main healer with a Priest or Shaman as backup who can use offensive abilities when healing isn’t required. This lineup requires you to out think other teams and play on their minor mistakes that will lead your team to a victory.

‘4-DPS’ – This group compusition is becoming more common this season, there is no real trick to it all you do is get 4 classes that can throw out a lot of damage at the begning of a match hoping to drop one of their members quickly. 4 DPS group comp matches are very short and require your team to have the best possibly gear to insta-gib a target, if your initial bursts fails you will more then likely lose. This type of team has high damage, medium to high crowd control, and low healing. Seeing as this is very gear dependent you usually wouldn’t want to start off with this group composition as a new team. Do not try to play this as your first arena team, It will require a lot of coordination and control in game to be able to pull this off, something you wont get until you’ve experienced arena for awhile.

‘3-Healer’ – A 3 healer group is probably the most boring to play, you play with out taking any real risks and just simply try to out last the other team. Games with 3 healers usually take as long as it takes the other team to run out of mana so depending on how many healers the opposing team has can take anywhere from 4-8 minutes. With this team you have low to medium damage, low crowd control and high healing. With this type of lineup you need DPS’ers that can provide endless damage as long as they are still alive, this includes Warriors/Rogues/Warlock’s only. Now that you have the group comp you want your team to play, now you must pick your teammates.

Now that you have what kind of group comp you want to play picked out, its time to fill that group comp with your teammates. Which will be released tommorow.