Every post-match interview was painfully awkward to watch.

It was just a big weekend in NYC where, unbeknownst to the hundreds of people living, working, and partying around the Hammerstein Ballroom, there was a congregation of geeks watching other geeks play video games for money. The North American regional finals for WoW 3s and Hearthstone finished up on Sunday, and since then, I have been PvPing and collecting conquest points like I've been inspired by the greats. However, the classes and team compositions represented during the WoW tournament were not very diverse. Thus, I decided to take it upon myself to come up with a few unique, strategic, and/or enemy-confusing arena comps for you to try in these last couple weeks of the season. Honestly, it's a little late to push 2200, so we might as well have fun with it now.

Next year, this could be you!!!

Jaws Comp: Rogue/Feral - Rogue/Feral
They can't kill you if they can't find you. Spend the entire time stealthed and circling the enemy team. Eventually, they'll just get bored and leave. Sure, there are shadow sight orbs, but they'll expect you to expect them to use them, and since they think they expect what you expect, you can expect them to not do what they think you expect them to do! By the way, this comp loses its effectiveness with more players since five enemies can spread out and find you more quickly. Not like it's a very effective comp in the first place.

NPF (NamePlate Fuck):  Hunter - Hunter - Hunter
Similarly, they can't kill you if they can't click your nameplate. Burst them down in the 20 seconds in which they're frantically trying to differentiate between you and your stampede. Results after that are not guaranteed. Also, beware of professional players with targeting macros or functional UIs, but at that rating, you should probably switch to a less idiotic comp.

PvEasy: 1 tank - 1 healer - 1 DPS
If the enemies are spread out, focus the healer. If they are clumped, AoE! Don't forget to use taunts, and blame each other when you die.

(Class) Neopolitan - 3 of the same pure DPS class in 3 different specs.
If each of a class' three different specs has different strengths and weaknesses, the best way to ensure a well-rounded arena team is to contain every spec, right? Don't muddle it up by adding a different class with CCs on separate DRs. That's just making it too complicated. By combining three locks and all of the advantages of Aff, Destro, and Demo, one is essentially forcing the enemy team to fight one ultimate warlock. As for the disadvantages, whether you're compounding them additively or multiplicatively is up for debate.

Tree Cleave
My favorite 5s comp, this is the only one in this list that I've actually tried. Basically, it's five resto druids that go in with Glyph of the Treant, pop Heart of the Wild, and try to Wrath someone to death. We had very limited success with it, i.e. we never actually killed anyone. Nevertheless, it was super fun, and I'm sure the other team's reaction was priceless, first when they zoned in and saw the comp they were up against and again when they witnessed an army of trees coming at them. Feel free to combine with Force of Nature for even more trees or Incarnation for some arboreal variety.

-Avia.

I have many skills, none of them profitable IRL.

My guild is taking a little mini-vacation from main raiding, which means that for the week of the 27th, I am available for rent.

Need help downing some new heroics? For the right price, you can have a 581 ilvl warlock making berserk timers and mechanics less relevant for your raid! Can't solo a mount boss? Voidwalkers can solo everything! Hopefully, the hunters in my raid aren't selling themselves this week as well. Are you a PvPer instead? I'll carry you in 2s and shoot you up to 2200 500 rating no problem! Or did your usual roleplaying partner go M.I.A. and you need someone to cyber with in the Deeprun Tram? ... We'll negotiate.

Now taking offers!

-Avia.

Putting a little extra effort into your AFK

Parking one's main in the middle of a capital city with all of its raid gear on has been the traditional way to idle since Vanilla, but today I am going to divulge my very secret favorite spots to semi-AFK while waiting in a DPS queue or watching Netflix. I encourage everyone to explore Azeroth in a similar fashion so they can find their ideal home bases that satisfy various individual needs and make their guilds wonder why they are always sitting in the middle of nowhere. Plus, I don't need everyone cramping my spots.

1. Right outside of Shrine

Nothing beats Shrine for meeting all the necessary criteria like city portals, banking, and vendors. However, there's also that annoying trade chat, and I don't need to be lowering my IQ with idiotic arguments and anal chat all day. Thus, here is my favorite place to idle: the now sha-corrupted lake with the forlorn crab right outside of the two Shrines. All the convenience of a capital city is a short flight away whenever I need to find a group hire a crafter check on idiotic arguments, and in the meantime, I can enjoy the relative quiet of my perch like retreating to a suburb on the outskirts of a metropolis.

2. Sunsong Ranch

I did buy it from Farmer Yoon, after all, so it's technically my house. Where else in the world (of Warcraft) can one say that? As a hero of the Alliance, I spend most of my time raiding dangerous dungeons or setting up in inns and sleeping in beds that thousands of warriors have slept in before, and who knows how often they change the sheets? But Tina Mudclaw comes by the ranch house every once in a while to sweep the floor and feed the pigs, and I can relax on MY own personal bed and pet MY unnamed dog while watching the fireflies on MY table. It's enough to make me want to sell my imaginary RP house in South Desolace; that goblin caravan hates delivering supplies to my demon-infested part of the neighborhood.

3. Pride Rock

4. Moonglade

Especially confusing if I'm not on my druid, even the lowbies that randomly stumble upon this zone because they got lost on the way to Winterspring are surprised that I'm there moonbathing by the lake.

Level 45 rogue: What do I do here?
Me, meditating at Lake Elune'ara: Nothing.
Level 45 rogue: No, seriously. Is there a quest?
Me, the serene hermit: Continue on, my son. This is not the place you seek.

5. Guard duty in various low-level zones

If a full set of heroic raid gear is going to be good for anything, it's definitely world PVP, and as anyone who has leveled with CRZ knows, both the Alliance and Horde are rife with rogue soldiers going on killing sprees of quest-giving civilians in towns 70 levels beneath them. Do not fear, citizens, for if I'm going to idle in one place, it might as well be in the skies over Darkshire, ready to swoop down on any unsuspecting no-lifer with nothing to do while their arena partner is out getting laid. Sure, you still have to wait for your NPCs to respawn, but with any hope, my massive epeen will have shot demonic flames so violently that it burned their tiny giblets into fel dust that I can use to power my warlock rituals, and they will crawl away back to Orgrimmar whimpering and holding their singed groins.

As long as they're as terrible at PVP as I am.

-Avia.

That wasn't that hard. Oh wait... it kind of was.

It was an arduous journey, my friends, but I finally reached my goal of 12k achievement points... and then some. O_o In reaching far into the depths of my achievements tab for time-consuming and soul-crushing 10 point gains, I went a little overboard and found that my 12000th point felt like a major victory while the 50 points after were so effortless, I practically pulled them from my felhunter's ass. This leads me to believe that as impressive as my guild master's 13345 points are, a massive amount of nerd points is relatively easy to acquire; it just depends on what a player is willing to do/willing to invest time in/willing to call in favors from the past six years for.

For example, I never thought that I would ever be the owner of an "of the Four Winds" title. On normal, Al'Akir was the biggest cockblock of tier 11 that made me want to throw myself off a literal platform to my RL death rather than subject myself to it. But then one day, I finally sucked it up, the guild let itself be led by a competent strategist, and five other DPS carried me through phase 3 after I inevitably died to a lightning cloud. Suddenly, I was thinking to myself, "Hey! It's ok if people find out I'm a noob at 360° motion. Swallow your pride and thank people profusely!" Bam. 12k achieve points.

My friend says I should try for more to reach #2 in the guild, but there are obstacles, i.e. achieves that I, for many reasons, will not touch. For carebears like me, a major bottleneck is in PVP. Those achieves aren't even difficult, but for someone who /cries while a Horde ganks my alt, the thought of carrying a flag in Warsong Gulch makes me want to curl up into a fetal position and protect my core. I already harbor bad memories of all six mobs in the PVP encounter of Trial of the Crusader turning on me at once. Even in fake PvP, the lock dies first.

And then there are the RP roadblocks. The same friend suggested I switch from Frenzyheart to Oracles so I could get the questing and rep achieves, but I outright said no. In my humble leveling journeys of Northrend, I met the Frenzyheart first and then had to listen to the Oracles bash my new-found friends. Yes, they're a little brusque in their demeanor, but that's just their personalities, and you accept people for who they are. Then, when I had to choose between the two factions and saved Zepik's life, he told me he was so grateful, that he knew he could count on me, and that he'd tell his village to be nice to me from then on. He gave me a vote of confidence! How could I betray that?

There are some things in life that are worth more than a few nerd points. Like being true to your alignment.

-Avia.

All I have is PvP achieves left now. :(

Dancing all day every day.

Some achievements are tough, and some of them take a long ass time, but last week I finally got an achievement that was practically a year in the making.

Gurubashi Arena Grand Master.

Yea, I know. It takes no skill and two days to accomplish. In theory. But if you're the kind of person who gets easily distracted jumping around Stormwind and then looks at the clock to realize that you missed the chest by thirty minutes AGAIN, two days potentially turns into months of cursing at yourself every three hours.

Eventually, I had to start recruiting people, not only to come with me to do the PvP nonsense, but also just to remind me that it was almost time to head to STV, to which I always responded, "OH YEA!!!" Because god forbid I ever remember on my own.

Aside from being an unforgivably (lol) inconvenient achievement, it got worse the closer I came to being done, because by the end, I had 11 of those non-stacking quest items taking up precious space in my bank. This is during all the hype about transmogrification when I'm scrambling to find empty bank slots for lowbie belts in five colors and trying to keep my inventory clear so I can do more BRD coffer runs without stopping at the vendor. I didn't get in-game rich by leaving trash items to rot!

But it's finally done. I swooped down on the Gurubashi Arena for the last time with a whole posse to protect me as I looted my final chest. Wearing my PvP gear from last season with a whole 2k resilience, I started the channel that would open the chest and lead me to 10 glorious achievement points...

And then I got backstabbed by a level 84 rogue.

We owned him.

-Avia.