Welcome Cataclysm and this assy blog + flashback to wotlk!

Well, yeah. It's about 4 weeks into Cataclysm now and some major balancing patches are currently on the PTR test realms. While the PTR patch notes are not final, there is some controversial stuff and very interesting changes that are majorly going to impact the playstyle of many classes. I believe the nerfpat is not hitting exactly the right targets, but atleast it's hitting to the right direction.

Probably the biggest changes is Blood Lust / Heroism / Time Warp not usable in arenas and trinkets removing silence. I personally welcome these changes. However, we'll see how arena and PvP will turn out in cataclysm, since Blizzard really wants it to be less bursty than it was in WoTLK. Comparing season 9 to season 5, PvP seems slightly less retarded than it was in early season 5.

Here's just some (retarded arena) stuff that everyone remembers WoTLK from. Most of it got eventually fixed.

HERO CLASS aka Death Knight

ICY TOUCH M8 ft def cd!!!! lol=)

That's a DK right there, yo. Icy Touch and season 5, /castrandom macros and 2k+ ratings totally made the unkillable Death Knights the class of the choice.

Hey, hero class had to be better than other classes, right?

Now in Cataclysm it appears that Death Knights are going to be probably the most powerful class if the current PTR changes go live. You cannot go wrong with the hero class!

Hunterlol

The hunter damage was also insane in the early WoTLK. TNT used to give a stun and Beastmastery hunter pets could basically solo casters alone and rape people in 2 seconds. Eventually these got nerfed.

hmm... lol i r hunter what does thsi shit do??
think it does dmg and rng stuns lol

I played a mage in season 5 and I remember using Icy Veins and evocation to survive the unstoppable hunter pet's damage as frost. That's how desperate I was.

Hunters in early Cataclysm though are exactly the opposite and yet again, has the lowest presentation in arena.

Though, at least imo one of the most disgusting things in PvP is the pet damage being too high. Yeah, pets are part of some classes, but the damage shouldn't just be that high by the pet. PvP isn't Pet vs Player anyway, or is it?

PROT HEAL PALA WHUT

nothing more to say. go away, protection specced faggots.

Rogues and Fan of Knives.

throw these around for guaranteed success

Blizzard probably never even realized the impact of a spammable FoK, insane damage, non DR cooldown interrupts in PvP. 

In 5vs5 teams, there had to be a FoKing rogue doing the FoKing aoe interrupts and FoKing everymotherFoKing caster up. And in 3vs3, only by spamming fan of knives, it was actually viable as long as there were casters around.

No matter what people say, this probably was one of the most retarded things I have and I ever will experience in PvP!

Beast Cleave, TSG, Wizard Cleaves etc.

Me and Namsy playing TSG in S7

As always, some of the arena combos will always be better than some others, but also, there will always be some combos that are powerful and viable by just tunnel visioning something and getting kills really fast by blowing something up in 2 secs while using random cd's.

I played TSG in season 7 and I can tell that I've never seen something that simple. If you had the BiS gear, knew how to press buttons and pve rotations, you could beat teams that had many hundred rating more than you had. It was simply because of the unhealable pressure this particular setup gave.

finally removed!!!
jk colossus smash

We, for instance, managed to beat some of the top RMP's in one death grip-> strangulate -> bladestorm, but also lost to some other TSG's couple hundred ratings below us, simply because they had BiS gear and we did not.

:( PvE gear for the win.

It did not necessarily mean that you can't be good players with this combo and do some cool stuff, but the difference of a 2k rated TSG and 2500 rated TSG was not that much.

Ring of Valor, Small Dalaran arena + buggy boxes innit

Arena map environment with RNG stuff was never a good idea. Some people might remember the early Nagrand arena, where there was some small tornados randomly spawning and moving around the map. If you got hit by those, you took some damage and got a knockback, if I recall right.

Well, Blizzard removed these in TBC because they thought the tornados and stuff were too RNG and not PvP-friendly. Ironically enough, when WoTLK came out, we got two, awesomely retarded and RNG arena maps!

"I FUCKING HATE THIS GAME"

Ring of Valor, with the RNG pillars going up and down,

some fire where people could get stunlocked into and take some medicore dot, people getting disconnected 24/7 and spawning next to each others every match, pets bugging on the lifts, really made some people feel like why such stupid shit would ever get into the game. It felt like that arena map never got tested in the beta and was released to the game too early.

And this also was probably true. Later, they removed the RNG fires and fixed the disconnect problems - but still, most of the community prefer this particular arena getting removed from the game. 

Currently, it's somehow bugged on live, so you can't get Ring of Valor. 

Hope it stays this way!

"I FUCKING HATE THIS GAME.
AGAIN"

Another one was Dalaran Arena, this one was less buggy than RoV. Really small arena, two platforms, some RNG line of sight in the middle and some boxes for line of sight. kk.

Biggest problems with this arena was simply, it was just too small and the boxes that people used for line of sight, were behaving strangely and had some strange hit-boxes. Also, warlocks could just teleport back to the starting area with their demonic circle and thus never getting to los / melee range of the enemy team and sit in the starting area like a retard for the rest of the match.

Later, Blizzard increased the size of this arena and fixed the bugged "hit-box of the boxes". Imo though, the los in the middle, still has to go.

Oh well, that's it! I probably missed loads of obvious stuff, but I'll probably release another blog soon. Hope you enjoyed it!

 -Matt