Good Arena Practice

I'm doing the tier 0.5 armor set quest at the moment as kind of an impulse to get some unique looking armor. When the quest was first released I saw a couple people wearing partial sets but the number of people who had the full set seemed rare. I am sure there are a couple people that have every piece stored in the bank but I am betting their numbers are low. Anyways while on the third part of the quest to upgrade my boots, shoulders, and legs I ran across an interesting fight. Its the fight that takes place when you trigger the Ring of Law event with the Banner of Provocation.

Normally the Ring of Law event is a short gladiator pit like fight in Blackrock Depths where you have to fight a single boss mob at the end. But while upgrading your dungeon set armor you eventually get a banner which you can set up in the middle of the arena to change the final boss that comes out. Instead of a single mob you get a small group of NPC characters who all have real class abilities. It's completely random which classes you will have to fight except for the warrior Theldrin who shows up every time to give the quest item.

This group of NPCs act just like a real PvP team. The rogue will stunlock any casters and use vanish if you get him down too low in health. The priest will dispel and heal everyone on his side while fearing anyone that tries to damage him. If your unlucky enough to get the shaman NPC then watch out for constant earthbind totems. The most annoying thing about the group is they target your own healers and ignore standard threat causing techniques. Don't expect Blessing of Salvation or Taunt to save any of your casters.

Probably the most interesting NPC that can spawn with Theldrin though is a small weaponless gnome named Lefty. Lefty hits like a truck and seems to use weird rogue like attacks. During one fight our warrior was hit for 7,000 dmg with a combo attack called "Five Fingered Exploding Heart Technique". Paying attention to our combat log we noticed most of his attacks were punches and kicks. This combined with his high hitpoints made me think that this NPC is actually a monk. Perhaps he was just put into the encounter as a joke but it's very interesting to see what Blizzard thinks a monk might play like.

Anyways I definitely recommend doing this encounter for the experience at 5v5 pvp. It seems as if Blizzard payed special attention to program all the dirty PvP tricks into these NPCs. Out of the five fights we did we lost to them twice. One time simply because the hunter mob feigned death and ice trapped our druid healer. My group was wearing mostly tier 1 epics from Molten Core and we still had some challenge with this fight which just seems to prove to me that PvP coordination is much more challenging then PvE raid coordination. I would recommend this encounter for anyone that wanted to practice for the upcoming arena system in the Burning Crusade.