When to perform a swap in arenas?

Situational swaps in arenas

In arenas (or any other PVP environment), swapping targets should never be done randomly, and one can look at 3 specific indicators that can lead you to either tunnel one target or perform a swap between your kill target and your off-target(s).

– Cooldown usage
– Positioning
– Mana status

Knowing when to perform a swap is part of the tactical skills and awareness of any good arena player. During a game, you should do a quick check for these indicators and call for a swap with your partner when one (or more) of these conditions is satisfied.

Cooldowns usage (trinket and defensive abilities)

You should keep track of your enemies defensive cooldowns which are listed here for each class in TBC:

– All classes: PvP trinket
– Mage: Ice block, Cold Snap
– Priest: Pain suppression, Stoneform for Dwarves
– Druid: Nature Swiftness, Barkskin
– Rogue: Cloak of Shadows, Vanish
– Warlock: Fel Domination
– Paladin: Divine Shield, Blessing of Protection or Sacrifice

If you manage to get some of these abilities on cooldowns from a target, you should now look at your enemies and quickly deduce from their positioning, their armor, resistances, and remaining CDs and evaluate on which target you should go and if you are able to CC the other target.
This decision also relies on your own cooldowns.
– Do you have one Prep (Vanish) to set up a new opener with the other player controlled?
– Do you have your Shadowstep to reach the enemy?

In what we call situational matchups, that is this ability to consider swaps based on the previous factors that will grant you your win condition.
For example, as Rogue/Mage, getting both enemies trinkets used early on against Priest/Rogue leaves you with different options depending on: the Diminishing returns (DR) for your Sheep/Sap, your Kidney shot cooldown, your Vanish.
Basically, if you force a trinket on Polymorph from the Priest, and get the rogue’s trinket on KS, you could actually think about swapping to priest with a Blind rogue into Sap or Poly while you chose to go priest with a new Cheapshot-Kidney-Counterspell
This situation leads us to our second indicator.

Positioning

In some situations, you will find yourself to be able to reach your initial off-target only, while your original kill target might be far away as he was running away from you (will often happen with the classes having high mobility and escape possibilities such as druids, mages and rogues).
It might also be one of your enemies who is overextending.

You should communicate with your teammate and consider performing a swap. This might even give you an advantage as the other enemy might not be able to peel or heal his friend who is now in a weak position, and a swap performed quickly might result in a kill. This is something that could happen quite often against Druid/Rogue teams when one of the players suffers a big pressure (deadly), or even Rogue/Mage or Rogue/Rogue team.
Imagine as a Rogue/ShadowPriest, being faced with a Druid/Rogue team composition. In many situations, you might consider going Druid but Druid’s mobility is quite huge and with great pressure, the player could even decide to completely leave his mate alone while his partner is Feared into Vanish-Sap, hypothetically out of his partner’s line of sight.
This could be your call for a swap, re set-up the dot with the Shadowpriest being “free cast” and then, land the kill with Cheapshot- Kidney because the Druid would be too late to connect and get his healing out damaged.

Mana status

A caster being out of mana might become an easy kill target once he’s out of mana, and this is especially true if they have already used their defensive CDs as explained in the first indicator.
This usually occurs in games with healers as these will tend to be longer.

These particular moments will allow you to find some windows to land Sap while the enemy tries to drink, or just swap on the enemy because he won’t be able to flee and kite (let’s say an OOM mage) or heal himself (let’s say a Priest).