Death arena teams

In arena Death wizards are having a bit of a hard time in 3v3 and 4v4.  I'll attempt to explain why.

Most teams now depend significantly on the use of gargantuan on their arena spells.  But most arena players now use gargantuan on smaller multi-hit spells.  This means you are getting hit even on the first turn and probably every turn for the first three passes.  Meaning that as a death wizard with poor resist and poor health you'll take about 2200 damage before you even get a chance to hit with a multi-hit spell.  So either you need to use wraiths and just chip away at one single player which isn't a viable strategy in 3 and 4v or you have to cast crow as often as possible with or without blades.  The Wiz makers did in fact add a sweet new spell to Death that decreases the opposing teams hit.  However, that spell costs 3 pips, and crit often makes it less effective, which means that to keep the other team dampened you basically have to use all your pips keeping dampening up or you just have to let them hit and try to save your pips and hope to survive and get an unblocked crit.  And the irony is that Death probably has the least crit block of all the schools too. :(

One for instance was that we fought a storm team that:
1) stunned us
2) did a tempest (each of them) 2600 total damage total even through shields
3) then each did a tempest again on one pip
- Game over -

On the last pass we assumed we were safe because each of them had a snowball pip but to my surprise the single snowball pip tempest without blades from the first player hit 490 after a critical block!  I thought those were supposed to be 80 per pip but it seems that with gargantuan and the incredible 70-90% tough plus that storm wizards can juice up to using special gear that if they have the right tough rating you're just plain dead.  But even so it makes one wonder if there isn't a miss calculation somewhere and maybe the critical block didn't actually block the critical completely? Who knows.

So far Death and life are the only schools that don't have low-pip multi hits even though life still has a low pip multi-heal.  Without a low pip multi-hit and with poor shielding and poor health Death wiz are having a super hard time in multi-v arena and still just so-so in 1v1.  Since the changes in the game my death wiz has dropped rank faster than a court-marshaled General.

In all the doom and gloom (pun intended)... death minotaur is certainly a bright spot. Without him there would be no chance in 1v1 and 2v2 pvp.

If there are any death wiz out there that are still doing well (1400-3000+ rank) in 3v3 and 4v4 please comment and I'll contact you for an interview.

Valerian Nightbringer