Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women? Blood Sport investigates the entirety of all-things arena for gladiators and challengers alike. C. Christian Moore, multiple rank 1 gladiator, examines the latest arena strategy, trends, compositions and more in WoW.com's arena column.

Listening Music: Home Video's "You Will Know What to Do." The video is some sweet NASA footage; try to not be mesmerized by it (difficult, I confess). When I first heard Home Video a few years ago (Citizen EP, We and In a Submarine), I thought the band might be a Thom Yorke solo project. That's high praise from me. These guys do not disappoint.

Last Week: Part V of our Beginner's Guide to Arena. After featuring some Miles Davis and John Coltrane, we talked a bit about some of the aspects skilled arena damage-dealers excel with.

This Week: We'll be shifting gears a bit this week. Protection warriors are an important (and hot) topic within the arena community. I was thinking about publishing this article as a stand-alone and continuing the arena guide this week, but I've just been a tad bit too busy recently. More after the break!

• Italics are Ghostcrawler's recent post.
  

Ghostcrawler on protection in PvP

• Will it nerf them for PvP? Yes. Aside from stuns and Dismantle, rooting or snaring the Prot warrior is the major way to keep him off of you. Considering all of the stuns and silences that Prot has, when they can also jump out of every Frost Nova with Warbringer, then there's not much in the way of skill a mage can employ to stay alive. They just get countered in every way.

False. Polymorph, charms, and other crowd control is much more effective at keeping protection warriors off targets (and will still be after the change). This really isn't a big deal though, Ghostcrawler probably had something else on his mind. However, let's talk about what is far more important here:

We need to drop the idea that kiting or distance is somehow important in arena. It's not. It hasn't been since the early seasons of The Burning Crusade (i.e. when people didn't know how to play arenas).

I'm sure we can all think of times when kiting or distance is important. Yes, if you're talking druid-warrior or druid-rogue compositions in season three or four, you'll probably make a good case that Entangling Roots, Hamstring, and Travel Form worked wonders for kiting, control, distance, survivability and so on.

Likewise, one might argue in support of matters of range when witnessing a warlock-mage combo absolutely destroy one of the best 2v2 compositions of all time, death knight-paladin in season five hayday. Frost Nova and chilly snares keeping the opposing death knight off the warlock while the two crowd controlled and nuked the opposing team into oblivion was a spectacular sight. We can all think of the occasional time it happens now, or scenario where it appeared in the past.

Frankly, if you're talking about kiting, you're going to be discussing 2v2 the vast majority of the time. In 3v3 and 5v5, kiting is about as common as actual kites. Blizzard has wisely eschewed the smallest arena bracket from the highest levels of competitive play for balance reasons, above all else.

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