by far the most annoying thing in pvp is people with resonant weapon and dark fog/bat staff.
people will just throw resonant weapon on a fast weapon such as katana or santier's spear (the most cheese weapon) and essentially do the same, if not more damage than a pure melee build. gg.
Yeah, it's yet again one of those minmax builds. To be honest, if you don't have a weapon buff you're pretty much gimping yourself - pure melee will never do as much damage as a guy with a weapon buff. Heck, I tried a few rounds without a weapon buff and I was doing much less damage.
I do advise getting Great Magic Barrier if you have enough faith (or use sceptics spice), it's a great defense buff for all the magic shit that is flying around in arena.
In other news, I'm having fun invading in Dragon Shrine. It's hardly ever fair (for me), since they always have summons (1 out of 10 is a 1v1), but damn, so satisfying winning against multiple opponents by outsmarting them.
Yesterday I won a 1v4 (he resummoned once) and a couple of times against 1v3. Sunlight spear, while being useless in 1v1, comes quite in handy with ganks, the few times that I sniped the host while he was fighting one of those dragonshrine guards while two of his summons tried to get me