A Simple Guide To World of Warcraft Arena For New Players

Overcoming World of Warcraft Arena's Catch-22
Playing Arena for many new players to the game can seem daunting when first starting out. Good players won't play with you unless you're geared and good, but to be good and geared you must play with good people (or at least decent people). I've been getting quite a few requests about writing something a post that not only consolidates useful information for new players about but also offers analysis on things you can't really find. For example: a definition of what "good" positioning is put into words beyond, "If you don't know that, please delete your character." There have been a couple of guides written on this already. How To: Improve Your Arena Ratings is one gem of a thread that's one of them. While useful, I feel it's incomplete and many of the links to Elitist Jerks's website concerning the subject are incredibly outdated, having been written well over a year ago during The Burning Crusade.

This series will be divided into 5 parts: Gearing Up Efficiently, Introductory Concepts of Playing The Game, Class Composition, Maximizing Your Play, Finding People to Play With. Much of this will be written generally to apply to all classes but will be peppered with specific class anecdotes to reinforce the concept. As is probably obvious by now, most of this will not be new to the SK-100 heroes who have no trouble getting into the top 0.5%. This is for people who don't know where to begin.

Part 1: Gearing Up Efficiently
While gear is arguably not the most important aspect, it still makes a significant factor in determining who wins in an equally skilled battle. Depending how you do it, gathering gear doesn't have to be a second job. Sure, there are more ethically questionable ways of doing it like having your newly imported wife from China grind honor for you or botting for honor but I'm going to stay away from that. By just playing the game there are a number of methods of acquiring the PvP gear you'll need from PvE instances to Wintergrasp and of course battlegrounds. There are 6 ways to get PvP gear:

Gear from badges: acquired by running heroics and raids, bmblems of Conquest drop from any 5 man heroic instance and 10 man raid instances released before Ulduar. These will get you Deadly Gladiator's gear, which while not the best is a much better start than the blue Savage Gladiator's set. Don't waste your time getting the blue set, as it's just barely better than the level 70 season 4 gear. For the same time invested, you can have an epic set that's much better. If you have access to raiding ToC, you can use your Emblems of Triumph to get the better Furious Gladiator's set.

Crafted Gear: If you just hit level 80, this is the best way to ensure you have a decent enough gear score to not be kicked from heroic groups for having really bad gear. You can craft the Blue PvP Set and wear it with craftable epics to get started collecting your gear if you have the money lying around and don't have access to friends willing to run you through instances.

Gear from honor: This is the most time consuming method of getting gear and unlike the previous two ways of obtaining gear, is completely unavoidable. To get the current Relentless Gladiator offset pieces (Neck, Cloak, Bracers, Belt, Boots, Ring, Battlemaster's Trinket) you'll need to grind around 375,600 honor. If you don't have the rating and don't want to spend thousands of gold for having someone carry you to 1800, you can buy the offset pieces for significantly cheaper. I advise not doing that, as you'll just keep making more work for yourself later down the road when you eventually get the rating you'll need for the offset pieces.

The main source of honor comes from battlegrounds. You will run Warsong Gulch, Eye of the Storm, Alterac Valley, Strand of the Ancients, Arathi Basin and Isle of Conquest until your eyes bleed. Fortunately, it's a good way to practice your class abilities, keybinds and macros (which I talk about later) so you get a lot of practice in. Yes, you can AFK and bot for honor but ultimately, if you're new to the game, you're only hurting yourself by doing so.

Wintergrasp: This is probably the most efficient way of getting gear for your toon, though it may not be as optimized for your character. Many resto shamans don't run with haste, for example, yet the WG gear is nothing but haste. Nonetheless, from a stamina, resilience, spellpower standpoint, it's really good gear for relatively little time investment. Instead of buying the furious offset, you can get gear from here faster while concurrently acquiring honor to buy your offset pieces as you get the rating you need for your offset pieces.

Vault of Archavon: My personal favorite way of getting gear, it pretty much boils down to luck. The bosses here don't care about your arena experience, your amount of honor or what you do IRL for a living. It's all based on the Random Number Generator (a concept I'll cover more in depth later.) You can be the only member of your class present in the raid and 3 things will drop for your class alone. It also works both ways. Some people go multiple seasons without seeing anything from any of the bosses and only have achievements and badges to show for it.

Gear from Arena: This is the slowest way of acquiring gear using arena points calculated at the end of every week, but it gives you access to the best of the best you can get. You can also get the previous season's gear using a combination of honor and arena points, but I advise against it as your points at the beginning of the season are precious and you want to save them up for what you can get later.


Part 2. Introductory Concepts of Playing The Game
Philosophically speaking, you must know yourself and your enemies in order to do well at this game. The old cliche of knowledge is power is paramount to the mindset one needs to have not only beginning arena, but throughout the evolution of the game as it changes along with your (hopefully) ever increasing skill level. Things like positioning, situational awareness, GCD usage, anticipation can be practiced in a number of ways. I love running skirmishes to practice these things while others prefer dueling.

"Play nonstop like it is your job. When your team isn't on, queue bgs and **** on bads until you can do it with your eyes closed." - Glick, Warlock

It's conventional wisdom that playing more will make you better. But if you mindlessly play every time you do, you'll never get better. Dueling all the rogues in the world as a shaman means nothing if you never learn how to ghost wolf kite effectively. LEARN while you practice. Get to know every other class' abilities like the back of your hand by dueling, running battlegrounds and skirmishes. Watch PvP videos of all classes and note what they do. Learn your macros and keybinds by heart to the point where they become second nature.

Anticipation: A big part of playing well is predicting what the other players will do and doing all you can to either prevent it from happening, or making sure you have the appropriate action prepared in order to counter it. Take rogues, for example. They generally all follow the same paths for making sure they're not brought out of stealth easily. If you play a certain comp and there's a rogue on the other team, you can pretty much guess who's going to be sapped, opened on and switched to. But sometimes, your predictions can be wrong and you have to be ready for that too.

For example, if I'm running Rogue/Warlock/Shaman against Retribution Paladin/Rogue/Priest, I know that most likely, I'm going to be trained from start to finish. What can I do? I personally like staying mounted, following my warlock as closely as him to possible so that if either of us gets sapped, we can have a chance of getting him out of stealth and making him burn a vanish. I know he's going to re-open, so then I adjust to that. I firmly believe that WoW is still a chess match to the tune where you move every 1.5 seconds (but sped up ridiculously after The Burning Crusade since damage is so high) and a big part of chess is being 4 steps ahead of your opponent.

Positioning: Positioning is an incredibly broad concept that changes every Global Cooldown and is arguably the most important variable in determining a team's strategy offensively and defensively. Finding a good definition for what positioning IS is incredibly difficult as a result. This is a problem for many new players. Everyone talks about good positioning and it's one of the most important concepts in arena yet there's no resource readily available explaining where to begin. So, with the help of a few top players I was able to come up with this:

Good positioning is making sure that no matter how the tide of the fight changes, you can adjust quickly to the situation offensive or defensively. Where the enemy has as little effect on you as possible while you maximize the potential to assist your teammates.

To show the fluidity of this concept, I asked several well known players to give their own personal anecdotes to it.

"...the difference of seperating a good pvper from a great one, is positioning.. almost anyone can know what spells to cast and what sequence to do them in, but knowing how to use your position in arena to make the other team's job harder of casting on your or your team is paramount." - Trance, Priest

"Against warlocks and mages you'd want to be next to a pillar so you can los the next cc basically, if you want to play passive, control the fight, and know youre going to die extremely quickly if the opposing team swaps on you, you'd want to be next to a pillar ...[if playing offensively] in general, if you want to interrupt a healer as much as possible. otherwise, theres' no point because you'll have to move your totems up, and healers can sacrifice some time to whack a totem." - Kollektiv, Shaman

"...the biggest thing with rogue positioning, I think is not to overextend or be baited into a spot where you can't interact with your teammates. That can mean like...don't get pulled behind a pillar or line of sight your healer that's more obvious, or it could mean don't open on a target when your teammates are out of range to assist with crowd control or dispels. Good rogue positioning is more about don't let the opposition control where you go, you control where the oposition goes and stays with stuns." - Akrioss, Rogue

Situational Awareness: You'll notice there's a bit of overlap here. Positioning is a BIG part of situational awareness but not the only part. Debuffs, debuffs, debuffs. Pay attention to them. If a rogue cheapshots you, keep an eye on exactly when the cheap shot ends so you can (hopefully) do something in between that and the kidney shot. I personally like to drop a stoneclaw totem and thunderstorm ~1.5 seconds into the kidney shot. Try to wait until debuffs like mortal strike and wound poison before doing your biggest heal (if applicable) on yourself.

You need to know what's being cast on you, what you're going to cast, what your partners are casting and what your enemies are casting on your team mates without them telling you. Play with the came sound on so you can hear when an enemy spell is being cast, when the pillers in Ring of Valor are about to rise and fall. Sometimes, your eyes can't see everything you need to keep track on so playing deaf isn't really a viable option if you want to play to your full potential.

There are mods that can help with this (which I'll get to later) but generally, you want to stay away from using too many of them as a dependence on them makes you a worse player, not better. Play a lot without using them for a bit and slowly add the mods to enhance your gameplay and you'll love yourself later for it.

Communication with your team members is another great way to increase your situational awareness. TALK as much as possible while the game is going on. Whether you're silenced, crowd controlled, out of line of sight or range, this will help everyone involved in collecting your points.

Well, this is pretty long and I've only covered the first two parts. Ming told me to break it up into two entries so you'll have that to look forward to. In the meantime, for those who missed it, Azael wrote a great article on Game Knowledge vs Player Skill that's quite insightful for new players. Also, Klynx wrote a nice glossery of PvP terms here.