This entry is a continuation of my last entry found here  in a short series which attempts to give new players to WoW PvP an introduction to concepts they should consider when attempting to begin playing. Today's subjects are broken down into: Maximizing Your Play, What Comps to Play and finally, an often asked about subject, How To Find People To Play With. As with anything PvP related, many of these concepts overlap and I'll try my best to keep them as categorized as possible to avoid confusion.

Maximizing your play

The first step to becoming good is realizing that you aren't good. From there, you tweak your play and practice like a madman until you are good. The first part is a difficult thing for many people, including myself. Here's what Glick had to say to me after fighting against me a few times and thoroughly kicking my ass this season:

"Sometimes you stand around like you're unsure of what to do. Plan your positioning better. For example, on Dalaran you can't seem to decide if you want to be on the top or the bottom, when you should probably just make a beeline for the boxes." - Glick, on how much I suck at this game.

Sometimes, the truth hurts. But you as the player have the freedom to make the decision of becoming better and listening, or letting your pride getting in the way by making excuses as to why you played badly those games. It's okay to make mistakes, you just have to learn from them. On top of this, the best way to get better is to play against people who are better than you. But, as this is an MMO, there are a couple of shortcuts you can take in order to make this process easier: gear (which I covered in my last article), gemming, talents, glyphs, macros and addons all have the ability to maximize your character as well as help you keep track of things that may at first overwhelm you with details.

With gemming, it boils down to your class, comp and playstyle. This week I spent about 3,000g trying different gemming styles for Rogue/Warlock/Shaman to see if a high stamina build would work against teams that focus me all the time. I ended up with 29,005 HP unbuffed and it worked alright. But then I had another problem: I lost 204 spell power. So while I was being focused less, my ability to keep up my warlock was slightly hampered. The solution I found was to go middle of the road with stamina and spellpower and go healing wave spec to be able to heal through cleaves better.

Sometimes, experiments don't turn out exactly the way you want them to but there's no such thing as a failed experiment if you learned something from it.  If you don't have the gold or patience to theorycraft, check out what top players are doing on the SK Top 100. SK-Gaming is a Swedish e-sports company with many resources on top level PvP news, commentary, and useful information for when you want to copy someone's spec, gems and glyphs. For actual strategy and information on the stuff you see there, there's Arena Junkies.

A NOTE ABOUT ARENA JUNKIES
Arena Junkies is not a well made site from a navigational perspective and many of the macros and strategy guides there are outdated. You also have to be 2400 rated to post on the damn thing. However, it's forums are an invaluable resource for people looking to find out trends with comps, strategies, specs and general gossip mixed in with a dash of bull****. Start here. Choose your class and read through the past 20 or so pages of forums for useful information and be sure to make use of the search function. Be assured, you're not the first person to have issues with starting out so in many instances there have been threads made which contain the information you see.

As you can tell from my talking about the SK-100 and Arena Junkies, research is a huge thing in terms of maximizing your play because the more you know before you queue up, the more you can meta game when you see who's on the other side when the gates open. Another source of research are PvP videos made by high rated players.

Here's a simple exercise: record yourself playing 10 games of arena, then go to Warcraft Movies and look for a high rated arena player's video of your same class. What's the difference between what they do, and what you do? Taking note of things like this and watching yourself play will elevate your conscious in terms of playing. Generally, we're our own worst critics so it's a good way to motivate yourself to get better at playing.

What Team Compositions To Play

If you're starting out, you probably want to stay away from experimental class compositions that may have a steeper learning curve and higher skill cap than the common compositions you'd see on the SK-100. WoW's greatest strength and weakness is that the game changes all the time, so it's important to keep note of how the trends change over the seasons, with patches and especially expansions because outside of Rogue/Mage/Priest and certain 5v5 compositions there hasn't been any consistent strong comps throughout every season.

 In The Burning Crusade for example, druids were by far the best healer but with Wrath of the Lich King, druids are considerably weaker when you compare them to the other healers while arguably still on par with them. The SK-100 keeps track of all of these trends in real time. To save you going to SK's site right now, I'll list some of the major popular comps in 3v3 that you'll see.

There are four types of teams:

• Melee Cleaves (Two Melee, One Healer)
• Hogwarts Cleaves (Two Caster DPS, One Healer)
• Comps That Actually Take Skill (One Melee, One Caster DPS, One Healer) 
• I Can't Believe People Run This Gay **** (Two Healers and a DPS, usually melee)

Common Cleaves Include:
TSG (the super gosus): Warrior/Death Knight/Paladin
Beast Cleave: Enhancement Shaman/BM Hunter/Priest or Paladin
Rape Is Legal in Texas: Retribution Paladin, Rogue, Priest
Preparation H: Feral Druid, Rogue, Priest
Wolves and Bladestormz: Enhancement Shaman/Warrior/Druid or Paladin
PHD: Death Knight/Hunter/Paladin
Retribution Paladin/Hunter/Shaman

Common Hogwarts Cleaves Are:
Elemental Shaman/Destruction Warlock/Priest or Paladin
Frost Mage/Destruction Warlock/Shaman or Druid
Shadow Play (technically): Affliction Warlock, Shadow Priest, Shaman or Druid

SKILLED COMPS Consist of:
RMP: Rogue/Mage/Priest
RLS: Rogue/Warlock/Shaman
WLD: Warrior/Warlock/Druid
Shadow Cleave: Death Knight/Warlock/Druid or Paladin
Hunter/Warlock/Druid

Comps Most Likely To Be Played By A Prince Body Double (if prince were tall) Include:
Double Healer Warrior (Any combination of healer)
Double Healer Hunter (Less common but still pretty dumb)
Holy Play (Obsolete but I'm sure someone's playing it. Shaman/Priest healers)

A SMALL NOTE ABOUT HUNTERS
Even if you play a healer, bind an AoE spell. Their snake traps give you deadly poison which stacks up to 5 times, crippling poison which slows you significantly, mind numbing poison which makes your casting slower and AIDS, which can't be cured by the things that clears poisons.

How To Find People to Play With

So now that we have the major comps down and you know what you'd like to play, the question becomes who do you play with? This is an easy question if you're on a high population PvP server, where the population consists of a significant percentage of bored male teenagers and college students willing to take out their pent up young male angst on a bunch of pixels. The challenge is if you're on an RP-PvE or PvE server, or if your server is low population so the pool of players is significantly lower. There are a number of solutions to this:

• Transfer to another server
• Make connections with like minded people by raiding
• Duel a bunch of people to make a name for yourself
• Write a Game Riot Blog to make yourself e-famous
• Sleep your way to the top
• Use Trade Chat to find people (be sure to subtract 200 from their claimed experience)

The first option may not be the most ideal for many people. After all, we have friends and significant emotional investment placed in not only our avatars but the avatars of others. It's difficult to leave that behind. Unfortunately, if the only high rated people on your server are your typical small-penis-having-big-fish-in-a-small-pond-douchebages then you may be SOL. Unless of course, you can somehow import a good player from another server then you're golden.

Other limitations of this option are if you DO transfer and you're not already known, you're starting from the bottom socially and you'll have to use the Trade Chat Random and Dueling strategy. Unless of course, you use Verdak's strategy of using your assets to get in-game swag.

All in all, as with any social setting it's about raising your profile. Your ability to do it depends directly on your ability to meet and interact with people who have similar ideals to you. The entirety of being introduced to arena comes from learning that the community is your biggest resource. With practice in your play, knowledge gained from research in this community, you'll raise your profile and arena ratings to eventually attain Gladiator.