A Dummy’s Guide to Starting Arena

Arena is an excellent source for certain pieces of gear - in fact most group roles except tanking can use Arena as a means to enhance their kit for endgame while waiting for something on their gear wishlist to drop (and we all know the pieces you’re really after will actually only drop after they stop being vital to you. If you had every single healing plate in an instance on a pallie wishlist, chances are no plate would drop anymore, ever, to the glee of the clothies running with you).

Arena and BG gear can therefore help you bridge certain gaps provided you are willing to take the time to accumulate the points over a couple of weeks. If you have lived and breathed PvP from level 11 to 70, this post will teach you nothing - in fact you could comment and offer more advice. Or you should actually be writing this, you slacker.

Err, sorry. Got carried away.

Anyway, if you only did some BGs on your way to 70, you may be curious about how to get started in Arena. So here are a couple of pointers for you.

Keys for Success

• Situation Awareness
• Knowing your own spells, skills and talents and when to use them
• Knowing when not to use a particuliar skill or talent
• Knowing what the other classes can do, first and foremost your team partners, but also your enemies (good old Sun Tsu’s Art of War still holds true)
• Until you reach a level where every team is fully epixed out, gear remains an important factor
• Teamplay and communication

The more you have of the above elements, the better you will get. Part of it can be acquired through other means (gear, communication, knowledge of others), but the rest only comes through practice.

Before getting started

• Stack stamina first, then damage or healing bonuses relevant to your class, then resilience and / or a deeper mana pool. Survivability is key.
• Try to get your hands on the BG PVP insigna trinket asap.
• Using the in-game voice chat can help. Make sure one team member at the very least is able to speak and has some group coordination skills as well as patience and anger control. Someone who loses his temper shouldn’t direct a team.
• Get an add-on like Proximo, and make sure your whole team uses it
• If you’re an add-on collector like me, also use an in-game add-on manager like ACP, and disable all non-essential stuff for arena (you don’t need Atlas or Cartographer for instance)
• Go browse various class forums / resources and learn first and foremost about your team partners, and then all the others
• Know that not all classes have been created equal for arena. If you’re a mage or a shaman, your class is strongly represented among the top 5v5 teams but appears to fare poorly in 2v2 and 3v3. If you’re a druid or a rogue, your class shines in 2v2 and 3v3 but appears much more limited in 5v5. If you’re a hunter, you’re out of luck at least until patch 2.3 - arena simply lacks the depth to let you play to your strength. Accept that as a fact and perfect your trapping skills. Or wait for the deadzone to dwindle on the next patch.
• Spec for success. If you and your team partners do it for fun and as an aside, that’s OK, anything will do. But if you want to eventually climb up to higher levels, Arena is like anything else. You have to commit for it, meaning you re-spec appropriately. Tankadins or Retadins (at least until patch 2.3), prot warriors, fire mages have little place in competitive arena.

Slow beginnings

No matter whether you join an existing team or form a new one, expect your rating to go down at first. The practical skills require, well, practice, practice and more practice.
Use Skirmishes as a warm up at the beginning of an arena evening, but be aware of their limitations. The Matchmaking system isn’t active on skirmishes, so you can face a lowbie team and defeat them with ease, or find yourself pitted against one of your battlegroups’ best (happened to Steptoe and me once. We had the time to notice we were against a lock and a priest, and about three seconds later the scoreboard came up- once we were back in Shatt we realized the duo was formed from our server’s then highest-ranking priest in all three brackets, and the guild leader of our most advanced guild, clad in full T5). Also, there’s no pressure in Skirmish, as you have nothing to win and nothing to lose.
In short, Skirmishes are here to set your mind back to Arena mode on a new day, get used to your key layout for this task again, swap any gear pieces you forgot to put on, and that’s more or less it. The only real practice you will get is by playing ranked matches.
I cannot stress enough that you need to be prepared to have your rating decrease steadily over the first couple of weeks. You need time to get used to the setting, and to learn communication and cooperation with your partners. The small formats are better than 5v5 for that, BTW, as there’s less room for a team mate to make up for your mistakes.
During this initial learning stage, your team rating really doesn’t matter. Most important is to learn to recognize at what point the game was lost, and to take in the lessons of that defeat. Part of it is sheer luck of the draw - not all class combinations are created equal either, and depending on your setup you could either be waltzing over your opposition, or face near unsurmountable challenges.
You could of course just disband and reform after a while, but this isn’t necessarily a good idea. The matchmaking system, for what it’s worth, will try to pit you against teams of similar ability. If you drop down to 1200 rating, forget about the your ego. At some point you will start rebounding, and your rating will increase gradually as your skills increase, letting you face harder and harder challenges.

When I joined Steptoe, it was as a replacement for another pallie who had PCTed out. The team was at 1440 rating, and we nosedived two weeks in a row, going as low as 1320ish at a point. And then we rebounded (I also got a bit of gear improvements, which helped), regaining rating step by step. We’re above 1600 this week, with an 8-2 score, our best win / loss ratio as a duo so far. We’re still quite a way from being good at it (that’s why I’m writing a Dummy’s Guide, not a Pro Guide). But we’re progressing, we’re having fun, and we’re getting the points we need for the gear we want. And that’s what’s really important.

For you: Gather Knowledge, Prepare Yourself with tools and external means, gear appropriately, and then practice, practice, practice. And you, too, should have fun. If you aren’t, just do something else.

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