If you’d like to try out Arenas but are lacking in confidence, or perhaps you’d just like to know a little more about how to be successful, Blizzard have drawn up a rough guide to help players.
Take a look through the guide below:
[BLUE=“http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=9956309330&sid=1”]A while back, we contacted a few highly rated Arena players and asked them if they had any Arena experience, tips, or strategies they’d be willing to share with their fellow players. We received a lot of excellent submissions, sorted through them all, and picked out a few guides that we felt would be helpful to players new to the Arena or interested in giving it a try. The following general guide was provided by Dieszel from Deathwing and Bhoris from Area 52. We hope you find it useful!
General Knowledge:
• In order to be successful in arenas you need to have an extensive knowledge base.
• It is important to have talents and abilities of other classes memorized, as well as each class spec’s strengths and weaknesses.
• Vital information about a class/spec include cooldowns (CDs) available, cooldown duration, and knowing certain class “tells” when they are about to do damage (ie: when a Warrior goes into Berserker Stance, you can almost always expect him to Intercept, this would be a good time to play defensive and possibly try to get out of his Line-of-Sight).
• Great players are able to track both opponent cooldowns as well as use of their PvP trinket.
• The biggest key to success in arena is communication. Voice chat is not absolutely necessary, but is definitely preferred. Call out heals that are going out, crowd control (CC) that is going out, CC that is coming in, damage taken, kill opportunities, etc. I cannot stress enough how important it is that you and your teammates communicate with each other. It is hard, especially in 5v5, for a player to know what every other player is doing; this is why communication is vital. You must be able to quickly share information so that you can make sure the right decision is made. If your enemy is focusing on one person on your team and they quickly switch to another, this information is vital to the healers. If you are splitting damage and one of the targets gets low in health, this must be shared with your teammates so they can focus fire on that target and CC the other team’s healers.
• In the arena, you must always know your surroundings. Know where to line-of-sight your enemies, and know where they can line-of-sight you. Know where your enemies are going and know where your teammates are going. Raid symbols can often be a huge help to track movement.
• You must find a perfect balance between doing damage, keeping aware of your surroundings and not getting tunnel vision. If you focus on just one person to kill, CC, or heal, you often lose focus of everything else going on around you. Try to be aware of everything going on. Focus Frames and Unit Frames coupled with healing/damage macros and focus macros will greatly aid you in this department.
• Many people make the mistake of trying to just burst a target down with no regard to timing; timing is everything in arena. Even if the other team is winning the mana battle and you’re behind, well timed CC and burst damage can completely switch the game and surprise your opponents. Save your burst damage for the right time. Have your cooldowns ready, which includes class abilities, crowd control, and trinkets, and wait until diminishing returns are stacked up on your opponents’ CC. When you feel like the pace is slow, CC whatever you can on their team (this ranges from long-term, such as poly and fears, to short-term, such as interrupts and incapacitates). Pop your cooldowns and trinkets, and burn as hard as you can. If you cannot get a kill shot, try to recover, stabilize your play, and control the match until you have your cooldowns back up.
• Be fluid when it comes to picking a kill target. Many teams will go on classes such as a warlock or mage because they are known for taking more damage, but these classes have adapted to this. Mages are used to being targeted so they are good at running. Warlocks are used to getting beat on so they gear and spec to take a beating. Because of this, committing to one person can often result in your team doing nothing but running around and getting line-of-sighted or crowd-controlled. If one person runs away, don’t be afraid to switch to a target that is close. Split damage is something many teams do not consider, but can create vital pressure. Often this will make two people go defensive and also apply extra pressure on the healers. If you have two Mortal Strike effects, this is especially useful. When one target is low, call for a switch and merge on it to try and create that vital kill shot.
• Don’t forget that you can bind all of your skills using the “Keybind” option in the game menu.
• The more you play in arena, the better you will be able to quickly recognize the opposing team’s composition and know your own team’s strengths and weaknesses against their specific makeup.
• Coordination between teammates is important, especially when quickly switching targets to exploit [/BLUE]
Ghostcrawler posted about Death Knights, easing people’s minds about the state of the class with only 2 months to go until the expansion is due to go live:
[BLUE=“http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=9956648601&pageNo=2&sid=2000#35”]We did a big comparison recently between tanks in Naxx 10 gear with appropriate talents. I referenced this recently in the druid forums.
DK armor ended up being within 3% of warrior and paladin armor. Avoidance is high, as you can probably guess, and we don’t want to boost it a lot higher, because avoidance-based tanks can have problems when that hit does get through. Health was a little low, though still within 10%, and that’s something we are looking into buffing. DKs also ended up with low expertise, which is a problem, because failing to land an early strike can throw everything out of whack. Other tanks can get expertise fairly deeply in their trees. We might adjust DK trees to make sure expertise is available for more than just Blood. It’s hard to pin good numbers on mitigation abilities with cooldowns. If you assume that Icebound Fortitude is up 20% of the time, then it’s comparable to warrior damage reduction on physical hits and AMS ends up being slightly better on magical hits. But warriors always have their damage reduction on, so it’s either a wash or slightly better for warriors. Scaling is still a little hard to evaluate at this stage: warriors gain more block with strength and DKs gain more parry.
We haven’t finished dps tests yet. If dps is low, as many of you suppose, then threat will likely be low too because DKs don’t have a lot of +threat modifiers. But that’s a whole other issue. Low threat tanks aren’t fun and we wouldn’t want to ship one in that state.
Another point worthy of note is that except for the druid (who can be uncrittable in any gear), all the plate-wearing tanks could not get to the defense “cap” without gemming for defense. If you feel like you’re getting two-shotted by bosses, you might look at your defense. We don’t intend for leveling instances to require a hefty investment in defense (you should be able to go with whatever quest gear you acquire) but you’ll want more for the end-game dungeons and certainly for heroics and raids.
The thing limiting runeforging from being really cool, in our opinion, is new art. At this stage in development, new art is pretty expensive to get, so that might be something we leave for the next patch.[/BLUE]
