A request for help: Stuck at low arena rating for a very long time

PVP Arenas
1

Hello.

I decided to ask for some pointers, since I’ve been getting a little frustrated at our team’s inability to increase our rating despite trying our best.

I’ve been playing arena with my wife doing 2vs2s since it came out 10+ years ago. During that time, we’ve played some 5000 matches with about 500 of those during BfA. We’re currently stuck at low 1400s, with our all time high being around 1550.

We’ve been doing all the trivial things such as making sure we have everything keybinded, mouse steer, use macros, focus targets, and have the recommended addons configured. Also, we communicate a lot verbally (we’re physically in the same room).

In order to improve, we’ve watched a lot of arena material (including paid Skill Capped vids) and recorded our play for analysis (although we can’t really recognize where we go wrong, when we watch those).

She’s playing a disc priest. I used to play enh shaman up to Legion and DH after that, since I realized I wasn’t improving on my shaman. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem Demon Hunter works any better for me. The moment we hit 1500, the next 10 teams outplay us and we find ourselves back at 1300.

Quite frankly, we’re running out of ideas. I wrote this post to ask two questions:

  • Is it “normal” for casual players to be permanently stuck at this low a rating considering the effort I described above?
  • What would you recommend we do next in order to improve?

I hope there are some veterans here with good tips. Cheers =)

Tiina

3 Likes
2

I don’t know what to tell you besides trying harder. You both should start watching good players (not swifty) of your classes and see what they are doing differently than you. The best place for that would be twitch since you can ask questions to the streamers right away.

For disc I’d recommend you hydramist or mehhx (rarely streaming).

For DH you could watch Trenacetatetv or Raikubest

I personally have never played thaat many arena games (around 5-7K in total) but I got somewhat decent by spending a lot of time watching streamers on twitch, understanding different classes and learning proper playstyles

3

I like your effort and that you dont give up on arena. I can offer you some training and tips for free.

3 Likes
4

I could try to give you some tips as DH if you want, and we can also play some games so I can see what you do wrong and where can u improve as I have a hpala so if you are interested tell me ishkar#21943

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5

Hey ,

it’s hard to help you without a video or explanation in which case you are struggling…
But in general the common mistake you have to avoid is overlapping cd’s this usually can cost you a game.

Try to speak a lot with your teammates about your cd/trinket or when you can burst someone , have a plan to cc the healer for exemple.

Avoid as much as you can losing your healer ( i know it’s sometimes hard as mélée haha) and try to learn everything you can about all classes/comp in general to know exactly how to play around.

For the rest, they answered above me :wink:

6

At this low rating just make sure you’re doing your damage and healing properly.

It sounds daft and kinda obvious but really your dps in arena, especially playing a DH is really important. And your priest needs to know how to heal and dps properly with you.

Honestly if you know how to do your pve rotation and throw in some stuns and mana rifts it shouldn’t be hard to get at least challenger

1 Like
7

So true.

I would even recommend trying to keep communication to a minimum. It’s a rookie mistake to shout everything that’s going on, but there’s so much a man can focus on and at this point you are probably need focus and work to get the basics right. Talking too much, which is bound to happen if you’re next to eachother, will distract you.

When you’re constantly talking you get the illusion and feeling it’s something you talk about that you don’t get right, while it’s the little things, the execution of the rotation, the fast and correct reaction to enemies that are the most important to get right, and if you don’t realize when you’re missing them and correct yourself the next time, you’ll stay in place.

You’ll eventually realize what’s important to talk about (by seeing when you lost games from overlapping cds / LoSing / missing CC oppertunities etc) and what is a distraction.

1 Like
8

Don’t overthink it, i bet it’s something like not enough dps or healing, wrong talents, training wrong target and not using defensives.

9

If you can’t tell what you’re doing wrong from your recordings then perhaps you should seek advice from others.

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Thank you all for the advice. We’re definitely going to practice more and spend some more time watching actual games instead of just theory videos. We’ll have to also try playing with some more experienced people and have them review our videos.

it’s definitely something fundamental we’re doing wrong. I don’t think its the damage rotation, since in many games I’m doing more damage than the enemy dps. I guess the problem is we’re not focusing on the important stuff like someone suggested and talking about irrelevant stuff.

Also, I believe our lack of proper tactics is a huge problem. In most games we don’t really have a plan nor know what to do next at a given point of time. I guess out-dpsing the opponent and still losing so often proves it. My plan is usually to pick a target more or less at random and tunnel him. When we do win, it’s only when we survive long enough to oom the enemy healer.

As for details, it seems we do better against casters. I am somewhat able to limit their dps or avoid damage using los. The real problem is melee-healer combos. Many of the warriors and rogues bring my wife’s priest down a lot quicker I can kill their healer and even with me on the dps peeling, I only delay her death slightly while their healer is left mostly free to heal making the dps really hard to kill.

Perhaps trying to learn how to prepare a proper “go” or CC chain would help. Learning this seems to be quite difficult as most material on the net speaks about talents and macros and such easily definable stuff, but liitle about actual tactics. How does one for example know how to select the kill target or plan a setup to actually accomplish that? The problem with trying to learn by watching actual matches is that I find it really hard to keep track what actual abilities are being used in a fast paced game, let alone understand why something was done.

Tiina

11

wow man what a bright idea is this. have you come up with this alone?

12

Well if you know their abilities you can guess which target will die easier, or just try different stuff and you should figure out best tacs eventually. Now you try to overthink it again, cc chains? proper “go”? You aren’t a mage.

That could also mean enemy healer heals better.

13

Well… I guess those concepts may be overthinking at this rating, but I’m really trying to come up some new ideas to do stuff differently here. I think we’ve been trying to adapt. Still, learning by doing is quite challenging is this game. I’m a bit afraid to see if it’ll be enough.

I mean, for example, you say we can “guess” the best kill target and “figure the tactics out eventually”, but for now trying to do that ourselves hasn’t worked out. You’d think the 500 matches during last three months would have at least improved our rating slightly, but nothing seems to be happening. I wouldn’t otherwise have asked for help in the first place.

Builds and basic rotations are relatively straightforward, but I really struggle deciding e.g. when to go offensive vs. when to defend or when to use CDs or CC someone. Haven’t been able to find consistent formulas so far. I’m not saying it isn’t a lot about my poor execution, but not knowing what to try certainly isn’t helping.

But yea. Perhaps it’s just that I haven’t watched the critical mass of match videos in order to really understand what they’re doing. We’ll have to try it out and see what happens.

Actually, that makes me wonder: Does anyone know if there are vids out there, where good players dissect matches down to each second and keypress explaining why they do a certain thing? Just looking good playing doesn’t really help, if one can’t make out what is happening or doesn’t understand their decision making process.

14

Try to get to know the other classes, what they have for spells and abilities, dont use all your burst or defensive spells randomly, try to time it for when they have used their defensive cd’s etc.

Make sure you and your wife dont overlap defensive CD’s like blur at the same time as pain suppression, then you got nothing later.

15

Hydra has some disc videos on his channel where he watch gameplay from 1500 players and comment on it. You can look it up.
2s as a healer in low rating is pretty much about surviving. Your wife needs to learn how to tank the enemy melee as long as possible. Know then to kite, know when to use PS or barrier. Get an addon like omnibar where you see enemy cds and only use your defensives when they are popping. Dh/heal should be easy rating because you just have to burn the enemy healer and survive as long as possible.
You can also watch Raiku VODs at twitch. He sometimes plays DH in 2s

16
  1. Know all classes in game

Both you and your wife should create 110 trial characters of every class in the game. Set them up like you intend to play them as main. (setup the skills, macros, everything). Learn the rotations, how they do dps or how they heal. Go hit some dummies. Read guides for every spec and class that you try. This way, when you are in arena, you will know what they want to do, what cooldowns they will use, why and when. You will be more prepared to react, counter and dominate.

Even better, really level up every class in game at least in one expansion and play them a bit in arena, get out of your comfort zone.

  1. Learn your class, and improve decision making.

The best explain is by example.

Disc priest (how I am thinking): I am playing against Assasination Rogue. His main dps cooldown is Vendetta. He may even use smoke bomb when he uses Vendetta on my Demon Hunter hubby. For that reason I will play Luminous Barrier PVP talent, that will completely counter that setup.

What this means: by knowing the other classes and knowing you class, you can make decisions that are going to change the tides of battle :slight_smile:

Demon hunter: We are playing against double dps (very often on low rating), and they are training my healer. I am going to stun one, and imprison the other one when they pop their cooldowns. Even further, I am going to play Cover of Darkness PVP talent, and I am going to use it if I see that my healer is dying because he doesn’t have cooldowns.

OR - I am being trained by double melee, they pop their cooldowns. Ok, I am not going to stay in their face like an idiot, I am going to slow/stun them, and kite around with my OP mobility, until their cooldowns are over, and then I am going to pop mine and rape them.

  1. Watch skill capped, and pro pvp streamers to expand your existing knowledge (not Swifty)

  2. Practice

Extra tip from disc priest: when you play 2vs2 with Disc in your team. You want to do big pressure from the start, and keep it until you kill. In order to win, disc has to do damage. And he can do damage if both of you together create that pressure, and put the enemy on the backfoot. If enemy pressure you more, disc will have to start healing (spaming shadowmends and what not), and that is when you start loosing. Disc priest has to use his cooldowns in order to not recover, but not to fall behind. Use them proactively so that you can spend most of your time dps-ing, and not reactively so that you have to heal.

Consider a disc priest to be a dps with some extra heals, and not a healer. You as dps have to understand, that you need to do whatever you can, so that your Disc can do damage. And your Disc has to know the same too.

1 Like
17

Hello there, nice couple.
Imho your combo is bad. Yes you both have tons of dps but lack on good cc. And cc is what wins games. You will do better if your wife has resto druid for cyclone and bash. I guess you lose to priest rogue, priest mage, druid rogue, druid survival hunter (all the comps with better cc)

Also IF you have rogue try rogue priest. You will have sap, blind, kidney, garrote, fear and mind control wich will win you games if you time it right.

IF you do not have the chance to switch composition you will have to play smart and here are the basics:

  1. Allways know where your healer is and be in range whatever the cost. You have to be in her range and she has to be near a pylon. Control the battlefield - your healer has to be near cover to los cc. Make their healer stand in the open. Bait enemy dps behind a pillar and go ham while his healer is trying to come to his resque.

  2. Allways peel for your priest because disco is like on a wheelchair. Mind that disco priest has no slow in his toolkit so you will have to take your talent to slow enemy dps at all costs.
    You will have better winrate if you try to cc enemy healer and kill their dps. (and this means your wife has to do mind control into her fear into your imprison). This is when she has to use schism and go ham with her op priest dps.

Other than that I cannot help. Share a youtube video of your healer point of view. She sees more than you because she is ranged.

18

I haven’t really played much with dh’s, but from the experience I have is that you can’t do things at random. You need to have some basic gameplan on when to do what, both offensively and defensively. You do seem to be aware of this (major) flaw in your gameplay, so that’s good, even though you seem rather lost on what the answer should be.

Usually sticking to the same partners is considered good, but for you two I suspect that you could benefit from playing a bit with some different people. Both to get direct input after the games, assuming you get to play with someone that is willing to do that, but overall also to see how others do it and then try to evaluate it.

Keeping an eye out on what your opponents do can help a bit as well, I recall learning some tricks from enemy priests when I started.
I also find it helpful to sometimes not just to analyse my team, what we did good and what went bad, but also what our opponents did wrong in case they lost.

I’m guessing that stick up your bum must be causing a lot of discomfort, hence the unnecessary hostile comment?

1 Like
19

You said you have addons and interface already set up. Do you use omnibars?
Use it to track:

  1. Interrupts.
  2. Defensive cooldowns (when enemy team ised them its time to burst)
  3. Offensive cooldowns (this is when you kite, peel and use your own defensives)
  4. CC - its good to know hex, freezing trap and the likes are on cooldown so your healer can breathe and spam some heals and dmg.

This addon is easy to be set up and it can help you alot. If enemy team has an interrupt and your healer is low hp all you have to do is cc to prevent that interrupt so your healer can top asap.

20

As a couple of other people have mentioned, playing with Disc is not the best / easiest comp, but I have reached around 1.9k rating with it and might push higher if I have time to play.

The biggest problem is facing melee + healer comps. It is extremely difficult for your Disc partner to kite anything. If you try to compete with for example a Fury Warrior or Assa Rogue in “training healer” - they will win.
Disc seems to be the most mana sensitive healer as well. Even if I use Mana Rift on the opponent healer multiple times, my Disc can run oom before them.
I have actually found that the comp I like facing the most is Assa / Disc (which I used to hate) because then I know for sure that the enemy will go oom first (if we don’t die before :)))))

It might not always be any point in the Disc (your wife) trying to run. The melee will still connect and she will just lose healing uptime and possibly kite you too in the process. The important part is to LoS the enemy healer in those cases - if you can put some pressure on the enemy when he can’t be healed, it might force him to use defensives or back off from your disc.

One common burst setup I use is:
Immolation Aura (to get initial fury) > Fel Eruption > Mana Rift (doesn’t have to be on the healer) > Eye Beam > Blade Dance (boosted in Meta)

Now after this, you can either continue spamming Chaos Strike (full fury bar after Eye Beam) with your Disc helping in on the damage, and/or you can Mind Control the target.
Mind Controlling the target will make it immune to healing, and you can switch to the partner, possibly follow up with an Imprison. This will effectively cause both targets to get rather “low” on health - forcing defensive cooldowns.

Some general tips that may or may not be obvious:

  • Kite away from totems / possibly kill them
  • Make sure to use Consume Magic all the time
  • Try to learn to make a judgement call, when to chase someone and when to simply just switch targets to keep your sustained damage up
  • Make use of Mind Control to prevent healing / prevent high damage cooldowns / LoS / jump off bridges

(Mana Rift get increasingly difficult to land with people running Relentless + nerfs coming next week, so not really viable anymore)