Video Guide ←
Hello Everyone
Disclaimer, while I’m only a 2k Experienced Player, these are things I’ve found out and heard from other players / read in other guides! This is aimed at Beginner Players.
My name is Marik your local PVP Guide and I’ll be introducing you to Arena. in this video I’ll go over
everything highly rated players do and Mistakes I made when I was a newer player. And If you’re like me, looking to get insane at
stomping others. This is the place. Wether you’re a new player, or already a Veteran. Let’s get straight into it.
Beginner Mistakes
The first things I see a lot of players do is Breaking line of Sight, not the good kind where you dodge all the Crowd Control.
But the bad kind, where your healer will jump behind you to save you. Only to be placed in the longest Crowd Control Chain you’ve ever seen.Then aftewards, you’re trinketing the first Crowd Control thrown your way after your burst has ended.
And essentially ruining your trinket timing
Gearing
But First, arguably one of the best steps you can take to join the Arena, is getting geared in Battlegrounds and getting comfortable
with your rotation. Ideally, you’d be able to use your rotation on auto-pilot. This way you can focus on other important things such as…crowd control, positioning, enemy damage, your defensives, cooldown left on the enemy healer, DR timers for enemy CC, why your parents don’t love you for playing rogue, why your kill target isn’t dead yet, how long it has been since you had any meaningful relations. Crowd control again?
Positioning
Let’s start with positioning the game is usually played around the pillars, certain big caster classes really benefit from staying in the open
but most don’t. The biggest reason you should be playing near a pillar as for example a healer, is to dodge enemy CC. Or to draw the Enemy
Healer out of position. Any person who’s focused can dictate the playground. Play around with this.
Damage
Onto Damage, being able to keep a offensive momentum is huge in Arenas, forcing the enemy teams defensive cooldowns and their trinkets.
And if you can stay offensive and Healthy, this usually wins you the game. Get comfortable in your rotation and know when to burst and when
not to burst. Usually, you want to throw some Crowd Control on the enemy to force more Cooldowns while bursting.
Mostly, just keep spending your global cooldowns to maximise uptime in the Arena.
Defensives
On the opposite side, we have trading the appropriate Defensive Cooldowns for the offensive pressure. You shouldn’t be scared to press your
Defensives, but make sure you communicate this with your team if you can, or download a addon Omni CD where you can track your teams defensives.
This way you can make an informed decision whether or not to reply to the damage you receive.Things to look out for are big offensive cooldowns and CC. Sometimes, it is better to be safe than sorry.
Peeling
You’re not always the Kill target and there are many things you can do to help out if your teammate is being focused,
this concept is called peeling. You could for example use minor crowd control such as roots or big crowd control such as fear and polymorphs
to reduce the pressure and live for another burst set up. And while peeling is a very good thing to do, there is a time and place for it.Preferably we would like to keep the pressure on the enemy team. So look out for players out of position and focus your damage or crowd control
on them.
Crowd Control
So lets exactly do that, we focus our attention to the win condition. Crowd Control the Healer, and stun the Kill Target.
This way, their healer is unable to use their big healing cooldowns and your target is unable to run away and use defensives.
This is where you put the pressure tab on and really dish out some damage. In the right scenario, your kill target dies during this
set up. But a lot can go wrong, so try to extend the crowd control on the healer as long as you can to really score that kill!So that means we could just keep Crowd Controlling the healer with several stuns? Right? Sadly, Blizzard has introduced
Diminishing Returns which allow a DR Category application to be in full effect only if the player hasn’t been Crowd Controlled
from that category the last fifteen seconds, if you do decide to apply any new Crowd Control during the DR window, the CC
will be halved for each cast and the DR window extended to its original fifteen seconds.Like I mentioned before, there is multiple uses to CC, crowd controlling the peels but the most common application is to cross CC.
This means, CCing all of the enemy team at once to deal unreal amount of damage in a small window.Well yes, but this concept can be applied to multiple comps. Even the most zug zug of them all
This sounds like a lot of work to get the pretty transmog, I know. But eventually you’ll grow to love the game. Just like we love to hang out
together in Discord where you can find like minded people to share your achievements and your memes with.You want to get the most certain CC out of the way first, and then go for the Risky one. Like, Dragons Breath into Polymorph.
Or Blind into Sap.
Trinket
You really have to consider your trinket being a Combo Defensive Cooldown, the biggest mistake you can make is to use three trinkets for a single
set up. As Teamwork can come along way to help each other survive. This way you have more answers the longer the game lasts.
In general, you want to hold onto your trinket and time it with your best Defensive Cooldown. Needlessly trinketing is worse than sitting the CC.
Read the room, is the enemy team warrior spearing your poor healer and pressing his one out of two buttons called Avatar?
You might consider trinketing peeling, however is the Warrior just slapping your healer up with no active cooldowns? Sit that CC.The only reason you want to use your trinket is to guarantee your kill, or guarantee a proper defensive answer to the enemy kill set up.
Trust me, theres nothing worse to trinket a kidney shot. Thinking you’re free of CC, only to get a full blind on your bakkes and into a Sap.
It sucks.
Camera and UI
The last things you want to get in order, is to turn off your Camera following you and place it at an angle where you can see most
if not all players. This helps you visualising a pattern of player behavior and how to counter them.And to of course not get overwhelmed with everything that is going on in your UI, create one for yourself or copy that of a pro player to
get a buttery smooth and clean experience. Some require a little more work than others. But I believe its worth it if you really enjoy the
game mode.
If you see any innacuracies with this post, please let me know so I too can learn more!
I’m not perfect either, but a mega fast learned B)
