i’ll try to answer to all points (not all in order sorry)
it may be a bit chaotic but if you are in the process of leveling i think playing as many skirmishes as you can is very good practice, of course the game is not balanced at all at lower levels so absurd things will happen but you can focus on learning the fundamentals of positioning, placing cc on off target and making a go on the kill target, kiting and line of sight.
twinks are a thing, but most of the time you get crushed in low level skirmish because of the (lack of) balance at these levels to the point where some specs shine at low lvl arena and there is not much you can do other than immediately dying. besides, don’t take it too seriously as in trying to figure out meta, tactics etc in low level skirmishes because it may be irrelevant anyway at max lvl (for instance in lower levels you often have to overlap defensives or press every single button in the game to not die to the air in a go whereas in the real game you can be fine with just one), which is why i think it’s good to focus on core mechanics such as positioning, landing CCs, kiting and generally getting to know your class well
also remember that skirmishes will always be double dps vs double dps in 2vs2 which is not accurate with the ranked ladder (most common comps are heal+dps), as healers are placed in 3vs3 skirmishes by default
for composition, if you plan to play 2vs2 especially i think heal+damage is better to learn because most double damage dealer compositions are very hard to play and unforgiving, so it’s better to play it if you already have a good knowledge of the game in arena already. if both of you want to play dps, you can look for a healer and play 3vs3. about classes to pick, i’d look for 2 strong classes that go well together (see tierlists in youtube channels such as skill capped)
for addons, here is a small list of addons that are very frequently used:
- sArena,Gladius or GladiusEx (Arena Frames)
- Omnibar (enemy cooldown tracker)
- Omnicd or ArenaTeamTracker (party cooldown tracker)
- Diminish (general diminishing return tracker, i like to use it to track DRs of party member and self)
- BigDebuffs which highlights important auras such as buffs, debuffs on unit frames by changing their portrait icon to the icon of the debuff, and if you use a fancy nameplate addon, in many cases it can also append the icon to the nameplate which is nice too.
there are many more you can use but these are the ones i need the most.
two more addons that i find very important are
- Details (advanced combat log analysis to understand everything that happened in one arena match)
- REFlex which tracks your progress on the arena, will record match reports of every arena match you play indicating things such as team compositions, win/loss, MMR, player names and so you can see what comps you struggle most with and other things like that.
If it helps, there is also GladiatorlosSA2 which gives you sound alerts when opponents use important spells, cooldowns, abilities.
Not arena related, but if you plan to play rated battlegrounds, BattlegroundEnemies is basically a “sArena” for battlegrounds, which is great!
recording every single game and reviewing them is very good, you can delete those later on, or you can use a streaming site like youtube and stream as unlisted or private, so it will be saved there and you don’t have to worry about disk space,and you can share it with anyone for review very quickly.
for youtube, many great ones were mentioned in the thread already such as Cdew’s videos and SkillCapped. i think Xaryu’s channel is great because he makes a lot of videos explaining in depth some matchups, even though it’s from a mage perspective (and often as double dps in 2vs2, but sometimes 3vs3 too) you will still learn a ton from it.
i also learned a LOT from Shadenox’s videos, which are great resources for rogue players, so i recommend it 100%. just type Shadenox wow in youtube search.
i don’t know if there is an MMR in skirmishes, some old posts i have seen from warlords era were some experiments where people said there actually was MMR in skirmishes, but by my experience in skirms you will meet all sorts of players…
and lastly for your first point, i wish i had started learning the abilities of all classes in detail straight away and started using arena123 keybinds for important spells straight away too, and focus123/target123 keybinds too. also learning the importance of setup for setup comps (especially being very cautious with DRs when trying to do a go), and basically putting an emphasis on learning how wow arena matches are heavily centered around trading of cooldowns (like Overwatch if you play it, you mitigate opponent team’s goes/ultimates with well chosen ultimates of your own, and try to never overlap defensives or overlap offensives when it is not necessary else you will lose the cooldowns race) so it is very important to learn what are each cooldowns of each class (offensives and defensives) so you can recognize when they are used, their effect, and how to mitigate each of them efficiently.
