I never looked for a team, I just play Arena with people I know from RL. Other people I’ve seen were playing with guildmates. I think almost nobody is looking for teams in /4 and back in the days I think the only ones who did that were people that just wanted a quick 10 matches on a tuesday evening to grab some points for the week. Which is obviously not that great with teams starting at 0 - but in my opinion Arena is supposed to be for more permanent teams.
When you win your rating goes up - this means that you play against teams that are better (on average). If they are better than you, you lose and your rating goes down.
Eventually you will be at a stable rating where people you play against are the same skill level as you. You then have a roughly 50/50 chance of winning. Hence the 50% win rate that is ‘forced’ by the system.
Overall your team rating is not what determines how much + or - you get after winning or losing, it’s your MMR and your opponents MMR. Having loss / winstreaks quickly increases or decreases your MMR. A lot of people start off with a very positive win ratio, but the more they play the closer they get to a 50% winratio which is intentional by the MMR system.
Even if you won your first 15 games and hit 1600 MMR, losing 10 in a row now because you are not up to par with other players will quickly decrease your MMR. When your MMR dips below your Team rating you will see a bigger loss of rating, and a smaller gain from wins.
I recomend downloading an MMR addon / weakaura to compare your rating to your MMR. As your MMR pretty much determines everything.
The only thing that matters is your winrate at your CURRENT rating, thats what will determine if you will climb up or down the ladder.
As an example me and my partner started off with a 80% winratio hitting 1800 fast. Now the opponents are better, and the higher rating we get the lower our winratio gets, as we are closing in on our ‘real skill rating’ as the system wants you to hit a 50% winratio where you belong. Now at 2200 rating our WR is only 53% which means we are getting even closer to our ‘‘Real rating’’ And we had one loss streak along the way cause we played poorly, after that streak we actually lost 12 points and won 9. Having a winstreak to get our WR above 50% in our CURRENT rating fixed our MMR and we’re back on track.
When you find yourself being stuck at around a 50% winratio, or even going down in MMR thats when you need to figure out how to improve. The MMR system main intention is to keep you at YOUR skill level vs people of equal skill. Now it’s up to you and your partner to improve and climb.
The overall W/L is still irrelevant. Only current session / current rating WR matters. And also yes, you could be ‘unlucky’ to meet lower MMR teams which would yield smaller gains and a bigger loss IF you lose, make sure to not lose vs lower MMR teams since it significantly lowers your MMR. (Can be tricky if their comp counters you). But being unlucky is not really something to blame if you’re lower rating since skill / a good comp should outweigh it. Most of the people at higher rating with a close to 50% WR most likely started off with a 70+ Winratio to get ‘relatively’ high rating and then they start losing more matches on average and it gets closer to 50%.
I had 1950 with 4-5 bis items, the rest was normal dung blue and 2 green rings, zero enchants and like 180 resil and 850 bonus healing on disci
Back in the days you would look for teams on server specific forums and in well known PvP guilds. Ofc, majority of players would play with pvp players from their own guild, but you would actually be surprised how many top 3vs3/5vs5 teams in Season2 (just an example) were formed via trade chat. 
Okay, thanks, did not know that. I mostly just saw the “lf partner for quick 10 games” requests. 
I mean not to be that guy but, this kind of negative thinking is really bad for people who think about trying arena and NOT TRUE. People who may want to try read this stuff and don’t because you make it seem impossible.
I’m currently playing at 2k cr and 2100 mmr. I had about 20 games of experience in all of TBC with a friend before I started with this new guy. I played at 2k with: 1 green piece, 1 epic and nothing but regular dungeon mix/HC mix blues and a total of 100 resilience. This was on a disc priest - one of, if not the, most resilience dependant class in the game.
People need to stop overthinking things, blaming gear etc and just learn. I’ve only played 100 ish total games and im at this CR/MMR with no experience (hell I’ve played one season of arena since WoD, final BFA season - and I hadn’t really played WoW either).
Granted it’s not going to be that swift for everybody, and truth is I’m way better than most retail glads - but that’s why TBC is so nice, you actually get to play with people have potential, rather than just ‘‘no glad xp no inv’’. Retail is so specific in matchups and kill windows/conditions, just find somebody who’s decent and enjoy learning the matchups - you can eventually find a new team but learning the matchups/windows alone is crucial.
You might lose a game here and there because of gear, but you’re learning the matchups, and most people aren’t glads anyway so who cares about the odd gear loss.
You are super lucky my friend. That’s all I’m gonna say.
Disc priest with 100 resi is disc priest with probably max 8k hp. You die in literally seconds against majority of classes, unless you are talking about 3vs3 and very, very specific comps (RMP can carry priests without issues regardless of priests gear, rogue-hunter-priest also for example).
Actually I had about 7.4-5k hp unbuffed ^^. I was talking about 2s. The vast majority of our losses were to RM & warrior rsham/druid - but just per example, once we began learning matchups better we 3-0’d some 2150 mmr RM team.
I’d guestimate about 30% of our losses were entirely due to gear (esp me also missing hit cap) - most of them were learning matchups, not fully being used to keybinds/matchups (esp the speed with which you have to pop CDs to not be blown up).
Now the other side of the coin is that truthfully I’m way better than most glad players and so is my partner, but as a very on-off player - it is virtually impossible to access decent partners on retail with limited to no previous XP. Also we were playing in that junk gear at 2-2.1k… you don’t need to hit that, playing at 1700 is just as fine while you gear up…
Thats exactly why people should try TBC, you can find people willing to play with you, who normally never would - it’s a nice fresh start.
(Also magerogue would already be much easier to deal with if they would just fix the magic quickening gem - both so it doesn’t break GCD and so it’s nerfed overall, sub-GCD polies belong in wotlk not tbc)
I have won 30 and lost 36 and got 1100 rating. I have played alot of arena. I do not remember getting 11 rating for a win at 1000 rating. As i remember i got 99 per game until 1000 and 39 rating per win until around 1450 rating. This low gains per game at low rating is new for me.
Ps: yea its insane hard to find players. Finding players on horde side with actual pvp gear : impossible!!!
It could be bugged actually as I have encountered something similar yesterday. I was helping friend in 2vs2 and joined his team, up to ~1.3k I was getting like 70 points per win or so (our team MMR was at 1.6k), then at 1.3k each win started giving only 10-15 points max despite that our MMR was still around 1.6k.
It was not like this definitely first few weeks, tho I did have funny moment two weeks back where I’ve lost 4-5 games in a row at around 1.8k CR (we faced 1.9k-2k mmr teams) and did not lose single rating. 
yup, everybody complains about X and Y so Blizz go and change Z…
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Just takes too much time getting the honor gear. Most people i know who plays semi casual just do 5 mans or the occasional pug kara. People just dont want to queue with 0 resi. And the time it takes to get it through solo bg is very disheartening.
Getting a free epic roughly every 5-6 weeks sounds pretty welfare to my 2007 ears tho. I guess raiding is the new welfare gear as it is piss easy whereas pvp is not against 15 year old computer mechanics!
Also I doubt that all of those “welfare” people would go 1400, some as 1500 is basis id say 1600 wouldnt have been much of a achievement lmao and prolly could push way higher with very little effort to begin with.
While I of course completely agree with the honor grind part, you’re no way near correct on the rating part. I’ve played in my feral pve gear (20 resi trinket only) up to almost 2k in 2s with a mage, the comp is not that good. The same in 3s I play a wonky caster cleave as resto druid with about 100-150 resi up to 2k. We’ve met plenty of people that are not fully geared, and of course the gear helps a lot and if I could I would farm it all right now…
But gear does not equal a win.
As for the OP, sure, finding teammates can be hard. But you keep climbing as long as you have a positive winratio (51%+), it may take some time for sure. But I never felt any issues getting to 1500, that’s not a game issue it’s simply that you do not win enough. My feral/mage team is probably around 55% winrate, we’ve been playing a lot of matches but we definitely did not stop climbing at 1500 due to 55% winrate.
Then again, I don’t really see the point in starting at 0. People should be able to get the lowest amount of arena points just by doing 10 games imo. Would be fine if teams started at 1k or simply gave the same points between 1-1500.
i have more or less same problem. cant find arena mates. i only play with 1 irl friend and our composition is trash. rogue warrior. we are stuck actually in 1300. i think 1300 for RW is more tham i expected.
Win rate has nothing to do with what rating you should end up with. The system tries it’s hardest to keep you at a 50% win rate, by pitting you against harder and harder opponents until you lose.
Lets say you are 1400, and by sheer luck/comps etc, you win 10 games in a row taking you to 1550. You’re now vsing players with 150 higher mmr. Unless you actually improved in play, you will likely start losing a lot more matches than you win until your rating drifts back to 1400 where it should be. Not all wins net you the same mmr. If you are 1500, and beat a 1450 team you will gain less mmr, than beating a 1550 team.
Oh my god, entry threshold for pvp is really high, what a surprise, nobody expected that really
Actually the system is different now and makes ppl stick at lower rating than it used to. When starting at 1500 it made it pretty easy to stay around 1500 or get up to 1600-1700 without being really good or well geared. Now its like 1200 is the new 1500…
Not to be that guy but if you win 10 straight you gain a ton of MMR, you would probably have an MMR of 1700-1800 if you win 10 straight starting at 1400 rating. Other than that, I agree
I haven’t heard ppl call it that but you could have a team of 2s, 3s, and 5s, and get easily almost 1k points in a week. so not that strange 