How To: Improve Your Arena Ratings

[Bloodwraith]

Article: How To: Improve Your Arena Ratings - TankSpot

On AJ: How To: Improve Your Arena Ratings - Arena Junkies Forums

This thread is meant to be a compilation and discussion on how to improve your arena ratings.

Your Computer

• Get high speed internet if you don't have it.
  
• On Desks
  
• Improve your FPS and Latency!
  
• To increase your FPS first tweak your WoW video settings. Don't be afraid to turn them down. Arena isn't about having the best graphics. If that doesn't work consider spending a few bucks and upgrading some hardware. Upgrading your RAM, CPU, or video card can substaintially increase your computer's performance. TigerDirect is a good place to buy hardware upgrades. Upgrading hardware is a very straightforward and simple process. Anyone can do it.
  
• To reduce your latency there are a number of programs that edit your registry to change your TcpAckFrequency. The easiest one I have found that works for all windows operating systems is: Leatrix Latency Fix.

Keybinds

• Keybinds and You
  
• How you can become a Gladiator: Keybindings Part I
  
• Keybind all of your abilities. Turn with your mouse. These two things alone will greatly improve your play.
  
• Download SnowfallKeyPress. This addon accelerates key bindings so that they are activated by key press rather than key release. This allows you to activate your abilities faster than you could otherwise. It has been compared to reducing your latency by 100 ms.

Self Improvement

• You will always have room to improve. Once you accept that you can start getting better.
  
• A win is the ability to successfully recognize what your opponents are doing/planning, act in such a way that their plans do not succeed or force them to deal with your actions, and communicating with your partner(s) to actually achieve a victory.
  
• How you can become a Gladiator: Know your character. - Elitist Jerks
  
• Recognize, Act and Communicate : The three pillars of successful arena. - Elitist Jerks
  
• Look up PvP guides for your class.
  
• Look up the top players for your class. Take note of their gear scheme, talents, and glyphs.
  
• Run a viable arena team. Look at sites that offer arena statistics such as: Realm History, SK Gaming, and to a lesser degree: Arena Junkies.
  
• Watch Arena videos and streams. Preferably of your class but just any class can help you to gain perspective and strategies. You can find videos here: WarcraftMovies. You can find streams here: Xfire Arena Streams - Arena Junkies.
  
• Your Priorities in arena should be: 1. Don't Die, 2. Don't Let Your Partners Die, 3. Don't Let Your Enemy Get Away, 4. Burst When Your Target Can't Get Healed, 5. Sustain Damage When You Know You Can't Burst Them To Death.
  
• Look for and correct mistakes you make. After you cast a spell you can usually tell if it was worth it and if was the correct thing to do. If something isn't working experiment to find other ways.
  
• Skill in PvP can be described by what you do with your GCD. Some players use the comparison to chess (Each GCD= a turn). While there are some exceptions that are off the GCD, like vanish or interrupts, for the vast majority of actions the speed of performance is neither highly variable nor an indicator of player skill. The skill in this game, just like in chess, comes from which action the player chooses to make each turn. The more turns the game lasts and the more choices the player makes, the more they have a chance to influence the game by how well or poorly they play.
  
• If your computer is good enough you can record your arena games with FRAPS. Go back over your games and you can critique your own gameplay to prevent making the same mistakes twice.
  
• Ask other experienced players for advice.
  
• Work on teamwork and communication. Call out heals that are going out, crowd control (CC) that is going out, CC that is coming in, damage taken, kill opportunities, etc.
  
• 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 the movement of your team.
  
• Try to do as many duels and 1v1's in BG's as possible. This will help make you a better player and increase your knowledge and ability to guess what classes will do in different situations.
  
• Try to learn all class's Telents/Abilities/ Weaknesses/ Cooldowns/and Durations. You can ask your friends, play other classes on the PTR, and look things up on wowhead along with your general experience.
  
• Avoid tunnel vision at all costs.
  
• Don't forget that timing is everything in arena. If you don't take timing into consideration you won't get very far.
  
• Don't be afraid to make hard switches or split DPS against other teams.
  
• Practice with your team and develop complex strategies. Simply using basic strategies like “attack the healer” will not get you to the top of the arena ladder.
  
• Use focus target to have a better idea of what is going on. Combine focus target with macros to play more efficiently.
  
• I personally couldn't see myself playing without nameplates showing. You can turn them on by pressing V. This puts a floating healthbar over your enemies. Since 3.0 you can see these for your opponents no matter how far you are from them in an arena. You can also set these to display class colors through the interface combat tab. You can download addons like Aloft to configure the appearance of nameplates. You can also turn off certain things like pets and totems to avoid clutter. Another Arena-Only nameplate addon is Overhead.
  
• Get your teammates to work on improving as well. They should be doing these things just like you should be.
  
• http://www.arenajunkies.com/showthread.php?t=149691
  
• Finding the right teammates by Sky You and your teammates should share the same goals. You should also have the same play times (at least a couple times a week) so you can get a decent amount of games in. They have to be willing to do what it takes to get to this goal (respeccing, gear choices, more playtime, videos, whatever). They need to be at around the same level that you are in terms of PvP. A bad player will hold you back and you will be holding a great player back. Everyone is generally happier when playing with people around their skill and commitment level.
  
• Don't get frustrated and just play to have fun. There's zero reason to yell at each other over a video game. If you aren't enjoying yourself or you don't even want to play it (to practice at least) then you won't succeed.
  
• Don't overreact in a 1v1 situation after your partners have died. If you get nervous you will play badly and won't be thinking clearly.
  
• Macros are an important thing to have. Macro focus target into certain spells. Create/find macros for your class that improve your performance and make things like changing stances easier.
  
• WoW PvP is very interface driven. All of your critical information is displayed by the elements of your interface. Keep your addons up-to-date. To quote Pharaunmizz:
  
  

  Never underestimate the power of having more space and less clutter. PvP is pretty dynamic, so being able to see clearly can seriously help you out. Don't bother using Addons if they aren't doing anything for you. Periodically evaluate each of your addons and see if they're actually worth their screen space.

• You should design your UI using a minimalist design. Basically just show what you need to see. A good way to save space in your UI is to go into your video options and click use UI scale. I personally turn it all the way down and then scale up addons accordingly. If you have a large screen, try not to put anything important along the right/left edges. If you put important things along the edges it will be easier to miss something important if you tunnel vision. It is important to be able to see everything you need to without taking your eyes off of the main action. Also don't be afraid to scale things up. On a larger screen it is easier to forget to look at something if it isn't scaled up.
  
• Gladius is an enemy arena frame mod. It has a ton of useful settings such as announcements and trinket tracking: Gladius
  
• Afflicted is useful to track enemy spells and cooldowns: Afflicted3
  
• SpellAlerter is customizable to show any spell casts that you want: SpellAlerter
  
• Here is a list of wrath updated popular mods: Wrath Mod List (Read Before Asking For A Mod!)
  
• This is a great flowchart.

That's all I can think of right now. Let's get some discussion going !

[Krehinth]

mkay this'll take a min to read

[Irat]

• Run a viable arena team. Look at sites that offer arena statistics such as: Realm History, SK Gaming, and to a lesser degree: Arena Junkies.
  

Any feeling on how much hindrance this could be?

I've been messing around with a mate recently and just playing 10 games a week we have made it pretty easily to 1000 rating. We were going to try and knock out 200 games next lockout and try and push for high teens.

http://www.wowarmory.com/team-info.xml?r=Barthilas&ts=2&t=Steak+N+Chips&select=S teak+N+Chips

Our win ratio isn’t great (57%) but its pushing up (70% this week). We are playing Prot Pally, Resto Druid. I can already see some weaknesses of the setup and I know we are going to hit a ceiling at some stage and it would be good if I could estimate it

[Bloodwraith]

Any feeling on how much hindrance this could be?

I've been messing around with a mate recently and just playing 10 games a week we have made it pretty easily to 1000 rating. We were going to try and knock out 200 games next lockout and try and push for high teens.

http://www.wowarmory.com/team-info.xml?r=Barthilas&ts=2&t=Steak+N+Chips&select=S teak+N+Chips

Our win ratio isn’t great (57%) but its pushing up (70% this week). We are playing Prot Pally, Resto Druid. I can already see some weaknesses of the setup and I know we are going to hit a ceiling at some stage and it would be good if I could estimate it

Your matchmaking rating is usually a good indicator of where you will be stuck around.

For example: My 3v3's matchmaking has been around 1950-2050 for a few weeks now. The team rating has basically bounced back and forth between these numbers. I switched frost for games yesterday and we started improving because it countered teams with rogues (RMP Especially) and I was able to put a stop to pressure teams owning my druid with AoE freeze. I'm a lot more bursty which can cause trouble for the enemy healer. I alos picked up DMC: Death to help with burst.

If you're not willing to go ret for example you're going to hit a wall and it most likely will be around whatever your matchmaking rating is.

[Irat]

Thanks Bloodwraith,

Im leveling a Hunter and Rogue to swap out and he is leveling a priest but we wanted to get in and have some fun with that setup.

Great thread.

[Bloodwraith]

Updated this to include Snowfallkeypress addon. I highly recommend downloading this addon.

[Destruyen]

thanks for the addon suggestion bloodwraith. downloaded it last night, found a random 2s partner and tested it out. there really is a noticeable difference with the addon.