Recognize, Act and Communicate : The three pillars of successful arena.

What makes a Gladiator? It's 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.

First, a disclaimer:
I am a firm believer that there is an operating difference in the capabilities of different people's brains. Two individuals presented with the same input will react differently. Whether it is just our game experience (unlikely) or the application of problem solving skills, prioritizing/multitasking abilities, spacial thinking, memory, reaction, concentration, pattern recognition and so on to the game, not all players are created equal. The same way Casablanca was years ahead of his peers in chess so are some people ahead in 'Arena Skills'. Given the same situation different people will react differently and yield different results. Luckily for us the complexity of arena is much more forgiving and differently paced then chess, so improvement is much simpler.

The first limiting factor is what action you chose to take in response to your enemies actions or to force them to react in a certain way. You can not counter-spell a heal if you don't know that the healer is casting it, you can not dodge that mana burn or fear if you don't know about it, etc. Lack of information will directly impact your ability to act in the game. The most ideal situation for an arena player is to always know exactly what their opponents and teammates are doing (And are going to do in the next few seconds). Having proper UI setups can make this a lot easier, but you must be familiar with animations, positioning clues and target switches. Mods can make noticing things easier (For example Party Ability Bars can make keeping track of your party's cooldowns a breeze, but the highest level players have an internal clock in the back of their head that tells them these things without mods).

So if we think of a human mind as having limited capacity to recognize actions, it must also have a limited capacity to execute the right actions in an arena game. We can solve this problem in a few ways: barring brain transplants there are a number of ways to make sure you're making the right decisions in an arena game. You need to make sure you are able to recognize what your opponent is doing, and once you can do that you can train your hands to do the action for you by repeating the pattern enough. Just as my hands still remember to press the konami code, so can your hands remember to respond to a blind with a PvP trinket, etc.

A lot of my actions in PvP come by instinct. Most of the time I time my lifebloom stacks without thinking about it, put abolish, faerie fire and feral charge on autopilot. This makes the game 'easy' but at high level play can be damaging as my opponents expect me to do what I will do and have a plan, so to win I sometimes have to do the unexpected/alternative and not most optimal course of action. Either way for most applications developing an instinctual response to actions of your opponents is a good thing, as long as you can consciously notice that your opponent actually wants you to do your instinctual response and that will benefit them, and think one step ahead of them. (Fakecasting is a great example).

Another way is to learn to manage more tasks at once. Being able to manage multiple tasks will cause you to recognize more things and will help you react more appropriately. We've all heard of the tunnel vision syndrome, so you must develop a routine that switches between focusing on UI elements, player positioning, debuffs etc.


The most common causes of tunnel vision are things like watching your cast bar, watching your enemy's HP bar, watching the pretty yellow numbers popping up. You must trust that your action will go through and not have to baby sit your flash heal or sinister strike to make sure that the action goes through. Very often when someone gets focused they stop all their actions and focus completely on slowly keyboard turning to get away, watching the damage they take and hoping to receive heals.

Not playing efficiently in WoW is equivalent to a blind, one legged man playing soccer. While that is heroic and admirable, you as a player are not an amputee.

Communication with your team will be a separate article!