How you can become a Gladiator: Know your character.

Know your character.

I often play AV on my druid, because Blizzard’s ingenious design forces hybrid classes to grind out 3 times more honor than other classes. When I heal random people as they try to kill their opponents I often look at what they specifically attempt to do. I remember a case in AV where I was healing a warrior as he tried to kill a paladin while another warrior was beating on him. I whispered the warrior to apply Battle Shout. In response he told me that he was busy using every global cooldown to kill the paladin and did not have time to use Battle Shout. He then went on a tirade about how I should not be telling him how to play his class because he had over 70,000 honor kills and had done AV a “million” times. Needless to say, his arena teams were in the 1500 bracket with many games played. Don’t be this guy.


As we concluded in the last segment of How you can become a Gladiator, the only thing standing between you and whatever rating you seek to achieve is your inability to play better. The solution to any problem in arena is always to play better. Always. Putting your pride and habits from years of incorrect play aside is your number one step to become better. The folks that never listen to advice, much less follow it, are not improving their play. They are not investing time in their mind to make themselves better. If you’re even remotely interested in earning items and titles you must look at how you can improve your play style.

In this segment I will focus on the non physical aspect of controlling your character: decision-making. Acomprehensive guide on the physical aspect – keybindings, UI, etc. – will appear in the next section.

In WoW, you control one character at a time directly. You have complete control over your movement and ability use, including interference to your opponent, unless they interfere via their ability use. As we’ve concluded, what differentiates a 2500-rated player from a 1500-rated player is character control. So the way a 1500-rated player can rise in rating is to start controlling his or her character like a 2500-rated player. However, the arena metagame is always evolving, so by the time the 1500-rated guy is playing like the 2500-rated player, that kind of ‘skill’ level may only be enough to get him to 2200– and the 2500-rated player’s ‘skill’ may have improved. So low-rated folks actually have to grow their ‘skill’ faster than higher-rated players to reach the same level.

Before you seriously consider doing arena, take stock of what you have to work with: your character’s spec. While ‘skill’ is always the limiting factor for arena rating, it is certainly much more difficult to get 2000 rating as a fury warrior than with Mortal Strike. Your character’s spec governs the amount of abilities you have and how your class mechanics are balanced with your opponent’s. So, while it is always possible to achieve a reasonable rating with a spec that is not the most viable, it’s not advisable. Now, this strikes a hard and painful sore for every fire mage, feral druid, destruction warlock, fury warrior, protection paladin, etc. It is a sad truth that some specs and classes have a ceiling for their performance, especially in the lower brackets. If you’re unwilling to change the spec (heck, even class!) you PvP with, you’re not in the worst shape possible but you’re not going to get the most out this guide. It is still possible for most specs to achieve a high rating in the 5v5 bracket, but only through being ‘carried’ by your teammates and their class composition. Do not expect to easily get on a 2300-rated 5v5 team as a fire mage without first achieving high ratings in the lower brackets… unless you have really generous friends.

I cannot teach each one of you how to tailor your spec for PvP purposes, but you can easily look at the top players of your comp and compare their specs to yours. A spec improves the tools you use as a player and rebalances the scaling of some abilities so they are viable to use in arena. Specialization is usually the key as well, so if you’re playing with a weird spec at lower rating you’re best off going for a cookie cutter setup – after all it’s called a cookie cutter setup because it has been successful.

Gear is something you cannot change swiftly, but you can model your gear as much as possible after the players you’re emulating, and adjust your gear from the cookie-cutter setup only after you have been successful in arena and you can speak from your own experience.

Emulating other successful players is the number one strategy you should use early on. There’s a reason why every other discipline of sports or sciences studies the achievements of those that preceded them before starting to implement their own additions. That’s the proven method to achieve the most in the least time. Often, after my arena partner and I played on the Tournament Server against a really good mirror team, we went over both what I did badly and what their team did well. Afterwards, we adjusted our strategy, copying things that worked well for our opponents. Sticking with the wrong strategy is worse then attempting to implement the right strategy. Otherwise you end up like the warrior in AV; he’s been playing one way forever, and he will blame everything except himself for his mistakes.


So far we’ve followed this logic:
Success in arena is made possible by playing well.
If you are not successful , you are not playing well.
You need to admit you are not playing well.
You need to strive to play well and be willing to change the way you play.

P.S. : The big meat of the guide is going to be in the next two sections.
P.P.S. : Thank you Vyk for editing.


Table of contents
I: Introduction
II: Know your character
III: Controlling your character efficiently
IV: Paying attention
V: Communicating
VI: Morale
VII: Class specifics