I think I had the most amazing PVP weekend ever. First I found a (temporary, normal is out of town) 2s partner and we've smashed our way almost to 1400 with relative ease. I suppose there is something to be said for running with an Accepted Comp rather than the I'm Challenging Myself comp...tree/dk has some amazing synergy, for sure.
I also compiled holiday numbers for AB...I lost most of them, until one of my networked pvp buddies invited me along on some premades he was in. Full premades, not the partials I usually run. We roflstomped AB all weekend, I think we ended up something like 30-0, made a chat channel so we could all reunite next weekend. AND we did the Resilient Victory come-from-500-points behind no less than three separate times, just for fun. The first time was a little off, and by the time we started getting points it was more like 650-0. But 4-1 bases still works for that. The second one was a thing of textbook execution, we all hovered around ST without tagging it while horde went up 4-0. Split into groups and fanned out at 350-0. LM, GM, and Farm all got tagged within 5-10 seconds of each other, and suddenly we were up 4-1 and rolled from there. I'm sure Horde was like... WTF just happened? OTOH, when they saw 15 alliance all huddled around the ST flag with campfires and nobody touching the flag, somebody intelligent probably looked at the roster and saw 14 people from draenor and figured it out.
The interesting thing was that the HPM on the premade wins was comparable to my non-premade wins. The real value in a premade is not that you get better winning HPM, it's your overall. B/c if you get a good one, like I got, then your winning HPM = your overall.
AB Holiday HPM (Cyclone BG, 54% win)
Winning HPM : 241.39
Losing HPM : 87.86
Overall : 171.28
So instead of 171...you get to say 241 is your overall. That's 70 extra HPM, or over the course of an hour running a good premade, 4200 more honor. Or looked at another way, a premade makes 140% of the honor (in AB) that running solo gets. Or looked at yet a third way, regular it takes you 5.84 minutes to get 1000 honor. A premade will get you that in 4.15 minutes. You can spend 71% of the time you would have spent soloing to get the same amount of honor.
I'm not sure why the losing HPM is so bad here, except to say that the average points accrued in a loss for my data is 786.86 -- there are not a lot of close games in AB. It's an interesting comparison to EOTS, where I've noted previously that the average points in a loss is about 650 (669 on nonholiday, 624 on regular). So at least they're closer than EOTS, but I would venture to suggest that this is due to the general rule of 2-3 games in AB (you lose controlling 40% of the resources) vs. the general rule of EOTS of having 1-3 games (you control 25% of the resources, and maybe the flag a few times).
However, EoTS rewards you more frequently, on the holiday at least -- you gain your bonus honor every 160 points in EOTS(H), but only every 200 in AB(H). So you need more points to get the bonus tickover, and maybe that's why it's so bad?
Showing posts with label arena. Show all posts
Showing posts with label arena. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
How to make an arena team :
So you may have noticed that Relentless Gladiator gear requires only arena points...but no rating. And also there's no option for getting it with just honor. It seems like to get that pretty i251 gear you may actually have to take off your socks and get your toes wet in the arena after all. But where do you start? How do you go about finding a partner? Well lucky for you that's today's subject!
BEFORE YOU GET YOUR TEAM:
1) Know this website : Arena Junkies -- it's the PvP equivalent of Elitist Jerks, except less n00b-friendly. There is a lot of information on there, especially in the forums where they only allow people with high ratings to publish. It's a somewhat-guarantee that the people talking know what they're talking about. We'll get into some specific things you can do with AJ a little further down, but for now, feel free to browse and see what you come up with.
2) Buy a charter. You can do this at four different places: a fella in Gadgetzan named Bip Nigstrom, a fella at the Nagrand Arena named King Dond, a fella at the Blade's Edge Arena named Steamwheedle Sam, and a fella-ette in Dalaran named "Baroness" Llana. Apparently if you're horde you can also buy a charter in Orgrimmar (lucky!) from Greela "The Grunt" Crankchain. A charter costs you 40g per person -- 2v2 is 80g, 3v3 is 120g, and 5v5 is 200g. General courtesy is that founding members of your team should reimburse you their section but that does not always hold.
PLANNING YOUR TEAM:
3) Now you've got a pretty charter, and it's got your own lonely signature on it. You need more. This is where AJ comes in helpful. If you click the "Ratings" tab at the top, you will see the top arena teams in various brackets. Go for the bracket you're trying to form a team for, and you will have a corresponding range of pull-down menus to talk about class. The first one is you. Are you married to having certain people on your team? Friends, guildies, etc. -- fill those people in also.
This is what I did when I wanted to make a 3s team. I knew I wanted to build it around me and my 2s partner, who is a mage, so I put us in and then look down the chart and it will show us what people with a druid and a mage are running with. 8 of the 16 highest teams run with a lock, so that's what we started shopping for.
Also be careful to look at spec -- you can click on the individual teams that show up. Once you have a team put together, find a team on AJ that matches that, and you may find that in order to do Well a respec is necessary. If you look at 2s teams with a druid/mage, tree is not optimal. Feral or Boomkin are much preferred. I chose to sacrifice that because I like to challenge myself -- but be aware of that handicap ahead of time. Which leads to :
4) Have realistic expectations. Don't expect to hit 2k in the first go-round. Experience playing not only arena, but with each other, shows noticeably. Me & Kitykat don't notice improvement particularly from when we first started, but when we picked up our lock for 3s he commented several times on how well we worked together. If you're running a sub-optimal comp, be comfortable with the fact that you may not hit 2k at all -- there is a glass ceiling sometimes to what you can achieve. Apparently, tree/frost mage CAN get to 2k...but there is only one team on AJ that has done that. I would be happy if we hit 1800. Know your limitations.
5) If you're shopping for a partner, do you want them to have experience? Or not? Like I said, experience tells, and it can teach you. I learned a ton from my first serious 2s partner over on Emerald Dream (Hello, Cleverfox!) and I am grateful that he took me with my relative lack of experience. That was an arms warrior who knew what he was doing. However you need to look at your synergy too -- If some people on the team have experience, will they be intimidated/threatened by people with more? Another thing to remember is that people who have experience have certain ways that they do things -- they're not wrong, or right, usually, but it may be different than other people run. I ran a few 2s skirmishes with a DK who had a tree as his actual partner, and there was an adjustment there b/c he was used to expecting certain things out of his tree that I didn't do, and not expecting things that I did do. You may add to your learning curve if people have to unlearn old ways of working. It's a balancing point.
6) Know where to get your gear and how to get it. Much like you have to run heroics before you can raid, you will need to do some non-arena stuff before you can run arena successfully. This can include BGs, Wintergrasp...even running heroics, since you can buy furious gear (i232) with emblems of triumph. I'm going to make a copout here and highly recommend that if you're having trouble with this step, you read Cynwise's article on the subject.
7) While you're gearing, don't do it alone. Gear with a buddy, ESPECIALLY your arena partners, in BGs -- it's more fun, and it helps you practice together outside of getting gibbed in 2 globals in an arena. Much like my set on healing battlegrounds, playing arena together is about two things : working with each other, and working against the enemy. When you first start an arena team, if you're a total n00b at it, then you're going to lose. A lot. And very quickly each time. It's hard to learn much, except what classes really have it in for you (Kitykat and I are terrible against locks, for example). So BGs can give you a longer set of time where you're all alive together to practice different things and coordinate them.
PLAYING YOUR TEAM:
8) Don't be afraid to lose. This doesn't require much explanation but your team starts with an invisible matchmaking rating of 1500, which means the system is going to try to put you up against 1500 teams. Your team is not a 1500 rating, and I don't care if it's the most dreamy mcdream team ever made : you lack experience together and there's going to be losses, especially at first, as you learn to play together.
9) Know your team's pacing -- does your team focus on burning someone fast? Or playing chess for a long game? Do you CC? How are you coordinating that? Figure out your team's strengths and weaknesses are -- playing a lot of games will help give you an eye for that -- and tailor your strategy for winning to your team's strengths. On the flip side, think about what you can do to limit your team's disadvantages.
10) Be prepared to step out of your comfort zone...but don't sacrifice your primary role to it (I need to CC sometimes...but not at the expense of healing necessarily). If you're dps, do you need to bandage your partner? If you're heals, do you need to throw in a last little push of dps to help drop someone? Look for opportunities to step outside your realm. As a general rule the need to do that is going to go down the bigger your team is -- in a 2s team there's only the two of you to do everything that needs doing; in a 5s team you likely have more specialized roles and stepping outside of them is not so much encouraged as frowned upon.
And last but not least :
11) Communicate! Vent or some similar form of real-time speaking communication is absolutely key for arena. Things move too quickly for you to take the time to type things out. My 2s partner and I really struggled last season, even though we had vent, in doing this. There was a lot of dead air during the match. Don't let that happen to you, talk about EVERYTHING. We've somewhat corrected that this season by having a little pep talk before we start a session. I say "What are we doing?" and she says "Communicating!". Whatever helps you focus. Referencing #9 above, we recognised that effective communication was one of our weaknesses that we needed to address, and so we added that little back-and-forth to our pre-game warmup to help fix it. And it has, and our performance has been noticeably better this season.
---
Hopefully this information will help you if you're new to that whole arena thingy...go forth and dominate :-)
BEFORE YOU GET YOUR TEAM:
1) Know this website : Arena Junkies -- it's the PvP equivalent of Elitist Jerks, except less n00b-friendly. There is a lot of information on there, especially in the forums where they only allow people with high ratings to publish. It's a somewhat-guarantee that the people talking know what they're talking about. We'll get into some specific things you can do with AJ a little further down, but for now, feel free to browse and see what you come up with.
2) Buy a charter. You can do this at four different places: a fella in Gadgetzan named Bip Nigstrom, a fella at the Nagrand Arena named King Dond, a fella at the Blade's Edge Arena named Steamwheedle Sam, and a fella-ette in Dalaran named "Baroness" Llana. Apparently if you're horde you can also buy a charter in Orgrimmar (lucky!) from Greela "The Grunt" Crankchain. A charter costs you 40g per person -- 2v2 is 80g, 3v3 is 120g, and 5v5 is 200g. General courtesy is that founding members of your team should reimburse you their section but that does not always hold.
PLANNING YOUR TEAM:
3) Now you've got a pretty charter, and it's got your own lonely signature on it. You need more. This is where AJ comes in helpful. If you click the "Ratings" tab at the top, you will see the top arena teams in various brackets. Go for the bracket you're trying to form a team for, and you will have a corresponding range of pull-down menus to talk about class. The first one is you. Are you married to having certain people on your team? Friends, guildies, etc. -- fill those people in also.
This is what I did when I wanted to make a 3s team. I knew I wanted to build it around me and my 2s partner, who is a mage, so I put us in and then look down the chart and it will show us what people with a druid and a mage are running with. 8 of the 16 highest teams run with a lock, so that's what we started shopping for.
Also be careful to look at spec -- you can click on the individual teams that show up. Once you have a team put together, find a team on AJ that matches that, and you may find that in order to do Well a respec is necessary. If you look at 2s teams with a druid/mage, tree is not optimal. Feral or Boomkin are much preferred. I chose to sacrifice that because I like to challenge myself -- but be aware of that handicap ahead of time. Which leads to :
4) Have realistic expectations. Don't expect to hit 2k in the first go-round. Experience playing not only arena, but with each other, shows noticeably. Me & Kitykat don't notice improvement particularly from when we first started, but when we picked up our lock for 3s he commented several times on how well we worked together. If you're running a sub-optimal comp, be comfortable with the fact that you may not hit 2k at all -- there is a glass ceiling sometimes to what you can achieve. Apparently, tree/frost mage CAN get to 2k...but there is only one team on AJ that has done that. I would be happy if we hit 1800. Know your limitations.
5) If you're shopping for a partner, do you want them to have experience? Or not? Like I said, experience tells, and it can teach you. I learned a ton from my first serious 2s partner over on Emerald Dream (Hello, Cleverfox!) and I am grateful that he took me with my relative lack of experience. That was an arms warrior who knew what he was doing. However you need to look at your synergy too -- If some people on the team have experience, will they be intimidated/threatened by people with more? Another thing to remember is that people who have experience have certain ways that they do things -- they're not wrong, or right, usually, but it may be different than other people run. I ran a few 2s skirmishes with a DK who had a tree as his actual partner, and there was an adjustment there b/c he was used to expecting certain things out of his tree that I didn't do, and not expecting things that I did do. You may add to your learning curve if people have to unlearn old ways of working. It's a balancing point.
6) Know where to get your gear and how to get it. Much like you have to run heroics before you can raid, you will need to do some non-arena stuff before you can run arena successfully. This can include BGs, Wintergrasp...even running heroics, since you can buy furious gear (i232) with emblems of triumph. I'm going to make a copout here and highly recommend that if you're having trouble with this step, you read Cynwise's article on the subject.
7) While you're gearing, don't do it alone. Gear with a buddy, ESPECIALLY your arena partners, in BGs -- it's more fun, and it helps you practice together outside of getting gibbed in 2 globals in an arena. Much like my set on healing battlegrounds, playing arena together is about two things : working with each other, and working against the enemy. When you first start an arena team, if you're a total n00b at it, then you're going to lose. A lot. And very quickly each time. It's hard to learn much, except what classes really have it in for you (Kitykat and I are terrible against locks, for example). So BGs can give you a longer set of time where you're all alive together to practice different things and coordinate them.
PLAYING YOUR TEAM:
8) Don't be afraid to lose. This doesn't require much explanation but your team starts with an invisible matchmaking rating of 1500, which means the system is going to try to put you up against 1500 teams. Your team is not a 1500 rating, and I don't care if it's the most dreamy mcdream team ever made : you lack experience together and there's going to be losses, especially at first, as you learn to play together.
9) Know your team's pacing -- does your team focus on burning someone fast? Or playing chess for a long game? Do you CC? How are you coordinating that? Figure out your team's strengths and weaknesses are -- playing a lot of games will help give you an eye for that -- and tailor your strategy for winning to your team's strengths. On the flip side, think about what you can do to limit your team's disadvantages.
10) Be prepared to step out of your comfort zone...but don't sacrifice your primary role to it (I need to CC sometimes...but not at the expense of healing necessarily). If you're dps, do you need to bandage your partner? If you're heals, do you need to throw in a last little push of dps to help drop someone? Look for opportunities to step outside your realm. As a general rule the need to do that is going to go down the bigger your team is -- in a 2s team there's only the two of you to do everything that needs doing; in a 5s team you likely have more specialized roles and stepping outside of them is not so much encouraged as frowned upon.
And last but not least :
11) Communicate! Vent or some similar form of real-time speaking communication is absolutely key for arena. Things move too quickly for you to take the time to type things out. My 2s partner and I really struggled last season, even though we had vent, in doing this. There was a lot of dead air during the match. Don't let that happen to you, talk about EVERYTHING. We've somewhat corrected that this season by having a little pep talk before we start a session. I say "What are we doing?" and she says "Communicating!". Whatever helps you focus. Referencing #9 above, we recognised that effective communication was one of our weaknesses that we needed to address, and so we added that little back-and-forth to our pre-game warmup to help fix it. And it has, and our performance has been noticeably better this season.
---
Hopefully this information will help you if you're new to that whole arena thingy...go forth and dominate :-)
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Arena Season 7 : Teh Funnyzors Wrap
With the arena season coming to an end last week, I decided it was time to compile a representative list of team names we faced this go-round. Without further ado, because how much introduction does something like this really need, the good, bad, and the funny, with a tacked-on head-scratching!
THE GOOD:
1. "Ebay Sold me a DK"
2. "Get the DK not Me" -- which is representative of several teams that tongue-in-cheek made reference to a nonexistent partner on the team. In this case, there was no DK anyway.
3. "Hit the MagOHGODCYCLONE" -- ditto above, I'm not sure this team had a druid OR a mage on it.
4. "Not now Mom" - I don't even want to think how many times this has been said in the heat of a brutal arena match.
5. "stop laughing right meow" -- Does it really mean anything? No. But it's got that light touch of whimsy that made me and Kity both smile.
THE BAD:
1. "for points only" -- it would be funny, except for the number of teams with some variant on it...much overused.
2. "UR MOMs MY EPIC MOUNT" -- similar reasons to the above, except this doesn't even have the virtue of being funny on its own.
3. "we touch young children" -- sorry boys, there's funny, and there's offensive, and this was way over the line.
4. "dont kill us" -- again...a stale, overused concept, along with teams like "are we dead yet"...it's supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating funny but it just falls flat.
5. "sloppy secunds" -- Geeks who think they prove their leet hotness by cracking misogynistic jokes, your mom jokes, sex jokes...wrong, it proves you're immature. If you're getting some, you don't need to constantly stroke it about how you're getting some.
THE FUNNY:
1. "THEY SAID THIS WOULDNT F"
2. "JFK Shouldve Bubbled" -- it borders right on the verge of being in bad taste, but it made us laugh anyway.
3. "Walmart Geared"
4. "She looked level sixteen" -- I give this a pass because blizzard already made the joke with their Noblegarden hijinks.
5. "Earthshield carry us" -- it's a similar self-deprecation, I think, but carried off with a little more class than the simple "don't kill us" appeal.
THE "HUH?"
1. "Too Fat to LoS" -- I guess it's funny too but...if I recall correctly this was not a team of big toons...blood elves, actually.
2. "ILADELPH"
3. "rng rng banana phone"
4. "Blueberry Scourge"
5. "Anything"
What about you? Any memorable team names on your list of opponents this season?
THE GOOD:
1. "Ebay Sold me a DK"
2. "Get the DK not Me" -- which is representative of several teams that tongue-in-cheek made reference to a nonexistent partner on the team. In this case, there was no DK anyway.
3. "Hit the MagOHGODCYCLONE" -- ditto above, I'm not sure this team had a druid OR a mage on it.
4. "Not now Mom" - I don't even want to think how many times this has been said in the heat of a brutal arena match.
5. "stop laughing right meow" -- Does it really mean anything? No. But it's got that light touch of whimsy that made me and Kity both smile.
THE BAD:
1. "for points only" -- it would be funny, except for the number of teams with some variant on it...much overused.
2. "UR MOMs MY EPIC MOUNT" -- similar reasons to the above, except this doesn't even have the virtue of being funny on its own.
3. "we touch young children" -- sorry boys, there's funny, and there's offensive, and this was way over the line.
4. "dont kill us" -- again...a stale, overused concept, along with teams like "are we dead yet"...it's supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating funny but it just falls flat.
5. "sloppy secunds" -- Geeks who think they prove their leet hotness by cracking misogynistic jokes, your mom jokes, sex jokes...wrong, it proves you're immature. If you're getting some, you don't need to constantly stroke it about how you're getting some.
THE FUNNY:
1. "THEY SAID THIS WOULDNT F"
2. "JFK Shouldve Bubbled" -- it borders right on the verge of being in bad taste, but it made us laugh anyway.
3. "Walmart Geared"
4. "She looked level sixteen" -- I give this a pass because blizzard already made the joke with their Noblegarden hijinks.
5. "Earthshield carry us" -- it's a similar self-deprecation, I think, but carried off with a little more class than the simple "don't kill us" appeal.
THE "HUH?"
1. "Too Fat to LoS" -- I guess it's funny too but...if I recall correctly this was not a team of big toons...blood elves, actually.
2. "ILADELPH"
3. "rng rng banana phone"
4. "Blueberry Scourge"
5. "Anything"
What about you? Any memorable team names on your list of opponents this season?
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Happy Season 7!
And what a delicious season it is too. I got three new pieces straight off the bat, including an IDOL, which I didn't even know was an option, and which pretty much doubles the effect of my old idol. Hmmm lifebloom spellpower by 125...or 246...think think. These are the hard decisions, folks.
Spent most of the day trying to herd my stray cats of arena partner(s!) into play, but once I did my 2s went 5-2 to start the season, and I actually managed to find a 3s team, with a survival hunter and a frost DK that went 1-1...but the loss was a bogus lag loss where we couldn't get past the loading screen until we were dead. Frankly I'm just happy to HAVE a threes team, which I don't think I've ever had before.
And capitalising on the enthusiasm, I scheduled two days of battleground premade within my guild...and actually had people *sign up*! Hopefully those will go well, reports to follow.
A very good day yesterday, though like cyn I was unimpressed by the style of the outfits. I was very pro-druid-pvp outfits when they first came out but they're starting to wear on me how only the shoulders change and the rest of them just recolor the same thing (and sometimes just the little gem on it, not even the whole piece). Ihra wants something new!
Spent most of the day trying to herd my stray cats of arena partner(s!) into play, but once I did my 2s went 5-2 to start the season, and I actually managed to find a 3s team, with a survival hunter and a frost DK that went 1-1...but the loss was a bogus lag loss where we couldn't get past the loading screen until we were dead. Frankly I'm just happy to HAVE a threes team, which I don't think I've ever had before.
And capitalising on the enthusiasm, I scheduled two days of battleground premade within my guild...and actually had people *sign up*! Hopefully those will go well, reports to follow.
A very good day yesterday, though like cyn I was unimpressed by the style of the outfits. I was very pro-druid-pvp outfits when they first came out but they're starting to wear on me how only the shoulders change and the rest of them just recolor the same thing (and sometimes just the little gem on it, not even the whole piece). Ihra wants something new!
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Oops!
Well there's an unpleasant surprise --
I thought we were still going to get another two weeks out of this season and it seems like this got kind of dropped out of the blue. Does anyone else remember "first week of September"? Or am I just hallucinating that?
Anyway I had been pushing my honor to buy some stuff for the end-of-season ratings push but now I question the wisdom. Clearly the wiser course would be to just save the honor for s7 but I'm only 20k away from cap and those 1000 arena points are getting converted to honor since I have the 5-set. My machiavellian plan is to save 5 of those arena commendations for next season but then what? Should I buy-and-use five? or just let the 500-points or so die away? I don't know what happens at cap but I would venture to guess that going into a BG would net me no honor, thus screwing up my stats. Or would it just give me the listing of honor I *would've* received but then not actually do it? Until I resolve this question I'm leery of getting too close to the cap :-\.
I thought we were still going to get another two weeks out of this season and it seems like this got kind of dropped out of the blue. Does anyone else remember "first week of September"? Or am I just hallucinating that?
Anyway I had been pushing my honor to buy some stuff for the end-of-season ratings push but now I question the wisdom. Clearly the wiser course would be to just save the honor for s7 but I'm only 20k away from cap and those 1000 arena points are getting converted to honor since I have the 5-set. My machiavellian plan is to save 5 of those arena commendations for next season but then what? Should I buy-and-use five? or just let the 500-points or so die away? I don't know what happens at cap but I would venture to guess that going into a BG would net me no honor, thus screwing up my stats. Or would it just give me the listing of honor I *would've* received but then not actually do it? Until I resolve this question I'm leery of getting too close to the cap :-\.
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