The Road to Gladiator

[Bloomfalls]

Welcome to my newest guide, The Road to Gladiator.

The purpose of this guide is NOT to give you a step-by-step guide on how to get high arena rating. Truthfully, that is nigh impossible. As always, my guides are about getting you to the right mindset and understand the thought process behind something.
In this case, behind getting to the Gladiator range in Arena.

I'll talk a bit about my experiences and hopefully, it will be useful to you.

The Philosophy


I've said this a bit in my older guides, but I think the most relevant piece of advice you can carry with you is that WoW is a skill-based game. Yes, there is RNG, there are different levels of gear, but in the core, if a game can have skill involved somehow, then you can use that to your favor.

In fact, if you're an older gamer, you might be aware of how many incredible things players did in Ultima Online. These differences are more visible in games where a player can have a real effect in the gameplay of others. In WoW you cannot take someone's items. In WoW, a level 40 cannot really kill a level 80. True, a very good level 38 player with a non-twink character can overcome the difference and kill a level 50 player, but for that to happen their skill level would have to be drastically different.
Were it Season 5 or Season 6 I would say "However, at level 80, the difference is not as grotesque as many players assume. " That's not the case, against a full ilvl251+ a fresh level 80 is probably as helpless - if not more - as a level 40 against a level 50.
Luckily for you though, getting acceptable gear is a very, very easy task. With the exception of weapons, you can get all Furious (current tier minus two) with just Honor, plus the current tier offsets which are a huge boost.
And this is the first thing you need to understand. It's of utmost importance if you want to ever have the chance of getting Gladiator that you comprehend the following sentence. I cannot stress enough how this is important:

1) GEAR IS NOT THE PROBLEM

If you already know this you can skip to the next step. If not, keep reading.
Once you bash this in your head, then you'll be more than ready to progress as a player. No matter how bad is your gear, it's perfectly possible for someone who just got level 80 in the latest season to get more than decent ratings without being "carried".
I've seen a lot of players complain that it's impossible to get, say, past 1500 MMR because there's already a lot of players with insert current season gear here, and they're just starting. Well, if gear is so important, then ask yourself: Why are they at 1500? I mean, they're playing with all that good gear and still are stuck to a rating where they're fighting someone who's just starting their character. If gear was to magically enhance one's rating, then they'd be much higher.
Or it might be that while gear is relevant, it's NOT the problem. If you can keep up the MMR with people with much superior gear, then that means one thing: There must be a different factor at play here. There are in fact, many different aspects in Arena.
Now, do not read me wrong. If you ask "But how can I win if the Warrior two-shots me", then indeed, there's few you can do. There are, unfortunately, counters, and hard-counters in Arena. However, you can never ever blame gear entirely. This is because of the next thing you need to comprehend:

2) HIGH-END ARENA REQUIRES SKILL

As always, this is one of the reasons why so many players cannot progress. They don't accept, or even consider that they are bad.

It's always the comp., the gear, the class, the faction imbalance, even the lag. I mean, there are so many reasons! The partners who are worse than them, or even the fact they're just not trying because they "have a life".

As long as you can accept you can get better, and in most of the cases there's a lot of room to improvement, you're in the right road.

I've seen incredible things - some from players much better than me. I've seen a 2600 rated Priest solo 1800 teams of well-geared Warlock and Rogue. Fought with naked priest to the 2000s while using a white weapon in hand, with the objective of opening a portal to Karazhan in the middle of the arena before actually trying to kill the enemies. And just as well as I won I lost to teams that completely dominated us. Rogues that dominated the arena in ways I cannot, with a superb perception of everything that is going on.

Orangemarmalade, one of best - if not the best - mages in the world claimed he likes to play with two seasons old gear, so that he doesn't lose his touch. He's also the one who pulled one of the greatest arena stunts of all time - defeated of the former champions, a mage and a priest, all by himself while running out of life.

One may say that all this may be right, but that this is because their skill level is so high that all these stunts are possible. Indeed, but that's what we're assuming here - that your intention is to reach such a level.

You see, there's actually an enormous difference between the top 5 and bottom 5 gladiator teams. A difference so high that it's well within realm of reason that one of these top players can get within gladiator range even under the most extreme circumstances - bad composition, no gear. What do these players have that you don't?

3) THE MINDSET

This is where we start to cross borders between the philosophy you should have and what you can do to improve your skill.

To convert all that philosophy into action you need to have the proper mindset. The first thing is: Play to win. Are you playing to win?

When you face a hard-counter, do you instantly give up? Do you ever "play 10 matches a week just to get points"?

You need to play to win. You need to understand that even when facing that hard-counter that also outplays you and outgears you, you still need to play to win. That's because even if you lose, you're improving your skill. By pushing really hard against that rock, everything else will feel like a breeze. It's a learning process, and you have to take the best out of everything.

This is a mindset you need to apply everywhere. It's specially good in Battlegrounds. You know, when you're going to lose, and there's always someone in the chat who says "STOP DOING ANYTHING SO WE CAN JUST GET THE POINTS".

Don't.

You see, it's not about defying him. It's not about some code of honor. There's no honor, there is just a game. The reason is much more simple - only in these moments you can show your worth. You can really push, you can really see how far you can go. It's about improving as a player. Don't lie to yourself: You're probably not gonna win. But you're gonna try your best to and, once in a while, you'll actually make the difference.

Now if that once in a while is 1 every 1000 matches, 1 every 100 or 1 every 10 matches, that's up to you to improve. There's always room for improvement. Even if your skill as a player is perfect, you might improve your social skills, start whispering players, giving orders, commanding them, making strategies.

Do not play for quick losses. Neither BGs nor Arenas. The Honor points don't matter. Neither does the Arena points. I mean, think about it - why are you getting gear if you don't WANT to PVP? Do you believe your skill will magically increase once you're filled with epics and the game will then get fun? This is the wrong mindset, and will not get you anywhere. PVP must be the end, not the means. Remember that, and play to win.

Even more important: Play to have fun.

4) IMMERSION

I know a player who's been top 1 for two seasons in a row who doesn't use any add-on. Although he's an exception, that should display the level of immersion you need to strive for.

I believe that immersing yourself in the game is very important to improve your skill. In psychology, they call something similar to that as the "flow", a mind-state where you're so immersed you become one with the experience.

We come to a full-circle here. In order to achieve such level of immersion, you must have complete control over your game. You need to sense it, as if it's part of you. And that will only happen once you have enough knowledge and skill of it.


The Good Practices

1) KNOW THE OTHER CLASSES

I'm not gonna start with the obvious. You should know your class, and that's obvious. More importantly, you should know the other classes.

For the sake of this, you should also treat YOUR class as "other classes". Ever got really angry at something someone did to you? How can YOU do that to your enemies?

Learn the skills of the other classes. What they do. The weaknesses. WHY they do. Ask a friend of yours, what do other players do that really shuts him down?

Which brings us to:

2) USE AN ANALYTICAL APPROACH

EVERYTHING that happens to you should be analyzed. Ask yourself these:
1) Why?
2) How could I prevent it?

Every time something happens that shuts you down, you should mind that. Why did that Hunter scatter shot you? Is he doing it on cooldown? Is he doing it in the hopes you'll trinket so the enemy team can shut you down with a crowd-control chain. Does he simply not know what he's doing at all? Is it part of their cc chain?

How can you prevent it? If it's part of their CC-Chain maybe if you shut down another player when the cooldown is over you'll break their coordination and make yourself an opening to defeat them.

Similarly, try to figure out their strategy. What are they doing to win? Put yourself in their position, and ask yourself what would ruin your strategy up the most if the roles were reversed.

3) CCS ARE YOUR FRIEND

As a whole, you'll want to shut down as many players as possible, as often as possible, with the smallest margin of error.

Some skills, such as Shadowfury, are easy for that. Some aren't. It's your task to elaborate a good plan on how to use your ccs the best way possible.

When thinking of crowd-control, take in consideration what your partners have to offer. At any given time, ask yourself: Could I be shutting someone right now? Would that cost me important damage? Would that leave me open? If yes, how can I remedy?

Similarly, you must react to what your enemies are gonna do. Feral Druids can get nasty instant cyclones, so you'll have to predict when they're gonna use it. Try to shut him down before he shuts you down. Use that to your favor, be annoying if you must, never losing sight of the big game. Make macros if you must. Did that mage just summon an elemental? This is when you're gonna abuse line-of-sight and ccs. Did the shaman just use Bloodlust or Heroism? CC them until it's over. Even better, try to predict it before it happens, so you can trick them into wasting the cooldown.

4) DO NOT CHANGE YOUR CLASS

This is more important than people think. Stick to what you like playing. Don't go with flavors of the month.

No matter how under-represented your class is, there's always gladiators of it. The game is constantly being fine-tuned and the balance is always changing. If you can get through the rough seasons as a "bad class", you'll be doing even better when your class gets buffed.

Now, I usually say "play to win", and that is right. If you're SURE that changing to a fotm will get you a good position, BY ALL MEANS, GO FOR IT. However, you'll probably create a bad habit, and will not have enough time to learn the class, or at least not enough for Gladiator range, unless you're a superb player. By sticking to one class you'll get progressively more and more experience with it.

5) PLAY WITH PEOPLE YOU TRUST

It's best to play with people you know in real life or, in lieu of that, whom you got to play a long time with even if online.

6) USE EVERYTHING IN YOUR POWER TO WIN

Like I said, even if that includes going for fotm (but BE CAREFUL with that, it's NOT good practice most of the times and leads to a very scrub-like mindset).

Make sure you have a good comp. Use the best tactics, even if cheap. Play to win. Eventually these tactics will no longer be good enough, but by then you'll be adapting to the new change. Make sure you're one step ahead, always.

7) KEYBIND EVERYTHING

I cannot stress this enough. Preparation is key. You need to have everything keybinded. Everything. Don't ever keyboard turn either.

The Road

Some thoughts and final words here.

I'll not deny that it's not possible for everyone to go and get a good rank. The system itself is against that. Only 0.5% of the players will get Gladiator, and that's it. If everyone improves then what happens is that you'll need to be even better to be a Gladiator.
There's also the fact each person has a different skill cap. There's a limit you might not be able to push farther than. This is a cruel, harsh truth a lot of people have a hard time accepting.

I usually talk a lot about skill, but I'm never talking about twitch reflex. I'm talking about it too, but as I state in my raiding guides, there are many different skillsets. Maybe you can think of a comp. that is so devastatingly powerful that no one will be able to beat you. Maybe you can think of a setup that is not inherently powerful, but uses such a different strategy that will allow you to win against enemies because of the element of surprise.

In fact there are some very crazy people pulling incredible stunts, including multi-boxers getting to Gladiator range. Say anything about them, but in the end of the day they're still the ones in top 0.5%. Even if they're not the best players per se, they use their creativity or their knowledge of the game mechanics to give them an advantage. That's all fair game. Remember, play to win, not to showcase some honourable gameplay.

If you've reached the cap of your twitch reflex and that's preventing you to progress, you may want to work on different aspects to gain the necessary advantage.

A good practice would be to think of the different aspect of arenas and see how good you're doing at them. For example, you can do this analytical approach: Pick up your rating and round it down (or up if you're very close to the next bracket), divide it by 100, and spend points through these 7 aspects:


Coordination: Up to 5, where 0 means you're playing with people you've never played with before, 5 means you and your partners have a long history of playing together and perfect synnergy.

Composition: Up to 4, where 0 means you're playing an incredibly bad composition that has never seen a group doing good, 4 means you're playing one of the best compositions possible.

Gear: Up to 3, where 0 means you're absolutely unprepared and just got to level 80, and 3 means you're almost (or completely) fully-geared with this current season.

Strategy: Up to 5, where 0 means your team hasn't developed any strategy at all, 5 means you understand almost every situation thrown at you and have the adequate strategy planned to counter them.

Game Knowledge: Up to 5, where 0 means you have bare knowledge of your class, 5 means you understand about everything the others are doing and can recognize about every skill in the game as well as understand their weaknesses.

Player Skill and Reaction: Up to 5, where 5 means you have fast reactions and can dominate the entire playfield. It means you almost never make mistakes or hit the wrong key and can see what everyone is doing at any given moment. 0 means you keyboard turn, performs slow actions and tunnel-vision.

Preparation: Up to 3, where 3 means you and your team have perfect latency, fully-set addons and everything with good keybinds, no mouse or keyboard issues and is playing with free time and no worries on your mind. 0 if there's anything happening that can impact your gameplay (such as severely bad latency).


If you do believe you excel above all others in an area, feel free to go one point above. For example, if you have a character with Shadowmourne and the best possible arena gear possible, you might give your gear a 4.

Believe or not, this is actually a good practice, as it will probably allow you to have a wider vision of what you're lacking. You can then sit with your team and discuss how to improve. Just remember that improving just yourself might help, but will not be enough to increase your team's rating. Arena is a coordinated effort, after all.

I really want to reserve this space to tell you how important coordination is. I've seen a lot of players who are team-hoppers. They stick to a team until they get to a rating, then they'll assume there's nowhere left to improve (since they're limited by the skill cap of others), then hop to a different team. While there are many team hoppers at high ratings, their reason to change teams is quite often different from the reason a 1600 player will be changing teams with frequence.

If you don't know your team well, you'll have coordination issues. It's good to play with RL friends because social interactions can make a lot easier for you to understand your friend. Besides, it might help you get more relaxed about the whole thing, since you might end up having a good laugh about these situations your team undergoes.

Most of all, it's important to play to have fun, and unless your friend or friends really end up being completely different or angry about Arena, playing with them might be a good experience.

As your rating goes up you'll notice that the different brackets feature... well, different characteristics. Specially above 2400, when the game changes completely. Here's more or less of a run down:


1800: This is where at least I consider the players who are barely more serious start to kick in.

2000: This is where players have a good knowledge of either their class, or their comp, or have a solid strategy that compensates for all their other mistakes. Above 2000 you'll be playing players who are at a considerably low %. While they're still away from Gladiators, statistically speaking it's a good point to say "good" players start to surface.

2200: The limbo where good players are getting better, but still not that better. I'd say it's possible to get to 2200 by just playing your composition well and following a strategy. Above 2200 you'll have to develop progressively more aggressive tactics and be good at adapting to different situations.

2400: From this point on, players know what is going on. They got their strategies down and their composition working. They don't make obvious or stupid mistakes. They have decent coordination. From 2400 on, predicting what your enemy is doing starts to become one of the most important factors in a battle.

2600: Above 2600 it's a matter of who makes a mistake first. The teams probably have players who have reached a mastery of their class and know their strategies. It becomes progressively more a matter of avoiding making mistakes while forcing the opposition to make one. Every single mistake and every single global counts. This is about where Gladiator range starts.

2800+ - These are extremely competent players, the ones that have an incredible vision of everything that's going on. There are very few players above this and there's not much else to say, from here on it's a completely different level.

Gladiator-level matches are very much focused on pressure and forcing the opponents to make mistakes.

CONCLUSION

I hope this thread was useful to you. Comments are always welcome, as are questions. In fact, feel free to ask arena-related questions, and I'll try to answer them the best I can.

[Serae]

Very interesting read, Thanks!

[PixelFlame]

Interesting, will read later.

[fredalbob]

Err... Brain... Hurts.... <---- Used to play Glad back in BC.
I just BOOM! DEATH WILL MEET YOU!
Good guide overall though.

[itachimacaco]

Good guide :P

[danzi3l]

Yet again Bloom, you deliver an awesome piece of work.
Thank you

[Kill604]

Nc info m8 thanks

[Bloomfalls]

Thanks everyone for the comments.

Err... Brain... Hurts.... <---- Used to play Glad back in BC.
I just BOOM! DEATH WILL MEET YOU!
Good guide overall though.

Personally, I liked Arena in TBC more though. Did you stop?

[*Phaze]

Very interesting bud, gj!

[[Z]em]

nicely put together guide

[hayboy1213]

Very well written, nice content, thanks man.

[Eire]

+rep added there. This insight is great. I've been working on my DK for 2v2 plus 3v3 but i'm a natural feral druid for pvp at heart so I will be playing a lot more as my cat. Thanks

[Bloomfalls]

+rep added there. This insight is great. I've been working on my DK for 2v2 plus 3v3 but i'm a natural feral druid for pvp at heart so I will be playing a lot more as my cat. Thanks

Feral is really fun, at least I had more fun as a Feral than a DK but hey, each person has a different taste. Good luck whatever you choose

[ßetray]

Im sad I missed out on the rogue mace stun lulz in BC. I played my mage as a raider, but now Im on my rogue pushing for 2k in all brackets.

[SoulShattered]

Very interesting read, +rep.