2008
Arena Tips - Before the first attack
Posted by Lithanial in Efficiency Tips, General Tips, World of Warcraft
Previously I have covered how to go about creating your arena team to give yourself a good chance of success, however going into an arena match with a strong setup and basic plan is only one small aspect of the battles within.
There are many steps and tactics that you can undertake to improve your teams’ chance of success before you are even engaged with your opponents; indeed many matches are won or lost by the preparation made right at the start.
Arena combat is highly competitive and so you must give yourself every possible advantage to be able to keep up; you can guarantee that your opponents will be utilizing every possible means they can get to improve their game play and so, you must do likewise.
The first thing to work on is improvements to your teams co-ordination and communication. To that end, one of the most important things to have for any serious arena team is voice communication.
The in game voice chat is unfortunately not too great - often having problems with its volume being much too quiet even when set to its maximum output. The two voice chat applications generally used throughout any competitive game play worldwide are Team speak and Ventrillo.
By making sure your entire team is connected to a voice chat server and has working microphones you instantly boost your performance due to being able to watch each others backs far more efficiently.
For example, healers can call out when they are silenced allowing hybrids to provide emergency backup healing as needed, and the DPS classes can co-ordinate their attacks and crowd control with much more speed to put some serious pressure on the opposition.
The second means to boost your team co-ordination is so simple and yet missed by many players. Arena combat can get very hectic and your team can end up scattered leading to confusion as to where the rest of your team is at any one time. This can lead to players becoming isolated from support.
The solution is simple, assign everyone in your team a raid marker. This allows you to easily track exactly where your team mates are at any one time, even through walls; a vital piece of information to ensure that you don’t end up accidentally getting out of line of sight of your healers.
With team communication and co-ordination improved, the next step is to improve the information available to you about your enemy. A fairly standard arena management mod is Proximo ( http://wow.curse.com/downloads/details/8291/ ) and what this lovely little mod does is provide a target status box for every member of the opposing team that you can target them by. But more importantly it shows this information the second anyone in your team with Proximo targets an enemy player.
This allows you to very quickly know at the start of an arena match just what you are up against in order to form an effective plan. And if you don’t manage to target everyone in the opposing team then one of your teams stealth classes, if you have one, can go and “scout out” the other side with ease.
Be warned however that hunters have discovered a nasty way to bug out Proximo. When you target someone via Proximo it targets by name, and hunters have taken to naming their pets after team mates to mess up your targeting.
Now, fully prepared to dominate, it is time to prepare your attack!
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