Arena Strategy

From GnomiesWiki

The following are a few suggestions for the various team combinations you will face and the different strategy you can try in each arena.

Currently there are three type of arenas: Circle of Blood in Blade's Edge Mountains, Ring of Trials in Nagrand, & Ruins of Lordaeron.

[edit] General Suggestions

• Focus fire (FF) and crowd control (CC). Pretty obvious I know but a lot of people do not do it.

• Use the different terrain of each arena to line of sight (LoS) your opponents or to hide behind.

• If you use water for mana regeneration, go purchase the PvP water from the battlegrounds rewards vendor so that you can use them in the arenas.

• Press the 'V' button on your keyboard so you can see nearby targets' health above their head. A lot of times, I am on one target and I see an enemy run by with a sliver of life; I make a quick adjustment and drop the low health target. Some people uses mods such as 'Arena Master' which creates a clack box in the middle of your screen which sorts your opponents by name/class and shows their health. It can be useful for targeting etc., but I find the damn box too distracting.

• Use voice chat such as Ventrilo, Teamspeak, or the the in game version. Some people have suggested not using the push to talk so that you can do other things such as killing your opponent, but then you will have to deal with your teammates breathing and any other noise that might get transmitted.

[edit] Basic strategy for/against each class.

Pallies - Use blessing of sacrifice on your teammates to help you break sheep/sap. Save your hammer to disrupt healers or anyone trying to escape such as a druid or to buy you some time to get out of combat to drink. Cast blessing of freedom on teammates that are being FF by melee. Pallies bubble can be dispelled and there are a host of things that can disrupt their casting.

Priest - MC someone off the bridge in Blades Edge.

[edit] Exploits

I've been doing some research on this since I've noticed that some teams are getting to the higher ratings really quick. Listed below are some exploits that I've heard about and the basics of how they work. I wouldn't recommend trying any of these per se, but to be aware of them.

Stacking Shadow Resist BT Gear

• How it works: If you know you will be facing Shadow Priests or Warlocks on the other side, stack SR gear to provide upwards of 350 Shadow Resistance, in combination with a pally's SR Aura. Players do this by creating a series of macros that will do a /ignore or /who <names of locks/priests> in their battle groups. If that player isn't in the arena, then you're fine. The reason this works (mostly for higher rated teams) is that at the higher level, you're facing only a few teams and you can find out who those teams are from the armory.
• This is used in many ways, but the main one is to prevent the Crowd Control of your healer by the other team (Priest's Psychic Scream, Warlock's Fear, Fel Hunter's Spell Lock).
• It is also used to mitigate the damage from a warlock or to prevent his DOT's from landing in the first place.
• Blizzard tried to hot fix this in the middle of Season 2 by preventing you from switching gear once an arena has started. Previously it was much easier to do since you only need to go out and see who your opponents are. If they use shadow, then you can use Outfitter to switch to SR gear and have the pally put up the SR aura. This has now reach exploit level because of the /ignore and /who exploits.

Win Trading

Some teams are artificially raising their ratings (for sale or otherwise) by win trading. This is also known as team feeding.

Here's how it works:

• First, you need to have at least 2 70's. One that is your main and the other that's your feeder. Grab some friends. They also need to have 2 70's. 2v2 teams are the easiest to feed since you only need 2 people. 5v5 teams require more coordination but it's still possible.
• Pick a time during the week when the least amount of people play. This exploit works better in smaller battle groups or battle groups with less PVP'ers. For example, 4:30 AM on Thursday morning would be a good time.
• You and your team mates get on their mains. Your friends that will be feeding you ratings would get on their feeders. All of you queue up for the arenas.
• There's a very very high chance (if you picked an odd time) that you'll end up facing each other. When this happens, the feeder team would just lose to the other team.
• Play 10 games and then switch roles. Your friends get on their mains, you get on your feeders and repeat.
• Since it's only 10 games a week, it goes by fast. Once your feeder team gets too low for you to leech from (say around 1100), disband the feeder team and re-form it as new. The feeder team will now start at 1500 and you can leech even more rating.
• Teams using this strategy have admitted as much and have gotten way above the 2500 range... there's one with a 3000 rating!