How does gear affect arena and if it does is it sorta pointless to be queuing for arena skirmishes while I’m wearing quest reward gear? Asking because I’ve queued up a couple times now and just get stun locked to death really quickly. ( elemental shaman)
Thank you
You will do less damage and have less health and armor compared to someone using heritage armor (gear that veteran players with lots of gold usually buy to make leveling easier).
Your gear, regardless of it’s quality, doesn’t effect your ability to deal with crowd control. That comes down to the talents (pvp and regular) you select and your best bet is to Google a pvp guide for that spec.
Some classes, Rogues especially, are just cc-machines and your best way of dealing with that is to make sure you’re in your partners line of sight and that you’re close enough to mutually support each other.
i think you mean heirlooms.
heritage armor is a racial reward.
Yes. meant heirlooms. My bad
I see I’ll have to work on positioning. I hit 120 recently and jumped into some arena skirmishes and it’s still super hard. Is this because I’m under geared (currently at 340)? Is the arena only for people who have high ilvl gear is basically what I’m wondering
340 is on the low-side now but there are quite a few of “casual play” catch up mechanisms. Do World Quests, do the weekly quest, LFR’s, dungeons, occasional mythic 2-3 key, and especially get into Najatar. The gear item level will come.
While gear does matter (more health, more damage, etc…), long term success in Arena is more about the learning curve. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of specs. Knowing how to position yourself and when to use certain skills and when not too. That only comes from persistent arena play.
You can really burn yourself out with the wrong perspective. Don’t over invest emotionally in success. Go in relaxed. Losing is OK. Learn something from every win and loss. Never give up the fight, even when your partners do. And laugh at yourself when you get pwned.
You’re occasionally going to get screwed in skirmishes by teammates dropping after you enter the waiting area or deciding that they shouldn’t help you. I’ve been on the weak side of many 1v2’s and 1v3’s and that goes about as well as you would expect. And I’ve been on the strong side of those situations and had partners not help because “the advantage was dishonorable”.
Just roll with it and try to have fun no matter the outcome.
Thank you so much for the detailed response! I’m definitely feeling that learning curve as I play more skirmishes with so many different class combos and abilities haha. I think I’m going to look for an addon that logs the enemy’s abilities so I can get a grasp on just what the heck is going on. Great advice, will do! TY
To make a point, I was doing 2s (rated 2v2 arenas) on my 435 BM Hunter yesterday with a similarly geared Boomkin from my raid team. We averaged about a 40% win rate in the “unranked” bracket under 1500 rating. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing in PvP aside from “shoot the people and maybe win”.
Basically, gear and knowledge help, but sometimes you run into a Blood DK/Holy Paladin team and just have to give up in disgust (because seriously, who does that).