Arena's and PvP HelpFollow

Hi All,

I, very recently, made 70th with a 2H Axe Arms/Fury warrior and am in desperate need of advice. I want to move upward with my warrior, and acquire the Merciless Gladiator plate set that can be obtained by Arena awards. But, therein resides the problem. I have mostly solo'd to get where I am, grouping only for 'group' quests, and have equipment that is almost completely from Outland quest rewards. To boot, I am in a guild which is no real help for Arena's or instances either. Can someone (anyone!) tell me a couple things?

(1). Is the set I am looking at worth the hastle? It looks good on paper, so to speak, but would I be better off trying to get in PuG's for instances to get better eq?

(2). I have tried the 'practice' 2 X 2 arena battles....and got my a$$ handed to me each time...though usually my partner died first. Worse yet, I didn't even rack up a single kill. Can someone give me some warrior based PvP pointers as my experience is lacking, to say the least. Would I be better off in a 3 X 3 or 5 X 5?


Any constructive help would be appreciated. Thanks, in advance.

The Merciless Gladiator gear blows anything you can get out of a five man out of the water. For comparison;

This is about the best weapon from level 70 normal instances, this is about the best weapon from Heroics, this is about the best weapon from Kara and this is the best weapon from PvP.

It's not even really close... the Merciless Gladiator gear is about as good as Tier 5 raiding gear, which requires 25-man raids. Moreover, the same comparison holds true for the armor pieces. It's actually even worse there; the Merciless Gladiator Breastplate is the best you can get up until you kill Kael'thas or Lady Vashj, which aren't exactly the easiest things in the world.

2) People usually suck in the 'practice' games, plain and simple... but even beyond that, you're going to have to find a group or friend you feel comfortable playing with, because Arenas are truly a team effort. You will also want to get some of the 5-man gear and especially get some of the Honor-bought gear, which you also get from PvP, as without it you're going to get your *** handed to you in the Arenas.

Just saying you need pointers is a bit too vague. What exactly do you or do you not know? You may want to try finding some good Warrior PvP videos (they're out there, although I've lost track of most of them recently) and seeing what they do.

Interrupts FTW.
After you charge healer swap to zerker stance and get ready to pummel.
You can also move out of range and intercept back in to stun.
Fear is also an interrupt if pummel on CD.
If its a pally you will prob force an early bubble. Intercept the other player and hamstring to releive the pressure on your partner, take a few shots, then go back to pally and keep working on him.

Pallys frustrate the hell out of me btw...

Cheers!

If you fight enemy that is just refusing to die you can try another tactic.

Start slacking. Just white hits and hamstring untill you have full rage.
Then start to get him down slowly to like 30 - 40 oercent where he is still confident. After that quee HS and make Slam MS WW right after HS. If you are lucky you have enemy dead or about to die as all those attacks come in a few seconds.

Oh and remember abuse hamstring.
I had funny situation yesterday. We had 2 warriors palla warlock and shadow priest. I died fast and so did our shadow priest so it came to 3 v 5 then suddenly enemies started slacking and it ended with one enemy shammy vs our MS warrior and palla and our warrior was so confident he forgot to hamstring shammy.
Shammy was kitting them for 4 - 5 min spaming /lol emotes. It was a bit ambarassing tbh.

Edited, Sep 11th 2007 3:30am by Krisss

I would have listed the Mace (see: I have a Stormherald), but I was trying to do a more direct comparison to the Gorehowl. *shrug*

Thanks for the tips, folks. It is greatly appreciated and quite useful. Also, on a almost too simple note, I found something that helped a lot. I changed the camera angle....sounds odd, doesn't it? I usually PvE and have a camera angle from behind, and a little up. For the arena, I switched it to almost straight down, zoomed out, and it works a lot better. I can see a lot more of whats going on and keep up with other guys who insist on dancing around and spinning circles.

Also, I caught a break and found a team to work with....3 X 3. A pally, rogue, and myself. We did some matches last night. And though they are as inexperienced as I was, we learned a lot and had fun....though out win/loss record was not exactly rosy.

Lastly, keep the advice coming. I still have a lot to learn....of that I am quite certain.

No, I'm not laughing, when I started out we were doing good to win 20-30% of our matches.

Points are awarded by which of your teams would give you the most points. So if you had 3 teams you would only get the points from the team that awarded the most points. This is usually your 5v5 team as there is a 20% reduction in points recieved from 3v3 teams and a 40% reduction from 2v2 teams. Not sure if that answers your question or not.

The Pala most probably got another Arena team, may it be 2v2 or 5v5. The other teams rating could be higher than your 3v3 team... You see if you got a 2v2, 3v3 and a 5v5 team and all their ratings are 1200 you will get the 5v5 teams rating as it will give you more Arena points than the other two... I also got a 3v3 team and we use to get wipped alot, but last week we actually got a win ratio of above 50%. So keep at it and all for the best...

Warrior is the most gear depended class. This means that warrior that just hit level is the weakest thing under the sun. Don't expect it to improve fast unless you will get some nice (epic) gear.

As for honor farming AV > all if you solo. Of course you will need tokens from other BGs to buy gear as well. My advice is run AV on weekdays and on weekends run this BG which gives additional honor.

If you will get sick of BGs you can farm mats for crafted gear or get epic ring for soul shards. Make sure you have best weapon avialable for you. If you are BS make one if not get crafted epic axe or sword - 109 DPS is a nice start.

Take heart my friend, and take a patience pill as well, that's what you're going to need. I was / and still am, I guess, in the boat as you. I hit 70, did all the necessary quests to get the best gear from them. Levelled my smithing to make my epix, made some neat gear as well (my Ragesteel gloves are the best pure dps gloves outside heroics, maybe even Kara).

I've only ever solo'd, don't like running instances (whether that's because I don't like the runs, or I don't like grouping, I'm not sure - but it's irrelevant), and I geared myself out pretty well despite that. I made /did enough to get BS to 375, got my Netherdrake, got exalted with Scryers, and pretty much did everything else that I could without starting to Raid.

That's when I decided to start PvP (I had 10 HK's to my name at the time thanks to a crazy 10 mins in AB when I was 39). The funny thing is, up until that point, I shunned PvP even more than instances, but I thought, "hey what the hell". I entered EotS with a few of my buddies (2 were as green as me, 2 were PvP-crazy), and had the biggest blast of my WoW career up until that point. I decided right then that this would be what I was going to do. So I started doing BG's, mainly AV for the honor, and if I felt like testing my skills against other players directly, I would try the others.

When I started, I had 7200 hp, 6500 armour, 1500 AP (thanks to imp berserker stance) and 27% crit (in zerker). The one comment I received here which woke me up was "I could 3-shot you with those numbers if we ever fought". So, I dumped a lot of my stamina light gear (even if it meant losing AP and crit), and started building up on survivability. As a blacksmith, I crafted a set of adamantite battlegear which, while only being level 66/67 gear, are 3 of the best PvP items that can be easily gotten. SOcketed smartly, these are better than the equivalent HW pvp items (if you ignore the res, which you shouldn't, but hey). I also changed from Axesmith to Hammersmith and crafted Thunder (109dps 2H mace). I respecced to a 33/25/3 build, and decided I was good to go.

I now have the 3 veterans plate items, and together with a few other pieces I picked up of the AH, I have 10,944 Hp, ~8000 armour, 1450 AP and a shade over 20% crit (resilience kills crits anyway so this is my lowest priority).

Right now, 1 on 1 - I pity Fire Mages, rogues, shammies, priests (non-shadow), hunters - I win a large majority of those encounters. 50/50 encounters are other warriors and 'locks (berersker rage and death wish are your friends against these critters). No win encounters (for me at least) are frost mages and shadow priests - just can't seem to beat these guys. Pally's are another animal totally - It's hard to kill them cos they are incredibly hardy - but they do absolutely nothing to me. I am yet to be killed by a pally, but HAVE killed my fair share - something which is incredibly satisfying ;-)

I will continue to work the BG's and get the other 3 epic pieces (neck, back and ring), at which stage I will take a break from the BG's until the season one gear becomes available with honour. Until then I'll run a few arenas with my newly geared out butt and see how well I do when I am always focus-fired ;-).

My main advice, give the bg's a good go - and don't be put off by dying .. it will happen ... all the time. But you will kill lots as well. You will also get to learn how to play your class properly, more so than you would ever have thought. Try and get yourself into a position when there is a Pally or Drood nearby - you will be absolutely deadly if they decide to start taking upon themselves to keep you alive. Endless DPS coupled to endless healing FTW.

Another few pointers, make sure you have First aid maxed, and make sure you have large amounts of bandages with you all the time. We can't pop a spell on ourselves to replenish lost HP between fights, so bandages are your friends. Also, learn to fight on the move... your opponents will always be moving as well, and you need to make sure you're not sitting in the same place waiting for some rogue to backstab you. Map your main abilities to easy to access buttons, and learn where these are, you need to be able to react as fast as possible in order to be effective.

Apologies if you're already familiar with these tips (which you would be if you have PvP'd a fair bit before reaching 70), but for me, these were by far the most relevant bits of advise I received, along with "Get sta gear/enchants/gems".

Sorry for the looong post, but I'm just glad there's another warrior in my position.

Good luck, and most important of all ... have fun ;-)

AV is Alterac Valley. It's a mixture of PvP and PvE in that your ultimate goal is to kill the other factions general. He's a 72 or so elite with around 350k hp. There are a number of other elites throughout the BG that yield honor if you kill them too.

ofc there are players there too and numerous little scirmishes break out all over the place, or massive ones break out in the middle if everybody ignores the main goal of the BG for a while - Imo, these are the most fun - a massive all out brawl 40v40, where you die in a matter of nano-seconds and you kill as fast.

The unique thing about AV is that everybody in the BG gets the honor for taking down the objectives, which means you don't actually have to be involved with achieving the objectives to get the honor.

This, is turn, leads on to the big negative about AV .. Leechers. Because you get the honor wherever you are in the BG, you get scores of players who enter the bg and never move from the starting cave. As long as they are there for the duration of the BG, they reap the rewards.

There are normally in the region of about 15 players per AV who are in the cave leeching, you will quickly grow to despise them. Just accept it as a fact of PvP life and move on. There are changes afoot to help eliminate these leechers (cheaters, AFKers, etc) in an upcoming patch, so let's hold thumbs for that.

It's good fun though, especially when everybody collectively decides to ignore the BG objectives for a while and just focus on beating the cr*p outta the opposing faction players.