Hey all. Today I want to talk about an issue that is about as near to my heart as anything related to arenas can be. Most people take a lot of time to figure out their gear and spec before stepping into arenas: they look for good teammates of the right classes, and they try to research strats, macros, mods, and anything else they can think of that might contribute to a win in arena. The number one most neglected issue is probably the most important: your mindset. When you go into an arena, you want to leave all considerations about what others will think of you if you lose, or how lame the other team’s comp is, and just focus on focusing.
What exactly is the right mindset? Well, you have to approach your games with the analytical skills of the scientist. Sometimes FRAPSing games can be helpful for review, but this can be hard to watch between queues, so you also want to cultivate the ability to vividly playback in your mind as much of the game as you can remember.
But first, let’s talk about the analytical part. Every time you go into a game, you want your whole team to be on the same page as far as the strategy. Once you’re inside the game, everyone has to be committed to what you plan to do, and there can be no second-guessing each other.
Once the strat has been settled on and the game played out, then you can sit back and try to figure out what went wrong. Even when you win, you probably made mistakes, so figuring out why you won is just as important as figuring out why you lost, unless you’re absolutely positive you will NEVER see that team again because you beat them so thoroughly they all deleted their character :P. If you lost and think this happened because of poor execution, then you should discuss this with your teammates and try the same strat again. If you executed perfectly and still lost, it may be time to modify the strat.
Of course, other factors such as RNG (a fancy term for “luck”) and gear exist, which can play a role whenever there is a large disparity. It’s usually not as big a deal as people think, however. You have to try and isolate what the major factors were in the outcome of the match- most people will do this naturally, but if you don’t discuss it on vent, your team will never be able to benefit from experience!
OK, so you discuss everything, you watched the replay, you know exactly what went wrong… or do you? Because everyone can only watch their own screen (and usually not even everything that happens on that screen) what happens is everyone gets a different perspective of the match. You must realize that you can’t see everything that happened, but one of your teammates probably did, so ask them to find out what was going on.
Aside from that, your responsibility is to keep track of as many things as humanly possible during a game, if for no other reason than it increases your chances of figuring out what went wrong. Importantly, you are not perfect and you can not have seen everything- there are multiple viewpoints and sometimes they are both at least partially correct, so be patient.
-Jurgwena
Also, check out the forums at skill-capped.com if you have any direct questions for me! there are tons of good videos for anyone wanting to learn how to pvp better as well.
“Once the strat has been settled on and the game played out, then you can sit back and try to figure out what went wrong.”
This is something i found out this week which is so important. I play hunter/ret/priest, me and the ret pala always seemed to want to do other things, if i called fast switch to a druid (which is the most simple of strats vs rdruid teams) he would sometimes switch to some one else because he wasnt sure i my choice of switch targets was correct. He got replaced and now it works perfect pretty much every time.
I think one of the most important things is to always appear like you know what your doing and know that you can and will control the other team to doing what you want. If you know your better than the people your playing against then you will find the games 10x easier.