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[WoW] Arena mechanics and tactics
Ryokaze
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Arenas are a brand new beast in terms of Warcraft's PvP scene. For good or ill, PvP has transformed from an objective-based apparatus with a focus on wider strategy, to a small scale tactical game. No longer is a win or loss based on how well you split your flag return/flag defense team, or how focused they stay on their objective; no longer is a LM/GM alternating rez wave assault from the BS a deciding factor in matches. Deathmatch may have destroyed strategy, but it's certainly brought tactics and (to a woeful extent) FOTM builds to the forefront.
While many successful team builds are already well established, it's absolutely possible to do well with just about any class of any spec, with very few exceptions. In the ensuing (long) post, I'm going to try to detail the underlying mechanics of how arenas operate, and expose some of the reasons behind why certain classes and combinations are powerful, and why others seem to lack. Hopefully this information will help illuminate things you can do with your odd class, rather than just complaining about how overpowered warriors are! (Die, mace stun, die.)
First, the DPS side of things:
There are many different ways to make things die in arenas, I've loosely categorized means of dealing death in three ways: Burst, Attrition, and Drain.
Burst teams seek to take a target from 70% to 0 in the space of a global cooldown; DPS Shaman, Mages, and Shadow Priests, and to a lesser extent Warriors, Rogues, and Warlocks are all staples of burst teams. They will require excellent coordination in releasing a burst wave at the same time (okay guys, cast NOW) and will also require a good bit of multitasking in control and healer shutdown on the part of dps members. As an Affliction Warlock in a 4DPS team, for instance, I'm very frequently fearing a shaman, starting a nuke on our target, and then swapping target to a healer while mid cast to spell lock an incoming heal. Situational awareness is paramount for Burst teams. It should be noted that Burst is the way to go for all DPS 2v2/3v3 teams, and 4 DPS 5v5 teams, all of which are quite viable at high levels of play.
Attrition teams attempt to force (and win) a mana war through sustained damage on MS'd or Wounding Poisoned targets. Warriors are an obvious staple of Attrition-based 5v5 teams, Rogues are also quite powerful as the focusing DPS for 2's and 3's in this kind of matrix. One key to playing attrition is to not have any members that are a large damage dump for the opposing team, and to limit mana-dependency as much as possible. Affliction warlocks and priests in particular do fairly poorly for attrition games, being very easy to catch and deal large amounts of damage to. Mages, while very dependant on mana, can do quite well in attrition, the key is to not focus so much on damage, but on control and longevity, bursting only when called for. Durable classes do very well in attrition matrices, Three durable healers with two non-limited DPS can work quite well in an attrition 5v5 setup, especially with the ability to have one of the three drinking at any given time.
Drain teams only very rarely existed until this season, with the advent of 400+ resilience on damned near everybody in upper brackets, dealing damage really took a big hit in terms of effectiveness. So where to strike next? Why, mana bars, of course! The premise of a drain team is to limit incoming damage as much as possible, and simply drain healers dry with every method at your disposal. Hunters are an absolute staple of a drain setup, scorpid poison+viper sting drains gargantuan amounts of mana, and is very, very difficult to get rid of. Holy priests and SL warlocks are the ideal support candidates for the draining hunter, and between fear, frost traps, and scatter shot, it's quite possible to keep your squishy classes alive for long periods of time. The key here is to run the hell away the moment any one member gets targeted, damage dealt is absolutely unimportant, mana drain will eventually win the fight for you so long as no one dies.
As you can see, there are overlaps between the team types, and--of course--every class brings unique tools to the table when you're determining what classes to bring. Attrition and Drain classes can work very well together, for instance. Mortal strike + Viper sting or mana burn is an outstanding way to run healers out of mana, and win the mana war even faster. Burst classes can also work well with Attrition classes, taking someone from 100% to 0 instantly is a tall order for even the most coordinated of teams, but mix in classes that are excellent at keeping pressure on a target (Rogues, Warriors, Warlocks) and suddenly you don't have to burst from 100 to 0, you only have to take someone from 70%, or maybe less if timed correctly. Unfortunately, Drain-based classes and heavy burst classes don't seem to work so well together. Hunters suffer from dealing physical damage, and so can't really be counted on for a proper burst, as such, they work fairly poorly with elemental shaman, shadow priests, and damage-happy mages. There are too many specific combinations to really go into here, but I hope the mechanics laid out like this help someone to build a successful DPS setup.
Secondly, Healing:
Healing has become a very, very difficult proposition in arenas, as player skill has gradually improved, those improvements have generally been made in awareness of healers. Many teams have established interrupt rotations, leaving healers who depend on casted heals (I'm looking at you, paladins) completely unable to get any healing out for extended periods of time. It's for this reason that most Paladins have discovered that they more or less *need* a second healer to do well in any arena, which is why we've seen such a decline in pally/X 2v2's in high end arenas, and a virtual extinction of pally+2 DPS in 3v3. Paladins do bring quite a bit of power in the form of blessings, but those have become much less effective, with both sacrifice and freedom taking large hits, making sacrifice nearly useless, and freedom much easier to keep off by dispel classes. Resto shaman suffer from many of the same problems, but they also lack a defensive dispel to keep their partner free of CC's, which, in my opinion, puts them in an even worse place than where paladins are at currently for small arenas.
Alternate healers have been developing tactics to fill the vacuum left by all the paladins, and they've done so quite well. Druids and Priests are fairly similar, in that any free global cooldown they get while not CC'd will turn into thousands of hp in hots/shields/PoM's, unlike their shaman and paladin brethren, who must spend time vulnerable to CC's to get healing done. What each brings to the table other than those instant heals is what suits them for certain pairings. Druids bring very strong CC to the mix, as well as superior durability in the form of kiting, but lack defensive dispels, and so require a team that can break or avoid CC as much as possible. Priests are much stronger in terms of what they can cast given time, but lack a lot of durability. Both an offensive and defensive dispel is an advantage that can't be ignored for small arenas, mana burn is also the only tool capable of beating a lot of attrition teams, especially with the relatively inefficient heals that priests provide. Teams that can avoid damage and let the priest use his offensive utility in lieu of spam healing will find the greatest success.
Shaman are a mixed bag of tools, a bag that I feel is fairly weak at the moment. Shaman healers are at their best, I feel, when they're a part of a burst team that doesn't already have an elemental shaman, bloodlust is very powerful, and if you don't have an ele sham to provide it, you might as well have a resto shaman! Some teams have gotten quite high in the 5v5 ratings by going 4dps+resto shaman, so it's quite possible. Lacking a defensive dispel can be crippling however, pairing with a shadow priest seems ideal, who also require a UA warlock to function well, which begins to pigeonhole your team very quickly. Some of Shaman's most powerful tools (tremor, grounding, poison cleansing) are extremely unreliable at the moment, and teams you would think that a shaman could counter very well end up not being countered so easily, due entirely to the weakness that totems present.
Healers, more than any other class, rely on the support of pillars in arenas. Try to stay near LoS objects, and get around them when you see people focusing on you. Use instants to heal as you're running, stopping will typically mean death. Turning nameplates on (V by default) is absolutely necessary, as you can see the opposing player's nameplates and 'dance' them around the pillar, staying 180 degrees away from them at all times. It's an invaluable skill, and one that should be practiced as often as possible.
Finally, practice! PracticePracticePractice!
Ten games a week for points may sound like a good deal, but it really isn't. You won't get better by playing a few team types once or twice a week, and you'll end up getting far fewer points than you could have gotten by just playing more. It may feel like a risk to your rating to play more games, but when you think about it, what do you really have to lose? The same teams hover around the same rating week after week. If you play enough, you'll learn how to beat them, or at least how to fight them to a standstill, and your rating will climb above them on to the next bracket, repeat ad infinitum. You should play at least double the games you have to, and if you want to get serious about it, play 50+ every week, it really doesn't take TOO much time, and you'll eventually see returns on your time investment. Take a few minutes after every loss to go over what happened, and what you and your team can do better or differently. Things are much more transient than they seem, and oftentimes somewhere in your matrix you'll have a skill or spell that can turn an otherwise impossible situation into a possible one.
I hope this helps some of you understand why certain classes do/don't work together, and help you figure out what kind of matrix you can run with, and remember, just about any setup can make it to 2k in 2v2/3v3 if you have the grit and determination to see it through. I play with an enhancement shaman, and we broke 2200 in 3's by spending time learning what we could do. So if we can do it with an enhance shaman, you can do it too.
I'd love to have more cogent discussions about arenas around here, so please, fire away! Tell me I'm stupid! Ask me why Ret Pallies fail long time! Ask me about all the things I left out!
While many successful team builds are already well established, it's absolutely possible to do well with just about any class of any spec, with very few exceptions. In the ensuing (long) post, I'm going to try to detail the underlying mechanics of how arenas operate, and expose some of the reasons behind why certain classes and combinations are powerful, and why others seem to lack. Hopefully this information will help illuminate things you can do with your odd class, rather than just complaining about how overpowered warriors are! (Die, mace stun, die.)
First, the DPS side of things:
There are many different ways to make things die in arenas, I've loosely categorized means of dealing death in three ways: Burst, Attrition, and Drain.
Burst teams seek to take a target from 70% to 0 in the space of a global cooldown; DPS Shaman, Mages, and Shadow Priests, and to a lesser extent Warriors, Rogues, and Warlocks are all staples of burst teams. They will require excellent coordination in releasing a burst wave at the same time (okay guys, cast NOW) and will also require a good bit of multitasking in control and healer shutdown on the part of dps members. As an Affliction Warlock in a 4DPS team, for instance, I'm very frequently fearing a shaman, starting a nuke on our target, and then swapping target to a healer while mid cast to spell lock an incoming heal. Situational awareness is paramount for Burst teams. It should be noted that Burst is the way to go for all DPS 2v2/3v3 teams, and 4 DPS 5v5 teams, all of which are quite viable at high levels of play.
Attrition teams attempt to force (and win) a mana war through sustained damage on MS'd or Wounding Poisoned targets. Warriors are an obvious staple of Attrition-based 5v5 teams, Rogues are also quite powerful as the focusing DPS for 2's and 3's in this kind of matrix. One key to playing attrition is to not have any members that are a large damage dump for the opposing team, and to limit mana-dependency as much as possible. Affliction warlocks and priests in particular do fairly poorly for attrition games, being very easy to catch and deal large amounts of damage to. Mages, while very dependant on mana, can do quite well in attrition, the key is to not focus so much on damage, but on control and longevity, bursting only when called for. Durable classes do very well in attrition matrices, Three durable healers with two non-limited DPS can work quite well in an attrition 5v5 setup, especially with the ability to have one of the three drinking at any given time.
Drain teams only very rarely existed until this season, with the advent of 400+ resilience on damned near everybody in upper brackets, dealing damage really took a big hit in terms of effectiveness. So where to strike next? Why, mana bars, of course! The premise of a drain team is to limit incoming damage as much as possible, and simply drain healers dry with every method at your disposal. Hunters are an absolute staple of a drain setup, scorpid poison+viper sting drains gargantuan amounts of mana, and is very, very difficult to get rid of. Holy priests and SL warlocks are the ideal support candidates for the draining hunter, and between fear, frost traps, and scatter shot, it's quite possible to keep your squishy classes alive for long periods of time. The key here is to run the hell away the moment any one member gets targeted, damage dealt is absolutely unimportant, mana drain will eventually win the fight for you so long as no one dies.
As you can see, there are overlaps between the team types, and--of course--every class brings unique tools to the table when you're determining what classes to bring. Attrition and Drain classes can work very well together, for instance. Mortal strike + Viper sting or mana burn is an outstanding way to run healers out of mana, and win the mana war even faster. Burst classes can also work well with Attrition classes, taking someone from 100% to 0 instantly is a tall order for even the most coordinated of teams, but mix in classes that are excellent at keeping pressure on a target (Rogues, Warriors, Warlocks) and suddenly you don't have to burst from 100 to 0, you only have to take someone from 70%, or maybe less if timed correctly. Unfortunately, Drain-based classes and heavy burst classes don't seem to work so well together. Hunters suffer from dealing physical damage, and so can't really be counted on for a proper burst, as such, they work fairly poorly with elemental shaman, shadow priests, and damage-happy mages. There are too many specific combinations to really go into here, but I hope the mechanics laid out like this help someone to build a successful DPS setup.
Secondly, Healing:
Healing has become a very, very difficult proposition in arenas, as player skill has gradually improved, those improvements have generally been made in awareness of healers. Many teams have established interrupt rotations, leaving healers who depend on casted heals (I'm looking at you, paladins) completely unable to get any healing out for extended periods of time. It's for this reason that most Paladins have discovered that they more or less *need* a second healer to do well in any arena, which is why we've seen such a decline in pally/X 2v2's in high end arenas, and a virtual extinction of pally+2 DPS in 3v3. Paladins do bring quite a bit of power in the form of blessings, but those have become much less effective, with both sacrifice and freedom taking large hits, making sacrifice nearly useless, and freedom much easier to keep off by dispel classes. Resto shaman suffer from many of the same problems, but they also lack a defensive dispel to keep their partner free of CC's, which, in my opinion, puts them in an even worse place than where paladins are at currently for small arenas.
Alternate healers have been developing tactics to fill the vacuum left by all the paladins, and they've done so quite well. Druids and Priests are fairly similar, in that any free global cooldown they get while not CC'd will turn into thousands of hp in hots/shields/PoM's, unlike their shaman and paladin brethren, who must spend time vulnerable to CC's to get healing done. What each brings to the table other than those instant heals is what suits them for certain pairings. Druids bring very strong CC to the mix, as well as superior durability in the form of kiting, but lack defensive dispels, and so require a team that can break or avoid CC as much as possible. Priests are much stronger in terms of what they can cast given time, but lack a lot of durability. Both an offensive and defensive dispel is an advantage that can't be ignored for small arenas, mana burn is also the only tool capable of beating a lot of attrition teams, especially with the relatively inefficient heals that priests provide. Teams that can avoid damage and let the priest use his offensive utility in lieu of spam healing will find the greatest success.
Shaman are a mixed bag of tools, a bag that I feel is fairly weak at the moment. Shaman healers are at their best, I feel, when they're a part of a burst team that doesn't already have an elemental shaman, bloodlust is very powerful, and if you don't have an ele sham to provide it, you might as well have a resto shaman! Some teams have gotten quite high in the 5v5 ratings by going 4dps+resto shaman, so it's quite possible. Lacking a defensive dispel can be crippling however, pairing with a shadow priest seems ideal, who also require a UA warlock to function well, which begins to pigeonhole your team very quickly. Some of Shaman's most powerful tools (tremor, grounding, poison cleansing) are extremely unreliable at the moment, and teams you would think that a shaman could counter very well end up not being countered so easily, due entirely to the weakness that totems present.
Healers, more than any other class, rely on the support of pillars in arenas. Try to stay near LoS objects, and get around them when you see people focusing on you. Use instants to heal as you're running, stopping will typically mean death. Turning nameplates on (V by default) is absolutely necessary, as you can see the opposing player's nameplates and 'dance' them around the pillar, staying 180 degrees away from them at all times. It's an invaluable skill, and one that should be practiced as often as possible.
Finally, practice! PracticePracticePractice!
Ten games a week for points may sound like a good deal, but it really isn't. You won't get better by playing a few team types once or twice a week, and you'll end up getting far fewer points than you could have gotten by just playing more. It may feel like a risk to your rating to play more games, but when you think about it, what do you really have to lose? The same teams hover around the same rating week after week. If you play enough, you'll learn how to beat them, or at least how to fight them to a standstill, and your rating will climb above them on to the next bracket, repeat ad infinitum. You should play at least double the games you have to, and if you want to get serious about it, play 50+ every week, it really doesn't take TOO much time, and you'll eventually see returns on your time investment. Take a few minutes after every loss to go over what happened, and what you and your team can do better or differently. Things are much more transient than they seem, and oftentimes somewhere in your matrix you'll have a skill or spell that can turn an otherwise impossible situation into a possible one.
I hope this helps some of you understand why certain classes do/don't work together, and help you figure out what kind of matrix you can run with, and remember, just about any setup can make it to 2k in 2v2/3v3 if you have the grit and determination to see it through. I play with an enhancement shaman, and we broke 2200 in 3's by spending time learning what we could do. So if we can do it with an enhance shaman, you can do it too.
I'd love to have more cogent discussions about arenas around here, so please, fire away! Tell me I'm stupid! Ask me why Ret Pallies fail long time! Ask me about all the things I left out!
Ryokaze on
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Posts
Damn you, Time Warner.
It went something like:
1) The warrior died immediately and with little fan-fare
2) The healers dropped from the instance in shame
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
So now I am leveling a druid to do arenas with. I might be frusterated by thier weaknesses too, but so far I dont see that happening. Having the ability to run around and still cast the majority of my good heals seems to be alot better than a 12 seconds of glory bubble.
I pair with a MS warrior, and I find that it works very well. The warrior will intervene to me, switch stances to hamstring and go back to whatever he was dpsing. I can usually run away enough to get a Holy Light on myself. Also holy shock everytime its up. Srlsy.
Im referring to the range options. Warriors tend to ignore you due to armor, only to throw the occasional intercept. Which in its own right is an interrupt. Any melee that was stupid enough to chase me around was usually on a 1300 or less team
Playing a druid is a different sort of frustrating, you may think paladins go down fast, but my 400 resilience druid can die in the span of intercept --> mace stun --> mace stun --> lololol mace stun, to a single warrior, I can't tell you how many times I've rooted a warrior next to me and been stunned from 100% to dead before I could move out of range. You can very much be slippery and very effective as a druid, but there are just a lot of random things that can stop you from doing anything at all, and when they happen, the game's pretty much over. It's unfortunate that the most common team is 2345 (mage, priest, shaman, warrior, paladin for those unaware,) which really excels at screwing paladins, since the priest is often free enough to watch for bubble and mass dispel immediately followed by a counterspell. It really reduces paladin effectiveness to not even get their 12 seconds of heals out.
Hammer of Justice, Arcane torrent! The lack of instant heals used to be mitigated by blessing of sacrifice, it essentially acted as a HoT on the focused target, but with a 30 second cooldown it's VERY easy to keep off.
Now, I admit I haven't played -that- much in the arena and haven't really moved up the rating ladder all that much, so maybe the people I'm facing don't know how to deal with Pallies that well, but feel comfortable going all out on a squishy priest.
Holy priests have a big bar to entry for being truly competitive in arenas. While a paladin can go into arenas with solid PvE gear and expect to do reasonably well, a priest will get trained down in seconds with PvE gear on every time. Once you start seeing 300 and 400+ resilience on your priest, you'll notice a huge increase in survivability, the synergy between blessed resilience, and the stat resilience is phenomenal, and makes for a very durable clothy.
Of course, without resilience you get your face crit off before blessed resilience procs.
Cute.
Blessed resilience is what gives priests their durability, and it's pretty deep in holy, sooooo...
There's a good reason you don't see pain suppression very frequently.
When I played my warrior, I noticed this. Teams without pvp gear I would go for some cloth wearing guy and I would see numbers I didnt even know exsisted. Then we fought an arena geared team and I couldnt drop a priest or lock for the life of me. It just makes a huge as hell difference. Paladins dont really need resil because they tend not to be focused very often, and even when you do you can usually survive it pretty easilly.
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bxrMzhgzrZfVtIc0oV0h
*The* Arena Healing Priest spec.
It pisses me off. What rapes paladins is mana burn, mindflay, and other non crit spells.
A guy in tier 5 is pretty much just as good against caster heavy teams as I am, in full merciless. Though, I have the edge versus mages, as they are a crit heavy class.
I had a paladin dance around the grave in the middle of the Lordaeron arena, LOSing every single mana burn I threw at him. There was nothing I could do.
Don't get me wrong. The second I see any priest casting a shadow spell at me, I run for cover.
Just saying, gladiator armour doesn't help against it anymore than t5 does.
Was he healing anyone? Kinda hard to heal as a paladin while dancing around LOS like that. Holy shock doesnt quite cut it.
I can lock one down pretty damn well, and this is also where I prove how godly arcane torrent is. It's yet another spell interrupt in between kicks, stuns and blinding powders. Until a pally bubbles, he is my bitch.
Once a pally bubbles, I just change targets for the next couple of seconds, and then switch right back to him and finish him off. I have yet to ever win a match against a paladin that we just left alone and didn't focus at least one person on. I dunno, i'll be the first to admit that I'm not really good at the arena, but I always found it a really bad idea to ever leave any healer unattended.
Thats generally a good idea. Warlocks and priests also fuck paladins up, but rogues do a good job.
They just don't really kill the paladin outright, just prevent them from casting.
It was a 2v2. My partner (rogue) was laying into his partner (warlock). They were coordinating so the lock would DOT/fear my rogue and then run to be in LOS of the pally as he ran out of LOS from me. There was very little we could do. The fight lasted a good 5 minutes, but I ultimately ran out of mana when the lock realized he had an instant cast mana drain channel spell that gets off at least 2 ticks of drain regardless of how quick I ninja out of LOS.
To win with a paladin, you basically have to have your partner take one them out before you are forced to bubble and it wears off. Or at least, shortly after it wears off.
Granted, my teams hover around 1900 right now. But I haven't had huge problems with lockdown, unless its from warlocks.
Rogues do a superb job of locking paladins down, but they're generally better used in a dps target unless you have no other means of shutdown. Not only will you deal superior damage to a squishy, forcing holy lights on Wounding Poisoned targets is an excellent way to oom a paladin, not to mention that wounding poison acts as a permanent 50% CC. Generally speaking, other classes have ways of shutting down paladins for similar amounts of time, but can ALSO stay on a focus target. Mages and warlocks can both CS + nuke, oomkin can cyclone --> nuke --> cyclone again, hunters can tab silencing shot, even warriors can pummel --> intercept back to their target. I think that's one thing that using the new 2.3 shadowstep is going to give rogues, you can spend time locking a healer down, and then when your focus gets low, kidney shot the healer ---> vanish --> shadowstep/ambush onto your target for a +50% damage ambush from hell.
How do hunters hold up against Paladins? We run a Druid/Hunter/Rogue team and the one time we did try and focus the hunter on the pally, we got curb stomped. We never gave it another shot, but I figured I'd ask as maybe it would be better for them to annoy the hell out of the pally while I burn someone else down.
Also,
Hunters are awful against paladins. I mean, you can annoy us, but its nearly impossible to kill a paladin as a hunter. Good luck having them stand in the open and let you.
I guess in a 5v5 setting, where the paladin is forced out in the open, you can open fire on them, but in that case, hunter isn't particularly more useful than any other dps in that regard.
Warlock + Shadow Priest (especially geared UA + sPriest)
MS Warrior targeting Pally
Rogue targeting pally
Shammy (smart with ES)
AP/POM Mage targeting pally
Ice mage
Hunter (Marks / Surival)
Warrior targeting someone else
Rogue targeting someone else
Druid Feral
Hunter (BM)
Actually basically anything targeting the pally first.
The Hunter's domain in arenas is currently drain and damage mitigation. Your hunter needs a scorpid, and he needs to relentlessly apply viper sting to their paladin. Beyond that, it becomes a waiting game, you still need to apply some damage to force him into burning mana, but you want to do it in the most efficient way possible while still not taking a whole lot of damage yourself. You also can't let your scorpid die, high end teams will gank your scorpid behind a pillar so that viper can be cleansed and the pally can drink.
It's certainly an uphill battle, but played well (and you have shitloads of CC with that team to accomplish this with) you should be able to play the drain/attrition game reasonably well.
Also, don't quote me on the shadowstep thing, post 2.3 shadowstep might end up sucking just as badly as 2.2 shadowstep does, but there's hope!
The majority of my games we never had the luxury of taking people out that quickly. But I think I had figured out our problem was having 2 warriors in a 5v5 with only one being MS, the other fury, and most teams learned to CC the MS warrior and they could heal through anything we did. Other DPS was a PVE lock who never PVPed before. The second healer was a shaman then a priest.
I was on a team with a shaman - 2 MS warrior - Moonkin before and we did very well, but I still ran into similar problems. Being locked down like noones business.
My biggest fear has always been mages. Nothing scares me more than an 8 second lockdown on everything on my action bar sans auto attack.
On the other hand, two warriors and a burst class on something like a warlock is pretty much GG for the unlucky lock, so you have to make calls, but be aware that more strategies are available.
And make fun of hunters as I may, I did some BM hunter/ MS warrior/ Holy Paladin 3v3 today and we flattened some 2k+ rated teams, even with the hunter DCing in one battle. Helps when all of us are completely decked out and play really agressively.
Massive Crystal Cavern!
Sitting back behind your pillar waiting for them to come to you, or rushing in on them from the start and going all out as quick as you can.
Which sounds more aggressive to you?
Granted those aren't the only two ways to play, you can also mana burn or just play run around and drag the fight out, you can play it man to man, heavy cc up front, save your crowd control, etc. There's lots of different little ways to play arena, it's not just "go kill shit!"