State of 5v5 arena? (EU vindication/general)

[Kaynin]

I'm on vindication, dinged 70 a week ago and went straight to the lion's pit. Granted, I did not expect to win yet. But here's what I've encountered so far.

First week. 1 win 9 losses - 4x shaman 8500 hp, 150 resiliance. 1x clothadin friend, 0 resiliance 6600 hp.
8 teams were full vengeful 3 geared, including shoulders on at least three people. Sometimes all five. All teams I lost 6-10 rating from. One team I won 22 rating from.

Did not meet blue geared/s1 geared teams.

Second week. This week, only had one day but, 8 wins and 13 losses. My partner was a full vengeful resto shaman this time. One of the best pvp resto shamans on my server.
21 games, met one team with s1 gear twice. The rest, all s2 or vengeful geared. Most of these teams were all 1400-1600 rating. Met one team I only lost 2 points against. The rest was between 8-18 win or loss.

Vindication battlegroup in the EU is a relatively small battlegroup. In battlegrounds, horde wins most of the time. Which is pretty nice. But 5v5 arena really seems to be dominated by full s3 geared teams. The occasional fresh teams are basicly so demoralized after a week, they forget about it and move to 2v2/3v3, causing even the better teams to go below 1500 rating, just because there's only good geared teams playing.

I wonder how the people that do arena in EU in this or other battlegroups have experienced the 5v5 bracket as of late. Is this the situation on most/all brackets? Have I had an extremely unlucky pooling in the 31 games I played so far? I didn't expect to get to high rated. But I did half expect to be able to hover around 1500. I broke below 1400 now. I've made a few mistakes, I've bettered some macro's. But most of the teams, I can't down a target. Simply because they outgear me. While they play on such a low rating. It's somewhat degrading...

I don't actually mind loosing, I'm no hothead, and these losses have taught me a great deal, but on the other hand, I also need to get points somehow in order to get the gear in which I can eventually compete on a good level with. This causes me to even consider temporarily migrating to another battleground. (I adore my current server though.) If there's battlegrounds with more active 5v5, and with a gearwall slightly higher then 1500. :p

I'm 70 for one week, running in 9500hp and 212 resiliance and 410 spelldamage now. Which simply isn't enough to nuke down an s3 geared warrior.

Against most of these teams, I dont have a chance, if my initial burst fails, I die within seconds. So far only s3 geared teams without melee I've been able to beat.

...So yeah, is it just my battleground? Is the grass greener on the other side? :p One month cooldown on transfers might be worth checking out another battlegroup for to get points quicker.

[Havelcek]

The truth is that arenas have been out so long now that people have gathered a lot of gear, even if you only log in once a week to lose your 10 games. Though seeing S3-geared folks in that bracket is probably more about win-trading than anything else.

[Mosg2]

I transferred to Barthilas which is on BG9 (Much to my chagrin, thought it was BG6) and my experience has been fairly similar. Almost every team I ran into from 1500-1650 was at least 70% S3, with most everyone having at least the weapons/shoulders. As Havelcek said, arena has been aroung long enough that people have been able to accrue points and go hog wild on the S3 stuff... Also, keep in mind that with the personal rating requirements on much of the S4 stuff, many people are burning points on the S3 stuff that they don't feel they'll be able to replace with S4.

The good news is that the difference between S2 and S4 won't be *that* significant. If you're in full S2/S3 when S4 goes live and you've got points banked then you'll do ok. Casters have an easier time of it than melee--They've *got* to get the new weapons to see a significant DPS increase.

[Kaynin]

Hmm, also asked around at other battlegroups and people I know in other battlegroups.

It seems a global problem in 5v5. No one bothers with that bracket anymore unless they got the decent gear. ;_;

[Crayonbox]

5s is mostly dominated by a more competitive players than the 2v2 and 3v3, in my experience anyway.
The 2s and 3s brackets contain the most class imbalances and thus is easier to rank gimmick teams to 2k rating, however the 5s bracket are more balanced and tend to keep players who are actually interested in the competition. Usually...

best bet is to keep playing and get the gear and practice for when season 4 comes out where everyone starts at 1500 again.

[Boylston]

I've chronicled my gear and arena records week by week on my blog, but I think what you're seeing is pretty universal.

I have fought folks with Gladiator titles and full vengeful that are on 1450 rated teams. I could tell all the same stories you're telling. If you just ding 70, you are at a severe disadvantage to folks who may be completely horrible but have slowly accumulated S2 and S3 gear.

The good news is Patch 2.4 rep-based-PvP items help. My first week in arena was spent with my new shamans (3 of them) at 6600 HP, 0 resilience, and 500 or less spell damage. I played with a warlock and we went 2-13. Things have slowly bounced their way up and down since then.

I'm sustaining between a 1550 and 1600 rating now, and I expect that with a couple more pieces of arena gear and some spell damage that we'll start breaking 1700. I think of our current situation as training to run with ankle weights on. :)

Hang in there, accumulate as much honor gear as you can, and work on your spell damage. That's going to be the biggest thing for you. The good news is that a S3 warrior on a 1500 team and a S3 warrior on a 2200 team will have about the same HPs. If you can get your tactics and teamwork with your partner solid, you'll be set for when your gear improves.

We are getting better, so my current complaint is not that the teams in the 1500-1600 have much better gear, it's that we will occasionally lose to a team that's at a 1300-1400 rating but is full of S3 geared folks. 18-20 point losses stink!


Keep at it-- If you can get better now, you'll totally mop up once the gear levels are matched better!

[Ellay]

Your going to get hit with well geared players then entire way, pretty sure it's like that on every battlegroup.
I'd shoot for the S1 gear and max it out and move forward. It took me quite a while to get better and better when I first hit 70 >< so your not alone.

[Kaynin]

Well, so far most of my problems have been faulty macro's. :p

[target=focustarget] not targeting hunters that feign. Was the most annoying macro error. Hunter at 30%, he feigns, I blow my instant, but I dont get the target except with my main. Can't target the hunter with my alts for some reason, aaaaargh! He got healed up, instant at the ready on my three alts, uugh, screwed. :P

>.< Some other stuff too that needed tweaking.

Accidentally going below the bridge was a huge mistake once. There was this team that constantly charge me, hit me once then jumped below the bridge. (Which looked very funny) and I had beat them quite badly once before, so they were just messing about, I figured, what the heck, went down tried to kill them, LoS screwed me over. xD

But that's all not the problem really, everyone has to learn, arena has always been a learning curve. :P Just would have been way more awesome to be up against teams in similar gear for better competition. =) Ah well, I'll just farm all non set epics first, then s1 stuff where I don't have vengeful yet. (Probably will get like, gloves in two weeks, then going for chest in 3-4 weeks.. Mmh... I reckon in about two months I should be geared up enough to compete proper with s3 teams.)

[Catamer]

I got my shaman team to 70 and jumped right into the arena and was shocked at how bad I did. fighting teams with full s3 gear and you can hardly scratch them. 3 good hits and one player is only down 20%. I won 1 and lost 9 game in my first 10 games. I know my problem is I just need a lot better gear. I guess I'll have to get some non-arena pvp gear before I start to win. I haven't figured out how the points in arena are given, seems random to me.

[Kaynin]

I got my shaman team to 70 and jumped right into the arena and was shocked at how bad I did. fighting teams with full s3 gear and you can hardly scratch them. 3 good hits and one player is only down 20%. I won 1 and lost 9 game in my first 10 games. I know my problem is I just need a lot better gear. I guess I'll have to get some non-arena pvp gear before I start to win. I haven't figured out how the points in arena are given, seems random to me.

You start with 1500 rating, winning or loosing alters that rating, eventually every reset (wednesday in EU) it will give you arena points if you have a team with 10 or more games played that previous week based on the rating you have at that time.

The higher rating the more points, there are calculators on the internet that will say how much points you get for the rating you're at.

And mhm, save first week as me then. Having the exact same problem, that I just can't hurt the first target hard enough to kill them quick, + I get raped within seconds after if I don't down two targets wuick enough. :p

I did better the second week with a full s3 geared healer backing me up, but still was genuinly tough. :p

[Boylston]

If you were asking about how the rating points work and why they seem "random", here's the answer:

When two teams fight, the winners and losers are each awarded or penalized the same amount of rating points. For example:

Winners: +15 rating
Losers: -15 rating

In the above example, these might be two 1500-rated teams at the start (though post-game they'd be 1515 and 1485).

The rating/ladder system expects that a higher rated team should win over a lesser rated team. So the points per match are altered to reflect that. In another example, a 1600 point team plays a 1500 point team.

1600 Team Winners: +13 rating
1500 Team Losers: -13 rating

The points are less than two evenly matched teams because the 1600 team should have been slightly better than the 1500 team. However, if the 1500 team had actually beaten the 1600s (a nice upset for the underdogs!), the points allocation would have worked out something like:

1600 Team Losers: -17 rating
1500 Team Winners: +17 rating

If these same two teams fought only each other continuously, their ratings would naturally converge to some value that would be indicative of how often the other team beat the other. If they were exactly 50% win/loss against each other, both teams would hover around 1500 rating.

At the extremes, the numbers get even farther away from a +/- 15 type award. A 2000 rated team fighting a 1400 team would receive only a small handful of points if they won, and could lose 22+ points if they were beaten. The matching system doesn't often put together such teams, but it can happen.

With me so far?

What a lot of people get upset about is when they lose to a team that is experienced/geared/skilled enough to really be rated much higher than their team's current rating. You may get handily spanked by a bunch of players who are intrinsically geared and skilled enough to be 2000 rated, but are currently playing on a team with a 1400 rating. In essence, you take a bigger point penalty than you should if you had been playing a properly rated 2000 team. (You're still going to lose most of the matches to them, it will just depress your rating more).

The above scenario shouldn't happen too often, but a couple of game mechanics driven behaviors made/make it reasonably common. One was team selling. If three people who are capable of sustaining a 2000 rated 3v3 team wanted to make some cash, they could buy a fresh team each week (or worse, a low-rated 1300ish team), quickly win a bunch of matches in a row, get the team to 1900-2000 rating, and then sell it off for gold. The whole time those players are "farming" up the rating on that team, they are beating teams that are being penalized because they are playing a wolf in sheep's clothing. The worst part is that the biggest penalties are going to come to those teams that are matched against the team while its rating is lowest. Right before the team is sold, the "2000 players" are finishing up the last few matches at a 1950 rating. If they play and beat an opposing team with 1975 rating, it's not going to have mattered (more than a point or two) whether the team's rating was an accurate reflection of the players' skills. That same team from 1200-1500 is going to be matched against much lower teams and is going to easily win. Pity the poor 1500-rated opponents that are matched against these "2000 players" while their new farm team has a 1200-1500 rating.

A not-so-reliable indicator that this is happening to you is the opponents' gear level and arena-awarded titles. Full season 3 opponents may not necessarily be farming a team up to sell. They may just be running with some new friends, they could have just slowly accumulated points up, they could have bought points and be really awful players... etc.

Here's when I knew we were getting screwed by a team farming group. A few weeks back, we were matched against the same team 4 times one night and lost 19, 18, 17, 15 points in those matches. We were very frustrated, because two of them had Duellist titles and all were in good gear. They were obviously lower-rated than our 1550ish team, but were quickly gaining rating because the number of points we lost throughout the night kept going down. Two days later, we fought the same team again and lost 7 points. They had obviously taken a low-rated team and had very quickly raised its rating. The team name was..... "Teamz for Salez"... and since the people in it were actually Horde on my server, at the end of the week we saw the Trade channel filled with its members offering to sell a 1950-rated 5v5 team. Game mechanics changes will make this less of a problem, hopefully.

Point buying is actually a little bit of a help. Points buyers generally pay a team a big sum of gold to play 3 games on an already high-ranked team, most likely lose them, and have the really skilled people who are the "points sellers" play the remaining 7 games for the week. When the buyers play those three games, they will frequently lose (since they're not truly skilled as high as the team is ranked). This seems like a good thing, and it is if you get matched against a points selling team when the "scrubs" or "points buyers" are playing their three games for the week. The problem is, the buyers get onto teams with 1900-2000+ ratings, and you're probably not going to be matched up against them very often if you're on a team that's stuck down at 1500 rating. (It does happen, though-- if you armory a team that you win, say... 21 points off of, you may very well find it's full of awesome players who have played a lot of matches. It will also contain the guys you actually beat, who were the buyers just losing their 3 matches for the week). Preying off points buyers can be done successfully if you play at the same time they are playing AND you are rated high enough to be matched with them with any kind of frequency. If you're a new L70 team at 1400-1500 rating, this isn't going to happen much, however.

Anyhow... there's a little information about arena points, rating, and a little bit of (unsolicited) information about how some arena practices can impact the amount of rating you gain or lose each match.

Hope that helps!

[Kaynin]

I'll take "wall of text crit for 10,000" Alex.

That's what elemental shamans do to people. ;)