Questions from an Arena virgin

[Kromtor]

blizzard certainly did everything they could to scare away casual players from 5v5's this season. merely participating gets you nothing but a bruised ego now.

[mikekim]

blizzard certainly did everything they could to scare away casual players from 5v5's this season. merely participating gets you nothing but a bruised ego now.

which is how it should be... Areana was becoming a joke, where you got points for just standing in there doing /dance

[Littleburst]

Never done arena before, but I have scoured these forums for info. I have a few questions that I can't seem to find any answers for here. (unless they are in the protected Arena forum that I don't have access to)

1) Do you get any points for losing? I'm afraid that I'll suck so bad that I won't win anything for a while

2) It seems like a no-brainer to do 5v5, but some recent posts seem to suggest doing 2v2 or 3v3 because less people are doing 5v5 now, so there are less teams, making wins harder to come by. But wouldn't it both take longer to get points for my 5 toons and make wins harder to come by because I won't have as much DPS on a single target?

3) For elemental shamans, is haste or crit or mastery the best stat for PVP? I recall haste being the best stat in the past, but I'm not sure at this point.

Thanks.

2) The advantage from a boxer is perfect communication between 4 toons. The smaller the arena, the smaller the advantage becomes. So we're definitely most effective in 5's, but it also has a smaller Playerbase. So to get points you could try 3's.

3) DPS wise Mastery is a very strong stat. Crit is definitely worst. I think you'll find that mastery is the best stat. Not that much experience yet.

which is how it should be... Areana was becoming a joke, where you got points for just standing in there doing /dance

It's quite hard to gear up if you keep meeting full PVPgeared teams as new player. Since you have to beat them to improve your gear. Yes i'm dramatising, but I'm not convinced yet. Just losing 10 games a week still took several weeks to get 1 armorpiece. It --seems-- that you get a lot more points now if you're halfdecent.

[Zappy]

which is how it should be... Areana was becoming a joke, where you got points for just standing in there doing /dance

While I agree, it was a joke to just queue 10 games for points, it's much much worse today.

The biggest problem with the 5s bracket right now is the lack of participation. I tried queuing various times and different days all last week and found that most mornings, the queues aren't even available. Afternoon - early evenings, expect a 5-10 minute queue, sometimes creeping up to 20 minutes. Late evenings seem best where 3-8 min queues are normal.

While the queue times are bad enough, it's way worse to get the same teams repeatedly. You think of how many millions of subscribers they have, and yet you still face the same teams over and over - the fact is, 5s has nothing special to offer over rated bgs or 2s or 3s, so the participation has died.

Like Remanz said, if you just want to get the points, find someone that will do 2s or 3s with you. The queue times are typically around a minute, and you'll face a lot more flavors. I've been playing my DK with my daughters druid in 2s and actually having a blast with that comp.

I've considered hanging my hat for boxing simply on how bad 5s are these day. I like the occasional BGs, but hate the grind. Back when you had sub 30 second queue times, and faced many different teams, it was always fun and challenging. I think with gear, it will be about the same as it was, but it's the humongous wait between matches that really burns me out on it. When I feel like doing some pvp, i like to queue arenas and fight. Simply queueing and working on archeology or other stuff just doesn't cut it for me any more.

On the other hand, I play frequently with a few RL friends in my guild, so I don't see myself walking away either.