Why I hate arenas

It was sarcastically suggested in my Sunday thread that I write about arenas. Well, here we go.

I'm bad at arenas. I get tunnel vision far too easily. I feel as if I'm being attacked from 20 directions at once and cannot escape or survive. My enemies do not die no matter how much I hurt them. If I go after the healer, they still don't die. I cannot out-damage the healing and I cannot out-heal the damage.

This isn't really the worst part.

My first PvP was long before I'd heard of MMOs, play some FPS of some sort or other. I think it was a demo of Medal of Honor. There's no gear. Only reactions, aim, and knowledge of the map so you know how to sneak around or where it is easiest to defend. No achievements, nothing unlocked, just shoot the other side and then disconnect if you want to play something else.

WoW PvP needs gear. You just wont survive without it. Except for extreme skill gaps, there's no way to skill away the gap between no resilience and lots of resilience. Same for damage, health, healing, and so on. So PvP requires a bit of a grind to get started. Get your honor and some arena points and spend some emblems carefully and you can close the gap and start to actually play. But it's not like a PvE grind. In PvE you tend to get a lot of insignificant wins which add up to a result: add up emblems or drop chances or reputation. PvP has this too. Except the enemies are the other players, the ones with better gear, and they will beat you. So the grind isn't one of victory, but of defeat. You will eventually get to a bracket of your gear and skill, but can you imagine if running heroics required you to first wipe a few times in Ulduar?

This isn't the worst part.

The true worst part is that PvP exposes me as an idiot. I keep advocating more dynamic encounters in PvE, claiming they would be more interesting, more fun, less repetitive. That's the sort of thing you can find in PvP, where even the same composition will not play exactly the same. But I suck at PvP. The very dynamic PvE encounters I claim to want are the very same ones that make me fail at PvP.

PvP makes me look dumb, and that is why I hate it.

If arenas gave no gear, would people do them?

Yes and no, somewhere in between known as "a lot less."

In a way arenas did stop giving gear. More ratings meant that people couldn't lose their way to epics and as a result arena play went way down. Naxx gives better gear, faster.

People aren't doing arenas as much now that they don't give gear. This isn't really the fault of arenas.

I started a team today. We're not in much PvP gear, we've not done much PvP in a long time, neither of us have proper PvP specs. We got our asses handed to us a few times before the system realized we should be down in the noob section. We're at some sad low rating. But, weird thing is, it was fun. I'm actually looking forward to playing more games. We've only done 10, or maybe 11 so far, and then we did WG and BGs for some honor. I want to play more though.

Arenas might be horribly unbalanced. They might be gimmicky. They might be artificially restricted PvP in a small box. But they can be fun. The problem is that we've all learned to chase gear. What gives us the best gear in the least time? Go there! That's the thought process.

I think I figured out why I'm enjoying arenas again. They're offering something that I'm not getting from raiding: learning and advancement. As I get better, I actually see progress, I get somewhere. In raids, my individual ability is diluted by 25 people. If I screw up, so what? Odds are someone else would have as well. If I do great, someone else screwing up still ruins it.

Arenas are more conducive to learning. Early on when you're terrible, you lose a lot, but what do you actually lose? Rating? You can't go below zero and until you've won a bit, you don't seem to lose rating anyway. Repairs? Nope. Time? Instantly requeue and you're back in much faster than a corpse run. Arenas encourage learning with almost non-existent penalties in the learning stage. In contrast raids do all their punishing while you learn, then once you get it: easy street.

I've learned some useful bits. While it is tempting to stay close to my warrior partner while healing, don't do it with DKs around or it's just asking for pestilence. I've learned to love 20 second HoJ.

One of our wins was against a druid-DK team (that's where I learned to spread out) and I saw the druid wasn't topped off. He wanted some range to get MS off and heal up, so he started casting roots on my partner. HoJ locked out his nature tree, my partner charged in and started doing painful things. Just to be sure I threw up an arcane torrent when I thought the interrupt string was wearing off.

Another win was against a holy paladin-DK team. We were slowly losing, with me losing mana much faster. But then the DK dropped a bit more than he should have been allowed to. The paladin saw the problem and started up a holy light. Interrupt, DK died, paladin bubbled, noticed what happened, and left the match.

There aren't really moments like that in raids. Arenas are still stupid and terrible, but I think I might enjoy their stupid terribleness. :P

[edit] I forgot to add, read this post by Tobold.