Arena of Champions Beginner's Guide

1. Getting in

Open arenaofchampions.live in a desktop browser. On the sign-in screen you can:

• Play as Guest: no account needed. You get a name like Guest12345 and every hero. Your heroes, talents, settings and ratings are kept from your first match, and Play as Guest on the same device brings the guest back after you sign out.
• Save Progress (bottom right in town): turns the guest into a real account (email, name, password), so you can play on another device and appear on the leaderboard.
• Download for Windows: the Windows client has much lower latency than the browser. See Windows download.

2. The town

Between matches you walk your hero around a town in a crater in the Barrens. Right-click NPCs to use them:

You can also right-click a player’s portrait to Challenge to a Duel (or type /duel Name). Duels are unrated 1v1s.

3. Pick a class and spec

There are 9 classes and 19 specs. If you have never played WoW arena, start with something forgiving:

• Want to heal? Every healer spec is in high demand, and queues split healers between teams. See the classes page for the four healers.
• Want to hit things? A melee spec such as Arms Warrior or Retribution Paladin is straightforward: get in range and press your big strike on cooldown.
• Want to cast from range? Frost Mage and Affliction Warlock trade burst for control and pressure over time.

Each class has a separate rating per bracket, starting at 1500, so trying a second class doesn’t hurt your main. Read your spec’s page for its talents and spells, then plan a build with the talent calculator.

4. Your bar: 8 spells + 2 utilities

A new hero starts with eight spells on the bar. Press N for Spells & Talents to swap spells and pick talents (one per row, five rows). Beside the bar are two utility slots; you start with the Gladiator’s Medallion (breaks a stun, fear or incapacitate) and a Bandage. Keep the Medallion until you know what you are doing. All five utilities are on Arena rules.

5. How a match runs

1. Preparation (40 sec): you wait in your team’s room behind a closed gate. Change talents or your bar now if you need to. When every player presses their room’s ready button, the gates open 5 sec later.
2. The fight: kill the other team. Use pillars and walls to break line of sight from casters.
3. Dampening: from minute 5, all healing gets 6% weaker every minute, so long fights end.
4. Time limit: a match still going after 20 minutes is a draw.

If you die you walk the arena as a ghost and can watch a teammate by pressing their party frame.

6. Habits that win early games

• Fight near a pillar. Casters can’t hit what they can’t see, and area spells respect pillars too.
• Save your interrupt for a heal or a big cast, not the first spell you see.
• Watch the arena frames: they show each enemy’s utilities and cooldowns, including who left their Medallion behind.
• Don’t chain the same crowd control: diminishing returns halve it, then quarter it, and the fourth is resisted until 20 sec pass.
• Play the Windows app if your latency readout (under the frame rate) is yellow or red. See Lag fix.