Ways to improve your Arena game

 Macros

Macros are extremely important. Find any thing you can macro, no matter how small or large, and macro it. Any spell without a GCD should be attached with another spell. The effectiveness of macros are tremendous. It could raise your actions per minute by up to one-third. If your bars are not filled with macros. You could potentially lose an extra spell cast once every 20 seconds. In an average four minute game, you may have lost out on nearly 12 GCDs on a spell/ability that you could have used. If you're not convinced that this may completely hinder your game. 12 missing GCDs in one game for a DPS is potentially 60k in damage. For a healer, we are looking at nearly 80k healing that could have been used in the match.

Raise your APM

Macros is one helpful tip that increases your actions per minute. It's important that you're always doing something as much as possible. Don't waste away cooldowns and don't waste away your usefulness in the match. There is always something that you can do. Whether your being kited or stuck in a long cc chain. There is something you can do within that time span. This can be changing your focus target if you're expecting another incoming CC, throwing out range abilities on your target, dispelling your partners, or buffing your team mates. You can inspect the buffs on every target of the opposing team and call out any type of buffs that needs to be purged/controlled until it falls off.

Keybinds are another way to raise your APM. Make sure all of your spell are keybinded. Each and every keybind should be no longer than two keys away from your movement keys. Any keys that are located further than your movement keys could make you lose out on a few actions during a single match. Your GCD should constantly be spinning over your action bars.

Play by the situation


Situational awareness plays a big role in this aspect. You need to be completely aware of whats going on in the match. The target of the enemy, the cooldowns they've just used, crowd control available and the crowd control on your team mates. A good way to improve on this is reducing the number of addons that may prove to be distracting. Combat texts are probably the most distracting addon to use for arenas and should be avoided.

A team that had just blew all their offensive cooldown should require you to use your own defensive CDs and control until you've successfully made it past their pressure. At this point, you should be trying to maintain position as well as control of the game as much as possible. When their offensive pressure has finished, yours will have just begun. This is a seesaw motion that occurs throughout most arena matches and when one team fails to control the match when the opposing team has their cooldowns up. The match is typically lost.

Make the most out of your abilities


When you pop cooldowns, you want to make sure you can get the longest benefit from the cooldown. Any class that can counter your cooldown should be controlled before popping your cooldown to ensure that you get the full duration of any cooldown. For example, a Ret Paladin using wings should make sure that a class with purge is being controlled. If you Iceblock, you need to make sure the priest is controlled or outranged. If you shadow dance it is important to control a class with a spammable CC.

Play with your team, not by yourself

Assist your team, and your team can assist you. Increasing the over all uptime of your team mates will create a lot more pressure onto the other team than you can do by yourself. Allowing your caster to free cast, or snaring a target for your melee to catch up and reducing the damage taken will allow your team to create a lot more opportunities and overall pressure onto the other team than trying to maintain uptime by yourself. Reducing the amount of damage taken also frees up GCDs for your healer that can potentially be used for offensive abilities such as dispels and purges.