User:SylvXIII/Team arena codex rant

From the day they announced the removal of TA, I told myself I need to give it a serious try before it's gone. I farmed RA to get my g3. Then I started getting into pugs in TA, had very little success except during the TA days where farming glad points had never been easier. I eventually developed a network of friends and got pretty decent in playing in Team Arenas. During the last week TA existed, I managed to get many 20+ streaks in TA. Me and some friends now had a unique core TA group and I was also a replacement player for another very unique TA core group.

This short breakthrough in Team Arenas allowed me to understand the mechanics of the place. After defeating groups with a high ranked profile (let it be gladiator rank or hero rank), I noticed that success in TA comes from originality and personal skills. The typical 1 FF Nec, 1 MB Ranger, 1 Warrior and a WoH monk setup is pretty solid, but anyone who wants to counter it can do it easily. My PvP background is low but I've always been told I'm better than my rank: I never devoted myself too much to something. The fact that I have tried and experienced many aspects of the game is one of my strengths.

Now we have Codex Arena and Random Arenas. The issue with Codex Arena is the typical closed-mindedness of players, notably HA players, as well as rank elitism like everywhere else. The second you join a Codex group, they usually ask you to ping your build regardless of whether you just logged in or not. You might be totally unaware of today's meta-build. In fact, it doesn't matter. Pugs will, in general, fail pretty badly in Codex Arena unless the players are very strong. Codex requires you to have a network of decent friends in order to be successful. This is hardly fun when you play with random players, no matter their rank. While the skill restriction is challenging, it has many flaws as the skill selection is random. Therefore, you can have a skill that requires a dual attack but no dual attacks; a skill conditional to a preparation without any preparations; a skill that is pretty much worthless considering today's skills (for instance Mantra of Lightning) and so on. On top of that, the skill choice of Dervishes and Paragons is narrower than the one of Assassins and Ritualists which is still narrower than the one of the core classes. In the end, the odds that certain skills, elite or not, might be chosen on a Core class is lower than the one of a class that came after Prophecies. You can dominate the arena if your group made the most effective and hardly counterable Codex build on a day or you can have a very hard time because gimmick build A beats B and B beats C and C beats A. In this event, you want to work on a new D that would counter more than 1 gimmick build.

Random Arenas is now the only viable place to work up your gladiator rank. If 3 decent players are in a group and their last ally is a bad player, they might lose versus a team of 4 average players. Considering you are only one player out of a group of four, no matter how effective and strong you might be, if the rest of your group fails, you're done for. It is not an organized form of PvP.