Getting Started

First Things First: Record

The single best way to improve in dueling outside of doing consistent matches and tournaments is to record your matches and watch them back. Often you remember something different than what happened, and by reviewing clips you can pick out your problem areas or learn about your opponent’s habits (which I will cover later).

A ton of people have Nvidia based video cards, and in that case you can use Shadowplay. 

Shadowplay will allow you to set start/stop record hotkeys, but if you forget to record a match you can use an ‘instant replay’ hotkey to clip a chosen duration of previous gameplay. So for example, you can set it for 1 minute replays, and if you die or win, you hit the replay hotkey and get a clip to study the 60 seconds that lead up to that win or loss.

If you don’t have Shadowplay, then I recommend OBS (free), which also allows you to use a ‘replay buffer’ option that acts just like Shadowplay’s instant replay. OBS has some more capabilities that are nice too, such as allowing you to split audio sources into different track layers for if you want to pull out your voice chat from videos using editing software, etc. Just Google ‘OBS setup’ tutorials to learn more.

If you have a hard time knowing what to look for or how to even analyze your own dueling footage, I think you can message any dueler that you respect and most will probably be happy to take the time and point a couple things out. Each player has their own style and a variety of notes can be good.

Drop Your Ego, No One Cares

Some players avoid the Arena because their entire identity is built around “winning”, but since it’s impossible to win every match in the Arena, they avoid it out of what they believe someone else’s perception of them will be or to make sure they don’t die to someone they spent the last 5 months trash talking in the field or in Discord. Others just don’t do it because it’s not their preferred type of gameplay. 

Most of the better/skilled duelers spend very little time talking shit to either good or beginner duelers, unless someone is being insufferable. Otherwise, it’s a pretty self-deprecating or sarcastic group, which makes sense, because you will inevitably look stupid in the Arena being cocky. Even playing at your best, you will still experience losses to people with less overall technical skill, sometimes even repeatedly. Although this is sometimes due to mistakes, it is more so due to how dice rolls can play out (both hit/miss RNG and damage range RNG) for either the whole duration of a match or within key moments during a cycle. The challenge is you knowing the difference.

There’s no reason to risk embarrassing yourself with elitist attitudes. 

On the other hand, also remember that virtually no one cares how good you were on some past server, in some other ruleset, or which old friend you have that you think would beat everyone today if only they still played. None of that means anything and never changed a single player’s perception.  

There is a riding-a-bike element to dueling, any previous naturally good duelers could come back and fit in pretty quickly, but when you combine more practiced active players with the possible dice streaks that I cover in this guide - there are going to be more chances now for variation in who wins duels than ever, I imagine, simply because more players are just better at interrupting/cycling/healing as more time goes on. Anyone can and will win in the Arena. 

You can and should learn from anyone, including players who have never made it to even the semi-finals of a tournament. Nearly everyone has little things in their style I think are interesting or worth noting and adapting parts of. 

Rage About It To Yourself… Then Figure It Out

I don’t know why more players haven’t noticed that one of the common ways a duel finishes between two skilled players is through “opposing streaks”. In this scenario, the offender usually lands an initial high burst damage hit and then follows through with an interrupt cycle. The defender makes attempts to trade back damage to force the offender to go defensive and/or Greater Heal or Mini Heal spam in order to survive. Within an opposing streak, the defender who took the high burst damage misses the majority of their trade-back swings and Greater Heal attempts (usually paired with timed missed punches as well) while the offender lands the majority of hits in succession between casting their spell interrupts. 

If the damage dice on those offensive hits are even relatively in the higher range, it’s even more exceptionally brutal and not even Mini Heal spam from the defender will outweigh it. The other result of this is the defender becomes mana locked from needing to spam heal, so even if they do survive, just a standard hit rate from the offender from that point on could be enough to win the match through attrition, since the defender will become completely mana drained. 

There are many duels that end up being both players just rinsing and repeating, waiting for these two opposing streaks to line up at the same time, maybe even subconsciously, hoping they are on the offender's side.

Again, it’s not the only way good players die, but it happens a LOT when noticing what ends a duel between similar skilled players, which on some level makes sense. Remember, if two players have the exact same skill level, the only real separation of a win or a loss would be dictated by RNG.

You cannot measure skill/improvement on a per-match or per-tournament basis. You measure it over many, many duels or tournaments. 

You will be frustrated if you don't acknowledge that weeks or maybe entire tournament seasons can play out differently from each other based on things out of your control. The difference between a well adjusted person and an embarrassing person is publicizing your frustration onto your opponent. 

Acknowledging anomalies or joking about them is fine, but don't be a dickhead.

You have to accept that you will take tons of losses that feel like complete bullshit, but the key to improving is you should always view them as if you could have played better.  You have to adapt to a mind state that believes despite your “incredibly bad luck”, you still probably made mistakes. Fixing those mistakes may not have kept you alive or made you turn the match into a win, but it will make you a better player in the future to acknowledge them, and potentially pull you out of rough RNG patches in the near future. I give examples later.

One of the dumbest things I have seen repeatedly when players talk about top duelers is mentioning  that “they make no mistakes”, and I watch those same duelers and see several mistakes in every duel. Everyone, at any level, is making mistakes. That’s a huge reason a great player even loses at all. So remember, your opponent can get extremely lucky but you can still likely find at least one mistake in your dueling when RNG is against you. Taking this approach is how you will get better in this very dice reliant system.

Only you can know from your recorded footage when exactly the odds were against you and if you worked with those odds as well as possible. You’ll also see when things were very much in your favor, too. Win or lose, if you want to improve, find something you can do better next time or be reminded of a bad habit you need to break out of... and yes, sometimes the result is just an absurd RNG gap.