The Arena World Championship (AWC) is set to return for its 13th year as the best World of Warcraft PvP players look to dominate the competition starting this August 22. As always, eight teams will face off from the Americas, Europe, and Asian regions, all hoping to take home their share of a $500,000 prize pool.

Currently, Cloud9 is the highest ranked team with 480 points acquired in the Americas region, which places them far ahead of the next closest teams. Spacestation Gaming, Golden Guardians, and M2KC all closely occupy the second to fourth place standings. In the Europe and Asia region Wildcard Gaming is currently in the top spot, followed by Method Black, nLite, and Diabolus.

The action all begins August 22 and from there will continue with weekly competitions until reaching the finals for each region over the weekend of September 26-27.

For players who are looking to work towards qualifying for future events, it is as simple as organizing a team and starting with the Arena Cups. These are 3v3 Arena tournaments held online that are directly hosted by Blizzard and open to players of all skill levels. Readers can click here for a complete rundown of the rules, and starting out is as simple as that.

While the road to the Arena World Championship is always exciting, it is even more interesting now because this will be the final opportunity for teams to play in the current meta before the launch of the next expansion. Although Blizzard has not given players a firm launch date for Shadowlands, they have affirmed that it will be releasing in the Fall.

The PvP scene in Shadowlands may look completely different to what we have not, not only because of class changes that are expected with each new expansion, but because of the introduction of Covenants. Once reaching the new level cap, players will be asked to join one of four Covenants and these will provide specific bonuses to each player, and right now it is not clear how this might shake out in terms strict PvE or PvP advantages.

Blizzard has stated that they understand concerns around one Covenant being superior to others in this regard, so changing from one to another may be a simple process, or alternatively, no Covenant may provide any real advantage for PvP. Hopefully, this is well thought out before launch, as forcing players into a single Covenant in order to avoid being disadvantaged in Arena would be a shame.

For a full schedule of the upcoming weekly competition, click here.

Source: worldofwarcraft.com

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