Go back far enough, and it actually did. 2 Class XP per fight, if I recall correctly, since Arena was basically considered a subset of PVP.
XP got removed before the hero did sometime between the 3.0 update and now. Maybe I’ll find the time to track it down…
EDIT: Found it — 4.2.5 Patch Notes
The rest of your post is reasonable and I can see your point.
I don’t believe mastery level applies to Arena. The number of mana surges is nowhere near 67%.
It might not seem like it due to the slower pace and all, but when your masteries look like this:
And then you can just be in a guild and they instantly turn into this:
Its kind of noticeable. And no, not just the numbers on the screen, but in practice, in the match, in Arena.
Most disparities I see on my main are in the realm of them having mid 50s surge chance versus my 64, but even that can matter quite a bit when “good” drafts tend to both sides having essentially glass cannons and losing a troop can mean losing 1 or 2 colors on your team (as well as the turns for the mana they gathered being “wasted”), things can snowball.
By the time i got DB, Arena was long dead for me… so… I bothered to play few runs with DB to see if it will be fun. It wasn’t. It was even less fun than RB runs.
RB might require 4 casts to kill everything with casts, but after 1 or 2 killing casts, your hero is 1hitting anything with skulls, so… it might sound wierd but from my small bunch of data gathered it was more optimal for me, to get 12 mana for RB, wipe 1 common troop with it’s cast and usually, by the time i got mana for 2nd cast it was just one crippled enemy standing there or everything was dead… on comparision: DB still wouldn’t be charged, or hero would die to random skulls from the sky before casting.
But that’s just small data sample.
and as @Tresk pointed out - no need to talk about it anymore, since weapons are no longer on arena 
Aha! Am “new” to the game, having joined at the end of March this year (so about 7 months ago). Although I’m at level 1200 now, I sometimes forget that this game has been around for a long time and that many things I’ve known from my Day 1 were many iterations beyond what might’ve existed before. Thanks for clearing that up.
The biggest problem I have with the new setup is consistently drawing support troops only. You may say oh, well, RNG, you’re just having bad luck. At least when the hero was available you knew you would have at least one solid attacker. Having to retire and redraw your team multiple times is a waste of gold and a huge waste of my time.
I’ve been trying to like the new arena and I just can’t do it.
I’m alright with the new Arena too. For the daily 3 runs. But for the event, it is such a passion to even considering playing that mode.
An idea though, would be to allow a weapon during arena events alone. That might please a lot of players.
Now there’s your problem…!
Great posts above many logically pointing out what is wrong with the new arena.
In summary: We are basically agreeing; THEY GOT IT WRONG. Problem is they cant see they got it wrong like many other game changes. It actually makes you scared when you think what they will do to the poor old treasure maps when they turn their greedy eyes in that maligned direction.
Unfortunately I think its closer to a case of they know they’ve got it wrong but they can’t or won’t actually do anything about it.
It’ll probably all come down to data. Are we playing more arena since the revamp? Probably, since I’ve seen numerous posts from people saying they now play 3 daily runs when before they didn’t touch the mode unless the campaign told them to (like me). This has been mentioned, which means that if this continues, it’ll have been a “resounding success”. Are there people who stopped playing now that they can’t use heros? Likely, but again it comes down to data, which we don’t have access to. Maybe 5.3 will see a revamp v2, especially since we’ll have 2 more arena events this month, which generate more data which will either confirm that this has been a great move that gets people to play a mode they previously didn’t and spend more gems than they did before, or it will wake them up to the fact that we don’t like the arena event, the new arena or both.
Only time (and data) will tell. For now, we just avoid, play or grind as our tastes see fit.
Game of thrones season 8 had more average viewers than any other season…
Got me thinking; there is a 70’s film called The Arena; yeah preferable to this game arena ; though both on reflection are cliché ridden and exploitive; the film does have slaves girls; so film is plus 1; this arena rating 0.
Yeah, definitely NOT a Fan of the supposed Arena rework. Must have been obvious to Devs that it would flop. But since Devs didn’t want to spend any money on improving it, they tried to re-work with the existing Arena assets. Poor design choice IMO.
Slightly off topic but I wonder what they will do with the Treasure Hunt revamp which may be still in the works?
They have no previous model to revert to unlike Campaign tasks/Daily tasks or Arena.
I guess they will just update the UI a little/nerf the rewards and call it a ‘revamp’ again? 
Well, whatever happens with Maps, it will not increase the rewards at all. The easiest way to revamp would be to allow the consumption of multiple Maps to get a slight bump in Rewards, something similar to the Vault difficulty levels. Example: Using 5 Maps at one time would increase Rewards by 50%.
Devs have been very clear that this simple fix to make Maps more valuable is totally unacceptable as it would increase the Rewards. So don’t expect anything good to come of a Maps rework @Graeme
In line with recent experiences, we’re looking at 15% of customer satisfaction as sufficient, as long as they play more so:
While theoretical, it seems in-line with what we have observed with the recent ‘revamp’, and looks just as good in paper as the arena ‘revamp’ must have looked.
I just did a very unscientific test. It’s impossible to properly test because variables are so… variable? 
. But I’m going to call it close enough for jazz.
To get 50 trophies In level 2 explore, it took me 14 minutes. (I think 7 of those minutes were clicking around interface lol, but whatever 
). In addition to my 50 trophies (that I don’t care about because everything I do gets trophies) … I gained 34468 gold and 3200 souls. This is in addition to the traitstones. While doing these level 2 explores, I could have written the state of the union address with my other hand. Meh 
It’s a thing.
I did two different arena runs to test. This is because I did the draft very fast, aka way faster than you normally would do it, because I wanted to get a best case scenario. I would have done more but I managed to grab a unicorn team zip zip zip on the second try.
For those 50 trophies it took only 12 minutes (this is from clicking on arena to the end so it included my quick draft)… 11484 gold and 2717 souls.
Neither of these tests were fun. But one of them could be done in a coma, and it was the one with greater rewards. So how is this a good thing?
The old arena at least rewarded you more for minutes played. My test here was extremely generous to the arena. I play it a lot and I know when I lucked into a ringer and I know when I did it quickly.
This new version is not more fun or interesting or even more challenging. It’s just more luck based and more time consuming for less reward. And no… I don’t consider an opportunity to spend gems a reward.
Yeah, the maps revamp will probably replace gems with “gem equivalent” crap we have no interest in. That’s what my bet would be for.
Instead of your paycheck, we’re paying you paycheck equivalents like this dry cleaning coupon and this stick of gum. 
Maybe we should all play maps before they do a revamp. You don’t know what you got until it’s gone.
from what was said in patch annoucement- there might be special weekend events where one of the troops will be preset and all player teams will include it,
Troop might brake the standard rules and be something special.
final note: might = it’s not guaranteed
