PvP Practices

Let loose the dogs of war! Advice and guidance on how to keep you and your teammates alive.

5 Ways to Survive Alterac Valley

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Before I played my Priest, I had a 60 Paladin. My first guild was Micro, a PvP group based in Twisting Nether. My time on WoW was spent running organized Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch for hours on end. This was before the battlegroups concept was introduced into WoW. You may consider me a hardcore raider, but I’m no slouch in PvP tactics either. The mechanics of AV has changed. What’s the general premise? Beat the crap out of the other team before they do it to you.

Two Methods to Victory

Killing the opposing team’s General
-OR-
Running their reinforcement counter to 0

As healers, we will often be one of the most sought after targets. Not all of us have full Season 2 gear with 400 resilience. If we want to give our team even a remote chance of winning, we need to survive. If we can survive, we can heal our own knuckledraggers pew-pewers. Remember, every death sustained is one point taken off of our reinforcement counter. With that said, here are 5 easy ways to live and support your side.

1) Use terrain to your advantage

When a player goes out of your line of sight, your spells automatically cancel. No other battleground or arena has much junk to hide behind. If you’re on the frontlines and you know you’re being targeted by range, duck behind a tree. You can move behind a tower. Don’t just stand in the open and give their mages easy Frostbolting action. Line of sight THEIR spellcasters. If I’m healing a Warrior, I will dismount behind a tree. All that crap you learned in Grade 10 math pays off here. Set up a triangle. You can see the warrior. Enemy mage sees the warrior. You can’t see enemy mage, therefore enemy mage cannot see you. Mage blasts warrior, sees heals, tab targets to you, realizes you’re not in line of sight, gets crushed by Skillherald. And all you had to do was park yourself next to a tree.

2) Do not mindlessly charge into the enemy

If I had a copper for everytime I’ve seen this happen, I’d be able to quit school and sell WoW gold for a living. In a game where every player’s life is precious, people who randomly charge into the horde with no support behind them are pissing away reinforcement points. Please do not do this. Do not stay mounted and numlock your way into Frostwolf Graveyard while realizing that there are 4 players of the opposing faction guarding that flag. If you’re going to go in on the offense, tag along with a few other players. Odds of survivability greatly increase with your proximity to other players.

3) Cut your losses

If your offense is stalling and you’re not able to sustain the health of players around you, do not hesitate to cut your losses and fall back. Being able to think on a macro scale and on a micro scale is an asset. If six players are rushing up the ramp into Tower Point and you just capture it, there’s no way you can hold out that long for four minutes. Forty seconds maybe, but not four minutes. Better to drop a psychic scream, jump off the tower and fallback to the IB graveyard. Because if you think about it, you can either lose the tower and two reinforcement points or lose the tower anyway and come back later with some fire power.

4) Maximize your range

What’s the difference between healing at point blank range and healing at maximum range? Whatever your health is. If your at max, you’re not likely going to be targeted because the opposing team is busy with groundpounders that are smashing their face up front. That leaves you free to drop your renews, healing waves, shields, etc. Use the players your side as a barrier. Keep them alive and they will in turn protect you.

5) Stalling tactics

We have defensive measures at our disposal that we can use to evade enemy attacks or make us stronger. When you’re falling back, slow down the other side. Keep using your global cooldowns. Shamans should be dropping earthbind totems and grounding totems as much as possible. Priests should be tossing up shields, screams, and stoneforms (Dwarves only). Tie up the enemy as long as possible. Delay them. Do whatever it takes. If you see a mounted Tauren ride by, frost shock him. This especially holds true when you’re assaulting a graveyard. Don’t fight ON the flag. Fight between the graveyard and the flag so you can tie up and stall the players that are ressing. Think about it for a moment. What is your first inclination when you see an opposing player that is trying to tag your graveyard? You are going to do whatever it takes to get that player off the flag, right? Exactly. The reverse holds true.

Follow these simple concepts and you will help your side see success in AV. At the very least, even if you don’t win, you won’t die as much.

Pain Suppression, Meditation, Arenas and blogging

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Patch is coming soon next week, doo dah, doo dah, Priests get mana up the butt, oh the doo dah day. I guess we’ll find out how good the increased mana regeneration buff will be when it debuts (Meditation). Considering we’re running five Priests in our raids, we should be able to project our spells slightly longer then usual. I’m rather curious as to the viability of the redesigned Pain Suppression. Right now, it reads:

Pain Suppression redesigned: Now castable on other friendly targets; Reduces target’s threat by 5% and the damage they take by 40%. Cooldown reduced to 2 minutes.

Typically, a Raid consists of three types or roles: Tank, DPS/CC, and Heals. In the past, the Discipline tree has always been considered a support tree. The talents have been designed to increase the survivability of a Priest and the amount of utility it brings. I find it unlikely that Raids will find room for such a role as outlined above. It’s easy enough to get Improved Divine Spirit and invest the rest into the Holy Tree and you’ll come out great. That’s the Priestiality of the situation. Alternatively, you join the dark side and melt faces for a living. Those are the primary reasons why Priests are brought into Raids. I find it unlikely for many Guilds to bring in a Discipline Priest because they do not fulfill the three roles as highlighted above. True, a Discipline Priest can heal, but not as well as their Holy counterparts. Smite damage? No thanks. You shouldn’t be Pain Suppressing a tank when they’re trying to get aggro.

So then what’s the point of the post-modern Discipline tree?

Combat. Pure PvP combat. You’re going in close quarters and instead of being two shot by that rogue, you’re going to get four shot. That mage that’s getting focused fired by a 4 DPS team? He’s going to last 6 seconds longer (but there’s a 35% chance that it might get purged/dispelled/etc). Are we going to see a huge influx of Discipline trees in the Arena? I don’t know, it’s tough to say. On paper, it looks plausible. But the assets that are brought in do not seem enough to nudge another class out of a PvP line up. It’s too early to say right now, so we’ll need to see. I can’t help but wonder if we’ll begin to see a 5-caster type team in the Arenas.

Speaking of PvP and the patch, here’s some healthy advice from the Out of Mana blog. The announcement of 2.3 heralds the end of Season 2, which means:

  1. Alterac Valley will change (hopefully for the better)
  2. Arenas will be in a frenzy when the Season 3 begins
  3. Honor points can now be used to purchase Season 1 swag

World of Matticus is about to undergo some minor additions. You’ll note that the middle column was removed in favor of extending the right and left bars. I’m going to make my RSS feeds more prominent on the front page somewhere. There’s a lot of things I want to do, right now.

By the way, I purchased Call of Duty 4. AWESOME GAME! GREAT way to relieve the stress and tensions of WoW.

Restoration Druids in PvP

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[Matticus’ Note: Quiz Thursday, presentation Monday, exam Tuesday. Expect a decline in material as I finish my cushion of columns. Besides, Pwyff’s always an interesting read. Just don’t come screaming to me if you start reading things that you object to. I’ve always loved to have discussion. Please welcome the Ooglar himself!]

For those who were interested in startling tidbits about my current arena teams (“The Art of trash talking when you lose”, or perhaps “Why does my Warrior have an outdated weapon while that Warrior chunks off 50% of my health at a time” or even finally “Is my Rogue going to be on, or will he (once more) be playing Pokemon”), I will have to defer your probing eyes for one week more. Todays and ‘morrow day’s articles will be concerning the Restoration Druid in Arena. The few, the proud, and sometimes the very, very bad.

What is a Restoration Druid? Aside from being ye olde Celtic Holy Man who presumably has garnered the reputation of being uplifting; the Resto Druid is potentially one of the most powerful healers in arena play. Today’s articles will focus on our strengths; next time I’ll address our biggest flaws.

So what makes us powerful? Essentially, the Druid is the only healer that can constantly CC (crowd control) an opposing team with any semblance of reliability. We possess an interrupt that is almost (or just as in some cases) as good as a Shaman’s, we are an extremely difficult class to consistently DPS, and we boast some of the silliest looking tier sets this side of the moon. I’m fairly certain that they giggle about us every now and then on the other side of the moon as well.

Our CC, Cyclone, has so much potentiality that it’s rather staggering. It is, ultimately, one of the most powerful CCs in the game by its very nature (outside of Fear; because Fear is really in some kind of quasi-Godlike tier of CC that would even force Jesus to trinket out of). Taking someone out of the game, quite literally, for 6 seconds / 3 seconds / 1 second is an astonishingly sharp double edged sword. If, however, you don’t wield it stupidly, it bypasses all that other stuff and goes straight for the goods. As an offensive CC, it obviously renders healers completely unable to heal. Obviously. Furthermore, if you should offensively (I don’t mean like screaming fuck every time you cast) cast Cyclone on an opponent that is low on health; you effectively render all things cast on this opponent as immune.

Can you see the strategic effectiveness of this? Common Druid CC-trains do not fully consist of CCing the healer alone. Our effectiveness lies in the fact that we can really screw with healers by the chain of:

Cyclone the healer – Feral Charge interrupt – Bash – Cyclone to interrupt – Cyclone to interrupt – Now Cyclone the player they were trying to heal – Feral Charge interrupt the healer after the heal recipient is out of Cyclone – Go Cat, Build a combo point and maim – Cyclone the heal recipient – Cyclone the heal recipient – Cyclone the healer for full duration.

Obviously this has only worked ‘perfectly’ like… once for me; but the fact that I know I’m capable of such ‘leet shit’ is pretty cool. I may have done a jig after my CC-fest was over and done with.

The reason why such a CC can be a double edged sword is generally the immunity portion of it, combined with its (in comparison to other ‘grown up’ CCs) short duration. All Druids, skilled or not, can testify to their ‘lolcyclone’ moments where a Rogue has rushed to blind a silly Priest, only to see, horror in their eyes, an immunity sign appear, grey devil-matter swirling about the Priest’s body. Or perhaps a Mage finds that he has a few seconds to spare to poly the Paladin before beginning his assault on the Warrior afresh; and to his horror, an immune sign appears. The Warrior is soon ‘all up’ on the Mage once more. We can imagine in all these scenarios the players staring squinty eyed at their screens, the words “fucking cyclone” meandering past their lips.

Obviously such demonstrations of pure angst can be avoided by careful communication; but even the best of teams find that their opportunities to sheep or blind may fall directly within the time frames of your fucking cyclone. C’est le vie.

The other thing that makes us so powerful lies in our mobility. Everything about us is concerned directly with our ability to do it on the move. The longest cast time for a good arena Druid is Regrowth, which is 2 seconds. We use this cast only occasionally. Outside of that, a Druid can keep constant heals over time, averaging about 800-1000 +HP per second (without MS applied) on a given target (fullstack Lifebloom + Rejuv), and he can do this on the move, or sometimes even when he’s not there. While those other poor shmucks, the Shaman, Paladin and the Priest are walking to their intended heal-ee, and then standing there while trying to re-invigorate a teammate, the Druid can simply run past like naked man who is halfway done jogging his route and has realized what cold air does to his goods. Those other healers must stand there, tiny bits all exposed; the Druid can simply sprint by, intent on getting to a safer location, yet still doing his job.

Furthermore, outside of facing insurmountable odds, like lolstunfests from Warriors (Rogues? Pshaw), the Druid is always capable of using his incredible mobility and pre-emptive heals to line of sight even the scariest of pain trains. The mage, one of the biggest potential threats of damage to most players, is rendered a lot less ‘freakish’ when faced with the fact that a Druid who wants to avoid damage will never sit there to eat an Ice Lance combo, or anything that takes a while to cast for that matter.

Ultimately, it is this combination of extreme mobility and excellent CCs that turn the Druid into an extremely strong contender as a powerful healer. Nobody else has our enormous repertoire of pre-emptive heals; it is these heals and our ability to consistently stay out of the line of sight of casters and DPS alike that make us what I like to call neato.

As a class in itself, Druids excel in outlasting teams, by our nature of mobility and control; we are excellent in offensive teams that can provide enough DPS, yet cannot afford to babysit their healer; we are the most independent healer in game, and so any matrix that makes such demands are ultimately the roles that we are fit for.

In the end, my tip for aspiring Druids out there is ultimately to learn your class, and learn it well. Mobility is the key factor with any Druid; and in the end, the motto “no damage is the best damage,” ought to become something of a life mantra. This is to be repeated every time you needlessly stand beside your Warrior; thinking that healing right beside him will benefit you somehow. It doesn’t.

Druid weaknesses to come, and further tips on how to prevent these weakness from being exposed like a raw wound to a rabid gopher.

Introducing Another Feature Writer, and Healing in PvP

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With the advent of examinations and other academic nightmares approaching, I found myself hard pressed to solo blog. Enter Pwyff: Restoration druid, PvP Veteran, and friend. He maintains his own blog over at Gameriot while allowing me the pleasure of relaying it to my viewers whenever applicable.  

Today’s column comes from Pwyff. It starts with healing in Player vs Player combat. If you’re already aware of this, just skim it and come back next time. He’s working his way up from the bottom. Expect to see more advanced topics coming soon. If anyone figures out what an Ooglar means, please tell me.

Top 3 PVP Rules as a Healer:

1.) Don’t be fancy!
I sometimes find that healers will get too caught up trying to bait out CSes and interrupts. Quite simply, I’ve seen a WAR+PAL team go down because I decided to go Bear and intimidate the heals. The Paladin spent so much time watching me and trying to fake out an interrupt that his Warrior died while I sat in Bear and looked threatening. If you’re going to bait, fine, bait, but don’t be stupid and fancy with your stopcasting macros.

2.) Be aware of your surroundings! Don’t simply watch everyone’s HP levels all the time!
Keeping aware of where that Warlock is so you can line of sight a key fear is the sign of a good healer versus a bad one. If you see an enemy Druid getting focus fired, and he goes Bear; stay out of line of sight! This can severely cripple the Druid’s ability to get away from everyone by Feral Charging you.
If you see a Paladin or Priest trying to get close to you, run away! A lot of the time, they’re trying to get in that HoJ or Psychic Scream that will put a severe dent in your capabilities to do things. Keeping aware of your environment while healing ultimately leads to an increased capability of healing as well.
Furthermore, by keeping tabs on where your players are, and keeping communication lines open, you can create advantageous scenarios by positioning yourself in key protected areas where you can predict your players to be, and then get off heals. Finally, it prevents you from getting LOSed by your own team when they panic and try to run away.

3.) Keep everyone topped off, or as high as possible.
Only in very specific battles is mana efficiency valued at even near your capability of keeping an individual alive. Thus, while I’m sure it does pay to be as mana efficient as possible, do not make it your priority. Your priority should be always trying to keep your teammate(s) out of burst HP levels. That is to say, out of the level in which a team can consistently ‘burst’ your player down via a full out CD spam, or even a Mage pet nova, frostbolt, ice lance vomno. The logic stems from the fact that having no mana is better than having nobody alive. At least, last I checked.

Top 3 PVP Rules as a DPSer:

1.) Don’t be fancy!
This comes a second time around for the arena DPSer by the simple that some individuals tend to get carried away trying to create some kind of insane vanish immune cheapshot full-parry-chun-li-special type of thing. If you don’t think you can do it, and in attempting to do it, you mess up your chances at bursting someone down, don’t do it.

2.) Control is often greater than DPS!
This is always and constantly true. As, say, a Warlock, you may feel completely inclined to set up your full UA dot cycle on everyone within your grasp, but if this means that the Mage can’t sheep anything, you have to ask yourself; should I really be UAing the Pally?
The answer is no, so stop fucking doing it.

3.) Trust your healers!
As a DPS, you may find that when you get to a scary low digit of health, you’ll panic and turn Sword+Shield Defensive tanking (thus losing your team MS), burn a talent to get the heck out of there, or quite simply, run.
Don’t do it! Keep your healers in consistent line of sight, and always trust that they’ll let you know when they can’t heal you, or when they’re controlled, or when you’re out of line of sight. Arena is a team game, so always trust that your teammates will support you! This in turn will give you greater confidence in pulling off your bursts, because you won’t suddenly find MS missing on the target because your Warrior is hiding behind a pole, spell reflecting moonfires with his sword and shield.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place, PvP Stories

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I started to level a Paladin.

Yeah, that’s right, it’s my third healer (I have a 53 druid lying around somewhere too).

Herein lies the problem. I’m out in the middle of hell(fire) happily wailing away on random boars so I can treat their toxic carcass (worst quest ever by the way) into something purified. Then receive a tell being asked if I want to heal Ramparts. I’m thinking about doing it until something hits me: I’m Retribution specced. Sadly, I turn the poor chap down.

Well, here I am in a sort of catch-22 situation. There’s almost no chance whatsoever that I can heal Ramparts with a ret-specced pally without substantial healing gear. But at the same time, if I switch over to Holy it makes grinding quests and leveling way more difficult then it should be (I leveled Holy/Disc on my Priest). So here’s my dilemma:

I can spec Holy and simply instance grind my way up to 70 and do whatever easy quests I can do.

or

Stay Retribution and stay out of Instances altogether relying on drops from Quests or the AH to upgrade my equipment.

I’m quite glad with Blizzard’s decision to at least look at the possibility of adding an element of spelldamage to all of us +heal users. Even though we’ll go down, we’ll go down with the intent of delivering a bloody nose to that bastard warlock or sneaky ball-less rogue who ganked us healers.

When I was grinding my Priest to 70, I didn’t have as much runins with the Horde as I anticipated. I guess that was because there was a mutual ceasefire between the two sides as both factions wanted to rush to 70 quickly. Oddly enough, I was the first to hit 70 in my Guild. Now it seems all bets are off as both Horde and Alliance are hanging out in early leveling areas to take out their frustration on us low level guys.

Carnage has developed a healthy hate relationship with Sword of the Horde. My Guildmates were out in Thorium Point in the Searing Gorge just leveling up their Shaman Alts. A few SoH members arrive and a skirmish ensues. Both sides begin calling for reinforcements but alas, I do think the decision went to SoH.

A few days later, we caught wind that SoH was planning to engage Doomwalker! Oh how the WoW Gods must love us. For those unaware, Doomwalker is an outdoor Worldboss. Ner’Zuhl is a PvP server. It didn’t take long before a battle plan was in the works. We had a few observers out by Doomwalker over in Black Temple and sure enough, SoH members began trickling in. Immediately the siren was sounded and a wing of Carnage members in epic mounts in PvP took off from Shattrath to head straight for BT. There were only ten of us but that’s all that was needed. We had no intention of engaging them in direct combat. Sheer numbers would dictate that we would lose. Our goal was to disrupt and harass. All is fair in love and PvP servers after all. We were noticed by one or two members and they broke away from their main raid group to engage us. Bad idea. All of us swooped down, dismounted smoked the lone Shaman, mounted up, and orbited the area within a span of 7 seconds (1 second to dismount, 3 to kill, 3 to mount). I love surgical strikes! Of course, we did have our share of problems with accidental Doomwalker pulls (I forgot he shoots people out of the air). Decision to Carnage.

Just a few days ago, SoH must’ve still felt bitter over the events that transpired. They start harassing my Guildies Shaman alts yet again (now in Hellfire). They ran back into the second Horde town (blood elf town) in the area hiding behind the town guards thinking they were safe. Our guys hopped on their mains. If you’re trying to get at two Horde low level Hunters who think they’re safe behind guards, so what do you do?

AoE the town Guards. It was absolutely hilarious when I heard about it over ventrilo. I’ve always known Mages were powerful, but you really do not want to get on their bad side. Decision to Carnage on this one. My hats off to them, they’re a great sport.
Now I wonder if I’m going to get jumped when I’m out there leveling.