Theo's PvP 101 (was forum=21)Follow

And so it begins.

Nicely done, great start. I'm assuming that additions and edits can be suggested either by PM or via posting? (Adding Hammer to Pally CC for example =)

You're going to expand this?

NPCs in BGs (like av and isle) will be affected by defense/hit/weaponskill and not by resil (EDIT: by the flat damage decrease component of resil). (unless it was changed by a patch I didnt read).

Flasks do work in BGs and the buff lasts trough death and you don't lose it when zoning in and out.

Vehicles can't be healed but they can be cleansed off of debuffs. Since debuffs not only do damage but also happen to be strong damage modifiers this can greatly increase the durability of the fragile vehicles.

Roles:

Tanks:
- Can carry/hold flags, best in company of at least 1 heal and 1 dps.
- Can tank bosses in AV and Isle.
- When 2 large groups meet the tanks have the ability to go into melee range without being insta-gibbed, they don't add as much DPS but can be very disruptive to the enemy group. (Do note that you don't really spec like a PvE tank, you spec for disruption effects like hungering cold.)
- Resil > Defense.

Death Grip: This spell alone is so powerful that it can be a role by itself alone. In BGs I can get 1 kill per cast of deathgrip guaranteed. It works by staying next to at least 2 teammates and anyone I deathgrip gets insta-gibbed without any chance to prevent it unless it's someone with a pally-bubble kind of immunity and does not have it on cooldown. If you pick targets correctly you can cast deathgrip on every cooldown and enemies will have 0% survival ratio. Part of it's effectiveness is in that it tends to pull people out of range of healers and pull healers out of range of their teammates.


Warsong:

Shaman, Druid, Mage, Rogue tend to be very good "escapey" flag runners.

DK, Prot Paladins and Resto Druids tend to be good "durable" flag runners.

When holding the flag you may not use any kind of immunity (paladin bubble, stealth, etc), mount, or engineer rocket boots.

The engineer boots however may still be used to run towards the flag to grab it but you have to click off the speed buff to be able to pick up the flag.

Free Action and Swiftness potions are great for running the flag.

There's 2 objectives, your flag and the enemy flag, if you're not going after either of the 2 objectives you're doing it wrong.

AV:

There's a trinket that you can use to switch to defense if the enemy team is advancing much faster than yours. This makes it an easy choice to go offensive and only port back and be defense if you really need to.


Edited, Aug 6th 2010 10:22pm by xorq

Edited, Aug 8th 2010 3:16am by xorq

Little typo under Rated BG's ("into" > "info"), but otherwise a grand job. I haven't done serious PvP in ages, but will keep an eye on the priest section. So far it all looks clean, clear and enjoyable to read.

It looks good so far. One thing I'd suggest, similar to the CC section, is one about interrupts, so they can be make-or-break in the same way if they happen at the wrong time.

Aside from the incorrect accenting of the word melee, very nice work Theo :D

I blame my iPad. I typed the first quarter of the post on it.

Excellent write-up. I think it's a great idea to have a nice simple pvp thread like this for people thinking of getting into it for the first time. Maybe it could become a general advice thread for people with questions about how to fight different classes and situations.

It's easy for newer pvpers to get quickly overwhelmed by more complicated resources like A.J or whatever.

Also some good racial trait for PVP, these 2 have excellent ones.


Gnome:
Escape artist : Escape the effects of any immobilization or movement speed reduction effect. Instant cast. 1.45 min cooldown.

Human
Every Man for Himself : Removes all movement impairing effects and all effects which cause loss of control of your character. This effect shares a cooldown with other similar effects, 2 minute cooldown.

Perception : Increases your Stealth detection, passive.

You need a target to cast Intimidating Shout. Your target stands still in the /cower animation. Up to four other hostiles around you run like beheaded chickens.

Right. Let me clarify...

Resil has 3 components.
1. Crit component that affects both players and npcs.
2. A flat damage modifier that only affects players and I think it doesn't affect BG npcs.
3. A mana drain modifier.

Also, you're doing pretty good but I think you might want to rethink the layout of your guide.

For one thing, unlike arenas, BGs are more strategic and less tactical. So you might want to focus on strategic elements and reduce the amount of explanation given to tactical elements or pass the per-class tactical elements to a latter extension or to a per-class guide to bgs.

While CC, interrupts and stuns play a role and are of obvious importance you may want to avoid running trough the extended list of such effects of each class of every possible spec and instead go directly to explaining strategies like explaining how mass CC is a great way to grab a flag in a guarded flag room and how certain spells can be key to protecting a flag carrier or fragile vehicle. You should still pay special attention to the very specific spells that are of real large scale strategical impact like for example ghost wolf, travel form, stealth, death grip, bloodlust and so on.

Also notice that in BGs a much greater variety of specs is available, unlike in arena. So you may get a wider range of interrupts and CCs and other various spells coming from talent trees like the warrior prot tree which is viable in BGs.

BGs have significant strategical elements that will pretty much take precendece over anything else, like for example in AV keeping track of where each team's dead players will respawn and in AB keeping track of the travel time of backups and the time it takes to grab a node from it's guarding force.

What the per class explanation should probably focus on is the role of each class related to BG objectives (such as flag carriers and so on) and their role as natural predator of other specific classes, for example you want to mention that arms warriors should hunt down rogues so that their clothies and healers can do their part and warlocks should focus on paladins because of how effective they are at removing that threat for their team.

Edited, Aug 8th 2010 2:39am by xorq

Yeah, I know. Paladins are one of the strongest classes in WotLK PvP by far. I don't see that changing much in Cata (part of the reason I'll be rolling a Tauren Pally).

Edit: Xorq, I couldn't care less what you think about my guide. Pretty much everyone but you thinks that this is valuable information about PvP, ergo it's going to remain.

This is NOT a BG guide. This is "PvP 101" or "the basics of PvP". The basics of PvP is how classes work and how they work together and against one another. BGs have been thrown in because they're seen as the basic level that people start doing PvP in. If I expand the rated BGs section enough, I may start actually posting strategies that will always win you a match (not that winning is that hard, really), but don't hold your breath.

Actually, please do hold your breath. This forum would be better off without your retarded posts.

Edited, Aug 8th 2010 10:37am by Theophany

That's probably a good idea. It would be more useful if there was a way to reference individual sections of the first post (like a wiki page), but in lieu of that, I suppose I'll have to break it up.

Another good idea. Thanks, I'll work on it.