Why wait for Cataclysm? There's nothing stopping you from running an organised group into a battleground now (a "premade"). A premade is to PVP what a guild raid is to PVE -- or described on the flip side of the coin, going into a BG without one is like trying to use trade chat to find an ICC PUG that's not going to fail. On a Monday evening right before reset. This post is geared towards newer people who have found their appetite for PVP whetted by the iminent Cataclysm, and want some information on how to get started before that hits and the world is changed forever.
I. Limiting Mechanics
II. Your Raid Composition
III. Leading the Raid
IV. Managing the Other People
V. Ending the Raid / Consistency
I. Limiting Mechanics
Blizzard restricted the amount of people you could take into a premade a while ago. Widespread wisdom suggests that you can only take a party-sized group of 5 with you, and to some extent this is true. But only to some extent. I formed a raid group of six over the weekend and attempted to queue for everything, with the following results:
Warsong Gulch (10) : Works with a raid
Arathi Basin (15) : Works with a raid
Eye of the Storm (15) : Works with a raid
Strand of the Ancients (15) : Works with a raid
Alterac Valley (40) : Limited to a party of 5.
Isle of Conquest (40) : Limited to a party of 5.
Random BG (??) : Limited to a party of 5, presumably because you might get one of AV/IOC, which apparently want you in smaller groups.
This is a little counterintuitive -- the smaller BGs allow you to take a larger group into them, exerting more control over the outcome, while the two largest battlegrounds restrict you to a small group. I wish I could explain Blizzard's logic here, but I can't.
There are ways to get around this, though they are cumbersome. An addon such as Preform AV Enabler will queue everyone in your party as individuals, and only enter you if everyone gets into the same one. I have used this addon in the past and found it to be clunky and time-consuming, apart from the difficulty of requiring everyone in your premade to have it installed...which if you're recruiting your premade out of trade chat and not out of a solid PVP guild that requires its members to have it, will cause yet more delays as everyone goes to go get it.
You might ask why that's worth it, and the answer is that Blizzard first attempts to queue premade groups against each other, considering the significant tactical advantage that accrues to people who queue as a group with instantaneous voice communication. Only after a set amount of time failing to do so will Blizzard match your group up against a pug, which you will undoubtedly stomp. AV Enabler (or addons like it) allow you to game the system into thinking you're all queueing separately (ie, not a premade) when in fact you're not -- guaranteeing you disorganised opposition. If you're one of those people who claimed to be excited when blizzard gave the ability to turn off XP so that your geared twink could face other twinks, but in reality stopped playing b/c your actual enjoyment came from roflstomping lvl 10-12s in grey gear...then an addon will let you enjoy that again. I personally do not find the organisational headache worth the tradeoff -- it inevitably takes a long time to get all the kinks straightened out with an AV Enabler group, and I would rather spend that time actually pvping -- but if you do...I've given you the resources to do it.
II. Your Raid Composition
I'm assuming that you're rolling with a 5-man premade, in order to be able to use the random BG queue and maximise your honor return. On a holiday weekend which allows it, you could make a larger one. Those five roles should probably be, with some variation as the situation calls for:
A Single-Target Healer
A Holy Pally or a Disc Priest work well here -- these are particularly useful in games where keeping one person alive is important -- the flag carrier in WSG, or a tank in AV or IOC. They also have nice synergy if they're traveling with your other healer --
A Raid Healer
Priority here goes to Resto Shamans, Resto Druids, or Holy Priests (assuming you can find any of the latter who PvP). These are useful when you need to keep a group of people alive -- defending or attacking a node/tower (AB/EOTS/AV/IOC), or trying to recover a flag (WSG). You can see, I think, that if you are forced to unbalance your group, it's a little better to have two raid healers than two single-target healers, just b/c of their slightly wider area of usefulness.
AOE CC
I like to take a lock or a mage here, for Howl of Terror / Frost Nova, respectively. A priest can also fill this role, or dual fill that role if you already have a priest as one of your healers. The ability to take a large chunk of an enemy force out of action, even for the smaller amount of time that you usually trade in order to get that AOE capability, is critical in several BGs -- it can buy your flag carrier in WSG needed space to get out of midfield, or put a lot of people out of range of your demos in SOTA (you only run as fast as the demos, barring things like sprint or dash, so once you get behind them you'll stay behind).
The Sneaky Folks
A rogue, or a druid (feral or otherwise) can provide you with valuable reconnaisance, spying out enemy weak points without putting themselves into harm's way. It helps that both of those classes also have solid single-target CC (sap, roots/hibernate/cyclone)
Everyone Else
Mostly you fill this with any dps; in some specialised instances you may want this slot to go to a tank -- WSG to run a flag, or AV/IOC to tank the enemy general NPC. If your premade goes to 8 or more people, I would bring a third healer.
Recruiting
Generally, you can fill your slots from four places, in descending order of usefulness : from your guild, if you set the event up on your calendar beforehand; from your friends list, especially if you make an effort to keep other PvPers on your realm on your FL; trade chat; and from the BGs you run -- if you see other people from your realm while you're running your premade, feel free to invite them along on your next queue.
A word about trade chat : you need to say three things. First, "LFXm to run some premades", replacing the X with your number. This conveys the idea that you know what you're looking for, which builds people's confidence that they're not signing up for a waste of time. Some servers have a negative connotation associated with the word "premade", for reasons that escape me, or people may not know what they are (if you're on a normal server, especially), and so sometimes you can get better results if you say "LFXm to run some (battlegrounds / battleground premades) with". Second, mention that they should have vent, and resilience. Again, this is a confidence builder. If you want to name a specific figure for resilience, that's fine too (5-600 is good); I usually just say "decent resilience" and rely on people to know what their own capabilities are. If someone doesn't know what they should have, I figure that's maybe not somebody I want running with me. Possibly that's judgmental of me, feel free to vary that. I say "decent" and I get people whispering me saying "I have 1100, is that ok?" which is amusing in its own way. Lastly, I like to put a smiley face, or an exclamation point (ONE ONLY) at the end...it demonstrates enthusiasm, that while you're going to be running something with a serious desire to win, you also haven't lost sight of the fact that you're also trying to have fun.
III. Leading the Raid
It is reasonably important that you have vent. You can run a premade successfully without it, but the quality of your win will be correspondingly decreased...much like trying to organise a PUG of any wing past the first in ICC without vent. You might pull it off...but it will be messy.
It is more important that you have a plan for every battleground you go into. Remember how we used our advertisement to give an illusion of self-confidence? Now is the part where you have to deliver on that, or you are not going to retain the people you recruited. This is where having two healers is crucial -- it gives you more flexibility to split your team in half to do a couple things at once. Within reason, the more map coverage you can get onto your vent, the more up-to-the-second information you have as the leader to determine what needs doing. Don't take this to extremes though -- sending one person to each node in AB may get you more information, but it nullifies your advantage.
In WSG, for example, I like to leave two to defend the flag (sneaky dps + me as druid heals, usually, but you could make any combination work) and 3 to go get the opposing flag with the crowd of PUGS. Once they make it back we swap to the FC and his healer (we send out the single-target heals usually) staying behind, and I take the other two dps with me to go lead an attack. By having a strong presence in both groups we have a good amount of influence.
The splitting also works well in a game like AB or EOTS, where you may need 5 people to take a node, but you certainly don't need 5 to hold one.
Speaking of lead...try to get yourself promoted to BG Lead...there's something about having different colored text that will occasionally make people listen to you.
Assist. The second guild I was ever in, a lovely PVP guild back on Emerald Dream called Meridius (and later, I regret to announce, DEVASTATE, yes in all caps), was fond of using an assist method, and I've carried it over to my premades. I usually pick a ranged dps before we go into a BG, or failing that I'll do it, to pick out high-priority targets and call over vent for an assist. I do this now just by having them say "assist" over vent, and making sure everyone has a macro made up beforehand that says "/assist XYZ". This is important for knocking down things like healers, or that Kingslayer DK with shadowmourne who's going to rip you all to shreds if you leave him up. It's also better that this person be someone at range b/c melee are...well...melee. They have a harder time seeing the bigger tactical picture than someone who's at a few steps remove from the brawl.
IV. Managing the Other People
One of the most distressing mistakes you can make is to forget that half your team, or more, is not on vent with you. Remember to relay information that you have in vent onto BG chat, if you expect anyone to do anything about it. I've led premades that went down to failure, only to realise afterwards that probably nobody had any clue what was going on b/c BG chat was totally silent.
The reverse is also true of course -- remember to READ BG chat as well.
There are two schools of thought on whether you should announce at the beginning of the battleground that you are a premade. School 1 suggests that you should do this, b/c it gives you auto-respect/authority and makes people more willing to cooperate with you. School 2 does not do this, b/c if you lose then the pugs will ridicule you incessantly. I belong to school 1...a) you should not be caring what pugs think b/c odds are you're not going to see them again, and b) I know that when I pug and someone announces a premade, I get all excited and just want to help. I don't think I'm alone in having that reaction either.
It is important that you value the pugged people you're with -- they are part of your team no less than your vented premade mates, but you guys can't be everywhere unless you're a full premade in which case...you shouldn't be reading this section anyway. Thank them for their help, both at the beginning, and at the end. Be civilised and polite, yet firm and authoritative. You are the default leader...act like one.
That being said, try to keep on top of what pugs are doing and tailor yourself accordingly. It is inevitable that some people will not listen to you. Try to work your premade's (people who WILL listen to you) strategy around that as much as possible, without fatally compromising your original plan. Hopefully you're using something reasonably simple that most people would already (*cross fingers*) be doing anyway.
I like to make my announcement at the beginning something along the lines of "Hello everyone. This is a partial Draenor premade...we will be handling XYZ, and we would appreciate it if you guys could do ABC. Thanks for playing with us!"
V. Ending the Raid
You should have in mind how long you plan on going -- someone may ask, and it looks better if you have an idea. That being said, don't be surprised if you have to swap people out more frequently than you thought. People are finicky about BGs...some people only want to go once, some people would go all night if you left them. I generally try to go for two hours or so, but sometimes cancel early, and sometimes go past. Have a finger on the pulse of it, and if it seems like your premade is not having fun, it may be time to call it.
The MOST IMPORTANT THING, and I cannot stress this enough, is that you NOT LOSE THE PEOPLE YOU RAN WITH. Offer to trade friend requests, get those people on your contact list so that you can grab them again. You will run better premades if you run them with people you've run with before. It's true in raiding, and it's true in BGs. I have reached the point where I usually fill 80% of my premades out of my friends list before I hit trade. Which is kind of like the job market, really...most jobs you never see advertised b/c they're filled by networking before it ever gets that far. If you run premades consistently (every saturday at 1pm! or whatever), create the event on your calendar and make sure that those people get invites. If you have too many friends...try to rotate them around so that everyone is getting a chance to run once in a while so you don't forget each other.
A good premade is like a raid that one-shots all the way up to LK...it's an exhilarating experience that has the capacity to completely overturn people's opinions about PvP. They are hands-down your best recruitment tool if you are trying to convince someone who "hates" PvP that it's really quite fun. And of course, it's more fun for you too. It goes without saying, I hope, that premades generally enjoy much higher win rates than going in solo. And they also give you the power to make legitimate attempts at the harder BG achievements (Resilient Victory in AB, anyone?). And yet for all that, they are not formed very frequently. I pose the theory that this is due to a dearth of people willing to step up and lead. Go forth and be a PvP missionary!
Showing posts with label strategies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label strategies. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
Revisiting the High Ground
Ihra can make mistakes. Despite the fact that he is not human, that night elves have a long history of being perfect (forget about the well of eternity. forget about the naga. forget about vordrassil's corruption. forget about...aw hell, just forget everything), Ihra can and does make mistakes.
I would like to retract an opinion I issued earlier, standing shoulder to shoulder with Cynwise, about the worthlessness of the hangar in IOC. I stand by parts of the original thesis, namely that
I have been forced to revise this plan on the basis of
I log into IOC and run into 38-19ish numbers disadvantages ALL THE TIME. And judging by the way other people complain about it, I'm not the only one. Of course, that's skewed by the fact that all of the people I hear complaining about it are from my battlegroup, so it's not really getting a wider representation, and also by the fact that we all know people are more vocal about complaining than when things are going well. That aside, however, it is obvious to me that with 19 people it is impossible to make a serious play for two of the middle nodes, and so we're left with trying one. I venture to propose that that one might, in point of fact, be best served if it were the hangar. Why?
1) Horde does not go there, because it is an inferior node. This minimizes deaths Alliance-side which, if you're at a serious numbers disadvantage, you can ill afford to do. You need every man, woman, and child to be alive the maximum amount of time.
2) Since IOC, to an even larger extent than AV, reduces to an exercise in herding cats, it is inevitable that you will fail to rally enough people around you to take something like docks, at least at the forefront. Horde simply puts too much pressure on it.
3) It's higher. This is, I think, an overlooked value to the Hangar, and has much the same benefits as the lumber mill in Arathi Basin. By a careful series of jumps, you can hop down from the Hangar to the Workshop, if you wait for the horde fellas to clear out. You can take advantage here of the fact that they may be horde, but they are subject to the same recklessly offensive spirit that wrecks us up. Nobody likes to defend something when they could be killing shiny objects somewhere else. Imagine the setback, the big siege engine takes four minutes to bring online, if you hopped down and tagged the workshop flag right at the end of that timer? It's like recapping a bunker in AV, big points for you.
With the current state of IOC, you cannot control all of the space you need to, Alliance-side. And fragmenting our numbers trying to do something beyond our means (ie, to carry out a 40-man strategy with 20 people) merely accelerates the losses.
I don't have a particularly good strategy envisioned here -- the best I've been able to come up with is to suggest a 10-10 split with people on defence and people going to hangar, in the hopes that we can turtle up long enough to get the numbers on a more even footing. But I won't pretend to any experience with that working, b/c nobody listens as soon as the word "hangar" or "turtle" comes out of your mouth.
Is going for the hangar still an inferior option? In the words of Spock, "All things being equal Mr. Scott, I would agree...however, things are not equal." If you have enough people to play IOC as it was meant to be played, then by all means do so. But I think there is a serious problem Alliance-side with over-reaching ourselves and trying to do too much with too little, the way that battleground tends to set itself up.
I would like to retract an opinion I issued earlier, standing shoulder to shoulder with Cynwise, about the worthlessness of the hangar in IOC. I stand by parts of the original thesis, namely that
- "EVERYONE ZERG HANGER PLX" is generally a stupid idea, and
- the key to winning should be, on paper, to control more of the three middle nodes that give you keep-assault options than the opponent.
I have been forced to revise this plan on the basis of
- Horde zergs docks all the time, resulting in a lot of wasted time corpse running if you even make a try for it.
- Because zerging docks is such a successful strategy for horde, and they win a lot more than we do, Alliance at least on my battlegroup has basically abandoned the battleground.
I log into IOC and run into 38-19ish numbers disadvantages ALL THE TIME. And judging by the way other people complain about it, I'm not the only one. Of course, that's skewed by the fact that all of the people I hear complaining about it are from my battlegroup, so it's not really getting a wider representation, and also by the fact that we all know people are more vocal about complaining than when things are going well. That aside, however, it is obvious to me that with 19 people it is impossible to make a serious play for two of the middle nodes, and so we're left with trying one. I venture to propose that that one might, in point of fact, be best served if it were the hangar. Why?
1) Horde does not go there, because it is an inferior node. This minimizes deaths Alliance-side which, if you're at a serious numbers disadvantage, you can ill afford to do. You need every man, woman, and child to be alive the maximum amount of time.
2) Since IOC, to an even larger extent than AV, reduces to an exercise in herding cats, it is inevitable that you will fail to rally enough people around you to take something like docks, at least at the forefront. Horde simply puts too much pressure on it.
3) It's higher. This is, I think, an overlooked value to the Hangar, and has much the same benefits as the lumber mill in Arathi Basin. By a careful series of jumps, you can hop down from the Hangar to the Workshop, if you wait for the horde fellas to clear out. You can take advantage here of the fact that they may be horde, but they are subject to the same recklessly offensive spirit that wrecks us up. Nobody likes to defend something when they could be killing shiny objects somewhere else. Imagine the setback, the big siege engine takes four minutes to bring online, if you hopped down and tagged the workshop flag right at the end of that timer? It's like recapping a bunker in AV, big points for you.
With the current state of IOC, you cannot control all of the space you need to, Alliance-side. And fragmenting our numbers trying to do something beyond our means (ie, to carry out a 40-man strategy with 20 people) merely accelerates the losses.
I don't have a particularly good strategy envisioned here -- the best I've been able to come up with is to suggest a 10-10 split with people on defence and people going to hangar, in the hopes that we can turtle up long enough to get the numbers on a more even footing. But I won't pretend to any experience with that working, b/c nobody listens as soon as the word "hangar" or "turtle" comes out of your mouth.
Is going for the hangar still an inferior option? In the words of Spock, "All things being equal Mr. Scott, I would agree...however, things are not equal." If you have enough people to play IOC as it was meant to be played, then by all means do so. But I think there is a serious problem Alliance-side with over-reaching ourselves and trying to do too much with too little, the way that battleground tends to set itself up.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
You've got one fire extinguisher
...and five separate fires. The other day I landed myself in an AB with all dps classes except for two pallies.
Ihrayeep: Please, for the love of...whatever deity you worship...tell me one of you pallies can heal.
Pally1: Nope.
Quick inspect: sure enough, both ret. Seizing the opportunity to crack the inside joke against my guild's pally healer,
Ihrayeep: Ok so...I'll solo-heal this. Should be fine as long as noone gets hurt.
Pally2: I'll bubble the whole game.
We eventually won that game, though I was outhealed by a pair of horde priests (I believe the numbers went 260-240-200(me)k), and this I think is why: For heals especially, it's not about topping the charts in a BG (though I do that fairly routinely) so much as putting those heals in the right place. When you are called on to solo-heal a BG, particularly the three 15-man ones, positioning is important. You are responsible for EVERY SINGLE FIRE. AT THE SAME TIME. It sucks, high stress. Basically, if you are standing still you are losing the game. You have to be constantly moving, because *something* is always under attack, and if it's not where you're at then you need to move yourself somewhere else. You have to be everywhere at once. Frequently you have to make heartbreaking decisions about who to leave to die because there's more than one flare-up. Also this is the one instance where I would diverge from my usual dictum that it's ok to be a healer stranded guarding a node. Because you are *it* for your team, you can't do that. Better (in this case only!) to leave the node undefended. Seconds you spend not healing watching the node are seconds where people are dying from no healing backup. Remember that healers are a force-multiplier in battlegrounds!
Still, there is a plus-side: you get to take sole credit for winning. SOLE. CREDIT. Because if you won with only one healer, you deserve props. And I give you full permission to be an egotistical glory-hog for pulling that out against bad odds. But be a fun egotistical glory-hog, mmkay?
Ihrayeep: Please, for the love of...whatever deity you worship...tell me one of you pallies can heal.
Pally1: Nope.
Quick inspect: sure enough, both ret. Seizing the opportunity to crack the inside joke against my guild's pally healer,
Ihrayeep: Ok so...I'll solo-heal this. Should be fine as long as noone gets hurt.
Pally2: I'll bubble the whole game.
We eventually won that game, though I was outhealed by a pair of horde priests (I believe the numbers went 260-240-200(me)k), and this I think is why: For heals especially, it's not about topping the charts in a BG (though I do that fairly routinely) so much as putting those heals in the right place. When you are called on to solo-heal a BG, particularly the three 15-man ones, positioning is important. You are responsible for EVERY SINGLE FIRE. AT THE SAME TIME. It sucks, high stress. Basically, if you are standing still you are losing the game. You have to be constantly moving, because *something* is always under attack, and if it's not where you're at then you need to move yourself somewhere else. You have to be everywhere at once. Frequently you have to make heartbreaking decisions about who to leave to die because there's more than one flare-up. Also this is the one instance where I would diverge from my usual dictum that it's ok to be a healer stranded guarding a node. Because you are *it* for your team, you can't do that. Better (in this case only!) to leave the node undefended. Seconds you spend not healing watching the node are seconds where people are dying from no healing backup. Remember that healers are a force-multiplier in battlegrounds!
Still, there is a plus-side: you get to take sole credit for winning. SOLE. CREDIT. Because if you won with only one healer, you deserve props. And I give you full permission to be an egotistical glory-hog for pulling that out against bad odds. But be a fun egotistical glory-hog, mmkay?
Friday, December 11, 2009
How To Heal a BG, Part 2
Time for part two of this series on how to heal a BG -- if you missed part one, you can find it here. Then, we talked about managing yourself, your addons, and your spells. Today we're talking about something more finicky and unreliable : managing group interactions with your friendly teammates. I am going to center this around a concept I call Battleground Inertia. Basically what that boils down to is: people are sheep. People follow whatever the prevailing mood, strategy, chat settings appears to be. If you are a dominant, take-charge person, you win what Richard Nixon I believe famously labeled the Silent Majority. It's important to remember that it was NIXON who coined this phrase because we all know Nixon was a crook, protestations to the contrary, and I think when he coined this particular phrase he was referencing the fact that he could pursue whatever policy he wanted and then claim that the people who opposed him were just a vocal minority and really, most people supported what he was doing. You shape opinion, by making an opinion. With that in mind, onwards!
Rule #4 : Setting the mood in chat
Conscious of the lack of promised pictures in the last post, I have endeavoured to make up that gap somewhat here, using an EotS match I did this morning. Step One is figuring out who your other healers are in the BG. I try to do something like this at the start of any BG I go into:
Sometimes this helps, and sometimes you get asinine comments like "I can bandage". So you have to be more proactive, for the people who are (remember!) sheep. Take a quick look at the people you have with you in the BG. In the case of my EotS match that went like this:
Now, this is where it becomes important that you have downloaded some kind of unit frames addon like I suggested (nay, ordered, even) you do in part one. Identify possible healers. Disregarding the straight-DPS classes, we have in this BG besides me (I heal, but presumably I knew that already) two pallies, a priest, and a shammy, all of whom could be potential healers. Pallies are easy: look at the mana bar. I don't have mana bars on my raid-frame, but when they're targeted they do. Each of those pallies had between 5-7k mana. That screams RET. Very rarely, they could be tanks, but you don't take tanks into BGs except maybe AV, and in any case, whichever it is, it's not a healer. A pally with 15k mana, on the other hand, definitely is. Similarly, a shaman with 10-12k mana is enhancement, not resto. Unfortunately they have a caster-dps spec (ditto that problem with boomkin druids and s-priests) and so you have no choice but to inspect them. This does not take long. Right-click, inspect, click talents. You don't even have to page through the different trees; the dominant one will come out on top. The shammy I was pretty sure was a healer, from
but I inspected anyway to make sure. Sure enough, he was. The priest, tenfour, also. If you look at my chat pic, you can see that by that point I had figured out who the healers were and had proceeded to
STEP TWO: Direct. Direct with a soft touch. People do not respond well to being ordered. I could have said, "tenfour, go MT -> FRR" but I don't find that works very well. Hence I just asked, with the intention that I would go somewhere else. There's a bizarre law of gravity that Cassandri over at Hots & Dots observed, that healers tend to clump up. It's not intentional, I don't think, but our mass causes some kind of gravitic interaction that sucks us together if you don't take strenuous efforts to avoid it. I regret to say that in this instance, tenfour did not tell me where he was going, leaving me to guess. But most people will respond to a direct inquiry with their name involved. I could have whispered him, I suppose, but I ran out of time here. Whispering is fine, it builds a sense of cameraderie.
Now you might ask : why ask who the healers are, when you can just inspect and find out yourself? This goes back to Battleground Inertia, and serves a secondary purpose beyond gaining knowledge. If you are in a BG where there is no bg chat, nobody will start it. If you're in a BG where there is angry bg chat with people blaming each other and telling everyone else how much they suck, then that will breed more of the same. What you are doing is hijacking the bg chat to serve your own ends. The end in mind here is "use BG chat to win the BG", which theoretically should be everyone's end, but frequently isn't. Set the tone right off: we are going to be helpful, we are going to coordinate. Also it helps reassure the dps, who tend to have bad self-esteem about things like this, that there are in fact healers here who are trying to keep them alive.
Rule #5 : Master the "Charge of Hesitancy"
Dilemma: How do you physically lead, without leading? I am firmly of the opinion that healers must be leaders in battlegrounds, for the simple reason that you stay alive longer than dps (generally) and so you tend to have a better overall view of the battlefield then someone who goes to point A, dies in four seconds, gets popped back over to point B to rez, and then wanders off to point C because point A now holds painful memories for him.
Given that, it is often your responsibility to lead the cavalry in a charge on another node (in AB/EotS/IoC), getting the flag back (WSG), or re-capping defensive towers (AV). However, as a healer, it is not good for you to be in the front because, well, we all know that the first one in is the first one targeted.
So how do you both? *Inertia*. People will rarely leave you to run off to a node by yourself, I find, and particularly at the beginning of one of those node-style games people tend to follow the ones who dash out the gate looking like they have a Serious Plan (even if they don't). So be the lead, charge forward. Here's the key part of this plan: when you start getting close to the node (crossing the bridge to the BS, or halfway across a bridge in EOTS, for example), take your finger off the forward key. Then charge again. Do this repeatedly, in quick, spasmodic stops. What this does is gradually put you towards the back, where all good healers should be, while gradually passing the lead torch to a DPS who, because of inertia, held down his forward key and doesn't know how to change directions or momentum. The point is that you STARTED the charge, and once the ball is rolling the other people will just roll with it even after you are no longer leading it. Like rolling a big rock down a mountain.
Rule #6 : Save someone's life
I generally do not advocate pocket-healing; it's too focused on one person at the expense of the overall picture. I do do it on occasion, as a fun change of pace and because I like people to hero-worship me *cough*, but overall, not recommended. Generally you can get the puppy-DPS to follow you with a short, sustained effort at the beginning. What you are trying to do is raise their awareness of you. To do this, an excellent tactic is to save someone's life, in a dramatic fashion. Standard healing here is not what you're looking for; people notice being healed from 70-100%; they will die for someone who just ostentatiously blew all their cds to bring them fom 1-60-100 (or whatever it is you do). Your healing of them can be subpar after that, or back to regular, but investing a burst of super-effort on someone once in a while goes a long way to making friends. And more importantly, encouraging cooperation. I had a pair of rogues in this game who basically circled me wherever I went like watchful puppies because I had heroically sacrificed myself to save them a few times. It also pays off more if you pull this stunt on classes who have NO SELF-HEALING whatsoever...they tend to notice it more.
Rule #7 : Be Situationally Aware
Use the M key. Seriously. Use it often, and know what you're looking at. Familiarize yourself with the maps, if you're new to BGs entirely. If you know the maps already, the next step is to build a connection between your map, and your raid frames. Particularly, try to keep tabs on where the other healers are, and try not to be there. Another good thing to do is to look for strategic places on the map that are poorly defended. Not that you have to go there immediately to defend it -- maybe it's poorly defended because it's in the back and doesn't need to be heavily guarded -- but mouse over the node on your map and see who exactly is there. Then close your map. Hunt on your raidframes for where that person (or persons) is. Try to keep an eye on that raid frame's health. If they start getting hurt, the node is under attack, even if they didn't call it in BG chat. Run over there and heal them up and protect the node. Call that it's under attack, obviously, since the original defence failed to do that. In this EotS game I was able to stave off an attack on two different occasions doing this. On another occasion I noticed that DR was being guarded by only the resto shammy. Since I knew he was a resto shammy from the beginning, I knew it wasn't smart to leave thim there so I politely asked in /bg for a dps to go back him up, even though he was not under immediate attack. He was attacked shortly thereafter, though I don't take credit for magically foreseeing that happening. The point is you are trying to keep control of the BG and see trouble spots before they develop. If you are not in a vent premade, reaction times go way down because you don't have that instant communication, so PREVENTATIVE action becomes more important, as well as anything you can do to speed up your (and others') reactions.
-----
That's it for this section. Next time, how to fight the bad men!
Rule #4 : Setting the mood in chat
Conscious of the lack of promised pictures in the last post, I have endeavoured to make up that gap somewhat here, using an EotS match I did this morning. Step One is figuring out who your other healers are in the BG. I try to do something like this at the start of any BG I go into:
Sometimes this helps, and sometimes you get asinine comments like "I can bandage". So you have to be more proactive, for the people who are (remember!) sheep. Take a quick look at the people you have with you in the BG. In the case of my EotS match that went like this:
Now, this is where it becomes important that you have downloaded some kind of unit frames addon like I suggested (nay, ordered, even) you do in part one. Identify possible healers. Disregarding the straight-DPS classes, we have in this BG besides me (I heal, but presumably I knew that already) two pallies, a priest, and a shammy, all of whom could be potential healers. Pallies are easy: look at the mana bar. I don't have mana bars on my raid-frame, but when they're targeted they do. Each of those pallies had between 5-7k mana. That screams RET. Very rarely, they could be tanks, but you don't take tanks into BGs except maybe AV, and in any case, whichever it is, it's not a healer. A pally with 15k mana, on the other hand, definitely is. Similarly, a shaman with 10-12k mana is enhancement, not resto. Unfortunately they have a caster-dps spec (ditto that problem with boomkin druids and s-priests) and so you have no choice but to inspect them. This does not take long. Right-click, inspect, click talents. You don't even have to page through the different trees; the dominant one will come out on top. The shammy I was pretty sure was a healer, from
but I inspected anyway to make sure. Sure enough, he was. The priest, tenfour, also. If you look at my chat pic, you can see that by that point I had figured out who the healers were and had proceeded to
STEP TWO: Direct. Direct with a soft touch. People do not respond well to being ordered. I could have said, "tenfour, go MT -> FRR" but I don't find that works very well. Hence I just asked, with the intention that I would go somewhere else. There's a bizarre law of gravity that Cassandri over at Hots & Dots observed, that healers tend to clump up. It's not intentional, I don't think, but our mass causes some kind of gravitic interaction that sucks us together if you don't take strenuous efforts to avoid it. I regret to say that in this instance, tenfour did not tell me where he was going, leaving me to guess. But most people will respond to a direct inquiry with their name involved. I could have whispered him, I suppose, but I ran out of time here. Whispering is fine, it builds a sense of cameraderie.
Now you might ask : why ask who the healers are, when you can just inspect and find out yourself? This goes back to Battleground Inertia, and serves a secondary purpose beyond gaining knowledge. If you are in a BG where there is no bg chat, nobody will start it. If you're in a BG where there is angry bg chat with people blaming each other and telling everyone else how much they suck, then that will breed more of the same. What you are doing is hijacking the bg chat to serve your own ends. The end in mind here is "use BG chat to win the BG", which theoretically should be everyone's end, but frequently isn't. Set the tone right off: we are going to be helpful, we are going to coordinate. Also it helps reassure the dps, who tend to have bad self-esteem about things like this, that there are in fact healers here who are trying to keep them alive.
Rule #5 : Master the "Charge of Hesitancy"
Dilemma: How do you physically lead, without leading? I am firmly of the opinion that healers must be leaders in battlegrounds, for the simple reason that you stay alive longer than dps (generally) and so you tend to have a better overall view of the battlefield then someone who goes to point A, dies in four seconds, gets popped back over to point B to rez, and then wanders off to point C because point A now holds painful memories for him.
Given that, it is often your responsibility to lead the cavalry in a charge on another node (in AB/EotS/IoC), getting the flag back (WSG), or re-capping defensive towers (AV). However, as a healer, it is not good for you to be in the front because, well, we all know that the first one in is the first one targeted.
So how do you both? *Inertia*. People will rarely leave you to run off to a node by yourself, I find, and particularly at the beginning of one of those node-style games people tend to follow the ones who dash out the gate looking like they have a Serious Plan (even if they don't). So be the lead, charge forward. Here's the key part of this plan: when you start getting close to the node (crossing the bridge to the BS, or halfway across a bridge in EOTS, for example), take your finger off the forward key. Then charge again. Do this repeatedly, in quick, spasmodic stops. What this does is gradually put you towards the back, where all good healers should be, while gradually passing the lead torch to a DPS who, because of inertia, held down his forward key and doesn't know how to change directions or momentum. The point is that you STARTED the charge, and once the ball is rolling the other people will just roll with it even after you are no longer leading it. Like rolling a big rock down a mountain.
Rule #6 : Save someone's life
I generally do not advocate pocket-healing; it's too focused on one person at the expense of the overall picture. I do do it on occasion, as a fun change of pace and because I like people to hero-worship me *cough*, but overall, not recommended. Generally you can get the puppy-DPS to follow you with a short, sustained effort at the beginning. What you are trying to do is raise their awareness of you. To do this, an excellent tactic is to save someone's life, in a dramatic fashion. Standard healing here is not what you're looking for; people notice being healed from 70-100%; they will die for someone who just ostentatiously blew all their cds to bring them fom 1-60-100 (or whatever it is you do). Your healing of them can be subpar after that, or back to regular, but investing a burst of super-effort on someone once in a while goes a long way to making friends. And more importantly, encouraging cooperation. I had a pair of rogues in this game who basically circled me wherever I went like watchful puppies because I had heroically sacrificed myself to save them a few times. It also pays off more if you pull this stunt on classes who have NO SELF-HEALING whatsoever...they tend to notice it more.
Rule #7 : Be Situationally Aware
Use the M key. Seriously. Use it often, and know what you're looking at. Familiarize yourself with the maps, if you're new to BGs entirely. If you know the maps already, the next step is to build a connection between your map, and your raid frames. Particularly, try to keep tabs on where the other healers are, and try not to be there. Another good thing to do is to look for strategic places on the map that are poorly defended. Not that you have to go there immediately to defend it -- maybe it's poorly defended because it's in the back and doesn't need to be heavily guarded -- but mouse over the node on your map and see who exactly is there. Then close your map. Hunt on your raidframes for where that person (or persons) is. Try to keep an eye on that raid frame's health. If they start getting hurt, the node is under attack, even if they didn't call it in BG chat. Run over there and heal them up and protect the node. Call that it's under attack, obviously, since the original defence failed to do that. In this EotS game I was able to stave off an attack on two different occasions doing this. On another occasion I noticed that DR was being guarded by only the resto shammy. Since I knew he was a resto shammy from the beginning, I knew it wasn't smart to leave thim there so I politely asked in /bg for a dps to go back him up, even though he was not under immediate attack. He was attacked shortly thereafter, though I don't take credit for magically foreseeing that happening. The point is you are trying to keep control of the BG and see trouble spots before they develop. If you are not in a vent premade, reaction times go way down because you don't have that instant communication, so PREVENTATIVE action becomes more important, as well as anything you can do to speed up your (and others') reactions.
-----
That's it for this section. Next time, how to fight the bad men!
Friday, December 4, 2009
How to Heal a BG, Part 1
It occurred to me when I was thinking about the last several blogs that I've enjoyed reading:
cynwise on Wintergrasp
phaelia on Grid
cassandri on Alterac Valley
mortigan on Rules for Raiding
that there's a unifying theme here. Can you guess what it is? That's right, they're all helpful well-written guides. And, with the exception of grid, posts on something I already consider myself fairly well-informed in. So the key is this, apparently. Friends like to read about crazy things you're up to. Experienced players like getting alternative viewpoints, even on something they already know. And new players like to be told how to do things they don't know how to do. And yet, when I go hunting for guides on BG healing I see a collection of bad editing and/or forum flaming without a whole lot of help. Niche window? In one of Ihra's trademark phrases, POUNCE LIKE TIGER!
It is my humble opinion that success in a battleground is all about managing relationships. -- awkward silence, while you all say to yourselves, “But nobody uses /bg chat except to use Rule 69...” --. Bear with me, mmkay, while I walk through three different relationships in these posts: yourself, your friends, and your enemies. Up today, yourself!
Rule #1 : Managing your screen environment
All da lovey pvp stuff, in its own area
Addons. Know them, love them. I don't even care what you use, so long as it is not the original blizzard UI. Just as in PVE healing, you want people's health bars front and center, and – d'oh! -- blizzard puts them off to the side, instead prioritizing your action bars. I hope by the time you're hitting battlegrounds you know which keys do which things for you (or no keys at all, if you've got one of those more-buttons-than-Lolth-ever-intended-mice). Also, Blizzard's unit frames do not identify CLASSES, which means that besides rogues, warriors, and death knights, you have to guess at everything; or RANGE. A raid frame addon is one of the most important things you can do to help yourself out here. I adore pitbull; my wife (who, admittedly, raids and does litle pvp) likes xperl. I've heard some people razzle-dazzling about VuhDo but I've never used it. I would disqualify IceHUD, because it's primarily a soloing addon which is not very group-friendly, and Healbot. I'm a little sketchy on Grid as well but without a lot of experience with that latter, I'm not in a position to comment exclusively on it. I dislike healbot because of the click-casting approach; I find there are too many other things I need to be doing in a PvP-oriented fight for me to spare the mouse-move-click. YMMV, depending how you have things set up or are used to casting.
You do not need raid-centric addons like Omen. DeadlyBossMods, I am told can do some things for you in a BG relating to timers (on towers in AV, or win-timers in EotS/AB) so may be of limited use.
Rule #1b: Managing your spells
If you are just dipping your armor-clad toes into the Bgs, you should know one thing : you have spells you didn't know you had. Seriously, go look into your spellbook, I guarantee you'll find something you'd totally forgotten about. Blizzard has spells that are specifically PvP-oriented, and as a result you tend to mostly-ignore them while levelling, and near-completely-ignore them when healing a 5-man or a pve raid. As a tree, I'm going to pull out these examples : cyclone, and nature's grasp. Both of them are crowd control spells, which is not your role in an instance. I mean, it's not really anybody's role since blizzard gave up on TBC-era 7-pulls (sigh), but if it were anybody's role it wouldn't be the resto druid's. Both of those spells are critical to me in arena, and in BGs as well (though I tend to forget more in the latter), though I wouldn't dream of putting them on a cast bar in PvE. Since I've got an action bar addon (the incomparable bartender), I put all my PvP stuff on a separate little action bar...but if you've opted not to use a mod of that type, seriously consider changing what's on your bars before you go into a battleground. And not just those newly-discovered shinies either – you'll probably find yourself using the spells you already have with a different priority than in PvE. Take my mage, for example:
PvE : arcane blast x 4 (2.5s), missile barrage if it procced (0.5s), or else arcane barrage (instant).
PvP : arcane barrage (ins), slow (ins), arcane barrage (ins), frost nova (ins), arcane barrage (ins)...you get the idea.
Everything is faster in PvP...a LOT faster. Priority tends to go towards faster spells, or instant ones if you have them, even if they do less healing, or less efficient healing. This is because you're either getting beaten on, resulting in a longer time for you to reach the end of a cast, or because of the likelihood of being interrupted by a fearsome array of potential lockouts (listing just the rogue ones would take a page of itself). If you ever go OOM in a BG, celebrate. That means you just performed an incredible feat of endurance, or helped someone else do so...it is very rare that you will run out before you are killed, and that's another reason not to worry about faster, less-efficient heals.
Rule #2: Protect Thyself First
If you die, the heals die. So long as you're alive, the heals keep coming, and everyone stays alive longer. Perhaps it's self-evident and I'm just a selflessly sacrificing nobody, but I have many times gone into situations and heroically tried to save someone at the expense of protecting or healing myself. I believe that is an error; invariably whoever I saved will die a few seconds afterwards, and how much did those extra seconds REALLY buy? Not much, I don't think.
More importantly, and again I mention this because it's something I tend to fall into and I think many other healers probably do too, remember your OFFENSIVE skills. Here I am referring primarily to methods of crowd control. It is a hard-won recognition from my 2s team, that it is almost always better to lock out a dps, then to try to control the damage they're pouring out. I have, let's say, ulduar-level gear; I can heal maybe 2500 hps if I'm straining myself. Let's even improve that gear level and say I could somehow pull 3k. DPS in comparable gear will put out 4k+. Four is greater than three. Now, that's an oversimplification, obviously. Usually, if you're fighting an Enemy DPS, you have a Friendly DPS helping you by, you know, *killing* said Enemy DPS. Or interrupting them, or silencing them, or whatever else DPS does. I'm just a healer. But I know they do something useful for me because the above logic would indicate that people I'm healing should have health bars steadily heading down to zero (though maybe slower than their opponent[s]), and many times that is manifestly not the case.
Look at this another way, then. Say you have a 4k dps. For me as a druid, the cost of cyclone is 1.5s, and it locks them for 6s (at first, subject to diminishing returns). I believe the math equivalent there is 16,0000 healing per second, in terms of damage prevented, which nobody could possibly manage in terms of healing DONE. Yes, idiot pally in my guild who insists he can do that, I'm looking at you when I say it's impossible.
Rule #3: You CAN be Autonomous!
I am here going to rebut Cassandri's argument that healers are not independent and are reduced to being pocket healers for people like pallies or dks, Lolth bless them (or curse them). I think this stems from a flawed perspective about healers being a primarily defensive role. Not that that means you must always remain on the defensive, obviously, because a good healer backing up a roving death squad in AB or EotS can really dominate a match, but we are the counterpoint to dps who kill things: we stop things from dying. What this boils down to, in my mind, is this: DPS takes nodes, healers hold them.
Cass makes the point that a DPS by themselves can run around and cap nodes, and healers, by and large, can't. The missing flip side to this coin is that a healer can sit on a node by themselves and protect it much better than a solo DPS can. Frequently in AB or EotS, when a dedicated attack comes in at a node, your team is not going to hold it with what you have on-site. It's a simple reason -- you don't have a mole on the opposing team so you have to defend everything, whereas they can concentrate their attack. Therefore, successful defence of a node consists not of beating off the attack, but in buying time for people to react from other (quiet) nodes you're defending and send reinforcements. And who can stall longer than a healer? I would argue, the answer is nobody. Cheating death is our entire point in life. So long as you can throw an insta-cast spell every now and then to interrupt attempts at capping, you can stall an assault long enough for a well-coordinated team to come to your defence. If you're on a badly-coordinated team, well, nothing was going to save you from a loss anyway. We're discussing theoreticals in this paragraph, and theoretically there may be some BG pug out there somewhere that knows how to communicate ;-).
---
Fin, part one. Next time, working with your friends!
cynwise on Wintergrasp
phaelia on Grid
cassandri on Alterac Valley
mortigan on Rules for Raiding
that there's a unifying theme here. Can you guess what it is? That's right, they're all helpful well-written guides. And, with the exception of grid, posts on something I already consider myself fairly well-informed in. So the key is this, apparently. Friends like to read about crazy things you're up to. Experienced players like getting alternative viewpoints, even on something they already know. And new players like to be told how to do things they don't know how to do. And yet, when I go hunting for guides on BG healing I see a collection of bad editing and/or forum flaming without a whole lot of help. Niche window? In one of Ihra's trademark phrases, POUNCE LIKE TIGER!
It is my humble opinion that success in a battleground is all about managing relationships. -- awkward silence, while you all say to yourselves, “But nobody uses /bg chat except to use Rule 69...” --. Bear with me, mmkay, while I walk through three different relationships in these posts: yourself, your friends, and your enemies. Up today, yourself!
Rule #1 : Managing your screen environment
Addons. Know them, love them. I don't even care what you use, so long as it is not the original blizzard UI. Just as in PVE healing, you want people's health bars front and center, and – d'oh! -- blizzard puts them off to the side, instead prioritizing your action bars. I hope by the time you're hitting battlegrounds you know which keys do which things for you (or no keys at all, if you've got one of those more-buttons-than-Lolth-ever-intended-mice). Also, Blizzard's unit frames do not identify CLASSES, which means that besides rogues, warriors, and death knights, you have to guess at everything; or RANGE. A raid frame addon is one of the most important things you can do to help yourself out here. I adore pitbull; my wife (who, admittedly, raids and does litle pvp) likes xperl. I've heard some people razzle-dazzling about VuhDo but I've never used it. I would disqualify IceHUD, because it's primarily a soloing addon which is not very group-friendly, and Healbot. I'm a little sketchy on Grid as well but without a lot of experience with that latter, I'm not in a position to comment exclusively on it. I dislike healbot because of the click-casting approach; I find there are too many other things I need to be doing in a PvP-oriented fight for me to spare the mouse-move-click. YMMV, depending how you have things set up or are used to casting.
You do not need raid-centric addons like Omen. DeadlyBossMods, I am told can do some things for you in a BG relating to timers (on towers in AV, or win-timers in EotS/AB) so may be of limited use.
Rule #1b: Managing your spells
If you are just dipping your armor-clad toes into the Bgs, you should know one thing : you have spells you didn't know you had. Seriously, go look into your spellbook, I guarantee you'll find something you'd totally forgotten about. Blizzard has spells that are specifically PvP-oriented, and as a result you tend to mostly-ignore them while levelling, and near-completely-ignore them when healing a 5-man or a pve raid. As a tree, I'm going to pull out these examples : cyclone, and nature's grasp. Both of them are crowd control spells, which is not your role in an instance. I mean, it's not really anybody's role since blizzard gave up on TBC-era 7-pulls (sigh), but if it were anybody's role it wouldn't be the resto druid's. Both of those spells are critical to me in arena, and in BGs as well (though I tend to forget more in the latter), though I wouldn't dream of putting them on a cast bar in PvE. Since I've got an action bar addon (the incomparable bartender), I put all my PvP stuff on a separate little action bar...but if you've opted not to use a mod of that type, seriously consider changing what's on your bars before you go into a battleground. And not just those newly-discovered shinies either – you'll probably find yourself using the spells you already have with a different priority than in PvE. Take my mage, for example:
PvE : arcane blast x 4 (2.5s), missile barrage if it procced (0.5s), or else arcane barrage (instant).
PvP : arcane barrage (ins), slow (ins), arcane barrage (ins), frost nova (ins), arcane barrage (ins)...you get the idea.
Everything is faster in PvP...a LOT faster. Priority tends to go towards faster spells, or instant ones if you have them, even if they do less healing, or less efficient healing. This is because you're either getting beaten on, resulting in a longer time for you to reach the end of a cast, or because of the likelihood of being interrupted by a fearsome array of potential lockouts (listing just the rogue ones would take a page of itself). If you ever go OOM in a BG, celebrate. That means you just performed an incredible feat of endurance, or helped someone else do so...it is very rare that you will run out before you are killed, and that's another reason not to worry about faster, less-efficient heals.
Rule #2: Protect Thyself First
If you die, the heals die. So long as you're alive, the heals keep coming, and everyone stays alive longer. Perhaps it's self-evident and I'm just a selflessly sacrificing nobody, but I have many times gone into situations and heroically tried to save someone at the expense of protecting or healing myself. I believe that is an error; invariably whoever I saved will die a few seconds afterwards, and how much did those extra seconds REALLY buy? Not much, I don't think.
More importantly, and again I mention this because it's something I tend to fall into and I think many other healers probably do too, remember your OFFENSIVE skills. Here I am referring primarily to methods of crowd control. It is a hard-won recognition from my 2s team, that it is almost always better to lock out a dps, then to try to control the damage they're pouring out. I have, let's say, ulduar-level gear; I can heal maybe 2500 hps if I'm straining myself. Let's even improve that gear level and say I could somehow pull 3k. DPS in comparable gear will put out 4k+. Four is greater than three. Now, that's an oversimplification, obviously. Usually, if you're fighting an Enemy DPS, you have a Friendly DPS helping you by, you know, *killing* said Enemy DPS. Or interrupting them, or silencing them, or whatever else DPS does. I'm just a healer. But I know they do something useful for me because the above logic would indicate that people I'm healing should have health bars steadily heading down to zero (though maybe slower than their opponent[s]), and many times that is manifestly not the case.
Look at this another way, then. Say you have a 4k dps. For me as a druid, the cost of cyclone is 1.5s, and it locks them for 6s (at first, subject to diminishing returns). I believe the math equivalent there is 16,0000 healing per second, in terms of damage prevented, which nobody could possibly manage in terms of healing DONE. Yes, idiot pally in my guild who insists he can do that, I'm looking at you when I say it's impossible.
Rule #3: You CAN be Autonomous!
I am here going to rebut Cassandri's argument that healers are not independent and are reduced to being pocket healers for people like pallies or dks, Lolth bless them (or curse them). I think this stems from a flawed perspective about healers being a primarily defensive role. Not that that means you must always remain on the defensive, obviously, because a good healer backing up a roving death squad in AB or EotS can really dominate a match, but we are the counterpoint to dps who kill things: we stop things from dying. What this boils down to, in my mind, is this: DPS takes nodes, healers hold them.
Cass makes the point that a DPS by themselves can run around and cap nodes, and healers, by and large, can't. The missing flip side to this coin is that a healer can sit on a node by themselves and protect it much better than a solo DPS can. Frequently in AB or EotS, when a dedicated attack comes in at a node, your team is not going to hold it with what you have on-site. It's a simple reason -- you don't have a mole on the opposing team so you have to defend everything, whereas they can concentrate their attack. Therefore, successful defence of a node consists not of beating off the attack, but in buying time for people to react from other (quiet) nodes you're defending and send reinforcements. And who can stall longer than a healer? I would argue, the answer is nobody. Cheating death is our entire point in life. So long as you can throw an insta-cast spell every now and then to interrupt attempts at capping, you can stall an assault long enough for a well-coordinated team to come to your defence. If you're on a badly-coordinated team, well, nothing was going to save you from a loss anyway. We're discussing theoreticals in this paragraph, and theoretically there may be some BG pug out there somewhere that knows how to communicate ;-).
---
Fin, part one. Next time, working with your friends!
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