I recently saw a post where someone said that the forums are all just people complaining. While I think there’s more to it than that, I unfortunarely tend to agree that there’s been a LOT more complaining than proactivity; especially since the introduction of shuffle.
I wanted to make a positive thread WITHOUT COMPLAINING (preferably, anyways. I’m not your mom and I don’t pay your sub). The theme for this is advice you learned or received that you may have found helpful that you think maybe not everyone knows!
Tl;dr: share advice you found particularly helpful in learning pvp
Mine was the idea that it’s okay to NOT do damage as the kill target if the enemy team is also not doing damage to you.
It’s okay for me to line behind a pillar and “do nothing” and let my teammates hit things for free. Way too often I’d have this mindset of, “I have to do damage or I’m griefing” when in reality I was just making it easier for the other team to setup or reconnect on damage.
For me it’s definitely trying to be more aware. I’ve played a lot of different classes and usually a fair amount of time between them “I skip a lot of seasons so have to relearn metas” and with that type of swapping came a lot of looking at my buttons.
I personally found it better to be slower at my rotation and more aware of everything else.
I think thats good advice and definitely somehting that’s important to balance!
Arguably the most important thing in PVP IS the damage/healing “rotation”, but realistically no one is going to do a perfect sim dps. You can do 90% of a rotation on most specs pretty passively and it’s definitely better to allocate the extra brainpower required for min/maxing to what else is going on.
Where people are standing, who has what cds available, who has trinkets etc.
It’ll never go as long as threads where Swole and kennie get into it sadly. Kudos to you for trying man.
Honestly kinda tough… Hard to judge what’s basic and what’s not. Also as dozer would say, I’m average at best ggs ig no cap.
A useful one I found for casters in the low to medium ranks.
Juke less.
Sometimes your team isn’t in trouble and you Juke 3+ times until your team is in trouble and then still get kicked. Not great. Juke 2+ times at most and vary at what point of the cast you Juke.
Also baiting kicks on some spells is great (again low to mid ranks). If enemy is hurting > cast lava burst > kicked > hex enemy healer for free.
Another thing a lot of people could benefit from is learning how to take criticism and self reflect. Can’t improve if you already believe you’re playing amazing and everyone else is the problem.
I have a high win % vs melee in tigers peak as a warlock.
The trick is to play long gate and short port. And gate from platform to platform. I even pulled it off on cdew and mes one time and they were like wtf.
This is a super important one. I regularly see people fake themselves to death (and have done it myself).
One thing thats particularly good to do on mage/boomy is also LET yourself get kicked on poly or cyclone when people have ~6-8s left on DRs. Youll be off kick lockout right when their DRs come back up and you can get free cc.
Can’t tell you how many times I’ve won a game because I’ll cast a clone with the whole team on DR that i would NEVER finish because it would just grief me and people will throw kicks, stuns, and knocks into it.
People are very bad at looking at their own and team DRs!
I struggled to make consistent upwards progress in 2s for a long time now. I felt like I was doing stuff like positioning and cc decently, but it wasn’t really mattering. A really really really good mw told me to just try to top the damage meter and worry about the other stuff after… and I got my first duelist on warrior as a result <3 the game feels a lot better to me now even with that pretty simple advice!
Don’t doomqueue. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve giga-tanked because I wouldn’t just let myself and on a L. If you’re having a had night, just stop. Doomqueueing won’t make your night or your gameplay in that moment any better.
My tip is to focus on yourself. There will be times when you know for a FACT you did everything you could have. You for the most part could not have given more to help your side win. And you just have to swallow your pride and realize that your other 2 teammates probably did make 1 or multiple fatal mistakes. They didn’t use a CD, a healer didn’t trinket or wasted it, and so on. But you do not need to go rage whispering them about it. If you want to kindly mention it, then so be it. But a lot of the time, these people already KNOW they messed up. You’re never going to be able to make everyone play the way YOU want them to. So, you have to focus on yourself, or you will pull out all your hair and smash your keyboard. Just take the L, learn and go next.
Oh! And record your games if you really want to improve. It can help you to figure out where you are making personal mistakes. Sometimes the human mind likes to protect itself and conveniently ignore the mistakes you personally make. Footage will be able to give you better self-awareness.
Similar to what Saratox brought, you can take it slow.
There is absolutely no reason you need to marathon your way to a rating.
If you find yourself becoming frustrated, put it down.
Go run some randoms, dungeons, delves, or something to simmer down.
Come back to it when it feels good, and leave it when it doesn’t.
This is a game. You should be having fun.
Success in PvP is mostly memorization. Once you know what all of the abilities of every class do and can recall them quickly, you’ll see more of what’s going on and everything will make a lot more sense. Until then, give some of these things a go. IMO most important is at the top of the list, but your mileage may vary:
Learn the damage (or healing) rotation of your build. Sometimes they’re not obvious, and most guide writers or streamers will tell you if you ask. I won’t mention names or websites, but the info is out there. Your PvP friends will know. tl;dr just because you spec’d it doesn’t mean you’ll be pressing it.
Know when your healer (or DPS) is in cc and learn to keep them out of cc without sacrificing damage during your burst cooldowns (letting yourself or your teammates die). Sometimes this means delaying your cooldowns a short time… sending your damage when your healer is controlled (sending your healing cds while the DPS has an active cooldown for damage reduction) consistently fails to land a kill (wastes a cooldown) unless the enemy healer is also locked down (the DPS presses too late or the cooldown is so weak they’ll die through).
Learn which cc DRs matter to you and get an add-on that tells you when they reset.
After that start to get into positioning and optimal cooldown cycling. Don’t worry about the rest until you understand how the game works.
Advice that I got from others was just enjoy the game for what it is and find people at your level or better with patience that are non toxic, its more important that learning the niche interactions, DRs, goes etc… Also avoid solo shuffle if you are new, as a healer its extremely toxic and will make you want to quit.
