How to Peel in Battlegrounds

PVP Battlegrounds
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This is a thread for tips and discussion on how to peel in battlegrounds. The goal is to help players of all levels improve at this important aspect of PvP play.

We can define peeling as “using your abilities to control and prevent enemy players from damaging or controlling your teammates, and to help your teammates gain useful separation from their attackers in time and space”. If you have a better way to define the term, feel free to share it in your reply.

If you play a dps or tank class, I’d like you to share tips on what abilities you can use to peel, and how to get the most out of them.

If you play a healing or flagrunning class, I’d like you to share which types of targets (rogues, warriors, etc) are most important to peel, how various dps classes can help you most with peeling, and which areas of the various battleground maps are particularly troublesome.

Any other tips or perspectives on the topic of peeling in battlegrounds are more than welcome.

I don’t intend to update this as a guide, so using a format like “For Warriors:…” in your reply might be the best way for readers to find information pertinent to them.

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I think it’s a great idea.

First, for all classes I think it comes down to situational awareness. It’s easy to get tunnel vision in a fight, but the group benefits if you can see what else is happening besides your own skirmish.

Currently (casually) I’m playing warrior, ele, boomy, and leveling dk/ret.

For warrior:

I find it very important to engage without charge so I can use it when needed. A good peel mechanic I like in a large fight like BS of LM or WW is to leap to the healer being attacked, aoe fear, and then charge back into the fight I was in (probably against some lame caster).

For ele:

Cap totem is amazing. I also run SoP so Frost shock roots after an ES and that can be used to slow down melee. Also thunderstorm is amazing. I also often run counterstrike totem in randoms because the average random bg player is too stupid to not tunnel damage and kill the totem.

For boomy:

Clone is incredible and spammable. Also roots, and if talented, disarm.

Off heals too for both boomy and ele.

On ret I really try and pay attention so I can use selfless healer procs as well as bop on healers or friends in need.

Dk, similarly to warrior, I try and engage without death grip so I can use it when I need it, which can be to pull someone off of a healer. Also chains is freaking awesome.

Overall, I think it’s really just being aware of your surroundings and helping out the team as much as possible.

Battleground enemies is a great add on and show the number of people on a target.

I was playing some low level bgs yesterday and the enemy team had 6 heals (5 monks). So I just paid attention to how many were on each target and focused the damage on the one most targeted, thus burning them down faster.

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I’m hardly an expert in technique or greatly experienced… but my thought on peeling as healer who doesn’t get peels often enough is…

Pick one of the healers in your BG. Click on their frame and select them as a focus.

Try to stay with them - maybe let them know so they stay with you. Ask them to set you as a focus. The focus frame should grey out if you are not in range of each other.

This guarantees you always have heals. If you work for each other and peel for each other you will both survive longer.

Something often overlooked by DPS that have dispels (Shadow, WW, Shaman, etc…) is to use their dispels to help people out of CC when its useable.

More Dps isn’t the only thing you need to do - using your whole kit to help near-by friendlies goes a long way.

A simple mouse over macro, or add-on like Clique will allow you to create click on frame casts for your off-heals and utility without having to change targets. It cost 1 GCD, but freeing a healer or fellow DPS could help keep you alive longer agains tough odds.

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Applies to all classes and spec.

Just because you can stun someone, doesn’t mean you should.

Crowd Control and Diminishing Returns

https://www.wowhead.com/crowd-control-diminishing-returns-wow-pvp

Learn it. Live it.

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For healers:

Warriors seem to be the most persistent attackers for me. I’m not saying they give me the most trouble - only that they are the class I see most often trying to pester me. But basically any melee except Paladin can stick to me like glue. Rogues and DK’s are the most annoying.

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Good advice in here already.

But I say this with love and respect: healers, if you see that the melee that is pounding on you has been rooted/frozen, please MOVE.

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Very good advice so far. I’ll add some things myself when I get done with work.

This is a very good aspect that I hadn’t given much consideration to, so I appreciate the share.

That’s an interesting dynamic for hybrid classes: when to peel and when to offheal, and how to do little of both.

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frosties :

sheep/root the dh
snare/root/blow up everyone else

  • once healz has some seperation
    quickly swap targets to front line and help finish off whoever they are beating the hell out of… lol
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Nice thread. I run battlegroundenemies and it shows me who is attacking the healer. It comes in handy since I get this duty frequently in each game. It is fun to compete with friends in games to see who gets the highest ccs or kicks or sometimes there will be dispel contests. I know this is running a little off topic but, the most fun is watching multiple druids competing to get highest cc count.

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That makes sense, but chances are good that we’re still stuck at 50% movement speed for several seconds even after a peel.

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Arms Warriors:

I used to think that Arms was not very good at peeling because it’s not really a cc class, but I’ve been focusing more on this recently and there’s actually several tools we have that are pretty usefull for peeling in battleground situations.

Hamstring: the unsung hero. It’s cheap, instant, and effective. Basically all you need is to be in melee range and have a free GCD. It’s pretty easy to apply to several targets if they’re clumped up chasing a healer, (like a poor-man’s Piercing Howl) and often that’s enough to help get them the space they need to get a heal off and get to a more favorable position.

Stormbolt is a versatile tool, and peeling is one of it’s many uses. Be aware that it’s duration is less than many other classes’ stuns, so try not to waste it (also see the post on Diminishing Returns above).

Intimidating Shout is great for giving heals/FC a few precious seconds of freedom from multiple targets (although you can usually expect at least one to break free early). You can also use it to stop an enemy who’s slightly out of melee range and allow you to damage or debuff them further.

Disarm can be good for preventing your opponents from using abilities that require a weapon, but be aware that they can trinket out of the disarm. I don’t actually talent for this, but I’ve used it in the past when it was baseline and it can be clutch in certain situations.

Taunt can actually be worth using if your teammate is being harassed by a class with a pet. It’s free, it’s got a pretty good range, and it can reduce the damage your healer or FC takes while forcing it’s owner to spend more of his attention micro-managing the pet. I try to do this with warlock pets like the felstalker, shaman elementals, or anything that seems like it’d be annoying to a healer.

That’s a great example of how addons like that can really help with awareness. They can also help you keep an eye on an enemy that you expect to be gunning for your FC/healer and help you engage them pre-emtively.

I really like that kind of pride in cc’s/kicks/dispels. Those plays don’t show up on most people’s scoreboard but they win games for your team.

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You know what would help even more than peels? If everyone would just target the enemy healer(s) from the start. It’s pretty sad when the healer on your team is the only one consistently targeting other healers. This happens equally, on both sides, in my experience. The upside is that Priest on Priest and Druid on Druid violence really tickles me, for some reason, so at least it’s entertaining.

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Oh it can do that? Do you use allied frames too? I only use enemy frames.

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I use both allied and enemy frames, and I hide the default raid frames. I haven’t really gotten it configured for Epic BG’s, so I usually just hide it all there. But on both the allied and enemy frames, it shows little class-color dots to indicate who’s targeting the character.

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Another pro tip for newer players.

Upon clashing with enemy team. Hang back for like 3-5 seconds. There WILL be a rogue on your healer. Or another dps. Simply cc the opener on YOUR healer. Throw a slow after they mongo trinket because they want to “down” the healer quick.
Literally I’ve seen people trinket a 1 second war stomp to continue dpsing the healer.

Stopping for 5 seconds to stop the first go on your healer sometimes wins the team fight all together.

Ps: once YOUR healer sees you do this. They will focus heal you :slight_smile:

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I wonder if I can configure those frames in clique for offhealing and dispel.

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UHDK is probably the best peeler in the game but a lot of UHDK don’t run this build since they run the FOTM arena build instead.

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Personally, I don’t need addons to identify healers or to see who is attacking them. Relying too much on addons is the opposite of awareness.

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this ^^

my sentiments exactly …

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There’s nothing wrong either way.
Add-ons or no add-ons. Just do the work.

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