Premade Guide: Warsong Gulch
This guide is intended to provide some general tools necessary to successfully run Warsong Gulch Premades in WoW Classic: Season of Discovery. It may be applicable to other version of WoW also, but its aim and focus is on SoD. It is not intended to be exhaustive, nor have advanced strategies, but rather to give a general starting point for anyone who is interested in running their own premade groups.
Disclaimer: If you’d like to say, “Hey Snipy! You’re a noob! You suck at the game and have no idea what you’re talking about!” Then I agree. You’re right. If you’d like to contribute constructive feedback, I’d be happy to incorporate it into this guide, so please do. Otherwise, I agree with you that I suck and have no idea what I’m doing.
Objectives
Warsong Gulch is a capture the flag game, where the primary objective, or at least the one that ends the game, is to be the first team to take the enemy team’s flag, and return it to your own flag spot 3 times (capture the flag). You cannot “cap” (capture) the flag if the enemy team currently has your team’s flag in hand.
Team Composition
Flag Carrier (FC): someone who carries the flag. Druids are a common FC, because they have a toolkit that allows them to sneak into the enemy’s flag room, move quickly with the flag, be tanky in defensive mode, have self heals, mobility, and can shift some CC (crowd control).
Other classes can be used, and may even be the meta at some point (maybe even now), depending on how things turn out at different level caps, and with runes.
Healer: Pretty self explanatory, but a healer is a class that is specc’ed (specialized) into healing, and heals. Priests are fairly dominant at the current level bracket (25), but Paladins, Shamans, Druid, and Mages are all healing classes.
Target Caller (TC): A target caller is a player whose target other players target to focus fire on the enemy team. This is a role often performed by a warrior, particularly once warriors are able to apply the Mortal Strike healing reduction debuff, which they do not have access to at the current level cap.
Warsong Gulch pits 2 teams of 10 against each other. Typically a premade team will have 1 FC, 2 Healers, and 7 DPS (potentially with one designated as a target caller. This is helpful, but not always the case).
General Strategy
Often times, teams will meet in the middle of the map and attempt to wipe each other. Generally, they are looking to identify and kill healers, the EFC (enemy flag carrier) to prevent them from making it to the flag room, and potentially the rest of the team.
You may have your FC help with the initial combat, or prefer to have them break away and attempt to get the enemy’s flag ASAP. Sometimes the FC will have trouble with the enemy flag being defended and needs help. So, you may have a designated FC Offense Group (the group that will go to get the enemy’s flag).
The idea here to to optimize for getting the flag and getting the FC away so CC classes and Healer classes are helpful. For example, you might have a mage and paladin support your FC offensively.
If both FC (your team’s Flag Carrier) and EFC (the enemy flag carrier) have the flags, you want to make sure your FC is protected with a defensive team, while everybody else prioritizes killing the EFC (you will often focus a healer, or CC the healer and focus EFC. Your target caller will make the call, if you have one).
Of course there are other situations that can and will arise, and it helps to be prepared. Experience is your friend here; expect to learn from it, and you can prepare strategies for situations you often find yourself in, or depending on team composition you may find different strategies that work better for you.
Example Team
- FC: 1 Druid flag carrier
- Healer: 2 Priests
- DPS: 1 Mage, 1 Paladin, 1 Warlock, 3 Hunters, 1 Rogue, 1 Warrior
- FC Offensive Team: Druid, Mage, Pal
- FC Defensive Team: Druid, Mage, Priest
Macros
Forming the group:
Assuming /4 is /LookingForGroup, /2 is /Trade, and that /1 is /General:
/4 lfm WSG Premade: Need Priest/Pal/Mage/Hunter - pst
/2 lfm WSG Premade: Need Priest/Pal/Mage/Hunter - pst
On my server, these two channels both move very quickly, so hitting this every 10 seconds (or even faster) does not look or feel like spam. It may be different on yours.
General chat however, tends to move much slower, while in Ashenvale, a major city or anywhere in the world, so I wouldn’t recommend tapping this macro in general more than once every minute of couple of minutes (like only after class requirement updates, for example).
Macros to use in the Match
Set healers {star} and {diamond} and FC {circle} (or adjust to your preference).
# General Strategy
/raid Targeting Priority:
/raid Peel for our healers: {star} and {diamond}
/raid Kill the enemy team's healers
/raid Kill the enemy team's Flag Carrier
/raid protect our FC: {circle}
/raid keep line of sight and peel for healers!
Using %t in a macro (or even in chat) will output the target’s name.
/rw focus fire on %t.
Anyway, this might seem like very straightforward common knowledge to some. It might seem horribly inaccurate to others, and it might even seem useful or helpful to yet others.
If you find any of the information in this guide to be incorrect, or if you think it could be better, please comment below.
Good luck out there, and maybe see ya in the BGs, whether Premade or Solo Queue!
