An in depth look

[Eathisword]

Well... I have been a ''competitive'' WoW player. Not on the world scale, but I did achieve rank 1 on my server for RBG when i had nothing else to do in my life (read: very very long vacations...). And I am probably also not the best here, although I am competitive in my own way, and you are confusing a lot of stuff here mate.

Note that I do understand why you don't wanna use addons. I have been in that situation. But for the general good of pug scenario, let's clarify !

In WoW, you don'T need addons because :
1- The game is fast paced, and tacking DR on 3 people in arena or 2 healers in RBG is kinda easy.
2- At high level, you know your teammates won't DR your CC cause they are not dumb or ideally, they don'T share any DR types with you (although this might have changed since i played).
3- 99% of the fights are very mechanical and the team that executes the more flawlessly will win.
4- They are not allowed in tournaments, so the pros HAVE to learn to play without them. Plenty of gladiator ranked players use a ton of addons though, I played with plenty of multiple season Glad that used over 10 addons and in the upwards 20s macros. On a side note, the gap between the best Gladiator casual gamers and the pros is massive. It can show as only a couple points in mmr, but in the actual fights, it is not even fun. Saupreusse hit the nail on the head about that one.

In WAR, you absolutely should use addons because :
1- The game is very slow (GCD is always 1,5s), so you have ton of extra time to look around your screen. Heck, some of the best RoR players are clickers... this is how slow it is.
2- You fight random numbers of enemies that do (often) very random things (there is no mmr). The corollary being that people on your team will also do very random things. And you NEED to know what those random things are to capitalize on them. Hence Buffhead/Aura are awesome.
3- You share CC immunities with everyone. Knowing instantly who is immune to what without having to target them is very very important and it gets even more important as number of players go up.
4- Assist macros : when in the middle of 36 enemies stacked upon one another, you try to assist, macro are very very useful. Also, the tab targeting here is very very shitty compared to WoW arena, where you can just bind target 1 2 and 3 (all the way to 10 for RBG) to different keybinds.
5- Randomness. In Wow, nothing is random. The arena maps are always the same, the number of enemies is also the same. Here, you will get stuck on rocks, cranies, you will have people jumping and punting of cliff, some sweet small fight will get interrupted by the untimely arrival of 2 crazy 2H tanks yelling WAAAAGGHHHH and so on.

That being said, I do admire your desire to thrive for excellence. But from my years of WAR/WoW experience, what separate best from the rest is knowledge of the game mechanics and abilities. Learn every ability of every class. Learn the combat formulas. Exploit it all to your advantage. Almost everything else is just noise. Imo, that is what makes great PvP game : actual game knowledge trumps the agility of your fingers to some extend.

[k1o3]

Well... I have been a ''competitive'' WoW player. Not on the world scale, but I did achieve rank 1 on my server for RBG when i had nothing else to do in my life (read: very very long vacations...). And I am probably also not the best here, although I am competitive in my own way, and you are confusing a lot of stuff here mate.

Note that I do understand why you don't wanna use addons. I have been in that situation. But for the general good of pug scenario, let's clarify !

In WoW, you don'T need addons because :
1- The game is fast paced, and tacking DR on 3 people in arena or 2 healers in RBG is kinda easy.
2- At high level, you know your teammates won't DR your CC cause they are not dumb or ideally, they don'T share any DR types with you (although this might have changed since i played).
3- 99% of the fights are very mechanical and the team that executes the more flawlessly will win.
4- They are not allowed in tournaments, so the pros HAVE to learn to play without them. Plenty of gladiator ranked players use a ton of addons though, I played with plenty of multiple season Glad that used over 10 addons and in the upwards 20s macros. On a side note, the gap between the best Gladiator casual gamers and the pros is massive. It can show as only a couple points in mmr, but in the actual fights, it is not even fun. Saupreusse hit the nail on the head about that one.

In WAR, you absolutely should use addons because :
1- The game is very slow (GCD is always 1,5s), so you have ton of extra time to look around your screen. Heck, some of the best RoR players are clickers... this is how slow it is.
2- You fight random numbers of enemies that do (often) very random things (there is no mmr). The corollary being that people on your team will also do very random things. And you NEED to know what those random things are to capitalize on them. Hence Buffhead/Aura are awesome.
3- You share CC immunities with everyone. Knowing instantly who is immune to what without having to target them is very very important and it gets even more important as number of players go up.
4- Assist macros : when in the middle of 36 enemies stacked upon one another, you try to assist, macro are very very useful. Also, the tab targeting here is very very shitty compared to WoW arena, where you can just bind target 1 2 and 3 (all the way to 10 for RBG) to different keybinds.
5- Randomness. In Wow, nothing is random. The arena maps are always the same, the number of enemies is also the same. Here, you will get stuck on rocks, cranies, you will have people jumping and punting of cliff, some sweet small fight will get interrupted by the untimely arrival of 2 crazy 2H tanks yelling WAAAAGGHHHH and so on.

That being said, I do admire your desire to thrive for excellence. But from my years of WAR/WoW experience, what separate best from the rest is knowledge of the game mechanics and abilities. Learn every ability of every class. Learn the combat formulas. Exploit it all to your advantage. Almost everything else is just noise. Imo, that is what makes great PvP game : actual game knowledge trumps the agility of your fingers to some extend.

Agreed 100% - especially the tab targeting. There's a lot of truth in what you said but without derailing myself with gaming philosophy it'd be not in my interests to go into it whilst being objective.

Also, funny that you mention the disparity between low end Gladiators and the pros - that's so true lol. I used to say the difference between a 2600 player and a 3000 player, though they might be only 20 positions on the page, was greater than the 2600 player and 2200 player, who might be 60 spots apart.

I think the records reflect that a lot as well.

A lot of the addons stuff is a personal opinion and frankly would be hard to justify to myself after all this time in Arena. I mean, I consider it from time to time every so often when I can grab that something slippery little gobbo to heal, but I guess I drank the koolaid so hard that it feels borderline blasphemous to me.

Thanks for all the feedback and responses: I'm sure (or, well, hopeful), that this will at least and aided someone thanks to your help.

[k1o3]

Alright, so in the first post I said I'd talk about this later, and as I'm not feeling well enough to actually play, I suppose here we go.

Baiting: This should be fairly straight forward, though I don't see it enough. I forget the name of the map, the one like a sideways v where both sides run to the other end with the one flag node? I can't do it right now because I'm too poor to be cool but, as I leveled, I used to go suicide into Orders force on their way over, and try to knock as many people off their horse as possible. Typically, I didn't really have to, because they'd all dismount because waaagh and such, but we'd end up capping the flag, I'd die miserably, and usually we'd snowball from there. After the first death, I'd actually go back, wait for them to spawn again, and continue 'cutting' their force, which i'll get into next. You can actually fake-bait disengage and then hard swap which is a tactic used a ton in small scale.

Cutting: Okaaay so cutting. The reason why I put cutting in here is because of the design concept of PVP as a whole. Basically, both teams are designed to work in pvp together, though not separate. If you, and perhaps a friend, can cut the force in half, even if you end up dying miserably, more than likely your team is going to obliterate the other as they stagger in piece by piece. Doesn't always work, but usually get this to happen once a day.

Hard swapping: Another fairly obvious one, though clearly not, but anyway - you get detaunted, swap your damn target. The healers started crossing onto your target, swap the damn target. Your target just kited you into oblivion, swap the target. If you're not doing anything after a few seconds, swap the target.

Crossing: So crossing more or less is assisting, but it's a little bit more evolved than that because it's assisting with purpose and without instruction. You see this with healers a lot as they assist each other as they are attacked, but tanks and dps can do this too. Whether you're using consume str on a chopper by swapping your defensive target as they're nearing a kill, or running by and bopping a bw with a silence as you target a healer, or you snare a tank as you sweep past them who's going towards your back line, everyone needs to just take a moment - realize they're not the only ones in that match - and help each other.

Disengaging (via crossing): So I mentioned this in some detail, but not quite enough. When you disengage (run from enemy team), you can't do it in a direct line. Someone will get hit, unmounted, and then annihilated. Usually it's quite a lot of people, and they ended up inadvertently 'cutting' your force. For a moment, picture yourself zig zagging. Then, instead of horizontal, picture it vertical as well. Now, imagine that every motion of the zig zag is actually your team, one by one , not just you. To do this effectively, your team needs to take turn peeling each other, then being peeled. I never, ever, ever, ever see this on ROR and it triggers me. Yes, you are going to move slower. But if done correctly, you probably won't lose 30% of your force doing it.

Splitting: So splitting is the opposite of crashing to some degree, and splitting is important because as healers when multiple people are on one target (and the healers are prepared) it is much easier to heal that target in a pug scenario (you can do preventative healing) unless the target is obviously one shot, which in most cases theyll just be rezzed and we'll be back at it. Splitting is actually an extremely fast way to kill a target, and it involves when a few people from your main target split off from that target to a target nearby, maybe a squishy target, and hard swap onto them. The healers are almost never prepared, (again, pug scenario), and you're more than likely kill your split target faster than the main team killed the main target.

Crashing: This is obviously from a Destro point of view, and i'd mentioned this in the WB post, but split crashing is a really fast way to destroy a creep setup. Order usually runs a creep setup, so dividing forces and engaging simultaneously is usually enough in and of itself to wipe them instantly (pug scenario). The tanks aren't paying attention, the RDPS starts running, the healers aren't getting peeled and everybody just kind of flops.

That's all for now. Think i'm going to hold my head under the faucet.

[Collateral]

I realize I've been too harsh for no real reason in my fist comment, so I apologize. I understand where you are coming from and what your goal is and I completely respect it. It would be great if new people came to the forums with a will to learn and read your advice. As you said, while some of these things might seem obvious, it rather seems they are quite far from it. So I hope this will influence at least a couple of people, which might then influence others and so on.

But perhaps one thing remains, and it's the age old saying - pugs will be pugs. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to discourage you (or disrespect pugs), but from my own and my guilds experience we simply don't trust pugs anymore, no matter how many times we tried it was just fruitless. But again, maybe if you persist enough, you will make a change, which the server really needs

[k1o3]

Haha no problem ! Well, I think people who know stuff need to actually share it and support each other. Like I said as this is not a physical sport it's really more about what you know and I think how can we expect the player base to improve if we don't share? ;3