CHAPTER 1: GAME LOSING MISTAKES

GAME LOSING MISTAKES INTRO

Welcome to our strategies course on game losing mistakes. These guides are meant to cover every class in WoW and are not specific to any role or any rating.

That's right, no matter what your experience level, mistakes are bound to happen. Each video in this course is going to highlight a common mistake that every player makes, broken up into bite-sized videos.

Now if you make it from start to finish, we're going to promise you you're going to feel more confident in your next queue session.

LACK OF GAMEPLAN

Our first mistake is one that's often made the second you hit that accept queue button. You see that loading screen and know you have a fair bit of time still until the gates open.

This can be a perfect time to quickly go grab a drink, get some snacks, pop to the toilet, change your song, or even tab out and click on the same spot over and over in a different game. Well, that right there is mistake number one.

The starting room in modern arena is one of the most underutilized tools. Back in the day, knowing what you were facing was considered a huge advantage, and players would go to huge lengths to make sure they had some ideas of what they were facing.

And this is now information we all get for free every single game. This is crucial for a few reasons.

First of all is the fact that you can sit there and change all of your talents and even tailor make a build to give you the best chance at winning.

This is obviously a lot harder if you don't fully understand your talent tree, which is why we highly suggest actually learning and reading through your talents to understand them yourself rather than just playing around with them. So, let's get started.

First of all, you can't just blindly copy builds. Small adaptations like picking up a decurse or disease dispel versus certain classes can go a very long way.

Just as important as adapting your talents is coming up with a game plan. Even rank one players get lazy and make this mistake a lot of the time when streaming, and they can often pay the price for it.

Whether you're doing solo shuffle or coordinated arena, you should always look to try and set up some sort of game plan with your team. This could be as basic as what target you want to hit, what target you want to crowd control.

Or it could be more involved. You can use this as a way to set up a game plan for your team to play.

It's a great way to get your team to play a game plan, and it's a great way to get your team to play a game plan. But it's also a great way to get your team to play a game plan for you.

So, let's start off with talking about potential swaps. Setting clear goals, however simple, can go a very long way.

Even if your teammates are unwilling to converse with you, coming up with a game plan in your own head of how you think the matchup will and should play out can still be a huge advantage. For instance, deciding who the enemy is most likely going to hit.

Who on the enemy team is easiest to kill? Should I focus on cleave or single target damage?

All these factors can not only prepare you mentally for what's to come, but also then help you adjust your talents and build like we just mentioned. So from now on, go to the toilet, get your snacks, then queue for arena.

The game starts the second you get into that waiting area.

POOR AWARENESS

The second mistake that we see is what we call poor awareness. DPS players can often end up tunnel visioned on just enemy nameplates or maybe even unit frames.

You can see your own health and the enemies and everything else is a complete blur. Asking yourself, why am I dying?

How come my healer is not healing? This guy sucks!

Whereas healers, it's common for lower rated players to only ever dedicate their focus to this tiny part of their screen. If health bars are low, you make them go up.

Having thoughts like, why can't I make this health bar go up? What the hell is hitting him?

Oh, my team killed somebody? Didn't even realize.

There's no one simple fix for tunnel vision, but there are some small tips you can use to help improve your awareness. A great one which I know has helped a lot of players is making it a habit to look at a different part of their screen every time they put themselves on a global cooldown.

In modern day WoW though, poor awareness isn't as much of a problem as it once was, and for the most part can be band-aided with a good UI, and clever add-on usage.

Things like having your party frames in a good position and downloading big debuffs can work wonders for enabling you to quickly see key information, like when your healer is crowd controlled, allowing you to recognize when you won't be receiving healing.

Making sure you have your omnibar visible and concise with its cooldowns. Even something like having enemy cooldowns over player nameplates can all aid in allowing you to quickly identify when offensive cooldowns are popped.

If that isn't enough, then just find something that works for you. If you need to know how to use your cooldowns, then just go to the link in the description below.

If you need an air horn to be playing every time your healer is crowd controlled, then that's fine. If you're a healer and want a cat meowing at you whenever a polymorph is being cast, if that's what works, then of course, why not do it?

If you need giant glowing icons in the middle of your screen to know when an opponent used an offensive, again, that's perfectly fine. We all process information differently.

But the one point that remains is that in order to do well in Arena, you need to be aware of what's going on.

COOLDOWN TRADING

This goes hand in hand with our third mistake, and that's poor or non-existent cooldown trading. We've mentioned this time and time again, but arena at its core is very back and forth.

You pop your cooldowns, your opponent responds. Your opponent then pops his cooldowns, and you respond.

You've probably heard the word scripted thrown around, and this is practically what World of Warcraft arena has developed into. Cooldowns are so powerful that they demand you to respond accordingly, and if you don't, then you'll be sure to pay the price.

To effectively cooldown trade, it starts with learning what cooldowns to be on the lookout for. We recently had a video on this exact topic.

Granted it does require a certain level of game knowledge, which can obviously take some time to develop for newer players, but at the very least, to start, try and memorize and get to know one or maybe two offensive cooldowns from each of the popular specs right now.

So, for example, knowing that you should look out for shadow dance from subtlety rogues, combustion from mages, wings from paladins, and incarnation from druids. Now that you're able to know what to look for, you can start to look for other cooldowns that are not on the lookout for.

If you're able to look out for and have the tools to identify when they're being used, you should focus on learning the correct responses to them. Say for example, a rogue saps your healer in the opener, then commits shadow dance onto you.

In this situation, you can safely assume your healer will never trinket, and it's up to you to trade a cooldown to survive. Sure, as a whole, learning perfect cooldown trading is a skill you need to hone, and something that gets a lot easier when playing with voice and as your game knowledge improves.

But even then, there is very clear indication to when you're going to have to wait. So, know what to look out for, and be ready to trade a cooldown.

A wise man once said, better to use everything and survive than nothing and die. Save that greedy play for the professionals.

DEFENSIVE PLAY

Our next mistake goes hand in hand with cooldown trading, and that's poor defensive play. Playing defensive is far more than just popping a defensive cooldown and carrying on with your day.

It's having that ability and understanding of when you need to switch gears and go from playing offensive to defensive, something a lot of players lack. This involves a few factors, one of which is identifying when you need to stop what you're doing and peel for your team.

Don't get me wrong, counter pressure does exist, sure, but in most scenarios it's a good rule to play defensively and offensively as a unit.

So if you're on the back foot and your teammates are low on health, pushing for crowd control onto the enemy healer and setting up a kill probably isn't going to be in your best interest for most situations.

Instead, looking to rotate peels onto the enemy dps, using some utility, or maybe even throwing out some off heals until you've recovered is going to be far more optimal. Then after you've recovered, looking to make your offensive play together as a team.

Another crucial factor to defensive play is something very commonly neglected by melee players. This is not understanding when it's time to just do nothing and line of sight.

As we mentioned, we've watched countless vods of low rated players over the years, and it's always far and few between that we ever see players, especially melee ones, just walk back and line of sight when they're in trouble.

But if you're an avid watcher of higher rated games, you'll often see players use mobility like shadow step or heroic leap for example, back to a pillar and then just wait.

It could be that you're just low on health and want to give your healer time to recover, or it could be that opponents have offensive cooldowns active and you don't, so being in the open does nothing.

It could be that you have nothing left defensively and won't survive another setup, so are looking to delay until you have something back, or it could just be that you're wanting to force your opponents into a vulnerable position.

That's all I have for this video, thanks for watching, and I'll see you guys in the next video.

PLAYING TOO PASSIVE

Our next mistake is almost the exact opposite of this, and it's making the mistake of playing way too passive for extended periods. Passive play can have its advantages, but this isn't how you look to climb, especially inside of a setting like solo shuffle.

Every second you spend not being aggressive means the enemy team is gaining more and more momentum, which means you are getting further and further behind. Instead, by being hyper aggressive with your damage and CC, you can actually force the enemy team to pull away, which means your healer has less to worry about.

If you're a caster who finds themselves getting bullied by melee lobbies in solo shuffle, this could be the single biggest adjustment you can make, and is a common strategy that high rated players use. All that it involves is being quick and snappy with offensive cooldowns and crowd control.

If you're sitting back playing slow, it's very easy for your enemies to know what to expect. Say you're a balanced druid.

A low rated player may start in stealth, sit back, maybe even open in the middle of the map by getting some moonfire and sunfires out, and before then looking to get into an eclipse. Maybe even get a little bit of a break.

Maybe even peeling the opener. Put a high rated player in that same situation, he's going to get in the healer's face.

Immediately root beam, instantly incarnation, and pump damage, threaten cyclones to extend that crowd control. Especially at the lower ratings, the more aggro and faster you play, the more you're putting your enemies in a position to make mistakes.

Not to mention, it's just always easier to play when you're the one who's ahead and has momentum behind them.

Aside from playing offensive from the get go, even basic tips like understanding when you're on diminishing returns, and how you just survived a setup can all be prime times to then look to play aggressive and get into the enemy healer's face and make them choke. Get out there and win the game yourself.

Don't sit back and let the game come to you and expect to win.

WASTING CC

This next mistake is very simple, but you'd be surprised how often it comes into contention, and that's wasting your crowd control.

Despite the fact that your favorite streamers are more than likely saying that CC doesn't matter, one of the quickest ways to lose pressure or ruin kill attempts is by wasting crowd control. The first layer to this is not looking at diminishing returns.

You would be surprised how much this happens in solo shuffle. If you're unfamiliar with diminishing returns, all it means is that certain spells and abilities become less effective against a target if used frequently within a short period of time, starting at full duration, then half duration, then a third of duration.

The best way to see this is by grabbing yourself any arena frame addon such as gladius or s arena. After that you will then want to look up what other crowd control is on the same diminishing returns as yours.

Say you're a demon hunter and have a hunter on your team. You'll need to know that your imprisoned shares a DR with their freezing trap.

With this information, you'll then want to adapt how you use your crowd control to refrain from stepping on your partner. So, refrain from putting the enemy healer on diminishing returns when freezing trap is ready.

And in most cases, given this scenario, imprison will then just be used onto an off target. Finally, the next step is recognizing when your crowd control is going to actually provide value.

Throwing all your crowd control onto an enemy healer when you or your team have no damage rolling isn't really going to accomplish anything. At its core, what has and will always win games is the combination and harmony of both pressure and crowd control.

Get into the habit of always combining the two.

STRUGGLING TO ADAPT

Next up, we've got a mistake that can go hand in hand with what we mentioned about game plans at the start of the video. That's lacking the understanding or ability to adapt during your games.

While we definitely suggest making sure to call a target to focus, or at least having some form of game plan before the gates open, this shouldn't always be something you blindly follow until you either win or lose the game. There are so many factors involved in arena that require you to adapt.

The target you called to go on in the starting room may just play completely passive, be sitting back and not even open themselves up to being a target. Somebody could waste a trinket mid game, somebody could use a defensive cooldown offensively.

All of these are factors that if you're able to identify and adapt accordingly, provide you with a higher chance of winning the game.

Target selection isn't always linear, and despite there being clearly better and worse targets to hit, factors like positioning and defensive cooldowns can play far more of a role than you might think.

POSITIONING ISSUE

For our final mistake, we want you to try and guess what it is. It's one that's so involved and important yet still criminally undervalued.

It's often one of the key deciding factors in a lot of arena games, and is constantly happening throughout your games in the background. It's one of the best ways to create pressure and score kills, but simultaneously, it's also one of the best ways to relieve pressure.

It can completely win or lose you the game, and can even make it unplayable for your opponent, and so much of World of Warcraft Arena revolves around understanding this one skill.

We're of course talking about positioning, and it's something we talk about time and time again in multiple courses and videos at skillcapped, but even learning the most basic positioning tricks can be massive for any player looking to climb.

Now we could very easily make this a two hour long video going over all the nuances behind positioning and its advantages, but we're going to save you the boredom of that and break it down to the most basic level.

For caster players, the tip is paying attention to two things, your own healers positioning and your enemy healers positioning. You want to make it as hard for the enemy healer to heal, while still making it possible for your own healer to heal you.

Melee players on the other hand have it much easier. All you need to pay attention to at the most basic level is your own healer.

Try to play in a way that makes it easy for them to heal you while still having a way to avoid crowd control themselves. So avoid chasing around pillars unless totally necessary, and don't mindlessly chase enemies into the middle of the map.

Easy. Whereas healers are unfortunately more so at the will of their teammates in a lot of scenarios, but regardless you primarily need to pay attention to two things, the target you're healing, and your own healer positioning.

First, the target you're healing, and the opponent on the enemy team with the most crowd control. With this your goal is to aim to avoid exposing yourself for extended periods.

So this means always trying to be near a pillar and using it to your advantage, then throughout the game looking to reposition as required.