CHAPTER 1: HOW TO INCREASE YOUR DAMAGE

HOW TO INCREASE YOUR DAMAGE INTRO

Welcome to our course on maximizing damage in PvP. The following guides are designed to take the skills you've been practicing outside of Arena and elevate them even further by teaching you how to maximize damage inside of Arena by avoiding some crucial damage mistakes no matter what spec you play.

Hopefully at this point you've already watched your sustained damage guide, but if you haven't, then we do highly recommend going back and checking out our class courses. But be sure to stay tuned because we know from data that increasing damage is the number one way to climb rating.

WHY LOW RATED PLAYERS DEAL LOW DAMAGE

So you're all geared up and now you can finally queue Arena. You're doing everything right.

You know how to CC, you know when to pop cooldowns, but you just aren't winning games like the pros. Now, I'm no doctor, but allow me to make an official diagnosis.

Your damage probably sucks! But not to worry, because Dr.

Skillcapped is here to give you some important medicine to fix this problem for both melee and ranged DPS.

MAXIMIZING DAMAGE AS A MELEE

Kicking things off, let's go over some of the biggest mistakes melee players make when it comes to dealing damage. By far the biggest problem we see with low rated melee are dead globals, but what the hell does that mean?

Unfortunately, targets in arena don't stand still like target dummies, they kite and make games miserable for you right? Many players make the mistake of endlessly chasing a single target the entire game, regardless if they can actually deal damage to them.

And to make matters worse, sometimes they ignore enemy players so they can quickly tab target for damage. This creates dead globals because you are effectively doing nothing with your GCD even though you could.

You're not chasing the love of your life, you're just chasing some scrub in arena, so just find that tab button on your keyboard and hit something else. All damage is valuable in arena, regardless of whether or not it will actually lead to a kill because it forces the enemy healer to spend mana.

Sometimes even the threat of damage on a swap is enough to force a mistake from the enemy team. Notice at the start of this clip, the enemy monk is under a lot of pressure.

He's trying to kite away the monk, but he's not able to do it. The monk will try kiting away and our warrior will commit a charge to reconnect, but now the monk will use ring of peace to zone out our warrior.

This presents a bit of a dilemma for our player. The monk is now in a safe position in the center of the ring of peace.

If our warrior tries to heroic leap onto the monk, there is a good chance the monk can just port away. However, notice that the druid is now directly next to our warrior.

They are now a viable target, especially since they don't have a fleshcraft shield. Our warrior immediately swaps to the druid, who panics and runs out of LOS of his monk to hide behind a pillar.

This is enough to distract the druid from healing his monk, who eventually flops to the pressure of our team. Building on this a bit, sometimes melee dps suffer from the sunk cost fallacy when it comes to damage.

The sunk cost fallacy is why we stick around to the ending of a terrible movie. We think we have an obligation to watch the whole thing just because we paid for a ticket.

In arena, players sometimes invest so much time attacking one target. They can't even get a chance to get a kill.

They can't even get a kill. This is a lot of damage.

It is often hard to handle a target that they can't think about swapping when it might be optimal. Here our team has already forced multiple major defensives from the enemy priest, who now has both thorns and roar of sacrifice.

The priest is casting door of shadows across the map, which will put them incredibly far from our warrior who doesn't have any gap closers to reconnect. Instead of just aimlessly chasing the priest, our warrior immediately tabs the feral, trying to maximize pressure while running towards the kill target.

Although this might seem like nothing. Using every point of damage matters and you should be willing to swap targets briefly even if you have already forced major cds from an enemy player.

On a related note, many low rated melees simply waste their own mobility. Abilities like shadow step, charge, and death grip are often called gap closers for a reason.

They are meant to close the gap between you and your opponents. Ideally you should wait until your opponents have used their kiting abilities before you commit any gap closers.

If a mage has shimmer up or a warlock has port available, you might want to keep at least one gap closer in reserve in order to reconnect your target when they start kiting. Many melee have the misconception that you need to immediately charge, shadow step, or death grip your opponents the moment the fight starts.

This is a massive trap since it can leave you vulnerable to getting kited. Even here against rogue mage where you would think its best to charge to get combat, its often better to just save your gap closers for when the fight actually starts in case you need to quickly connect on your target.

So just to recap, as a melee dps, you need to take advantage of tab targeting more often, especially if you are a melee dps. On top of that, try not to waste your gap closers.

Dont charge just because its up, always make sure you can keep your target locked down after you connect onto them.

MAXIMIZING DAMAGE AS A CASTER

Moving on, let's go over some huge mistakes casters make that is causing them to lose damage. We're gonna say something really bold here, and that is to stop juking.

Ok, don't stop entirely, but if you aren't doing as much damage as you think you should, it's probably because you were juking too much. Most casters have multiple spell schools, in fact all of the top 5 most popular casters have at least 2, with some even having up to 4 depending on covenant.

So what does this mean? It means that tanking and interrupt really isn't as bad as you think it is, because chances are you have at least one ability you can press while locked out of a cast.

Here we have a few examples, but there are obviously much more than these. While you are casting a spell, you should be consciously thinking about what button you will press in case you get interrupted.

In the middle of the cast, be ready to instantly queue a new spell once yours has been kicked. Let's see how a rank 1 mage manages spam interrupts.

At the start of this clip, our mage is casting a polymorph immediately after using blink. Once the poly lands, a fireball gets cast but immediately gets interrupted.

Wasting no time, our mage immediately recasts polymorph on the DK, anticipating a dispel. Once the polymorph gets removed, another polymorph gets casted, but this time gets interrupted by the warrior.

Now that both melee are on top of our mage, he goes for a ring of frost cast, which gets immediately kicked. But notice our mage has already queued a fireball on the shaman, who is under quite a bit of pressure from our rogue and priest.

Our mage will continue to get interrupted by the enemy team. Each time he does, he will be automatically queuing another spell to cast.

Juking in these situations can be a gamble since you are likely to get interrupted anyway. It is often better to just soak the interrupt since there will always be something else to cast.

There are times when you want to juke of course, but pro players almost never juke their damage since for most classes there really is no downside getting interrupted because you can always cast something else.

Moving on, there is one problem that we see many casters make, and it has even crept up the ladder to affect the playstyle of rank 1 mage. The problem is that the mage is not able to cast any spell that is not in his hand.

This is a problem that we see many casters make, and it has even crept up the ladder to affect the playstyle of rank 1 mage. The problem is that the mage is not able to cast any spell that is not in his hand.

This is a problem that we see many casters make, and it has even crept up the ladder to affect the playstyle of rank 1 mage. You see, in a perfect world you would always land CC first and then damage.

This makes sense right? If there was ever a caster strategy guide it would be this.

If you want to build pressure you need to make sure the healer is controlled. Well not so fast.

This rank 1 mage spent the whole game trying to land CC on the enemy shaman despite constantly getting locked down. He didn't want to commit combustion until CC was landed and as a result he did almost no damage.

In season 2 damage is high enough. But complicated setups aren't even necessary sometimes.

In some cases throwing your damage with offensive cooldowns is enough to force major cooldowns or even land kills, regardless of whether you CC first. Melee players have been doing this for ages.

Cleaves like TSG have been pressing their W key at one target all game and winning like this for centuries. Now it's time for casters to do the same.

GENERAL DAMAGE PROBLEMS TO AVOID

Now let's look at some general problems which cause both melee and casters to lose damage. The first is attacking into major defensives.

Of course the natural flow of arena means that players will eventually be forced to use defensive cooldowns and if you have enough pressure you can kill through cds. Other times though your opponents will have enough damage mitigation that there is no way they can be killed.

For melee dps attacking into targets with blessing of protection can be a waste of global since the target will be partially immune to damage. For casters hitting into anti magic zone is often pretty pointless for the same reason.

What this means is that you shouldn't be committing your damage globals into targets with high damage mitigation. Instead consider swapping when you see major defensive cooldowns when you are absolutely sure you cannot land a kill.

Here our team is forced cauterize and bubble from the enemy players and our warrior will have to make a decision on who to target. With cauterize up the mage will be able to quickly cross the map and evade most of our damage.

But pay attention to the enemy rogue. Their evasion is about to end and they are in a vulnerable position away from their team.

Instead of trying to burn mobility and kill through the mages cauterize our team makes a swap to the rogue who no longer has evasion up. Due to the rogues aggressive positioning he is a very vulnerable target and if we want to maximize our damage swapping like this is the best way to do it.

Another huge mistake that many players make is failing to pool their secondary resource before dealing damage. Here we have a list of some of the most important burst spells and their resource requirements.

Ideally you would want to pull the mage out of the mage's base and then use the mage to pull at the minimum amount of resources to use your hardest hitting ability before using major offensive cds.

There are obviously more spells than this but lets use star surge as an example to show why resource pooling is so important for burst. If a boomkin were to pop celestial alignment with zero astral power it would take them six seconds of free casting wrath to get enough astral power to use one star surge.

This effectively wastes 30% of your cooldown just to get enough power to use your damage. As you can see it took 7 globals in order to pull the mage out of the mage.

This is a pretty good example of how you can pull the mage out of the mage's base and use it in order to deal 25k damage when we didn't pool any resources. Now lets see what happens when we pool all of our astral power.

Lets see how much damage we can do in 7 globals. By pooling 100 astral power we were able to deal 3 instant cast star surges in just 3 globals, already dealing more damage than we did with 7 while starting at zero astral power.

On top of that we were able to cast wrath and another star surge, doing over double our total damage from the previous clip where we didn't pool resources.