CHAPTER 2: WINNING AS A DPS IN SOLO SHUFFLE

PLAY BETTER THAN 90% OF DPS IN SOLO SHUFFLE INTRO

Did you know that with only a few steps, you can achieve your rating goals as a DPS, whether it's 1800 or even 2400 and beyond? Today we'll prove that this is possible by focusing on one concept most players ignore, momentum.

In this video you will learn how to build a momentum pyramid that will actually help you climb the ladder, while making you feel like the best player in all of your lobbies. The momentum pyramid is a concept based on the three building blocks of solo queue.

Initiation, maintenance, and optimization. Your goal is to build your pyramid from the ground up, as without fully understanding level 1, you cannot progress your gameplay to level 2 and 3.

Think of it like this, if you do everything in level 1, you can achieve 1800. If you do everything in level 1 and level 2, you can achieve 2100.

And if you do everything in level 1, 2, and 3 together, the sky is the limit.

STEP 1: INITIATE

So the first core concept we need to understand is initiation. This is the first step to any arena game and will lay the groundwork for the tempo of the entire match.

Whether it's managing offensive cooldowns, applying dots, or using crowd controls, the first 30 seconds of a shuffle game can often be the most important as you try to get ahead of the enemy team. This step varies depending on what class you play, and the win condition that best suits the matchup you've been given.

So we're going to go through all the potential openers for each gameplay archetype, starting with the most aggressive. If you're playing a class with a 2 minute burst cooldown like Incarnation, Metamorphosis, or Crusade, you're going to want to pull the trigger on these early in the game.

This will not only allow you to force cooldowns and huge tempo in the early game, but it will also set you up for the late game where dampening has racked up so high that your second use of these 2 minute cooldowns can score you the kill just through raw damage output.

Sitting on these powerful cooldowns for too long in the opener is a major mistake that we see low rated players make constantly in our VOD reviews, as they delay their pop for so long that they only get a little bit of a boost.

This largely differs from high rated players who try to send as early as possible to have their cooldowns come back at the 3 minute mark, allowing them to carry momentum in the late game, where dampening is high enough to win off of damage alone.

Similarly, if you're playing a class that relies on crowd control chains and setups such as Death Knights, Rogues, and debatably Shadow Priest, you'll want to utilize these tools early on to force as many defensive cooldowns as possible, while preventing the enemy team from building their own pressure.

This can not only lead to early kills. It can also force them to play more defensively early on, limiting their ability to apply pressure later in the match.

When you're setting up these crowd control chains, it's not just about doing them quickly, as you've got to time it right and pair them with your offensive cooldowns.

A silence stun fear combo becomes infinitely more deadly, and will force significantly more defensives from the other team if you're in void form or dark ascension with PI up than if you're just trying to send out some dots and mind blasts. The length of CC chains is also incredibly important.

You want to be extending these as long as possible to allow your teammates to have the longest kill window.

In this clip, you can see Nodge carrying his teammates momentum with crowd control through a sap into his teammates stun, followed by his own blind and then a shadowy duel, allowing his teammates to have free reign DPSing without the enemy healer being able to react.

This is a very important skill to have in order to be able to get the most out of the team in the game. This is a skill that can be used to counter the enemy's stuns, and can be used to counter the enemy's stuns.

As a CC heavy spec on solo queue, these are the plays you should be looking to make, as it is your job to enable your teammates and allows them to win the game through your setups. At the other extreme, we have classes who want to play a much slower game, as they rely on dampening and pure damage as their win condition.

These classes, namely elemental shamans and affliction warlocks, want to begin the game simply by applying their damage over time effects to everyone in the arena, while maintaining defensive positioning when possible.

By doing this, they set themselves up for the rest of the game, be it through flame-shock-generating maelstrom, or just rotting down the enemy team as they try to play the rest of the game out. These slower classes generally won't win the early game due to their lack of offensive cooldowns and crowd controls.

So slowing the game down and opting for defense is the optimal way to play. The momentum initiated by these specs is often very slow, and takes time to be truly effective, which means stalling the game long enough through defensive oriented play to survive into the late game where passive damage starts to take over.

Finally we have classes like mage, hunter, and windwalker, who sit right in the middle of the spectrum. These classes of course want to deal as much damage as possible, but also need to be timing their crowd controls in the right windows to create deadly kill conditions.

The gameplan of these classes will vary per lobby, but high rated players know getting their crowd controls out early will give them the most amount of kill windows.

A great example of this is high ranked hunter players trapping out of camouflage in the opener, which allows them to force early defensive cooldowns and trinkets from the enemy team.

Compared to lower rated hunters who will open with their DPS rotation, often delaying their intimidation trap combo for over half a minute, allowing the healer ample time to ramp their HPS, which causes these hunters to have far less momentum, and even leaves them more exposed to the enemy team's damage, which will make trapping even more difficult.

When it comes to a class like mage with casted crowd control, the lines between the ideal opener do get blurry, with dragon's breath ring of frost being utilized if a team is stacking, to dragon's breath sheeps if there's a stun on the team, to simply sitting back and doing as much damage as possible.

Mages will sometimes be in a position to play a slow game if landing CC on the healer will prove to be difficult. While doing so, the important concept to remember is that damage is what will ultimately carry.

If you can maximize your damage output while minimizing damage taken, then you are well on your way to winning the momentum battle. At this point, we've built the base on our momentum pyramid.

We need to initiate pressure early, which will vary slightly depending on your class.

STEP 2: MAINTAIN

The next crucial step is to maintain that momentum throughout the game. And the easiest and most effective way to do this?

Proper preemptive defensive cooldown usage. Defensives are the most misunderstood cooldowns in World of Warcraft Arena, which is mind blowing considering they are one of the most powerful aspects of the game.

How many games have you played where you generate immense opening pressure and are then forced on the defensive as the enemy team pops their cooldowns? This happens in countless shuffles and leads to the game backfiring on the aggressor as they get snowballed by the team that uses their offensive second.

In solo shuffle, defensives become an offensive weapon. Instead of using them reactively to prevent death, use them preemptively to match enemy cooldowns and assert dominance early in the match.

This prevents the enemy team from gaining a tempo advantage and potentially scoring an early kill. Not all defensive abilities work the same way though.

Take Netherwalk for example. It doesn't let you take action, making your team fall even further behind on momentum when the enemy shifts their attention to your partner as you sit in your immunity.

That's why smarts are so important. Smart demon hunters in a heavy melee lobby will always trade their blur first, which allows them to still stay aggressive while countering several offensive cooldowns.

Blur is also a very short defensive, so by using it first while the enemy pops their offensives , you're countering several minutes of CDs with just one minute of yours. Outside of using your defensives for aggression of course, you will be using them to stay alive.

However, it's very important you do not overlap with your healer. To make sure this doesn't happen, it's incredibly important to be aware of your healer's positioning and whether they are crowd controlled, as these are the key moments when you should be trading out those walls.

If you react too late while your healer is in a CC, you run the risk of them trinketing at the same time you use your defensive, and you are instantly on the back foot the entire game from only a few seconds worth of misplays. Remember, cooldown trading is a delicate balance.

Using defensives too early can leave you vulnerable later, while using them too late may not prevent significant damage. Positioning and awareness are key to anticipating enemy cooldowns and reacting appropriately.

Which is why we recommend heading over to our discord and grabbing our big debuff profiles to know exactly when to trade your cooldowns, along with our healer and crowd control weak aura to be alerted when your healer is stuck in their CC chain.

With foundations of the initiation and maintenance of momentum firmly established, our pyramid is almost complete, but there is still more work to be done to truly master solo shuffle.

STEP 3: OPTIMIZE

We must now learn the final building block, optimization. To be the absolute best, it's all about optimizing your decision making, allowing you to minimize the damage you take while ensuring every global you execute is worthwhile.

This approach is key to winning games, especially in the intense late stages of dampening in solo shuffle.

Whether it's only leaving the pillar when you have Freedom Steed as a ret paladin to minimize the time it takes to connect to that enemy range in the late game, or engaging in a wizard war where you weave in and out after every global to avoid incoming spells, every spec has a way to avoid as much damage as possible while dealing as much as possible.

Figure that out and apply it to your games. A great unique example is the gameplay of an arcane mage who can weave around the pillar with slipstream and ice flows while casting.

Allowing them to take close to zero damage while they can still maintain solid DPS. These are the types of micro plays the best players use in solo shuffle.

Contrary to popular belief, the focus is not simply to blast on damage, but to make sure you're able to get the most out of your play. You can also do this by using a melee to avoid the enemy's attack.

Instead, what really carries at the high end is doing effective damage to the enemy team while preventing the enemy team from attacking you. Even melee can do this, weaving in and out of line of sight to avoid casts while poking at enemy players from the safety of a pillar.

This concept also applies to whom you're dealing damage to, as you want to hit people who won't drag you into a terrible position, leaving you far away from the safety of your healer or pillar.

Instead, in dampening, you need to adopt the mindset that every point of damage matters, and that's why you should be using a melee to avoid the damage that matters. Often, just hitting what you can will yield better results than chasing.

This is a huge mistake we've seen, even at high ratings. Players will tend to tunnel vision one target in deep dampening, leaving themselves in vulnerable positions without realizing that they could safely hit another player instead for even more effective and safer damage.

When it comes to crowd control, you might think hunting down the healer for that flashy setup is the way to go. After all, you're a setup class, right?

Well, this changes in dampening and shuffle. If you're wasting countless globals trying to CC when you could have been dealing damage, you've probably done more harm than good.

Your healer has had to commit more mana than the opposition, you're in a vulnerable position, and you'll have negative tempo while trying to rambo across the map, ignoring your DPS rotation.

Instead, to truly optimize your gameplay, you'll want to deal damage first and then capitalize on the tempo you've generated to land crowd control. It's much easier to CC a healer who is stressing to heal their team than one solely focused on avoiding your setup.

Relying on interrupts to seal the game is also a very potent insular shuffle, especially in a meta with a lot of disc priests.

Not only will they be using penance very frequently, which is a great heal to shut down, but by locking the single cast you'll prevent them from using their major defensives like rapture, dome, and pain suppression, possibly forcing them to life swap very early on.

High ranked players are also aware of how aggressive the enemy healer is playing, saving their crowd controls for when that disc priest is running across the map for a fear or the restoration druid is going for the cyclone.

These moments will not only prevent the enemy from generating momentum, but leave them vulnerable to the rest of the team's crowd controls as the healer is an easy to reach position.

As dampening progresses in shuffle, smart positioning, mobility usage, and target choice are more effective options than trying to win by pushing in and brute forcing CC. And with that, our pyramid is complete.

We started with initiating momentum, with the goal of maintaining it as long as possible. Then for extra credit, we can optimize our gameplay to keep the game in our hands.

We'll do this in our favor, using some nuanced tricks.