CHAPTER 3: ADVANCED DEFENSIVE CONCEPTS

ADVANCED DEFENSIVE CONCEPTS INTRO

Welcome to our course on Advanced Defensive Concepts. Now as the name suggests, these guides are specifically designed for players looking to really min-max at ratings from duelist and above.

But even if you aren't at this level quite yet, you're still going to learn something valuable. We're going to focus on a concept known as Pre-Kaidi, which was honestly being developed by top players way back in Shadowlands.

This new innovation marks a crucial change in PvP history and is still being developed and explored today. So we're going to have to warn you though, what you're about to learn might completely change your approach to PvP.

But trust us here, it's for the better.

THE FLOW OF ARENA

Before we get down and dirty, we need to remind you about the flow in Arena. If you're a regular viewer here, you've probably seen us mention this graph and how Arena involves pushing in and doing kill setups and then pulling back to block enemy attacks.

At some points in the game, your team is playing to win. This involves trying to set up kills by combining damage and CC.

But the enemy team will also be doing the exact same thing, meaning at some points in the game, it becomes your job to not lose. For the most part, this is how every Arena game is played at the highest level.

The best teams in the world are able to have powerful offensive pushes while also being able to trade cooldowns effectively to deny enemy kill setups. And while we have shown you time and time again how important it is to rotate cooldowns as a team, sometimes your team won't be able to help you.

And this is where you'll need to learn what makes you vulnerable.

KNOWING WHEN YOU ARE IN DANGER

Knowing when you will be under pressure or in danger is a skill that the majority of players struggle with. Remember that playing WoW at higher ratings requires you to not just play in the moment, but also think about the future.

While addons like weak auras have made it easier to see when you are immediately in danger, they don't really paint a complete picture in Arena, and sometimes players fail to realize that there are other conditions that also indicate when they are vulnerable to dying.

One of these conditions are whether or not the enemy team has cooldowns ready. This can easily be tracked with addons like omnibar, and across nearly every comp in the game offensive cooldowns are the primary win condition in Arena.

If enemy cooldowns are ready, that is usually the first indication that you might be at risk. But more often than not, you or your team will have some way of denying enemy offensives.

Your personal defensive cooldowns, including your pvp trinket or your teammates pvp trinket, combined with other cooldowns like damage mitigation spells can be used to block attacks. You probably know to look at your own bar to track personal skills.

You can also track your partner's cooldowns with the help of addons like omni cd. If you or your partners have defensives ready, you might be ok.

But not all cooldowns and classes are created equal. Large damage reduction cds like unending resolve work really well at mitigating a lot of heavy burst damage, while smaller cds like earth and wall totem work better at mitigating smaller damage spikes.

The strength of enemy offensive cooldowns needs to be considered when you are thinking about whether or not your defensives or your team's defensives can save you.

This requires you to know a lot of game knowledge, like knowing exactly which offensives are the most threatening, but memorizing this information is crucial for becoming a better player.

In any case, if the enemy team has powerful offensive cooldowns and you don't have powerful defensive responses as a team, you are likely going to be under huge pressure soon.

With enough game knowledge, you will learn that there are times where you need to flick a switch and transition immediately from offense to defense. This involves thinking ahead and knowing that although you might not be vulnerable now, you might be 100% dead in the next setup.

So what does this mean for you? It means you will need to adjust your playstyle immediately by playing not to lose as opposed to playing to win.

But what does that look like? Let's find out.

WHAT MAKES YOU VULNERABLE

But you might be asking, how do I know when I'm in danger? Luckily for you, we made you a checklist.

Your defensive resources in Arena are balanced between you and your partners. It is your job to save your partners when they are out of resources, and it's their job to save you when you are out of yours.

The most important resource you and your partners have is your PvP trinket. Without it, getting stunned means you can't use some of your biggest defensive cooldowns, you can't interrupt CC or damage casts, and you can't kite away.

The same is true for your partners. Without PvP trinket, they can't break up kills with their own CDs and interrupts.

So if you and your partners are missing your PvP trinket and other defensive resources, you then need to look out for a few more things. For one, you should check to see if the enemy team has cooldowns ready, which can easily be done with add-ons like Omnibar or Weak Auras.

In general, cooldowns are the primary win condition for most comps, and kills are set up around them. And usually, cooldowns come paired with crowd control, meaning you should also pay attention to diminishing returns on yourself and your party members, which we showed you how to do.

In our recent add-ons update video. Finally, positioning represents the final vulnerability.

If you're in the center of the map, in striking range of enemy casters, or if you're standing on top of your healer and exposing them to interrupts and cross CC, your position can be exploited by the enemy team to secure a kill. Here is the full list of things that make you vulnerable to death in Arena.

Your team is usually fine if only one or two of these boxes are checked, but in case all of them are, you will have to play in a very specific way in order to not lose. So, now you know what makes you vulnerable.

It's time to see what you can do to stay alive.

PRE-KITING AS A DPS

The tools you have to survive on your own vary slightly by class, but let's go over the things everyone can do to prevent a loss. One of the best things you can do to avoid a loss while you're out of resources is to avoid the enemy setup entirely by running away before the kill setup can be executed.

Pro players sometimes refer to this as pre-kiting, and it is essential for squishier classes like rogues, demon hunters, and warlocks. Your goal when pre-kiting a go is to stall the game by avoiding damage long enough for your team's resources to become available again.

Let's see that in action. At the start of the clip, notice how the hunter is about to have trap ready.

On top of that, our partners don't really have many resources to save us. If we get stunned when the hunter has trap ready, this could put our rogue in a game-ending situation.

Because our rogue is in the center of the map, he can't really avoid damage with LOS, so he needs to get a bit creative. And the moment he sees the feral start approaching, he uses shadowy duel on the priest.

And using this, he is able to avoid damage in a crucial moment. Even when your team has resources ready, pre-kiting can be used to preserve important cooldowns like pvp trinket on your healer.

This can put you far ahead on defensive cooldowns and allow you to snowball a game later on. At the start of this clip, our monk has just used life cocoon on our mage, but now the enemy hunter has trap ready.

If our mage stays in the fight, they risk burning even more resources for their team. In the background, you can see the hunter disengage towards our healer, indicating that they want to set up a freezing.

Noticing this, our mage starts moving to the pillar, eventually blinking behind it once our healer gets trapped. This allows him to avoid a significant amount of damage, and more importantly, allows our healer to preserve their trinket for a future setup.

If you play a squishier class, pre-kiting can essentially remove you as a viable target for the enemy team and force sub-optimal target swaps from your opponents. Although this is a rare situation, here we have a warlock against triple dps.

If we pause for a moment to look at our warlock's resources, they don't have their pdp, trinket, or unending resolve. Meanwhile, the enemy team has cds ready, and with the feral druid going for a restelp, we know an attack is coming.

Before the feral can even reach our warlock, he immediately ports away. This forces the triple dps team to swap to our priest, who is about to have dispersion back up.

On top of that, our warlock is now in a safe position to free cast on the enemy team. Not only were we able to remove ourselves as a target and stay alive, but now we are in an advantage state offensively.

You will often need to pre-kite goes when you are playing an lfg and you are not able to get out of the fight. This is a good time to pre-kite your goz, and you need to make sure you avoid as much damage as possible.

Here for instance, the enemy mage just used combustion, and for some reason our shaman is deciding to sit the blind from the rogue.

Adapting quickly, our demon hunter instantly leaps to the z axis above, and then angles his camera to monitor the positioning of both the mage and the rogue, avoiding the remainder of combustion for as long as possible.

PRE-KITING AS A HEALER

Okay, so obviously pre-kiting can keep you alive as a DPS, but it also has its uses as a healer. Some healers are incredibly vulnerable to getting trained, and the same benefits to pre-kiting as a DPS also apply to healers.

In matchups where you will be the kill target, you can make it much harder for the enemy to reach you if you pre-kite their go. This is incredibly important for disc and holy priests when playing against melee cleaves.

When the enemy team has a setup ready, your focus should be avoiding it at all costs by pre-kiting in order to preserve resources. Here for instance, our team has just performed their setup on the melee cleave, but now that the CC chain is over, our priest is vulnerable to a setup.

Seeing this, our priest immediately starts heading back to the pillar to avoid death grip from the DK, who now has AMS popped. Our priest will kite as far back as possible, knowing that the melee cleave wants him as their target.

And even though it may seem like this kiting won't matter, it actually makes a huge difference since it allows DRs to reset and put his team closer to another setup. Just like you can pre-kite a setup on yourself as a healer, you can also pre-kite the enemy CC chain.

By monitoring the cooldown of certain spells, you can preemptively avoid longer CC chains on yourself in order to put your team ahead on setups. Here for instance, our team has just done their go on the enemy jungle cleave, but trap is about to come off CD, meaning our opponents will be able to reverse pressure.

Both our priest and our rogue use this critical moment to pre-kite back to the pillar. This will prevent the enemy hunter from landing a trap, thus delaying the setup from the jungle cleave.

As an added bonus, it will allow CC DRs for our team, allowing our RMP to get two kill setups before the jungle cleave is able to do theirs.

DO NOTHING (AND WIN)

Okay, so now you know how pre-kiting can keep you alive. Let's take it a step further to dispel one of the biggest myths in PvP.

Low-rated players sometimes believe that in order to win, you have to stay aggressive. While this might be true in some cases, many classes simply do not have the durability to endlessly stay in the fight.

On top of that, if your class or comp relies heavily on large burst setups to win and not sustain damage, it can be better to limit your interaction with the enemy team. Here, for instance, our Monk and his partner are able to force trinket from the enemy Resto Druid, but the trap on the Warrior is about to end.

Our team tries to force the kill, but the Druid winds up kiting to survive. We now have one giant issue though.

There is a relentless killing machine in the center of the arena, and they want nothing more than to kill our Monk. If we try and square up with the Warrior, there's no way our Monk will survive since he is far less tanky.

Instead, our Monk and Hunter do their best to avoid as much Warrior damage as possible, and the entire time, this is allowing our Monk to survive. We now have the Druid's trinket, we just need to be patient and look for an opportunity to finish him off with our CDs.

And finally, after over a minute of kiting, our team finally gets the opening they were looking for and connect onto the Druid with CDs ready. This is a common strategy you see often in high-rated 2v2.

Some classes are simply more threatening in 1v1 brawls, so you need to be willing to kite away and wait for important CDs and DRs to reset before you engage. In this game, there is no way our Rogue will be able to outpressure their Survival Hunter in a 1v1.

Instead, he needs to find short windows to attack, and then once the enemy team leaves CC, he needs to wait for DRs to reset. The key diminishing return our Rogue is looking for is stun.

His win condition is not consistent damage, but instead, periodic attacks using stun setups. And now, with stunned DRs resetting, he can push back in for an attack.

Once again, he can't fight the Hunter forever. He needs to push in when DRs are up, and pull away when the enemy team is immune to his stuns.

His attacks are meant to gradually wear down the enemy team's resources, so that he can set up progressively stronger kills. Here, our Rogue has already pre-kited the enemy Hunter's trap.

He is already in a safe position when his healer gets CC'd. Our Rogue will continue to avoid as much damage from the Hunter as possible, delaying the game long enough for his cooldowns to rotate back up, while dampening stacks higher and higher.

And finally, our Rogue's pre-kiting impatience pays off, as he's able to get a clean setup on the Druid with his offensive cooldowns. By playing patient and choosing to run away and avoid damage, eventually our team was able to win.