CHAPTER 3: RANGED POSITIONING

RANGED POSITIONING INTRO

Welcome to our course on ranged positioning. This one is a lifesaver, literally.

So we want you to think of your last queue session. We're gonna guess you were the target in almost every game you played, right?

Well, trust us, we absolutely know your pain. Getting trained means less damage, less CC, and so much more.

And all you want to do is play the dang game. This course is going to show you that positioning is a crucial step for making your life 10 times easier as a caster.

We're going to drop you directly in the center of every single arena scenario, and throughout this course, you're going to learn how to master positioning in every single matchup in PvP. Trust us, you don't want to miss this.

CASTER CLEAVE VS. MELEE CLEAVE

If you play a caster, it's your lucky day as we're giving you the key to unlocking free rating gains. That key is...

Positioning! To demonstrate this, we're going to be showing you how much you can do with just good positioning instead of arena.

And of course, the opposite. We'll show you just how much harder you're potentially making your games and not only for yourself, all down to your positioning.

If you're a caster, then this video is a must-see. To start off though, let's take a look at the benefits good positioning can provide you.

First and foremost, what you need to understand is that when you're the target of the opposing team, you fall in the unique position of being able to dictate where the enemy has to stand if they want to hit you, especially if they're melee.

This can then be used to cause enemies to sacrifice their own position and end up in vulnerable spots and putting them in a bad position. Alternatively, when you're not the target of the enemy's focus, you can position yourself in between your enemies and their healer.

This offensive position can open up a lot more situations for you to create pressure, whether it be by your crowdfunding, your control, or just the damage and pressure you can put out.

But simply just the process of being between the healer and the DPS causes the enemy healer to zone themselves from healing their team, whilst you're able to freely pressure both the healer and the DPS simultaneously.

Then, on the flip side of things, bad positioning could be the main cause for a lot of the problems you're having in Arena. Starting off with your survivability, positioning is just as important as defensive cooldowns in allowing you to survive, especially as a caster.

For instance, if you're in the middle of the map against casters, you're tanking a lot of damage. But, I mean, that's obvious, right?

Then, you've also got the problem that if you push in too far or overextend, you may get caught in an awkward position, where you're then forced to overuse defensives in order to get back to your team and survive.

And, something you may not even think about is the impact this has on your team, more importantly, your healer. Positioning poorly against casters and not taking your healer into consideration will leave them vulnerable to crowd control, which in turn then hurts your own survivability.

Then, you may have to think about how to deal with your team's damage, and how to deal with the damage that you're doing. Then, against melee, running back and taking them too close to your healer, or playing by the same pillar as them, opens your healer up to potential interrupts, crowd control, or even swaps.

But it's not even just your survivability that gets hurt by poor positioning. Bad positioning also hinders your ability to deal damage.

As if you're positioned poorly, you're going to be making it a lot more difficult for not only yourself, but also potentially for your team to land casted damage. This is often the case when you're positioned in a way where the enemy has a pillar and you don't.

This also applies to crowd control. If you're pushing in and chasing enemies around pillars trying to secure casts, you'll often end up making things harder for yourself.

Whether you're targeted or even free inside of a game, your positioning is going to be one of the deciding factors in determining how much or how little you're able to accomplish offensively. Okay then, skill-capped, I'm sold.

There is clearly a lot of positives and negatives to where I'm standing in Arena. So, tell me where to stand.

Well, let's break it down. Alright, well, first of all, let me start by saying it's sadly not as simple as stand here on X map.

There are tons of different factors which come into play. For instance, what composition you're playing.

Is it a caster cleave or is it with a melee? Then, what composition are you facing?

Is it a double caster? Is it a cleave?

Or is it a melee and a caster? To start, let's take a look at how we should position from the POV of double caster when up against double melee.

Okay, so to start off, let's talk about the most important rule which outweighs everything else when playing with another caster. And that's, can my DPS partner deal damage?

This is something that should continuously be going through your head when playing with another caster. No matter the composition you're facing, if you stand in a way where enemies can hit you and you can hit them back, but your partner can't deal any damage to them, you'll obviously always lose that trade.

The overwhelming reason for this is when playing double caster compositions, it's heavily up to the caster not being trained to create the majority of the pressure. So, for this reason, everything you're doing in-game should be to best accommodate for your DPS partner rather than yourself.

But, if you're not the one being trained, you need to think to yourself, can I pressure all three enemies? Like we just mentioned, playing a double caster composition puts a lot of pressure on the player not being focused to get stuff done.

To give you the best chance of creating pressure, you need to be able to interact with all enemies on the opposing team. More importantly though, your kill target and the enemy healer.

If you're unable to do this, it is likely down to one of two reasons. Number one, your partner is positioned poorly.

Number two, you're not positioned offensively. The easiest way to put both of these fundamentals into practice when playing double caster is to adapt a concept you've probably already heard of and is the key to double caster positioning.

The triangle formation. This formation essentially accomplishes both of our fundamentals.

So, it allows the non-targeted caster to pressure but also giving the targeted caster a good position to situate the enemies. As the name suggests, you're going to be playing loosely as a triangle.

The caster not being focused should always aim to be at the point of the triangle. Between the enemy healer and their DPS.

The player being focused should always be at either side of the base of the triangle with your healer being on the opposing end. Why this works so well is that all three members of your team have decent range between you making interrupts, swaps, and crowd control easier to deal with.

The player at the peak of the triangle also has free range to do as he wishes being able to freely pressure and crowd control all targets, most importantly the enemy healer. This formation is something you'll then want to loosely stick to and adapt throughout the game.

If the melee DPS swap targets, you swap your formation accordingly. If the enemy healer changes position, you again adapt your formation.

In fact, on the bigger maps like in this example of Tol'Viron, the enemy healer has no choice but to swap pillars and cross the map. Especially if the DPS being targeted is continuously moving away, resulting in the enemy healer having to adjust.

And this here is where you capitalize. Whilst this is definitely much easier to demonstrate and execute on Tol'Viron, this formation can be adapted on every single map.

Just remember the basics. Target not being focused situated between healer and DPS to get maximum pressure.

Target being focused continuously moving away from enemy healer to draw them out of the pillar.

CASTER CLEAVE VS. CASTER CLEAVE

So what if you're two casters up against another two casters? Well, this is obviously a little more tricky, but in essence, a lot of the same concepts remain.

To test your knowledge, take a look at this situation here from a user-submitted game. We've got two enemy casters playing on the pillar.

Our Shadow Priest is in the open with his team back at the other pillar. Can you tell me what's wrong here?

Well, it's very simple. One team of casters has a pillar and the other one doesn't.

The two warlocks on the enemy team can freely dip in and out of line of sight, choosing how much damage they both take and deal.

Our POV, which is our Shadow Priest, is in a position where he can only hit the enemy casters when they allow him to, and if he gets in danger here, he has a long way to get to any line of sight for safety. This is always going to be a losing position from the Shadow Priest and his team.

This comes from staying and playing in what we'll refer to as No Man's Land. No Man's Land is part of the arena map you'll never really want to stand, when playing caster versus caster.

So on this map is anywhere here in the center, whereas the pillars or the steps are the preferred positions to play. Unlike when playing against melee, against casters, pillars are integral to your survivability, and the center of the map and open spaces should be avoided.

Also, it's a lot easier to play, as there's only the one rule you need to abide by, and that's don't give enemy casters a pillar when you don't have one.

This can, granted, get very awkward, especially if the enemy casters don't want to give up their pillar, and be the ones in the losing position in the middle of the map. The solution to this is to push as a team.

This forces everybody to have an even playing field at the same pillar, and is how most caster versus caster games end up. Just avoid being the ones stuck in the middle whilst your enemies have a pillar.

CASTER CLEAVE VS. MELEE CASTER

The other type of comp archetype that we haven't touched on is one melee and one caster. This is, for the most part, played exactly the same as you would double melee.

Your goal is to capitalize off the fact that the enemy melee will have to come into vulnerable positions in order to deal damage. The biggest difference is you need to ensure your healer always has a pillar to play on so they're not in the open against casted crowd control.

So your triangle formation will need to be slightly adapted and when repositioning, your healer has to be extra aware of the enemy caster.

RANGED POSITIONING WITH A MELEE

Moving on, let's now talk about how to effectively play a caster when paired up with a melee on your team. Although you have a little more responsibility, positioning actually becomes a lot easier.

The main adaptation is instead of worrying too much about your DPS, your full focus should be on healers. Let's first start with our fundamentals.

Number 1. Can my healer easily heal me?

Your positioning when playing with a melee is heavily focused around your healer. Where you stand should always be in one of two places, either near your healer on the pillar in case of casters or out to the open max range from them in the case of melee.

Then number 2. Is my positioning achieving anything offensively?

This is the biggest point when playing with a melee. Similar to double caster, it's going to be up to you to pressure the enemy healer with your positioning.

Either by being able to hit them, land crowd control, or causing them to sacrifice their positioning on the pillar. This time, let's start by analyzing positioning when up against double melee as this is where you'll be tested the most.

Once again, using Tol'Viron as our example, we've got the enemy healer on the pillar here. Whilst we, the caster, are able to hit the enemy healer on the pillar.

This is where you'll be tested the most. The caster are situated in the middle here, being trained by two melee with our own melee hitting them as well.

As we're the sole caster, we've got a lot more responsibility and need to land the crowd control ourselves. To do so, do we, A.

Push into the enemy healer to try and land crowd control. B.

Wait for the healer to poke his head out and land crowd control. C.

Drag the melee away from their healer, forcing them to leave the pillar. D.

Complain that you can't land crowd control and instead swap onto the healer. Well, the correct answer here was of course C, but this is an issue we see continuously from lower rated players, where they'll instead push in and find themselves in a situation where they're hindering themselves with their own positioning.

Remember the fundamentals. When facing melee as a caster, you're in that unique position where you dictate their positioning.

If they want to hit you, they need to be on top of you. If you're struggling to land crowd control onto enemy healers or even damage for that matter, you can't do that.

So, if you're struggling to land crowd control onto a melee caster, remember that the problem is more than likely where you're standing. Moving further away causes them to come into you or cross the map.

The bottom line, why push in when you can make them push into you? But then, if in the rare case, you're not the one being focused when playing melee caster versus double melee, you should aim to, once again, exactly the same as double caster, be in between the enemy healer and the melee dps at all times.

CASTER MELEE VS. DOUBLE CASTER

So now, what about when facing Double Caster? This gets a lot harder as you've got a melee on your team who's going to have his position dictated by the enemy casters.

In these games, you're gonna have to do one of two things throughout the game. A.

Play with your healer and push in onto the enemy healer. B.

Play near the pillar and hit the closest target. Option A requires you and your healer to assist your melee DPS, making a team effort in order to push into the enemy team, taking their healer's pillar and using it for yourself.

This is the most aggressive option and will cause you to constantly need to reposition to stay on top of the enemy healer.

In order to do this, you're of course going to have to stop crowd control or damage whilst your healer safely crosses the map with you, so you can only do so if you have pressure or cooldowns to be able to do so safely. Option B, on the other hand, is a lot more simple but requires more target swapping.

This is for when you're not yet ready to play aggressive. You just sit at a pillar with your healer and have your melee hit the closest DPS.

This gives the enemy only one target, and if they want to land A, and you can't land anything on your healer or yourself, they'll have to push in to do so, at which point you'll have a pillar still.

Then, once you have the pressure or cooldowns required, you can execute on option A and make that offensive push with your team.

CASTER MELEE VS. CASTER MELEE

Which leaves us with mirrors. Caster melee versus caster melee.

Now, this is just a complete test on the fundamentals. If you've got a melee on you, you'll want to make sure that you are not positioned too close to your healer to risk interrupts and cross crowd control.

If you want to land crowd control, you can either push with your team or drag the melee further away from his healer, causing him to have to leave the pillar. And if you're in a spot where the enemy caster has a pillar and you don't, then adjust accordingly.

Honestly though, in these matchups, it's heavily dependent on the compositions you're playing. Cases like mages can take melees to obscure positions out of LOS and crowd control them.

Cases like shadow priest or warlock can drag the melee away from the healer and get spread pressure via lack of healing. So overall, take these matchups by a case-by-case basis.

And if you remember the fundamentals, you'll be good to go. Just aim to make the game easy for yourself and your healer.

RANGED POSITIONING RECAP & COMMON ISSUES

So now that we've covered the general rule of thumb in most situations, let's now go over some common problems that require slightly more nuanced positioning, and address some common questions you may have. The first is to avoid any AOE CC the enemy team might have.

Mechanics like Psychic Scream and Leg Sweep are incredibly common and can easily turn the game against you if you aren't careful with your positioning. The simplest solution for this is to monitor AOE CC with add-ons like Omnibar and making sure you aren't stacked on top of your healer whilst these are up.

And it's always going to be worth sacrificing your positioning for a short period to avoid stacking for these spells. Something you may struggle with is to apply the fundamentals you've learned in this guide to the smaller maps like Ruins of Lordaeron or Dalaran Sewers.

Well, let me start by saying fundamentals like the Triangle Formation can be applied on every single map, just not in the conventional way. On Ruins of Lordaeron, you can use the starting room to drag enemies out of LOS, forcing healers into the middle of the map.

Then on Dalaran Sewers, you should always aim to utilize the bottom of the map. Using the stairs here... ...you're able to continuously swap from one side to the other, which will in turn force the healer to either stand at the top of the stairs here or continuously reposition from one pillar to the other.

Either way, you're achieving the same goal, which is forcing the healer to sacrifice their position. To recap, positioning is one of the strongest tools you have available to you inside of games.

And if you know the fundamentals, you can get so much done with something as simple as just where you're standing. The easiest way to pick things up is to always think about where you're standing in your games and what you're achieving whilst doing so.

You can always accomplish something with your positioning, whether it's defensive or offensive. And last but not least, positioning isn't a static concept.

It's something you're gonna have to be constantly adapting throughout your games. Anyway guys, that about brings this video to an end.

Hopefully, you were able to fully understand the importance something as simple as positioning has on your overall game.