CHAPTER 4: HOW TO WIN IN DAMPENING

HOW TO WIN IN DAMPENING INTRO

Welcome to our course that will teach you how to win during dampening in Solo Shuffle. What 90% of players don't realize is that this single mechanic right here should be changing the way you play in the middle of every single Solo Shuffle game.

The best players know this, they know when and how to adjust their gameplay the moment dampening starts to really kick in. Hey, Big Macs didn't get to number one in the world for no reason, alright?

Anyway, stay tuned because this course could be the solution to many of your Solo Shuffle losses.

DO MORE DAMAGE, TAKE LESS DAMAGE

There is one thing most players always forget when they play Solo Shuffle. It is one tiny detail that nobody seems to notice until the moment it's too late.

No, it's not the fact that Illidan God X never uses Blur when they're in your lobby, or that the BM hunter on your team with the Rexxar transmog misses half of their traps. No, this Solo Shuffle demon is far worse, because it causes everyone to lose raiding without them ever knowing why.

It's the fact that nobody remembers that after one minute, dampening starts growing bigger than the ego of an 1800 RPG leader. Anyway, today is all about Solo Shuffle, and the one thing that everyone forgets, that dampening gets super high, super fast.

What most people don't realize is that this feature means you need to change the way you play, but how? To answer that question, we worked with Marrow, one of the best players in the game, who at the time of making Solo Shuffle, was ranked 1 in Solo Shuffle for all 3 mage specs, yes, including fire.

Today, we will learn the 3 essential tips for playing in dampening, as told by one of the best Solo Shuffle players. This one should be obvious, but the most essential tip to remember in deep dampening, is to not only deal maximum damage no matter what, but avoid as much incoming damage as possible.

Let's start with dealing maximum damage. This makes sense on paper.

Over time, heals become weaker, so damage becomes harder to heal, which in turn makes damage gain exponentially more value. As time goes on, damage starts to overvalue healing so much, that simply doing damage is the most effective thing you can do.

If you are a melee and someone kites all across the map away from you, just swap to a target that is easier to hit. There is no reason pursuing a target you can't do damage to.

Don't overcommit chasing a target for no reason, and instead just look for moments to hit other nearby targets, in order to make sure you are always just dealing damage. The same applies to ranged DPS.

Let's pretend someone starts pillaring all your damage. Do you need to always chase them around pillars?

No! Just tab to whoever you can hit with the sole purpose of making sure there is always damage flowing.

While you are doing this, minimize the damage you take.

In normal 3v3, you might save your kicks for important CC casts, but in solo shuffle, kicking damage spells is extra important, since any point of damage will get harder and harder for your healer to deal with, meaning you can win the game passively by interrupting damage as often as you can.

Another way you can stop damage is through CC. There is no 3-2-1-ing in solo shuffle, so if you have a stun, you should look to use it during moments where you can stop damage.

Here, for instance, we can see our team is quite low against a red paladin who has freedom up and is running away to kite. Joe Fernandez stormbolts the paladin without any cross CC on the healer, since dampening is so high that all he needs to do is make sure his team doesn't die in this crucial moment.

And by doing so, he accomplishes the goal of maximizing damage. He's able to deal to a slippery target while also minimizing the damage his team takes.

Remember, dampening is a two-way street. It makes scoring kills easier, but makes your team feel more vulnerable as time goes on, which means you need to minimize incoming damage whenever possible.

But here is where we need to mention something super important. While it is good to minimize the damage you take, this does not mean running away forever.

No, because remember, damage is the most valuable thing you can do. While it's perfectly fine to try and reset the fight in normal 3v3, where you are looking to coordinate offensive pushes with your team, there are almost no opportunities to reset in deep dampening, since you are on a very strict timer to win the game.

You don't want to be in a position where you are constantly running away while still taking residual damage without doing damage back to the enemy team. It's okay to kite every now and then, but if you are constantly running away, you will have fewer chances to put your team in a winning position.

So don't take damage for no reason, and whenever you can, just avoid it entirely while also trying to maximize the amount of overall damage you deal to the enemy team.

TARGET PRIORITIES CHANGE IN DEEP DAMPENING

Along with that you need to realize that target selection is slightly different in deep dampening. Hopefully by now you watched our solo shuffle targeting guide because as we mentioned this is the follow up video.

One thing that many people found controversial in our guide is that we said affliction warlocks are squishy. With some people even saying that warlocks are tankier than mages.

Maybe people think warlocks are tanks because they have death pact. Huge absorb right?

How do you kill something with a shield that big? Oh yeah and they have healthstone too.

Huge heal that's off the global. An amazing button for their whole team.

And whenever they want they can just heal themselves with drain life. And who needs to worry about anything when you have a shield wall.

But wait, what's common with 3 out of 4 of these things? They get worse in dampening.

Yes the value of healing based cooldowns goes down over time which means specs that rely on healing based cooldowns to survive will only get weaker. That warlock?

Sure they might be a tank in the first minute of the game when they have all their mobility and all of their defensives but as the game goes on the value of most of their defensive cds gets worse.

So if you manage to survive a minute against a warlock they're only going to get weaker and weaker making them much better targets as the game goes on.

Compare that to an arcane mage who have consistently more mobility and more ways to avoid damage including a shield, a shield wall, a mini shield wall, and omega shield wall and a god tier shield wall.

And only one of these gets hurt by dampening but only just a little bit since prismatic barrier reduces magic damage taken by a flat percentage. This makes killing classes with lots of damage mitigation defensives or passive defensive damage taking a lot easier.

So if you manage to survive a minute against a warlock they're only going to get weaker and weaker. So if you manage to survive a minute against a warlock you're only going to get weaker and weaker.

This makes killing classes with lots of damage mitigation much harder since cooldowns like alter time for mages and blur for demon hunters will have even more value in deep dampening since they can minimize damage taken.

This is completely opposite for healing or absorption based defensives like death strike or anti magic shell which get worse as time goes on. This is why we said that dks become better targets in high dampening.

Anyway it should be clear by now that healing cooldowns get weaker in dampening which means classes that rely more on healing to survive will become more and more squishy as time goes on.

USE DEFENSIVES EARLY

Tip number three is to use defensives early. This one requires a bit of nuance.

In low levels of dampening, you can sometimes afford to be slightly greedy with your defensives. Maybe you want to wait until it is absolutely necessary to use a cooldown.

Okay, that might be a bit risky, but can work in 3v3 games when you are coordinating CDs over voice chat.

But in deep dampening games with no communication, every moment spent taking damage and trying to greed a CD becomes a bigger and bigger problem that your healer has to deal with, which sometimes means they have to overcommit cooldowns just because you want to be greedy, and other times means you straight up dying to damage alone.

Instead, DPS should make their healers' jobs easier by using defensive CDs at higher HP than generally needed. Here, we have an extreme example of that in action.

Vanguards is stuck in the middle of the map against three rank 1 priests who are all ready to mass dispel his bubble. Not only is dampening about to hit 20%, but there is a Syphine deploying more healing reduction in the background.

So instead of waiting to drop low to bubble and risk 3 MDs and 3 Shadow Word deaths, Vanguards' bubbles at 40% HP without any CC on his druid, just to kill Syphine to make sure he doesn't drop too low.

With higher amounts of healing reduction, there is no guaranteeing you will be able to hold onto your cooldowns long enough. Instead, you need to sometimes send them to prevent dropping low in the first place.

Anyway, don't try and be greedy with defensives, and especially healing based defensives. Every second you hold that healing CD, the worse it will become later on when dampening makes it almost useless.

This is why you will see good ret paladins use Lay on Hands early in the game, before they have used bubble.

This means that when they can get more value out of Divine Shield later in the game, since it completely stops all damage, no matter what level of dampening, while Lay on Hands gets nerfed the longer the game goes on.

As a reminder, everything we covered so far mainly applies to solo shuffle, but could easily apply to 2v2 and 3v3, since dampening exists in those brackets too.