CHAPTER 4: VOD REVIEW

VOD REVIEW INTRO

You've probably heard us say that if you want to improve, that means recording your own gameplay. But we realized something, we've never told you how to review your own games.

Not to worry though because today we got you covered. We will be breaking down the three levels of gameplay review and showing you how you can use them to improve faster than you ever thought was possible.

So if you want to see exactly how the pros break down their own gameplay, and if you want to see dedicated rating gains, then stick around because this one's for you.

ANALYZING THE KILL

You've probably heard us say that if you want to improve, that means recording your own gameplay. But we realized something, we've never told you how to review your own games.

Not to worry though because today we got you covered. We will be breaking down the three levels of gameplay review and showing you how you can use them to improve faster than you ever thought was possible.

So if you want to see exactly how the pros break down their own gameplay, and if you want to see dedicated rating gains, then stick around because this one's for you. Let's start out by looking at the most fundamental way to analyze gameplay, which involves looking at the final moments of the game.

Watching the ending of your games can give you key information about what exactly caused you to lose, like whether your team was late on using important CDs or if you got caught out of position at a bad moment.

One of the best tools to analyze your games is an add-on called OmniCD, which is used for this level of analysis and the two deeper levels we will be covering later in the video. OmniCD will conveniently display all of your team's most important cooldowns right next to their frames.

If you see where your teammates die with CDs available, it makes analyzing the loss pretty straightforward and allows you to say oh, if we had just traded more cooldowns here we probably could have lived. So let's rewind to see what caused our druid to die in the first minute to RMP.

This example is a bit obvious, but we will be building a deeper analysis in the next section. As you can see, our team has put a lot of pressure on the priest, who has already used trinket and guardian spirit, meaning we can win the game in a following setup.

Meanwhile, our team is sitting comfortably on HP and we have all of our defensive cooldowns. This is an easy win, right?

So how does our druid die? The RMP does their classic triple CC setup, stunning our entire team.

Our druid thought this setup would be on our paladin, so he uses ironbark and overgrowth by mistake. And despite our entire team being cross cc'd and the enemy team popping CDs, nobody on our team responds, and it isn't until 30% HP that our druid actually uses barkskin.

And to nobody's surprise, our druid dies in this setup, despite our warrior and red paladin having every defensive CD available. So, what can we do?

What can we learn from this loss? For one, our team had momentum.

We just needed to live, but unfortunately nobody on our team respected the RMP setup and only barkskin was traded, but a bit too late. The lesson we should take away from this is that if we get caught in a triple CC setup, we need to efficiently trade one or more CDs if we want any chance at staying alive.

It's okay to be critical of your mistakes as a team, as long as you can learn from them. In a later game, our team is able to use what they learned in their first loss to respond better to an RMP setup.

Once again, everyone is put into triple CC at the same time, and no matter who the RMP attacks, one of us will need to respond. This time, our red paladin instantly trinkets the setup on himself and uses it to stun the priest to deny the mind control on our warrior.

Still under pressure, our red decides to trade more cooldowns, anticipating a follow up sap on our druid. This is completely warranted since our team is still cross CC'd and the enemy rogue has committed multiple offensive cooldowns.

This time, our paladin narrowly lives. Despite having an almost identical cooldown, our druid is able to trade more cooldowns, and the red paladin is able to kill the red paladin with a single cooldown.

We can now see that our team is able to trade multiple cooldowns, and the red paladin has a lot of cooldowns. Despite having an almost identical triple CC setup, our team adapted by trading multiple defensive CDEs as a response, avoiding the mistakes made in the previous game.

Obviously some deaths are nearly impossible to avoid, and sometimes shadowlands is just shadowlands, but when you aren't getting killed by a monk in one second, make sure you're reviewing the final moments of the game to see crucial blunders in defensive gameplay.

ANALYZING PREVIOUS SETUPS

Now, looking at the moment of your loss is pretty straightforward, but we're just getting started. Like any good detective, sometimes you can't just look at the last moments in your game, but instead you need to go deeper.

Losing an arena is like the butterfly effect, sometimes one small mistake early on into the game can have consequences later on. It's not just the final setup that matters, and more often than not losing an arena means making one mistake that sets off a chain reaction.

So the goal then is to look at each setup individually to see defensive mishaps that happened in the setups leading up to the final moment of the game. Let's look at the end of this game to try and see what went wrong.

As you can see we have a pretty standard triple cc setup from the RMP. Our team still has some defensives available, but unfortunately our ret paladin doesn't have trinket or bubble and is still on forbearance, meaning we can't use blessing of protection on ourselves for another 7 seconds.

The RMP wastes no time and uses shadow blades and combustion to kill our ret paladin right before forbearance fades. And if we look at our omni cd.

Our druid tried to save us. With trinket.

So what went wrong? In these situations we can't just look at the kill alone, but we have to backtrack to see how our cooldowns were used in every setup in the past.

With that in mind let's look at the setup that happened around 30 seconds before the final kill. Once again we have a fairly standard cc setup, which means our paladin is about to be under a lot of pressure.

With the rogue popping cooldowns and the priest casting mind games, our paladin is forced to bubble this setup. But if we go back 4 seconds we can see a few potential issues.

Notice here that our druid still has trinket and ironbark. Normally you would want to save trinket for blind, but it looks like blind is on cd, meaning our druid could have trinketed the sap and immediately ironbarked us.

Instead our druid sits the sap, letting our paladin drop low enough that he is forced to proc his guardian while bubbling, and to make matters worse our druid wastes his ironbark here after the kill setup was blocked with trinket. The whole setup was blocked with our paladin's cooldowns.

Seeing this exchange makes us wonder one thing, what happened with the rogue's blind? This is the moment the rogue blinds our druid.

Normally you should try and line up pvp trinket with blind as a healer, but it looks like our healer was confident in his hots.

Unfortunately though our paladin doesn't kite away while his healer is blinded and instead wanders around the map looking for a target to hit, eventually leading to him getting caught out and stunned forcing his bubble. So now we know what went wrong on this setup.

But one important question remains. What caused our ret and warrior to trinket?

Once again we have to go even deeper into the past, which means retracing our steps to the exact moment where we used our trinkets. And yes this is exactly what pro players do when they analyze games.

It involves a lot of work. Here we are in the first kill setup of the game and as you might have guessed the rmp has triple cc on our team.

But since this is the first kill setup this also means our team has all of their defensive cooldowns. So let's see what went wrong.

A mistake just happened but did you see it? Look at omni cd for clues and then look at our paladin's cooldowns.

Can you see what happened? Times up.

Here's what you should have noticed. As you can see our ret paladin overlaps his pvp trinket with his warrior.

This was likely due to a simple miscommunication. In this situation our ret paladin could have preserved his trinket since our warrior combos his cc break with an aoe fear to break up the kill on combustion.

This completely wastes the paladin's pvp trinket, especially since he combos it with bm trinket and shield of vengeance. So let's piece everything together.

In the opener our team overlaps two pvp trinkets against an rmp, giving them one less defensive block for a future setup. Our healer then holds trinket on blind which awkwardly forces our ret paladin to use his biggest defensive cooldown on the setup right before the kill since he had no other options.

Eventually this means there were no cooldowns available for the final setup where our ret paladin dies. So what can we learn from this loss?

For one we learn that it is bad to overlap trinkets against rmp. We want to make sure we have at least one out for every setup.

Second we learn that we need to handle blind properly, relying on communication with our healer to know how we should react as a team. Finally we saw that we shouldn't peek into the open against rogue mage when we are out of cooldowns and they have a setup ready.

Instead we should try and avoid their damage until we have major defensives available. So just to recap, when you are looking at your losses don't just look at the final kill setup because it doesn't give you a complete picture of the game.

Instead you should trace your setups back setup by setup in order to see where your team either overlapped or didn't. Even more often than not, it is defensive mismanagement that causes you to lose, but that begs an important question.

What about offensive mistakes?

ANALYZING OFFENSIVE MISTAKES

There will be times you watch a game and you realize you weren't even close to winning. This usually means something failed offensively.

As long as you play well defensively you can avoid losing games, but let's make one thing clear, there is a difference between avoiding losses and actually winning. Let us explain.

You might be able to play well defensively and avoid dying setup after setup, but this doesn't mean you automatically win the game, you still have to play well offensively. First you have to make sure you attack the right targets.

Target selection is pretty straight forward and requires some level of game knowledge and experience with a single comp. What is often more important though is analyzing your kill setups to see if they were actually productive, and to find out why you weren't able to convert your setups into a kill.

To see this in action let's look at a defensively demanding matchup and break down an RMD against a turbo cleave. From the perspective of the RMD a lot needs to go right in order to win this matchup.

Every kill attempt will require cross CC since the turbo cleave has so many defensive cooldowns and off heals they can rotate through. Unfortunately this game has lasted over 5 minutes and our RMD is still in the game.

The RMD wasn't able to convert their setups into kills. Let's see what went wrong.

This time let's start from the beginning to see our offensive mistakes. We told you that when you analyze a game defensively it's good to start at the end and work your way backwards.

For looking at offensive mistakes it can be better to start early and see how the game progressed. The game starts off well for our team as we force the shaman's trinket and astral shift without any CC on the druid.

Now our goal is to rinse and repeat cross CC setups until no CDs are left, so let's see what our team's aim is. Here our team tries to get some cross CC as the warrior gets put into a full sheep while the shaman is stunned, but there is still no CC on the druid.

In the background our mage goes for a dragon's breath ring, but misses his ring placement while the shaman is able to recover. Our second kill attempt didn't really do much, so now we have to use our next setup to try and force CDs.

Unfortunately our team is never able to efficiently land their cross CC in a way that forces the enemy team to use their cooldowns, it isn't until nearly 3 minutes into the game before our team actually gets the CC. So we're going to have to wait for our team to recover.

We're going to have to wait for our team to recover. We're going to have to wait for our team to recover.

We're going to have to wait for our team to recover. We're going to have to wait for our team to recover.

We're going to have to wait for our team to recover. Which happens right here during a blind maledict setup.

Unfortunately the shaman's trinket is about to come off CD, which pretty much puts us back to where we began. Thankfully the enemy team is about to gift us a massive opportunity, and a few moments later the shaman will give us his trinket for free.

Which he does right here. Now we have 2 trinkets down and 1 to go.

To make things even better for us, our druid also has bash ready. Meaning that we can have at least 2 guaranteed triple cross CC setups by the time the enemy team has their trinkets ready.

Unfortunately there is about to be a crucial offensive mistake. With bash and dragon's breath both ready, we can DB sheep the druid at the same time we bash cyclone the warrior and kidney shot the shaman.

At best this will secure the kill, but at worst it will at least force the warriors trinket. But due to a miscommunication, bash gets used on the druid, effectively ruining any chance we had at getting efficient cross CC.

Not to worry though because we have one more bash available to try again since pvp trinkets on the shaman and druid aren't up for over a minute. Remember, we need cross CC on all 3 players or we won't win, and with 2 trinkets down this should be easy, so let's see what goes wrong.

Here we have our next opportunity to land cross CC. Our druid bash clones the warrior and our mage DBs the druid.

We just need to cross with a stun on the shaman, but because there was no cross CC the enemy shaman is able to grounding totem right before the polymorph lands. And now with nearly a minute remaining on the druid's trinket, this means there will only be one more time to use bash.

Our team needs to execute this next setup if they want any chance at winning before trinkets rotate back. Here our mage goes for a really high level play by polymorphing the warrior and at the same time he DB rings the druid.

This requires a lot of technical skill, but there's one huge problem. He went for this without any CC on the shaman, who is still on stun DR.

And because there was no cross on the shaman they are able to break up the ring of frost cast with a sunder, once again denying our kill entirely. If our mage would have just been patient and crossed CC with his trinket, we would have been able to break up the ring of frost cast with a sunder.

If our mage would have just been patient and crossed CC with his trinket, we would have been able to break up the ring of frost cast with a sunder. If our mage would have just been patient and crossed CC with his trinket, we would have been able to break up the ring of frost cast with a sunder.

If our mage would have just been patient and crossed CC with his trinket, we would have been able to break up the ring of frost cast with a sunder. Eventually the warrior's trinket does get forced, right here.

But it is too little and too late since the druid's trinket is about to rotate up again. Despite our team playing well defensively and rotating cooldowns properly, they weren't able to actually win the game.

They did well to not lose the game at different times, but they ran out of opportunities to actually convert their defensive mastery into a kill. So when you're analyzing games offensively, ask yourself two things.

1. Did we make the right target?

And 2. Were we able to get the most out of our setups?

Some of you may be saying, but wait I don't play RMD, so how does this apply to me? The truth of the matter is that nearly every comp in the game has some form of crossed CC setup.

I challenge you to name more than 3 popular meta comps that don't have crossed CC potential. They all do.

The best players try and make the most out of their setups, combining proper target selection with efficient offensive pressure and control. Just because you aren't losing defensively doesn't mean you're guaranteed to win the game.

Alright guys. That wraps up today's guide on reviewing your own footage.

This is probably one of the most important things you can do right now to elevate your gameplay. So put these lessons into use and we guarantee you will see that rating go up.

If you're interested in recording your gameplay for a chance to appear in our videos, be sure to join our squad OV which can be found on our discord. As always though, thanks for watching, see you soon.