CHAPTER 5: DEFENSIVE INTERRUPTS

DEFENSIVE INTERRUPTS INTRO

Welcome to our course on Defensive Interrupts. In this course, we're going to be showing you how to master your interrupts, starting with all of the ways you can defensively carry by using your kick.

That's right, kicking is a vital part of crowd control too. But with so many spells in the game, it can really be hard to know what exactly is worth stopping and what times an interrupt is needed the most.

This course is going to answer your questions and even prove that sometimes the best kicks might be during moments you weren't expecting.

STOPPING INITIAL CC ON HEALER

There are a few mechanics that truly define WoW PvP, and interrupting is one of them. You might have a basic understanding of when to kick, but over the years you might also have developed some really bad habits.

Well, in today's guide we will be breaking down interrupts by showing you how they can be used to keep your team alive. Be sure to watch this guide until the end, and stay tuned for our follow up video on how to use interrupts offensively.

In any case, we're here to show you some of the most common mistakes made by low rated players, but then show you some easy fixes so you can break your bad habits once and for all. Let's kick things off by looking at the most important thing to interrupt, which is CC on your healer.

The most common CC spell you will need to interrupt an arena is polymorph. Mages are one of the most popular casters, and polymorph is an integral part of their win condition across most of their comps.

Against almost every team with a mage, polymorph is the start of the entire kill setup. It is used to lock down healers while focusing damage into DPS.

This usually forces one or more of the mage to use the skill. This is a good way to get the most out of your team.

Polymorph allows you to get more defensive cooldowns from the defending team, and in turn allows the mage team to dictate tempo throughout the game.

Under perfect conditions, your healers should do their best to avoid getting randomly polymorphed, making sure to stay out of the mage's LOS, and removing the threat of CC entirely. Obviously this isn't always possible, and sometimes the mage will be inline to freely poly your healer.

With this in mind, you should be selective as to when you are actually committing your interrupt. Here are some general rules to follow for kicking the initial polymorph cast.

1. If your healer can avoid the cast with LOS, you can use polymorph to interrupt the initial cast with LOS.

Avoid kicking. 2.

If your healer is on full DR for the CC cast category, avoid kicking. 3.

If your healer is off DR for CC and the enemy team is about to set up their kill, get ready to kick if possible. Dragon's Breath is often used to lock down healers momentarily in order to ensure the polymorph lands.

If your healer gets DB'd, it's up to you to stop the subsequent cast. In order to anticipate dragon's breath on your healer, look at the mage's positioning.

If they are running towards your healer, chances are they want to DB. Here our warrior is right on top of the mage after the dragon's breath, and with our feral under pressure, the sheep must be stopped.

Our warrior kicks the cast, denying the CC chain from starting and allowing our team to recover. Whenever possible, you should try and stop the CC chain from starting by interrupting the first long CC cast on your healer.

On top of that, you should be aware that many good mages will try and bait kicks with random polymorph casts on DPS in order to have an easier time landing CC on their healer. Sometimes it can be beneficial to kick these bait casts.

But in most cases, you should simply tank the polymorph as long as your healer can dispel you. As you can see here, the priest is in an excellent position to simply line this opening polymorph.

Our mage doesn't really care if this cast actually lands, and instead is only using it to bait kicks. The hunter takes this bait and kicks the cast.

Now there is one less interrupt to deal with when our mage is going for his actual CC chain. Knowing exactly which polymorph cast will be threatening can take some experience, but as a general rule, you should avoid kicking casts on your healer if they are in a position to just line of sight.

In any case, one benefit of kicking polymorph is that it prevents the mage from using another important defensive spell, like shimmer and alter time, allowing your team to reverse pressure while also preventing the mage from using counterspell and spellsteal, which can allow your healer to recover your HP.

Although polymorph is the most common form of casted CC you will encounter in arena, it's certainly not alone. Cyclone, Hex, Mind Control, and Fear are also important to interrupt on their initial cast, since any one of these spells is capable of putting your team behind.

This is a good example of how you can counter the mage's counter spells. In some rare situations, there will be two separate CC casts on your healer at the same time, and stopping both might seem difficult and will require you to use more than just an interrupt to block both casts.

Here our rank 1 warrior will have to stop two separate hex casts on his healer. He only has one interrupt, so how can he do this?

The first hex is cast by the ele shaman, and as we can see, our shaman is currently stunned and will be unable to avoid it.

This is the cast we want to kick, but if we notice in the background, the enemy shaman is running towards our healer, and with his team at full HP, this is a signal that he is trying to do something aggressive. The second shaman tries to hex, but luckily for us, our warrior saved his aoe fear as a stop.

Whenever you can't interrupt a crucial cast, you need to use your other instant cast CC options to deny enemy control.

STOPPING FOLLOW UP CC ON HEALER

Stopping the initial CC on your healer makes sense on paper, but in practice this isn't always possible, which is why stopping follow up CC is equally as important.

At a certain rating, most teams become good at cross CCing every player on your team, preventing you from stopping the initial polymorph cast on your healer.

One mistake that mid level players make is then failing to interrupt subsequent polymorph casts, allowing the mage to chain an additional 6 seconds of CC on their healer. This in turn will burn more resources from their team and will put them even further behind.

The easiest solution to this problem is to simply stop the follow up polymorph cast on your healer. The first cast is the most difficult to stop, but once it lands you now know exactly what the enemy mage wants to do, and that is to cast 2 more.

Even though the follow up CC is usually less valuable, it is still important to interrupt since letting it go through can put your team behind. Unless you have a ranged interrupt it can be difficult to consistently stop follow up polymorphs, and sometimes you need to improvise.

Here we have a standard triple CC opener from an RMP. Our goal is to prevent as much as possible.

We want to have as much follow up CC on our healer as possible after this sap ends. Our warrior is forced to trinket the poly in order to break up the combustion from the mage.

The mage trinkets and then casts a follow up polymorph on our healer. Remember if we allow this to go through this could burn even more of our teams defenses.

The mage is out of range of pummels so we have to use our other stops. Because of this we use storm bolt to shut down the follow up, breaking up the chain and allowing our team to recover.

In high tension situations like RMP openers you should be willing to commit your instant cast CC as a form of interrupt to prevent the enemy team from landing important casts. Once again though polymorph is not the only form of follow up CC that you have to worry about.

The same spells we mentioned earlier, cyclone, hex, mind control and fear can also be chained together with other CCs including polymorph. At the start of this clip our shaman will be put into a full trap from the hunter, but notice the position of the priest and feral druid.

The priest is locked down on the pillar, far across the map from our shaman, but the druid is stunned in the center of the map and an easy cyclone range of our team. This is a good sign for our team to be able to get out of the trap.

The druid is now in the cyclone range of our healer. This is where you need to pay attention to a follow up cyclone, and as you can see the druid moves towards our shaman, clearly telegraphing that they want to cast a cyclone.

Our warrior wastes no time, leaping to interrupt the clone. Always pay attention to enemy positioning to see what follow up CCs are coming.

There are some rare situations where there are multiple follow up CCs you need to stop at the same time. God comp is one of the few popular setups that has multiple spammable range CCs and the mage and druid will usually try chaining polymorph and cyclone together on end of the healers.

This can create a bit of a dilemma, which should you interrupt? Lets assume that there is a full polymorph on your healer against god comp.

The sheep is about to end and the mage is casting polymorph while the druid is casting cyclone. So what should you stop?

In most cases it will be the cyclone. If it lands it will CC our healer for 6 seconds instead of the half duration 4 seconds from polymorph.

On top of that if we allow the polymorph cast to go through, that means the mage has a cast bar worth of time not pressing any damage. Which slightly reduces the damage.

If you need to stop a follow up CC be mindful of its duration. Sometimes its ok to let a cast go through if it is only its quarter DR.

Your priority is to interrupt the longest duration CCs first. One useful way to track DRs in your team is with an add on like diminish.

This will help you make better decisions on when you actually need to use your interrupts. If you see that your healer is quarter DR'd on polymorph you know that you dont need to commit a kick.

Sometimes good mages will immediately recast a polymorph on a healer shortly after the full duration sheep lands. This is done to bait a kick from the DPS in order to set up a longer chain CC.

Here the mage is recasting a 4 second DR polymorph despite there still being 4 seconds left on the initial cast. There is really no reason to kick this poly since its not adding much time to our healers CC chain.

Dont fall into this trap. Always pay attention to the duration of the CC on your healer before going for kicks.

One of the easiest ways to do this on your own is with an add on like big debuffs which will clearly display any CC debuffs on your team. Its not just polymorph you have to worry about as bait.

Sometimes ring of frost will be bait casted too. Here the mage is bait casting a ring of frost on a healer even though the polymorph still has 3 seconds left on its duration.

Our warrior falls for this bait, kicking the ring but then having no stop for the actual follow up polymorph. This is a highly advanced strategy that can fool even the best players in the world but it reinforces how important it is to monitor the current CC on your healer before kicking follow ups.

STOPPING CC ON YOUR DPS

It's not just CC on your healer that you need to worry about, sometimes interrupting CC casts on DPS is also important defensively. Remember that at a certain rating, your opponents will become really good at controlling multiple players on your team and not just your healer.

In some situations, CC spells will be cast on your DPS in order to set up 2v1 or 3v1 situations where your entire team is locked down. Because of this, stopping CC on DPS is also important when it comes to shutting down kill attempts.

This is especially true for classes that have lots of team-wide utility, like hybrid DPS and arms warriors. Stopping a polymorph on a red paladin, for instance, can allow them to off-heal, use their blessings, interrupt damage casts, and even reverse pressure.

At the start of this clip, Dragon's Breath will be off CD, and once our DPS are stacked, the enemy mage will attempt to DB to CC both the feral and warrior to set up a kill on our monk. Fortunately for our team, our monk is able to disrupt the first ring of frost and our warrior is able to kill the first ring of frost.

He is also able to reflect the follow-up polymorph on himself. Remember, if either of our DPS gets CC'd, that can be huge trouble for our team.

Our warrior interrupts the next polymorph cast, and our feral is right there with us to stop the ring. Even though none of these CCs were intended for our healer, it's super important that they are stopped since it will open our team to a 1v3 situation.

Just like before, you need to be wary of cooldowns and diminishing returns to know when your team is most vulnerable to the threat of cross CC. Use Omnibar to track the cooldown of Dragon's Breath and Kidney Shot while using Diminish to track DRs on your team.

If CDs and DRs are coming up soon, anticipate a setup. Also be mindful of enemy positioning.

If you see the enemy team start pushing into your healer, you should anticipate a setup. The worst thing that can happen to your team is getting into a 1v3 situation, so avoid getting cross CC'd at all costs.

At the start of this clip, our monk is under huge pressure from an RMP, and our warrior needs to make sure he avoids as much CC as possible. Since he is playing with a feral druid, he knows this CC is 100% meant for him and if it goes through, he can't stop.

He can't support his monk. The kick on Polymorph will give him an incredibly tight window to support his healer, but it is enough to squeeze in a war banner right as the kidney shot ends, reducing the follow up stun on his monk and therefore keeping him alive.

This play would not have been possible if he didn't interrupt the polymorph on himself.

STOPPING TEMPO ON ENEMY DPS

By now you are probably wondering about damage casts, and yes those are important to interrupt as well, but only at specific times. In previous videos we have compared arena to a series of waves where both teams fight for pressure.

Your team will have moments where it peaks on pressure and will take control of the game, but at other times you will be in recovery mode and will prepare to block enemy attacks.

During this downtime where your healer is still on CCDR, or when an enemy kill setup isn't eminent, it is often beneficial to interrupt damaging spell casts to maintain tempo, so long as you are interrupting the right ones.

Keep in mind that almost every high tier caster in the game has multiple spell schools, and some even have multiple schools that deal damage. Not all casters are created equal.

Destruction warlocks for instance have both shadow and fire spell schools, which allows them to deal damage with incinerate even while kicked on fear. They also have a chaos spell school, which is considered both shadow and fire, meaning interrupting chaos bolt will lock them in.

Shadow priests on the other hand only have one spell school for all their damage and control, meaning interrupting vampiric touch casts will almost completely shut down their offensive pressure, making any of their shadow spells high value interrupts.

Interrupting damage or CC to reduce pressure can be even more effective when combined with stuns. Ideally you should look to interrupt one cast, waiting for the lockout to end, then chaining it together with a stun to prevent even more casts.

This will give the enemy player a really short window to actually land their spells. If a rogue interrupts a shadow priest on vt for instance, the lockout will last 5 seconds.

Once those 5 seconds are over, a kidney shot can be used to lock down the priest for an additional 6, meaning that the remaining cooldown of kick will be 4 seconds, forcing the priest to use that small window to try and land casts before kick is available.

This window becomes even smaller the more interrupts you have in your party, which is why chaining interrupts together as a team is highly effective for reducing pressure. This is something that the best teams do, they will take turns interrupting spell casts, making sure they avoid using their kicks on the same day.

This is something that the best teams do, they will take turns interrupting spell casts, making sure they avoid using their kicks on the same day.

This is something that the best teams do, they will take turns interrupting spell casts, making sure they avoid using their kicks on the same day. and then chaining this together with stuns on their team. One thing you need to be aware of when kicking is interrupt immunities like unending resolve.

Here our Warrior stormbolts the Warlock, but once the stun ends, the Warlock will use unending resolve, granting immunity to all interrupts. This is a very niche interaction, but ideally you should try and reserve a CC for when casts can't be interrupted due to interrupt immunities.

There are some damage spell casts that are almost always worth interrupting since they are huge threats. Although some of these are rare.

They include Deathbolt from Affliction Warlocks during Dark Soul, Chaosbolt from Destruction Warlocks, Decimating Bolt from Demo Warlocks, Greater Pyroblast and Pyroclasm Pyroblasts from Fire Mages, Arcanosphere from Arcane Mages, Convoke the Spirits from Nightfae Druids, and finally, Fey Transfusion from Nightfae Shamans.

Any one of these casts is worth instantly interrupting in most cases. There are two more common spells that are always worth interrupting as well, one of which you might not know about because it comes from a melee class.

Our smartest viewers might know what we're talking about, can you guess it? It's Eyebeam from Demon Hunters, the reason being that it gives DH a haste buff and will proc metamorphosis for 6 seconds if the cast successfully finishes.

This is why you see many rank 1 players instantly interrupt his cast, since it gives the Demon Hunter a massive increase in damage if it channels for its full duration. Another cast you need to be wary of is mind games, especially if there is a hybrid DPS on your team.

The overwhelming majority of priests you will play against in Arena will be Venthyr, meaning they will have this as their core. Venthyr is a very powerful healer, and will be able to counter any off healing.

The damage from mind games is already pretty high, but its healing reversal can be absolutely devastating, meaning you should prioritize interrupting it during kill setups when possible. Ok guys that wraps up the first half of our guide on using interrupts.

Be sure to watch our follow up video on how to use interrupts offensively as it will take you through everything you need to know to win games with successful kicks. As always though, thanks for watching, see you soon.