CHAPTER 5: LINE OF SIGHT

BASIC LINE OF SIGHT

As a healer, when I hear the word Line of Sight, one thing comes to mind. Chasing my DPS partners around a pillar, attempting to heal them until they chase to their death.

But what if I told you Line of Sight can be used in numerous different ways to give you an advantage inside of Arena? Well, strap in and get ready to learn, as today we're exploring the secrets of Line of Sight at three different difficulty levels.

Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced. Before we go any further, I just wanted to quickly explain what Line of Sight actually is.

Line of Sight, often referred to as its acronym LOS or sometimes Lining, is at its simplest form just putting something in between you and another target on the enemy team. Most commonly, it's pillars, but you can use terrain, walls, anything really.

And the reason for doing so is what we're going to be breaking down in this video. Let's start off by taking a look at the most basic level of Line of Sight.

This is something everybody is capable of doing and, to be honest, should already be doing inside of Arena. Which is using Line of Sight to avoid crowd control.

Granted, every map is different, but they all have one thing in common. There are always positions you can stand where you can utilize Line of Sight.

Most commonly, this will be utilized on healers. So, naturally, as a healer, you'll want to be pre-positioned near a pillar.

And then, when you see a crowd control cast, which you believe to be on yourself, step to the side out of LOS to cancel the cast and avoid that crowd control. We'll try to avoid covering positioning too much throughout this video, as it's a concept we've covered in depth in other videos.

Anyway, just because this is important for your healers and almost second nature, this doesn't mean you should neglect using LOS to avoid crowd control as a DPS. Granted, as a damage dealer, your position changes a lot more and you'll often be required to be in the thick of it.

And, as a result, won't always be near a pillar. But, if you do find yourself near a pillar, it's still important you make a conscious effort to Line of Sight crowd control.

Simply sidestepping for a second or just walking a bit to your left or right could provide you with a bunch more uptime on your target and resulting pressure.

Simply sidestepping for a second or just walking a bit to your left or right could provide you with a bunch more uptime on your target and resulting pressure. pressure, especially if it's a form of crowd control your healer cannot dispel. Take this example here taken from a 1600 rated game.

Our Windwalker and his team are trying to kill the enemy Rogue. We see the enemy Mage casting a Polymorph which lands on our Windwalker friend.

Now there is nothing that could have been done line of sight wise to avoid this. He's on the enemy Rogue who obviously dictates his position and whilst the Polymorph is being cast, there is nowhere he could have moved to in time.

After getting dispelled, the enemy Mage instantly casts a re-polymorph. Remember, we've got no dispel for this one so no matter what, it's going to be a 4 second crowd control.

But during this cast, look at our Monk's positioning. The problem here is that if he took one step to the right, he could have avoided this cast and kept up the momentum.

Alright, the other very basic way to utilize line of sight that we wanted to touch on is using it as a way to avoid casted damage. Once again, this is very obvious but you'd be surprised just how many times you'll see this overlooked in the game.

We find that if players are at a pillar and in danger, they will always remember to line of sight as much damage as possible. But if you just so happen to be near a pillar and see damaging spells coming when you're not in danger, players tend to tank a lot of very unnecessary damage.

As a general rule of thumb, if you're near line of sight and somebody is casting a spell on you, no matter how small, you should aim to avoid it if you're losing nothing to do so.

This is partly the reason classes like Elemental and Balance Druids are generally very strong into other casters, as when both are on pillars, they can do almost all of their damage without the need to cast, so they can continuously avoid damage whilst doing damage themselves.

And this is why we always see high-rated casters positioned out in the open against melee damage dealers. If the opponent can avoid damage while still doing damage to you, you're obviously not going to come out the winner.

But even then, you continuously find times as caster, melee, or healer to be able to do damage or heal while still avoiding damage yourself thanks to line of sight. Now, yes.

Avoiding damage and card control by using line of sight isn't some newfound discovery, and hopefully you all already know this.

INTERMEDIATE LINE OF SIGHT

But don't worry, we're just getting started as now we're moving up into our intermediate level ways to abuse Line of Sight. First of which is something almost non-existent in the lower ratings, and that's using Line of Sight as a way to delay and potentially reset the game.

Okay, so what does this mean exactly? To demonstrate, let's take a look at this clip.

We see Waz on his pharaoh succumb to a setup from the enemy shadow play. He's forced to use his trinket as well as his bark skin in an attempt to live.

At the same time, his healer overlaps by using his own trinket to throw a dispel and a heal. As there weren't any big cooldowns from the opposing team, primarily the warlock's dark soul, Waz and his team are now in a very vulnerable spot.

Or, well, if they choose to be, that is. As now, after this costly overlap, all that happens is they use Line of Sight and the pillar to delay the game and wait for these important cooldowns to come back.

This is something you can't do every game, and especially not for this long, usually. But think, tier 6.

What happens if this shadow play attempts to push in? Just like we covered with our beginner section, if the shadow play pushes in, they'll just get lined on all of their cast whilst our jungle can still do damage.

As a result, the game just turns into a stalemate, with the end result being Waz getting his cooldowns back. It doesn't always have to be for this long or as drastic as this, though.

The whole idea of delaying the game could literally be for just a few seconds, for instance, just until you get an interrupt back, or waiting a few seconds for an important defensive, or even just hanging back out of line of sight, while waiting for a damage cooldown.

If you want to slow down the game, Line of Sight is a great way to do so. See it this way, you're avoiding the damage but before it happens.

Our next intermediate way to use Line of Sight is probably the most important in this section, and is the answer to something a lot of players struggle with, securing crowd control onto healers. Yes, using Line of Sight, but to crowd control.

The best way for us to explain this concept is to show you. So you're a shadow priest looking to secure crowd control on this healer at the pillar, but what you're gonna do first is just sticking the shield right next to the shield. here.

The problem is, the warrior that's on you is giving you a hard time, and it's allowing the restoration druid to just max range heal, making it nigh impossible for you to secure any crowd control. What you can do is step back out of line of sight to somewhere like here.

This will cause the DPS that's currently on you to also have to line of sight his healer if he wants to hit you. As a result, the enemy healer will change positions.

Depending on the skill level, they'll do one of two things, either run into the center of the map trying to heal, or swap position to the closest pillar where their DPS is fighting. Either way, they're now closer for you to crowd control.

Not to mention, whilst the healer was changing position, he's vulnerable in the middle of the map without a pillar, so your teammate can potentially capitalize with CC of his own. This is a concept you can use on every single map and in every single game.

It doesn't purely have to be in a caster vs melee situation either. This works equally as well against all opponents.

It's all about understanding how your position dictates where the enemy will end up. And abusing line of sight to do so makes this an incredibly strong technique to help land crowd control.

Our third intermediate way to abuse line of sight is again to help with landing crowd control. This time though, it's not on healers, but on the DPS targets.

Same as before, let's quickly bring up our Tol'Viron game, but instead of a shadow priest, we're a mage. This time though, we want to kill the enemy druid rather than just CC him, but don't want to deal with the appeals of the enemy warrior.

How we do this is by abusing line of sight to crowd control. This is exactly the same concept as the DPS out of line of sight of their healer's dispel.

This keeps them completely out of the game. This is something you see very regularly at the highest rating.

Simply taking an enemy out of their healer's line of sight and then landing crowd control. They can't get dispelled and you can then do what you want for the duration of that lockdown without having to worry about that DPS.

Finally, before we move up to our advanced section, the last way we wanted to talk about using line of sight is in order to set up kills. This is exactly the same concept as the controlling out of the enemy healer's line of sight.

This time though, our goal is to get that player out of line of sight of their healer and then attempt to kill them, preferably inside of a stun. Simple, right?

Well, yes, it's simple, but also very effective.

ADVANCED LINE OF SIGHT

Alright, so, time to take this all one step further as now we're getting into the advanced concepts. In this section, there is only one, but this one concept requires you to be able to apply everything you've already seen in this video in order to execute it.

We're going to be using Line of Sight to not only create pressure and score kills but also to simultaneously relieve pressure and survive. Single-handedly the best use of Line of Sight there is.

Again, to show this in the easiest way possible to understand, let's go back to our Tol'Viron map. Okay, so it's 2v2 and we're a healer being trained by a warrior that's also getting hit by our DPS partner.

Our goal? Dictate the position of this warrior watching only one thing, the position of the enemy healer.

Every time he gets in Line of Sight to heal his warrior, we move to a different part of the pillar and Line of Sight again. So basically, all we're doing is Line of Sighting the enemy healer.

Why is this so good? Well, think about it.

If the warrior wants to chase, he's going to have to use Line of Sight to heal his enemy healer. So, if he wants to chase, he's going to drop low due to the lack of healing.

We do have our DPS partner hitting him after all. This will in turn create us pressure.

But if the warrior can't chase due to lack of healing and chooses to swap targets or wait to be topped, well, we've just instantly relieved all pressure, buying us time to recover. This is a strategy seen at the highest levels of play, especially inside of the 2v2 bracket.

But just like all of these concepts you've seen in this video, they can be applied in a ton of different scenarios and circumstances, and no matter what class or role you play. So, if you're a DPS, you can use Line of Sight to heal your enemy healer.

Alright guys, that wraps up today's guide on how to abuse Line of Sight. LOS and abusing it is without a doubt one of the most important fundamentals of Arena, and if you do it well, it will elevate your gameplay to that next level.

So, try to apply the concepts and techniques you've seen in this video, and we guarantee you'll see that rating go up. As always, thanks for watching, and we'll see you in the next video.