DIFFERENT WIN CONDITIONS

DIFFERENT WIN CONDITIONS INTRO

Welcome to our course on identifying win conditions in PvP. Now despite what people might say on the forums, kills are not completely random in PvP.

99% of wins happen during very specific moments, and if you want to truly climb rating, you need to understand everything that goes into scoring a kill, which involves planning for the future and carving your win condition minutes before it actually happens.

In this course we're going to teach you how to visualize each win and how to spot different paths to victory, so stay tuned because you're about to learn what it takes to think just like a rank 1 gladiator.

DO YOU KNOW HOW TO WIN EVERY COMP? (SKILL TEST)

Did you know that in order to win arena you have to bring your opponents HP to zero? Learn more at skill-capped.com.

Ok but seriously, winning arena games requires you to recognize win conditions, but that can be kinda tricky. Low rated players sometimes fail to see a clear path to victory and even worse sometimes they choose the wrong target the moment the gates open.

But not to worry because there are fixes to both of these problems and today we will show you how to select a target in arena and how to identify win conditions for your comp. Targeting can be difficult to master and often requires some experimentation.

With that in mind, there are patterns or rules you should follow on who to target based on the matchup you are playing. Target selection first depends a lot on the strengths and limitations of your comp.

Melee cleaves for example will do really high damage into low armor targets but at the cost of having limited mobility and CC options. No matter what matchup you are playing as a melee cleave you need to be thinking about who you can hit the hardest while having the most uptime.

Healers can be really good targets for cleaves but that doesn't mean you should always attack them. Think about this for a second, if you were a melee cleave like ret warrior, who would you rather train?

A disc priest or mistweaver monk? The choice should be pretty obvious, the priest will have less armor and less mobility, meaning you will be able to maximize your uptime and pressure.

Monks on the other hand are really slippery and can even port while stunned to prevent total lockdown. But if you are playing a melee cleave like demon hunter, wind, or dragon, you will have to be careful.

If you are playing a melee cleave like windwalker, the mistweaver monk suddenly becomes a kill target since you can actually keep up with their mobility. You need to be thinking about the strengths of your comp or class when deciding who to kill.

As a melee cleave your mobility can be a limiting factor and your target choice needs to reflect that. Melee caster setups like RMP or windwalker boomkin have a different set of strengths.

Instead of needing high uptime on targets with limited mobility, these types of comps are generally centered around control and usually the best target to control is the enemy healer. And finally we have caster cleaves which have the most flexible target selection of any archetype.

Instead of being hard locked into a target all game, your goal is to simply hit whoever is the most exposed in order to zone out the enemy team.

This is a very good way to get a good shot at getting a good shot at getting a good shot at getting a good shot at getting a good shot at getting a good shot at getting a good shot. But this doesn't mean there are no bad targets for caster cleaves.

DKs for instance have multiple spell damage mitigation tools, making them almost impossible to kill for casters. Healers can also be difficult to kill since they will usually be playing far away and out of line of sight.

Of course there are nuances to every matchup and you will have to play off the strengths and limitations of your own comp when experimenting with different targets, but target selection is only a small part of the battle. What matters more is your understanding of win conditions.

Which is by far one of the most important things in a melee game. One of the biggest issues we see in low rated gameplay.

But what exactly do we mean by win condition? It involves finding a window of opportunity to score kills.

Ok, it's really not that dramatic, but in arena your goal is to use a combination of damage and control in order to create moments where the enemy team is most vulnerable. This means gradually wearing down at cooldowns one at a time until you have a cooldown advantage and there is nothing left to block your attack.

This requires you to play for the future. Your offensive pushes aren't necessarily meant to win the game immediately, but instead are meant to create situations to have a better chance at winning the game later on.

If this seems confusing we promise it will make more sense as you watch this video. To understand this lets start with a challenge.

Pretend I offered you $500 to kill this necrolord resto druid in under a minute. You will have to play sub rogue and I will be giving you some help.

I will give you a fire mage and I'm going to take away one of the druids conduits and they won't be able to move at all. Seems easy right?

But what would you do to kill them in under one minute? Since they are necrolord they will be starting with a big shield but not to worry since you have a 2v1 advantage.

Maybe you think the best strategy is to blow all your cooldowns immediately to burn through their fleshcraft. You are on a timer of course, but how would the druid respond?

Since they have a shield they might just bark skin all of your damage during your stun. They might be low at that point but once the stun is over they could just heal up to full hp.

Once DRs are over you might stun them again but there would be one huge problem. They might just have to use a shield to heal up to full hp.

They might have to use a shield to heal up to full hp. You have no cooldowns so your damage isn't going to be that good.

So they could probably just sit the stun and ns up to full once it's over. Ok so you have one more shot.

You wait for DRs to reset, you press your stun and JK the druid just trinkets and presses frenzied regeneration in bear form. Challenge failed.

Let's look at a better way to kill the druid. This time you won't use all of your cooldowns in the opener since you need to have them later on to burn through more defensive cds.

For this opener your mage uses combust while you are just there to stun. Just like before though the druid must respect your cooldowns so he trades bark skin in the process.

And just like before you wait for DRs to reset and now you have go number 2. This time though you use shadow blades and because of this the druid is forced to respect your cooldown and trade his trinket to survive your setup.

We now have reached the window of opportunity. Now the druid is missing two of their biggest defensive cds.

And with a few seconds to spare they can't even do anything. If you don't spare in the challenge you will be able to stun them with no trinket or bark skin and budget any remaining cooldowns like echoing reprimand in order to kill him before time is up.

This obviously was a very basic example and with more players on the enemy team there is more complexity involved in finding your window of opportunity. But if you aren't thinking about arena this way then you should because it will give you a massive edge over your opponents.

One thing we see time and time again at lower ratings is that players try and win games randomly with brute force. They don't really think about anything else.

They just think about how to create and exploit windows where the enemy team can be most vulnerable to their burst damage. People are often stuck at lower ratings because they develop this brute force mentality.

That in order to win you just need to randomly press your damage and hope the enemy team dies eventually. While this might sometimes work against weaker opponents your goal should be maximizing damage during key moments of the game.

There are countless defensives standing in the way of your path to victory and it becomes your job to learn how to play around them. In arena you have to have short term goals of burning important items.

You can't just play around with your weapons and just play around with your weapons. You have to have a lot of time to play around with your weapons.

You have to have a lot of time to play around with your weapons. You have to have a lot of time to play around with your weapons.

You have to have a lot of time to play around with your weapons. Other factors make ut to go.ícia this battleeny against pusica nothing left from the enemy team.

But RMP isn't the only comp that does this. In fact the majority of comps in the current meta rely on gradually wearing down at enemy defensives in order to arrive at their true win condition.

Many people use the word setup based comp to describe RMP but virtually every comp in the game needs control based setups to find their windows of opportunity. But we have one quick question for you.

There is another win condition that some comps rely on. It is not nearly as common.

Can you guess what it is? It's mana.

If you play a comp that has limited setup options but is really good at dealing damage and you are playing against healers like priests or holy paladins, many times your win condition is met by outlasting your opponents mana bar. So let's bring everything together that we've covered so far.

Your first task in arena is to identify your kill target while remembering that it might change throughout the game depending on what cooldowns get used. The next step is to work towards your win condition.

For most comps that means gradually wearing down at enemy cooldowns with your own control and damage until you have a small window where the enemy team is able to get you. This is a very important step in the game.

The most important thing is to know when your opponent is going to be ready to attack you and how to deal damage to them. If your opponent is not ready to attack you, then you can get a chance to do so by using your RMP.

This is a great way to know if your opponent is ready to attack you and if they are ready to attack you. The next step is to look at your opponent's RMP and see if they are ready to attack you.

If they are ready to attack you, then you can use your RMP to see if they are ready to attack you. Let's look at some gameplay and see what that looks like in action.

Let's kick things off by looking at an RMP game. And before you say, wait I don't play RMP, listen up because there is a lot to learn in this clip.

Our RMP has selected the ret paladin as their kill target. Why?

Because they have tons of CC available for the healer and the warrior has way more passive durability with defensive stance, meaning he will be much harder to kill. The strength of their opener will help dictate the pace of the game and if successful it will bring them to their win condition with relative ease.

The opener starts with triple CC on the entire enemy team and by doing so our RMP instantly gets trinket and shield of vengeance from the paladin. If we look at our mage's buffs.

They have used combustion and have PI from our priest, giving us huge momentum at the start of the game. The opener is strong enough that it will force the paladins bubble.

Now we have two huge cooldowns down from the enemy team. Now we need to pause briefly for a second here to quiz you.

What remaining cooldowns should we be looking to burn to bring us closer to our win condition? The obvious one should be trinket from the enemy healer, but there are less obvious cooldowns also standing in the way from the warrior like rallying cry, war banner, and intimidating shout.

If we skip ahead to a later stage of the game, our team has yet to force the healers trinket. To an inexperienced eye it might seem like our team is doing something wrong.

But if we look in the bottom right corner you can see that for the last minute our team has managed to force multiple CDs from the enemy team while also surviving their offensives. And on this next setup they force intimidating shout, removing another obstacle standing in the way of their win condition.

Moments later our team makes an improv swap to the warrior while the red paladin is still there after the last kill attempt. Was this swap a success?

If you said no, it's probably because you are looking in the wrong place. If you checked the warriors buffs they were forced to use rallying cry on this improv swap.

And this will add to the list of cooldowns our team has successfully burned from the melee cleave. At this point you might be thinking to yourself, wow this seems like a lot of work, do I really have to do this every game?

The honest answer is yes, if you really want to start playing arena like a rank 1 player, you need to be thinking of all these smaller interactions that happen throughout the game.

It may seem overwhelming at first, but we promise you that once you think about cooldown trading and searching for win conditions you will improve faster than you ever thought possible. The game we have been showing here includes two teams at 3000 rating, so of course they are highly efficient at making cooldown trades.

If you're a lower rated player, teams aren't nearly this good at surviving setups, meaning if you're consistent with your attacks you will reach your window of opportunity fast and will be able to steamroll your way up in rating. Thanks for watching.

Now our RMP has another opportunity to force trinket from the enemy healer. And if we take a quick glance over to omnibar, you can see that bubble is still on cooldown from the start of the game, but unlike the opener there are significantly less cooldowns standing in our way.

And with this setup our team gets exactly what they were looking for, not only do they burn trinket from the enemy shaman, but they manage to burn spirit link in the process. Do you know what that means?

It means we have reached our window of opportunity! Ok, we promised that's the last time we will do that.

Now the enemy team has virtually nothing left. Our kill target doesn't have trinket or bubble, their healer can't trinket link, and will even waste ascendance.

And even though the warrior does have trinket, they don't have rallying cry or war banner. After 2 minutes of cooldown trading, the window is wide open.

All we have to do now is survive until DRs rotate back up and our rogue's cooldowns should be enough to finish out the game. And with barely any gas left in the tank, our team manages to secure a somewhat janky cross ccc.

This is a pretty good setup on the enemy team, but since the melee cleave barely has anything left, it will be enough to land the kill. And this final frame is worth discussing.

Notice how our team had a wide open window but narrowly landed the kill. If this intimidating shout had landed a second earlier, or if the polymorph was late, this kill would not have been possible.

This is just the consequence of playing at higher ratings. Your goal is to take full advantage of the limited kill windows you have to actually land a kill.

The better your opponents, the smaller the window. Your goal as a player is to learn how your comp can navigate each matchup and not just play to win with brute force, but instead to win by planning the kill minutes before it's actually possible.

This approach holds true in 2v2, and for the majority of comps, your win condition is met by finding the window of opportunity once the enemy team runs out of cooldowns. Let's look at this matchup for a second and pause to think about what cooldowns our team has to burn from the enemy team if we want to kill the monk.

From the priest, we have pain suppression, barrier, and wrath. We can't do much about that right now, but we can do a lot of damage to the enemy team.

We can do a lot of damage to the monk, but we can't do a lot of damage to the priest. We can't do a lot of damage to the monk, but we can do a lot of damage to the priest.

From the monk, we have fortifying brew and touch of karma for sure, and we will either have dampen harm or diffuse magic depending on the monk's talents, and of course we can't forget about PVP trinkets from both players. Our win condition will be met once we manage to burn through all of the enemy team's defensives.

If we can manage to do that, we will have a really strong window of opportunity. Luckily for us, the priest gives us his trinket immediately, and although there are more cooldowns standing in the way, our goal should be to land control on the priest.

While our dh avoids the monk, he puts pressure on the priest with metamorphosis, forcing barrier and rapture in the process. Now we have burned through the majority of CDs from the priest, so it's time to see what we can force from the monk.

Our feral will then pop his own CDs, and by combining them with a stun on the monk, he will force the monk's trinket. At this point trinkets are down from both players, meaning our goal will be to try and weave in consistent CC setups with the monk.

We can't do much about that right now, but we can do a lot of damage to the monk, and we'll also be trying to trade our own dhs while trading our own defensives in order to burn the remaining cooldowns from the monk.

And that's exactly what happens here, as our druid lands a cyclone on the priest, which forces the monk to trade his touch of karma. Our window continues to grow, and with a stun on both players, our team will force the last cooldown from the priest.

Do you see what it is? It's pain suppression, but isn't the priest in a stun?

Well yes. But PS is one of the few defensive cooldowns that can be used.

If one of the priest is dead, you can't be able to get the last cooldown from the priest, used while stunned. The one thing that should be apparent from every interaction that has happened so far is how effective it is to simply cc the healer while stunning the dps.

If you combine this with enough damage, you are almost guaranteed to force major cds. Like we just did here, as the monk feels enough pressure to burn one of his last defensives.

We now have one final defensive left standing in the way of our kill, but we don't know what it is. Depending on the monk's talents, it is either dampen harm or diffuse magic.

This detail doesn't matter that much since our goal now is to continue weaving in our damage setups no matter what while also trying to survive enemy cooldowns. And here with a simple stun on the healer, our team is able to burn the last remaining defensive from the enemy team as the monk uses diffuse magic.

Now we just have to wait, but what are we waiting for? We don't have major offensive cooldowns, but how else can we guarantee the kill?

If it wasn't obvious by now, it's our control. But in order to reach our control based win condition, we have to wait a bit longer.

We have to wait for our cc to reset, and then we have to wait for our cc to win. We have to wait for our cc to reset, and then we have to wait for our cc to win.

And once they reset, we will have our small window of opportunity to win the game. And that's exactly what happens here as our dh lands a fell eruption to stun the priest while chasing the monk.

By burning every defensive and then capitalizing on the small window we had to land a cc chain, our team is able to win the game. Ok so we know some of you out there are thinking, wait my comp doesn't really have cc setups like that, what does my window of opportunity look like?

Earlier we mentioned that mana is another win condition for some comps. If your comp is bulky and good at dealing high sustained damage but doesn't have many control options, winning the mana race is something that gives you your window.

But even if your win condition is mana, you should still try and wither down at enemy cooldowns in order to maximize overall dps. Here for instance our team is playing into a disc priest as thundercleef.

We don't really have the same type of coordinated cc setups like rmp, but we have one huge strength, our damage. Notice that our resto druid currently has a mana advantage over the enemy disc priest.

On top of that, our team has just forced pain suppression and roar of sacrifice. Because the priest is nearly out of mana, we aren't necessarily looking to get coordinated setups, but instead we just need to focus on dealing as much damage as possible, and by doing so we will passively burn any remaining defensives.

Because the priest has ps and roar of sacrifice, our warrior turns his attention to the feral, which forces them off our team. And while this is happening, our resto druid will go for a drink in order to guarantee that we can keep our mana advantage.

Notice that when he does this, he has ns ready in order to recover if our team drops in hp. For the remainder of the game, our goal will be to continue dealing as much damage as possible to pressure the priest's mana bar.

While doing so, we will passively burn defenses from the enemy team without really needing to cc well. In these situations, it is often better to use your control defensively to keep your team alive if you know you will win the mana race.

What is really important in these situations is that you monitor the healers positioning at all times. Once they can try and slip away for a drink.

If this happens, it is crucial that you stop it, since it will close your kill window. Remember that when you are winning on mana, you can still try and coordinate setups, since your goal is to gradually chip away at any remaining cooldowns, and cross cc against an um healer means enormous pressure.

Here our team manages to score cross cc on all three players, and because they are already under huge pressure, they overlap pvp trinkets in the process, and the hunter burns aspect of the turtle. Now we are even closer to our window of opportunity.

The priest is um and there are virtually no cooldowns left on the other team. Once again, this means our focus for the rest of the game will be dealing as much sustained damage as possible while doing everything we can to stay alive.

One huge mistake that even experienced players make is trying to play overly aggressive when the enemy healer is completely um. It is possible to die to a team whose healer is completely um.

So you should avoid trying to force the win by using your cooldowns aggressively. But instead, prioritize playing as conservative as possible, since the win will eventually come to you.

Our win condition at this point is clearly mana, so by playing to not die, we will passively win the game. Target selection in these moments should be really flexible.

Maximizing damage generally means hitting whoever you can. If this game was from the perspective of a wizard cleave, it would mean simply hitting whoever is in the open.

If we were playing a melee cleave, it would mean hitting whoever is in range. If we were playing a melee caster team, we would be hitting whoever is in range.

If we were playing a melee caster team, we can do both, while also trying to stop drinks in the process. Finally, our team arrives at their true window of opportunity.

The priest is completely um and the jungle cleave has no defensives left. Even if there were any remaining cds, they really wouldn't matter too much, since our team could simply swap targets or wait them out.

And by maximizing damage against an um healer, we were able to win the game. If there is one thing that should be apparent by now in these clips, is that rank 1 players don't just play in the moment.

Instead, they think and plan for the future. Win conditions are never given to you.

Instead, you must create them. This requires you to plan your strategy in the opener and coordinate your attacks to gradually burn resources from the enemy team.

Remember, it's not just RMP that has to do this. It's nearly every comp in the game.

Cooldowns are everything in shadowlands. At lower ratings, games end in 30 seconds because people don't recognize the strength of their own defensives.

Cheese wins are bound to happen from time to time, even at higher ratings. And in the core, arena is all about making efficient trades, and the best teams are those who can trade for the future and not just in the moment.

If this is news to you, don't worry. The majority of players in arena don't think of all the complexity that actually goes into winning games.

But the better you understand your win conditions, the better you will become at finding the WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY! Okay, really, can we please stop doing that?

Uh, alright, just roll the outro. Ahem.

That wraps up today's guide. This video covered one of the most fundamental concepts in arena, so we really hope you found it useful.

As always though, thanks for watching, see you soon.