← Back to Index

On this page

HOW TO OUTPLAY

HOW TO OUTPLAY INTRO

Welcome to our course that will teach you how to outplay any opponent in WoW PvP. By now you've probably seen a Twitch clip where a rank 1 player makes someone else just look like an absolute noob.

So the truth is, making these outplays is something you can do too. In this course we're going to teach you that game knowledge is the foundation for every outplay in PvP, and you can use what you've learned at Skill-Cap to always be one step ahead.

HOW TO OUTPLAY

I'm sure at one point, whether it be a twitch clip, a livestream, or even a youtube highlight reel, you've seen clips of various top world of warcraft arena players making what seem like ridiculously flashy outplays. Take this clip here of our priest melding a hammer of justice and then removing the paladin's bubble.

So how on earth does our priest know the paladin is going to hammer of justice at that exact time? Do these players just happen to be the rinaldos and messys of the gaming world or is something else at play here?

Well today we're going to be finding out and also testing you the viewer to see if you're capable of making these flashy plays as well. Surprisingly these flashy plays in world of warcraft don't take some extraterrestrial skill level in order to pull off effectively.

In fact it's quite the opposite and there is very little skill involved. Anybody can effectively outplay an opponent if they have a good understanding of two key concepts.

Those being game knowledge and game awareness. Combining these two key concepts allows you to always understand what your opponent is going to be looking to do next.

And then from there you'll be able to use that information and knowledge to execute outplays. To highlight this let's rewatch the clip from the intro.

So our priest uses his shadow meld to avoid the hammer of justice, mass dispels the bubble, psychic screams the paladin and then kills the windwalker. Looks like a huge outplay on the surface but let's break the clip down from a game knowledge standpoint.

Starting with the very basics. Paladins are of course immune to everything while divine's shield is active.

Nothing new here. This is something everybody watching this should know already.

Then our next snippet of game knowledge is that priests are able to remove divine's shield with mass dispel. Again something everybody watching this should already know and understand.

But now right here we have the basis for an outplay. The paladin obviously wants to remain in bubble so he can heal while avoiding the psychic scream and the priest wants to remove the bubble so he can secure his psychic scream.

This is where the next tidbit of game knowledge comes into play. How can the paladin stop the mass dispel cast?

Well first of all falling back to game knowledge once again. We know holy paladins don't have a spell.

They don't have an interrupt. So the paladins only way of stopping the mass dispel is with his hammer of justice.

Break it down like that and it becomes super simple and is something everybody at this point should be capable of doing. Where it gets a little tricky and the skill aspect comes into play is combining game knowledge with game awareness.

So again falling back on this same very short clip. Using our awareness we can instantly pinpoint that the monk is caught inside of a stun.

This tells us we won't have to worry about any kicks or interrupts from him. Then in regards to the paladin.

He's clearly in range to use his hammer of justice and posturing in a very clear way to indicate that. On top of that and probably the most skill intensive part of this play was understanding that the paladin has his hammer of justice ready despite our priest omnibar saying otherwise.

This again falls under game knowledge but paladins have a talent called fist of justice meaning although omnibar doesn't show hammer of justice ready just yet it's safe to assume it is anyway.

OUTPLAY WITH GAME KNOWLEDGE

Game knowledge is entirely about building a, let's say, database, almost, in your head of all the important abilities or passives that each class has. I mean, how do you even attempt to outplay if you don't know what different specs or classes can even do?

While it's not really feasible to tell you guys to go off and memorize every ability that every class has, it's important to at least know the basics of each spec. Starting with offensive cooldowns.

This is incredibly important at allowing you to outplay due to giving you a good indication of when enemies are looking to set up kill attempts and do increased amounts of damage.

If you know what offensive cooldowns classes use to go for kills, you can prepare accordingly and trade defensives or even shut down the go entirely with whatever tools you have available to you. For instance, you're facing rogue mage and the enemy mage has his combustion ready.

Understanding that combustion is a mage's most important offensive cooldowns enables you to know that next time somebody is stunned, he's more than likely going to be pressing combustion. Knowing that you can then look for outplays.

So something like, pre-perching, avoiding crowd control to enable you to peel for your team, crowd controlling the mage, or tons of other ways you could potentially attempt to outplay that kill attempt. All of which stem from your game knowledge of knowing how a mage looks to set up kills with combustion.

So try to memorize and build up a database of offensive cooldowns. Defensive cooldowns are equally as important to learn though.

This allows you to predict how enemies are going to look to survive your own kill attempts. Just take this clip here of Waz in an example.

Waz opens onto the warrior with a cheap shot. While crowd controlling his healer with a sap.

With Waz's priest standing next to him ready to fear out. Soon as the cheap shot is about to expire onto the warrior, it's clear he's going to have to pop a defensive.

After all Waz has dark archangel, flagellation and shadow dance active so there's a lot of damage still available. What do you think the enemy warrior is going to do defensively as his answer to this?

Well let's think about it. Using our game knowledge, warriors have a few answers in their swiss army knife of defensive cooldowns.

There is rallying cry or die by the sword. So what do you think the enemy warrior is going to do defensively as his answer to this?

He could also either disarm Waz, intimidating shout or storm bolt. But using our game awareness we can see storm bolt has already been used.

And using intimidating shout would mean the warrior doesn't have that for crowd control later in the game. So it's not likely to be his first response.

So that just leaves disarm, die by the sword and rallying cry. So what do you think the warrior should do?

Well the obvious choice here is to instantly die by the sword as soon as the stun ends. It's the warrior's best answer to reduce the rest of the enemy's damage.

So what do you think the warrior should do? Well the obvious choice here is to instantly die by the sword as soon as the stun ends.

It's the warrior's best answer to reduce the rest of the enemy's damage. So that just leaves disarm, die by the sword and rallying cry.

But using our game knowledge, warriors have a few answers in their swiss army knife of defensive cooldowns. So what do you think the enemy warrior should do?

Well the obvious choice here is to instantly die by the sword as soon as the stun ends. It's the warrior's best answer to reduce the rest of the enemy's damage.

And survive the rest of the crowd control chain onto his healer. What you need to understand is when looking to outplay it's important to put yourself in your opponents shoes.

And this is exactly what Waz does. He knows the warrior wants to die by the sword.

What does he do? Well once his stun ends he disarms the warrior himself.

Do you know why? Take a second to think about it.

The answer is, warriors are unable to use die by the sword while they're disarmed. If you were extra vigilant you would notice the warrior is relentless.

Meaning he has no way of getting out of disarm and being able to use his own die by the sword defensive. So now even lower on health and noticing he's unable to use die by the sword, what's the next response by the warrior?

He's of course going to look to now disarm. Something you can still do while disarmed yourself.

What does Waz do? He preuses his own evasion to dodge the disarm.

The warrior now is in a state of panic. Every single keystroke he just made was predicted and outplayed.

He tries to panic intimidating shout which gets trinketed and then just falls over before he can even comprehend what just happened. So this outplay Waz just did to this poor warrior was entirely based around his game knowledge of defensive cooldowns.

Not only what defensive classes have but also understanding how each defensive works. And the different ways to counter it.

This obviously doesn't have to be as in depth as this. But knowing little things like what defensive can be used while locked out on what school of magic.

What defensives you can use in stuns and which ones you can't. All of this knowledge is very important if you're looking to outplay.

As this is a skill test after all let's do a quick quiz. If locked out on nature can a shaman use their astral shift?

Yes or no? Take a second to write your answer in the comments below.

The answer was yes, shamans can use astral shift while locked out and even while silenced but just not while in stuns. Alright back to the video.

So we've covered how building a database and learning the important offensive and defensive cooldowns of each class can allow you to predict what your opponent wants to do next. Giving you the ability to then look to outplay.

One more thing to add onto that is crowd control. What we mean by this is learning and understanding how most compositions or classes look to set up kills via crowd control.

Now. I'm not asking too much here.

Yeah guys just go and learn every offensive cooldown, every defensive cooldown, and every crowd control. Well yeah.

World of Warcraft arena is very much so a game of knowledge. The more you understand about each class and the more you know the higher chance you'll have of winning.

Knowledge is far greater than skill when it comes to wow arena. A lot of this is all stuff you more than likely already know well.

For instance jungle looks to stun healers into a freezing trap. RMP looks to stun or dragons breath a healer into a polymorph.

Boomy DH revolves around runes. Root beam and cyclone.

Learning the meta compositions and classes and how they look to set up kills with crowd control is what's important here. As knowing this lets you predict how they might attempt not only their kill attempts but also potentially stop your own.

Ok so lets test to see if you guys are capable of outplaying a setup from a rank 1 mage. Here we've got maro playing windwalker fire mage holy priest.

They paralyze your shaman and are looking to go on him out of that. Knowing how wps works.

If the priest and the warrior are not crowd controlled. They'll likely be able to shut down the setup.

As they can peel with crowd control like psychic horror, silence, intimidating shout. Or can reduce damage with intervene or life grip and numerous other defensive tools.

The warrior isn't quick enough to react so gets caught into a chastise. We're not blaming him here because it's almost impossible to outplay two instant crowd controls if the enemy team is coordinated which maro's team is.

After which maro starts casting a polymorph. Who do you think this is going to be on?

The warrior or the priest? I'm not sure.

Obviously the priest. Remember maro's team wants to set up triple crowd control so they can do a clean setup onto the shaman.

Seeing this our priest uses shadow word death and breaks the polymorph. Now with his warrior about to be in a mind control and him about to be in a re poly.

What he does is silence maro and stun his priest. This stops the re poly and keeps his warrior out of crowd control.

From there he purges the combustion from the mage and his warrior is able to leap to the shaman intervene and rally in cry. Allowing our shaman to survive this wind.

This windwalker mage setup without anybody on his team even using a gladiators medallion. So this entire outplay by the priest comes from the fact he understands how maro's comp wants to set up kills.

Not only with what offensive cooldowns they want to pop but also by how they look to begin crowd control and cross certain players. Now yes death in crowd control is of course unique to priest.

But there is so many different ways you can look to outplay a scenario like this. You could just be line of sight.

You could interrupt the polymorph. You could shift.

Ground. You could do a lot of things.

Honestly there is way too many things to list and pretty much every class in the same scenario has a way to deal with the incoming polymorph.

OUTPLAY WITH GAME AWARENESS

Okay then, so you've built up this database of crowd control and both offensive and defensive cooldowns. Now it's time to put this into practice.

Anybody can memorize and learn abilities. The difficulty comes with applying this into actual games.

This is where game awareness comes into play. The basics of this are to first get used to checking for when certain abilities are ready.

This can be done with add-ons like Omnibar. For instance, you see a ret has wings ready, or a mage has combustion, or that rogue has blind, and you can use that awareness to then look to outplay.

Another great trick is to get a way to track your own diminishing returns. Throughout your arena games, you're more than likely constantly checking your arena frames to see the diminishing returns of your opponents so that you can secure crowd control or stuns.

And chances are, your opponents are doing the exact same thing. So knowing when you or your teammates are off diminishing returns for certain crowd controls can aid in predicting what your enemy is going to do and when.

On top of that, try to pay attention to the positioning of your enemy. This can be one of the best early indicators that something is about to happen.

If a rogue's running over to you, he's more than likely about to either blind or kidney shot or maybe even swap to you. If a mage is posturing near your pillar with dragon's breath ready, it's more than likely the case he's looking to polymorph you.

Very simple positioning cues are one of the best indicators at identifying what your opponent wants to do. Remember that in the same way that you were trying to figure out how to win the game, the enemy team is doing the exact same thing.

So by knowing and keeping track of their abilities and also positioning, you'll be able to put yourself in their shoes and get a feel for what your enemy is trying to accomplish. And now, from this point, you're ready to make outplays.

Thanks for watching!

HOW TO BE ONE STEP AHEAD

Hey guys Zot here and welcome to another video in this video we're going to be looking at a skill all top players possess and that's their ability to be one step ahead at all time in all games be it well or let's say chess when playing against a good player it always somehow seems that they are always able to predict your next move this results in them always being one step ahead of you but just how do top players do this well in this video we're going to be doing exactly that and I'm going to be giving you a few examples where I myself am one step ahead of my opponent then I'll break down my thought process during the game in this game we've got me on Shadow Priest playing 2v2 against a misweaver and a warrior now I'll let you watch the clip okay so I might control the Warrior making him friendly and forcing the monk to cocoon himself but that's just what you see on the surface top players are top players for a reason and that's because this play wasn't luck it wasn't random it was simply knowing what your enemy is going to do before they even do it themselves but how do I know well I'm going to play the same clip and explain what's going on in my head and my thought process start to finish throughout the clip instantly first thing I notice is that the warrior now this is easy to keep track of I can see that my vampiric touch and Shadow Word pain have gone from the target and also that his dispell is on cooldown on top of that I can also see that the monk is currently in a sin and punishment a crowd control you get from dispelling vampiric touch now this is obviously nothing special anybody can keep track of this be it with add-ons or simply just some basic awareness anyway the next problem I encounter is now I need to get my dots back up onto the target but he has both reflect and pummel available which I know from my Omnibar so I use my global to dispel his envelop in mist waiting for my psychic horror to come off cooldown and then I stand the warrior in conjunction with a scythe fiend and proceed to get my dots up now my thought process here so far is that I'm a shadow priest I need my dots to do damage but the warrior has two ways of stopping me available to him from reflect and pummel and as the healer has no dispel I can easily use my stun here and proceed to get my dots up and get my pressure rolling once more seeing and listening to my thought process here is simple right I'm a shadow priest and I rely on my dots it's fairly obvious I'm going to make this play and stun the warrior when you think about it for these reasons we covered now knowing all of that if you was this warrior what you could have done is used your reflect the second my psychic horror came off cooldown and reflected the stun back at me this is the difference between top players they take this thought process here and then apply it to their enemies this Warrior should have had the exact same thinking pattern as me he should have put himself in my shoes and have known I was going to stun him when I lay it all out it's actually extremely easy to predict what your opponent is going to do and it's how top players make these what seem like flashy plays but instead all it boils down to is just good game understanding and knowing what's going on in the game currently okay so let's continue with the clip after I get my dots stun they get dispelled once more which i noticed using the same reasons from earlier now with my game knowledge i know that monks have another dispel which as you probably know as well is revival although i'm not tracking this on my omnibar i can easily see that my dots were removed once more whilst the monk still had his normal dispell on cooldown from earlier now again trying to get my dots up on the warrior he still has both reflect and pummel available still i know for a fact when i cast my next vampiric touch he's going to either look to kick or reflect the ability this is easy to tell because for one he has it available number two he's in range and he's a low amount of health already so he's going to be trying to prevent as much damage as possible here in order to survive so i try to cast vampiric touch and then instantly fake cast faking his pummel in the process now this was an extremely easy pummel to pull out and i'm going to show you how to predict for the reasons stated above now after that i instantly get stunned on my next cast and the warrior's monk is coming out of crowd control now all he has to stop me getting my damage rolling is his reflect but has his monks out of crowd control the warrior feels safe so he goes into blade storm now with my game knowledge i know warrior relies on blade storm for a huge chunk of their damage i also know warriors are unable to reflect whilst blade storming so knowing this i just cast my vampiric touch and then i cast my next cast faking his pummel in the process and successfully apply it to the warrior despite him having reflect available shortly followed by a mind blast and void eruption okay so now what i'm looking to do is land my fear as during his blade storm my hamstring has dropped off now walking over to the monk it's obvious what i'm wanting to do it doesn't take some advanced game knowledge or a rocket scientist to know if a priest is walking over to you it's likely that he's attempting to psychic scream you and i know he knows that so when i get in range i hold my fear as he's a monk so he's likely going to portal away this same concept goes for all night elves as well as psychic scream is an incredibly telegraphed ability as long as you know the range it's very easy to shadow mount so if he was a night elf here i would have also waited my paladin luckily positioned in the right place to land a repentance so without a trinket the monk is going to have to sit this fall and it's going to give me the time to get there in order to land my psychic scream still with my fear i head over to the monk looking to try and land my psychic scream noticing i'm not going to make it in time i make a calculated aggressive play and use dispersion for the freedom and movement speed increase to make it in time before the repentance ends now i feel safe committed such a large defensive cooldown for a few reasons first is that the warrior is already sub 50 i personally know i have a lot more damage available for him as i've got my void form rolling on top of that i also have my silence for even more follow-up crowd control furthermore if this cc chain ends or is interrupted the warrior will either get healed or dispelled before the next cc lands resulting in it being vital for me to chain the crowd control correctly i secure the fear and then proceed to continue with damage forcing the warrior to his rallying cry shortly after the warrior charges me and uses his reflect in order to stay alive and prevent all damage whilst i continue the crowd control chain with a silence now at this point i assess the situation in my head the monk silence is about to expire in two seconds and me or my paladin have no follow-up crowd control as he's already used hammer of justice as well as repentance and all mines also on cooldown the warrior is low but as i know my class i understand him being low i'm not going to be able to kill him here as both my void bolt and shadow of death which are instant are on cooldown and he has pommel available to interrupt me if I cast knowing he has pommel what I do is ask for a blessing of protection this makes all physical abilities immune including pummel now at this point I begin to cast mine control why you might ask well I've not got enough damage to finish the warrior off with my game knowledge I also know that monks have zero instant healing outside of life cocoon and revival and as we saw him using revival a little earlier what do you think he's going to do that instant his silence runs out taking into account his warrior's health yes exactly it's simple he's obviously going to cocoon here even if he didn't the warrior's rally would simply expire and he would die during my mind control as the warrior's friendly the monk ends up life cocooning himself and the warrior dies instantly after his rally expires okay so this play was made possible for two reasons and these two reasons are why professional and rank one players are always a step ahead the first one being game knowledge for instance using myself as an example this game alone thanks to my game knowledge i knew that firstly warriors are unable to reflect during their blade storm unless they cancel it monks can portal to avoid crowd control and also the blessing of protection makes you immune to interrupts.

Also, my knowledge of monks allowed me to understand that he has no instant healing. What he does have though is a very short cooldown cocoon, something that they will almost always use if the target is low on health when coming out of a pra control.

Pair this all with my knowledge of how mind control works and you can see why. Now I'm not saying this is extensive game knowledge by any means.

Most of these things are commonly known, and I'm sure you guys watching this know most of it if not all of it anyway, but it's applying this knowledge into your gameplay that makes the difference and allows you to be one step ahead. The second reason is game awareness.

Now this is your overall awareness and overview of the game. Your ability to assess the situation you're currently in, including opponents cooldowns, opponents defensives, their positioning, there are tons and tons of things happening in a game at any one time.

You need to hone in on those that are going to be affecting your next move. So, let's get started.

First, I'm going to talk about the game awareness. This is a game awareness that I'm going to talk about in a video called Game Awareness.

So, the simplest bit of game awareness is, I'm about to cast a spell. Does the target have an interrupt?

Is he in range? Now, you can take this a step further.

For example, in this game, my awareness helped with a few things. First was dealing with his interrupts.

I either removed them out of the equation with a stun, or recognised he was likely to kick me based on his health, his range and the fact he had it available. Second was my ability to track their cooldowns.

Things like interrupts, reflect, defensives, healing cooldowns, I had an understanding of what was up and when they were going to use it. Next was identifying my win condition.

I'm only going to win this game in a CC chain. I recognised this and was able to identify that I was in a position to win and committed defensive cooldowns offensively.

Combine both game knowledge with good awareness in-game and you too can be one step ahead of your opponents at all times. Thanks for watching and be sure to plus skill and leave a comment if you enjoyed this video.

Subtitles by the Amara.org community