MAKING BETTER DECISIONS

MAKING BETTER DECISIONS INTRO

Welcome to our course that will teach you how to make better decisions in PvP. Now imagine you needed to bet 500 bucks on a coin flip.

Is it smarter to bet heads or is it smarter to bet tails? Well, neither since it's a 50-50 chance no matter what.

But what if you somehow knew that this coin was special and had an 80% chance to be heads? Now there's a smarter decision right there.

Clearly, well we're going to teach you that there are several of these special coins in WoW PvP and with one single change to your mindset you can avoid a ton of mistakes in Arena. In this course we're going to teach you about the 80% rule and how this small adjustment can increase your rating.

Once again, there will be some mentions of mechanics from older expansions but as always what you learn is really timeless.

THE FUNDAMENTAL DEFENSIVE CD

But in case you're new to the concept, cooldown trading is a general term used to describe matching enemy offensive CDs with your team's defensive tools.

This fundamental idea is part of the expression scripted PvP, and when you hear rank 1 players tell you just follow the script, what they mean is just learning how and when to trade cooldowns efficiently. With that in mind, there is one cooldown that every class has that is absolutely critical to trade effectively.

Can you guess what it is? Yes, it's the PvP medallion.

Unless you play major warlock, this is probably your biggest cooldown. But why?

For one, most other defensive CDs are unusable while you are crowd controlled, meaning your medallion is often the only way to access other life-saving cooldowns. This applies both for preventing kills on yourself, but also for your partners.

Just like your trinket allows you to keep yourself alive, you can use it to disrupt enemy kill attempts on your teammates, either with peels or off-healing. But that leads us to an obvious problem.

We all know that there are countless ways to use our trinket. So how should we figure out which moments are good and can cause us to win the game, and which ones are bad and might cause us to instantly lose?

THE 80% RULE EXPLAINED

Enter the 80% rule. Anytime you make a decision with your trinket, ask yourself, does this have an 80% chance or higher of producing a positive result?

This concept can be applied generally to most of the decisions you make in arena, and you probably do this already in other games. Every game you are forced to choose between multiple options, and it's hard to know exactly which decision is best, especially in wow arena.

But with the 80% rule, you are less likely to gamble with your decisions, making it easier to know which mistakes actually lost you the game. One of the biggest pain points for lower rated players is seeing how their actions early into the game affect the outcome later on.

There is a tendency to see the loss only when it happened, instead of backtracking to see how it started. But by following the 80% rule, your actions are less likely to have a chain reaction of negative outcomes since you are taking significantly less risks.

LOW RATED GAMEPLAY ANALYSIS

Let's explore this concept further by looking at actual gameplay from our Road to Glad series, where our rival-rated rogue had some questionable trinket choices before his first week of coaching.

Now, even if you know nothing about rogues or this specific matchup, let's see if you can figure out if he is following the 80% rule. Okay, so here is the moment our rogue gets stunned by Hammer of Justice.

Let's take a look at everything else that's going on. The enemy team has popped CDs, which can indicate a trade is needed, but currently the warrior is off chasing our priest.

Now, if we look at our Gladius, the enemy team still has all of their trinkets available, since we are still in the early stages of the game. On top of that, our priest is currently free to act and isn't under any form of CC.

With all this information in mind, does our rogue's trinket have an 80% chance of producing a positive result? The answer is no.

Even though the enemy team has cooldowns up, our priest is free to act, meaning this stun could easily be dispelled. Trinketing here isn't even a winning gamble, it's simply pointless.

Our rogue decides to trinket the dispellable CC, which now puts him in an incredibly vulnerable position, since he has removed the option to trinket vanish, a setup which is one of his best defensive combos. Here, our rogue gambled in a situation that didn't even require it.

This is one of the biggest and most meaningful differences between high rated and low rated players. At lower ratings, players tend to take significantly more risks, but as you climb to the highest ratings, pro players gamble significantly less, and chances are they are using the 80% rule without even realizing it.

But as we saw in the previous video, the enemy team is now able to use the 80% rule to get a higher chance of winning the game. But as we saw in the previous video, the enemy team is now able to use the 80% rule to get a higher chance of winning the game.

And while we're on our Road to Glad clip, our rival rated player chose to gamble when it wasn't even needed, and it should seem obvious to anyone that trinketing a dispellable CC is an unnecessary risk in some cases.

But eventually, you will find yourself in situations where both you and your healer get CC at the same time, which means that two people need to quickly make a decision. So, how do you manage that problem?

Does the 80% rule still apply? Again, let's take a look back at our Road to Glad series, and see how the 80% rule might apply to situations where we are stuck in a stun with our healer unable to save us. found himself in a familiar situation.

He is put in a full dispelable hammer of justice by the paladin but this time there is cross CC on our entire team. Our priest is locked down with a stormbolt and our mage has been interrupted on polymorph.

Ok so now this definitely means we need to trinket right? Well maybe not.

Can you think of some reasons why this situation might not be worthy of our trinket? For one, the enemy team has no offensive cooldowns active.

Warbreaker and wings are both on CD when the stun lands and our rogue is at 100% HP with a power ward shield. And even though the shaman is casting hex, it's not vital that we interrupt this.

If it's intended for our priest, our mage will be able to dispel it once the lockout is over. Now you might be wondering, is there an offensive reason to trinket here?

Well it might seem that way by simply looking at the enemy team's trinkets. It might seem like we have an opening.

But if we check diminishing returns, we don't have poly DRs ready for the healer or the paladin which makes it a little bit more difficult to trinket. So we're going to have to wait and see if we can get some of these trinkets back.

But if we do, we're going to have to wait and see if we can get some of these trinkets back. But if we do, we're going to have to wait and see if we can get counter pressure next to impossible, especially since our entire team is locked down.

So with all of this in mind, is there an 80% chance that this trinket will lead to something positive for our team? It should be obvious that the answer is no, but our rogue doesn't realize this and burns his trinket anyway.

The consequence of this is now the pressure will be on his teammates to make a defensive save if a setup happens again with the enemy cooldowns popped. Now don't get us wrong, these are easy mistakes to make since it requires knowing so many pieces of information all at once.

These things might be hard to realize mid game, and even the best players trinket when they don't need to, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't actively be thinking about all of these conditions before making a decision. And if you think making one mistake with your trinket isn't that big a deal, you are simply wrong.

The truth is, any defensive flub can easily snowball into a loss. And since your trinket is your biggest defensive, the margin for error is incredibly slim.

Again, let's look at our Road to Glad series to see how this happens in actual arena games and learn how violating the 80% rule can snowball into a loss. This time, our rogue will try to make sure that the trinket is not a big deal for our team.

So let's try and trinket aggressively, but let's see if you can figure out why that's a bad idea. First of all, let's take a look at the CC our rogue takes.

It's an incapacitating roar, which our priest won't be able to dispel. On top of that, our rogue has all of his cooldowns popped, which means he can do a lot of damage, right?

And it just so happens that the enemy priest is sitting at 40% HP, so do you think this is a good opportunity to trinket? Take a moment to think whether or not our trinket has an 80% chance to lead to a kill.

Okay, time's up. Your answer should have been no, and there are a few reasons for that.

For one, the priest has dispersion active, meaning they will take dramatically less damage. On top of that, we currently have no CC on the enemy druid, and even if by some miracle we are able to damage through dispersion, a quick nature swiftness will instantly block our attack.

Despite all of this, our rogue trinkets anyway, which leads to absolutely nothing happening on the priest. What a surprise.

So our rogue used his trinket aggressively. So what?

They have other cooldowns to keep them alive, right? So our rogue used his trinket aggressively.

So what? They have other cooldowns to keep them alive, right?

So let's discuss how this situation plays out. For example, before you get too confident, let's see how this situation plays out.

Here he is later on into the game trying to score a kill on the druid. Now though, he has run into a problem.

His priest is cc'd and he is incredibly low on HP. Okay, no big deal.

A simple cloak of shadows is enough to keep him alive. But now, we have a problem.

Both trinket and cloak are on cooldown against a spell cleave, which means the next setup could be deadly. So now we have a problem.

Let's skip ahead about a minute forward. Remember that both trinket and cloak of shadows are 2 minute cooldowns baseline, which means our rogue will be vulnerable, a setup as long as both of these are on CD.

Now our rogue has found himself in a potential checkmate position. He is stunned at low HP while his priest is cross cc'd.

If he had saved trinket for this exact moment he could have combo'd it instantly with vanish to stay alive. Instead our rogue will die in this setup.

Our priest potentially could have saved him here with a trinket of his own but mind games and shackles would have made that into an incredibly narrow window. If we go back to where this all started we can see how one poor decision with pvp trinket led to this unfortunate series of events.

It was this key moment right here where our rogue gambles and aggressively trinkets that caused him to have no guaranteed outs with trinket and vanish nearly a minute later. If he had simply followed the 80% rule this game could have been completely different.

Are you still not convinced and think this mistake was an isolated case? Let's find out.

In this next example our rogue finds himself again with a strong offensive setup but unfortunately gets hit with a disarm to block the kill. Now just like before this cc cannot be dispelled and it would appear his team has momentum.

The ret paladin is now on the right side of the map. The shaman is super low on hp without bubble but there is no cc on the shaman who has healing tide ticking in the background.

Our rogue decides to trinket the disarm but this is met with a spirit link from the shaman which completely denies the kill. And if we fast forward again our rogue will use another ability offensively which is exactly what he does here when he burns his vanish.

Remember it's not just your trinket that requires you to think about the 80% rule. It also includes your entire toolkit.

His vanish didn't have an 80% chance to do something productive. So it was generally wasted.

The consequence of burning both trinket and vanish aggressively would come to bite our rogue later on as he would have no tools left to deal with the enemy cleave. His decisions in both games to choose the aggressive and risky option wound up failing.

And this would be one of the main adjustments we would have him make on his road to gladiator where he would use the 80% rule in his high rated games.

RANK 1 GAMEPLAY ANALYSIS

Don't get us wrong, sometimes even pro players gamble with their decisions, even in moments when loads of money is on the line. But the gambles often include a safety net.

Take this moment as an example. Here, Aiden makes an insane play of disarming Kalvish on his go.

This forces Kalvish to calculate whether or not he can trinket. One reason he might want to is because every trinket has been forced from the enemy team, and the mage and priest are stuck in CC, meaning Kalvish has a deadly opening.

He also has a safety net. His priest has trinket available, and some of his own CDs are rotating back up.

Kalvish considers this information and trinkets the disarm. Even though it doesn't lead to the kill, Aiden drops the lethal range.

While this decision to trinket ultimately failed in this moment, it was still the best decision he could have made given all the available information. In other words, it probably had an 80% chance of winning the game.

Alright guys, that about wraps it up for this video. Again, let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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