SNOWBALL PRESSURE AS THE ONLY MELEE

HOW TO SNOWBALL PRESSURE AS THE ONLY MELEE

Hey everyone and welcome. Today we'll be showing you how to help snowball your team's pressure when playing as the only melee.

We'll be running you through a game where you're about to learn some of the core fundamentals to being successful as a melee player. The gameplay we'll be using this time is from a Rep Haldan's perspective where I, Mystic, am playing as one of the highest rated in Europe.

And once you've finished watching this guide, you'll have learned many invaluable concepts that you can apply to your own gameplay straight away to consistently create pressure when playing with a caster.

Before we get into the main part of this guide, let's first go over our missions that will allow you as a melee to make it as hard as possible for the enemy healer to deal with your pressure. Mission 1, rotate CDs to survive setups.

To deal real pressure, you must first ensure you don't let your guard down. You'll want to respect every time the opposing team sets up a kill using your defensives accordingly, to allow you to work on missions 2 and 3.

Mission 2. Hit the healer to build or maintain pressure.

Most players try to CC the healer and hit the DPS because they are really scared of melee cleaves while playing with a caster. However, hitting the healer while your caster spreads their pressure is the easiest way to up your pressure from 0 to 100.

Note that this is most effective by locking the healer down with a stun and interrupt when you swap. Mission 3.

Snowball by swapping to low health DPS. With all the momentum you gain from mission 2, you'll have a choice.

Either continue on the healer or swap. If you don't have kill potential on the healer, you'll want to snowball by swapping onto the DPS that your caster has gotten low.

These swaps are even better if your team can CC the healer when you swap. We'll go into more detail when we reach these missions in game.

In this matchup, we're looking at the melee caster comp RedDog. We're going to be using the melee caster comp RedDog.

RedDog is a melee caster comp that is used to kill the DPS. We're going to be using the melee caster comp RedDog is a melee caster comp that is used to kill the DPS.

We're going to be using the melee caster comp RedDog. Shadowfreeze Shaman against one of the top NA teams, Seedoo, Mez and Trill playing the melee cleave Windwalker DK Shaman.

Let's get to it. Jumping into the midpoint of this game, both teams are pretty even on cooldowns and have not traded any major defensives yet.

At this point, we see the DK has just used his Pillar of Thrust. This is a major offensive cooldown and when you spot this, it's the easiest sign to read where you can expect them to try to CC your healer.

We'll also be looking for the Monk's Touch of Death as his offensive too. We'll also be looking for the Monk's Touch of Death as his offensive too.

As most of us know, with any class you play, you have a cooldown to use in direct response to stuff like this, which either have a similar cooldown or level of importance.

So, for myself playing the Rett here, Eye for an Eye is a mirror and cooldown to Pillar of Thrust and is my go-to button that I save for it, much like an Acero would use Crimson Vial, a DK would use AMS or a Demon Hunter would use Blur.

Like I mentioned earlier, when your opponent uses their offensive, it screams that they are going to try and CC your healer, and if they have stuns, they'll try to lock you down too. So, by instantly reacting to Pillar, I can get my defensive up before the Monk can stun me, potentially saving my PVP trinket.

Anyway, just as we predicted by seeing the DK use his offensive, their Monk has used Paralysis on my healer. Seeing your healer in CC while the enemy has used an offensive is a surefire way to know that you have to act on Mission 1.

So, while my Eye for an Eye was well timed, the opposing team did a great job at CCing my healer and bursting me down, so we'll need to use a bigger defensive cooldown to deal with this. Our choice as a team here is to trade Spirit Link to preserve my divine shield.

This is a choice based on Rett Paladins, as Rett's really want to keep their divine shield for as long as possible as it's ultra reliable and allows you to play offensive throughout the game while it's available.

However, let's say I was a warrior here, I would have used my die by the sword earlier and we'd be safe, having traded my biggest defensive to keep the pressure off my shaman in the first place.

So while we do our best to teach you to become a better decision maker, in high pressure situations like this, it'll be up to you and your team to make the right call about which CDs you want to trade to survive.

Now, although we plan to use Spirit Link Totem, we see a wrench in the works with the blinding sleet on my healer which prevents him from saving my divine shield. Rolling it back, I wanted to highlight a subtle move I could have made to save my divine shield by denying the DK a chance to CC my healer.

The DK landed the blue shield and I was able to save my healer by using the shield to save my healer. The DK landed the blue shield because my shaman sacrificed his positioning to Link us both.

If I had just moved towards my Shadowpriest and told my Wrestle Shaman to use Spirit Link Totem from range, he could have avoided the blinding sleet and we could have saved my divine shield. This may seem super specific, but this concept applies to many different situations, no matter what healer you're playing with.

Basically, if there's the threat of AoE crowd control, like a Leg Sweep or Fist of Fury from the monk I'm facing, do your best to avoid moving on top of your healer to help them avoid that CC. Moving on, with Divine Shield being forced, it's essential to actually get something out of this by pressuring the enemy team.

If you let teams force your cooldowns without trading something back from them, you'll quickly fall behind and find yourself struggling to win games. During the previous trade, my healer was able to land a hex on their healer which caused both DPS to drop low.

Take a moment to think to yourself, what do you think I should do next? Thinking back to when we introduced the missions at the start, for mission 2, whenever the DPS are under pressure, swap to the healer to deny heals.

So, in this situation, it's the ideal moment to act on mission 2, and I do so by swapping to the healer with a stun. Hitting this stun is good, it's the right choice and our strategy here is correct, but making the right choice and executing it correctly are totally different things.

What we do is we swap to the healer to deny heals. What we did here is a basic mistake that we as top players managed to make, so you can be sure that this type of thing happens all the time at lower rating.

We left a small gap between the Hodge and the Silence, which allowed the rest of Shaman to Earthshield in between and hold onto his trinket, which really hurts our tempo. When you swap to a healer with lockdown, you can be sure they're spamming a defensive, hoping to get something off as soon as possible.

So, really focus on not leaving a gap between the lockdown to stop this from happening. It sounds simple, but simple stuff is where it plays.

So be consistent with this one. And while my SP could have done a better job, it's also on me for not communicating actively for him to chain properly.

Regardless of our mistake, because we did chain our CC together, the Shaman was unable to heal for quite a while, forcing him to use a cooldown to survive. Though our communication was not optimal, we did communicate to swap with our CC, which in itself was powerful enough to force something.

Your takeaway here is that if you just randomly throw out your CC and never use it, you're going to lose. So if you just randomly throw out your CC and never try to chain it with your teammates, enemy healers can come out of your CC and heal through your damage effortlessly.

With Earthen Shield totem now used, what would you as any melee do in this situation? Bear in mind my interrupt is still available.

Should you just sit on the Shaman so that you can interrupt him and maybe score a kill? Should you attack the Windwalker monk that just ported back to peel you and is on 40% health?

Or should you run back to your team and cleave the melee DPS together? Well, Earthen Shield totem is such a powerful cooldown that I've pretty much lost any kill potential I had on the rest of Shaman.

It also affects the monk, which rules him out of being a good target too. In fact, Earthen Shield is so powerful that even if I interrupt the Shaman, it won't be enough to score a kill.

This same sort of thing applies to any big defensive cooldown you might force on a healer, like Pain Suppression from a Disc Priest. On top of that, because the monk ported back to peel and I'm low on health while lining my healer, I could die if I stay here.

So, what do you think? So, all signs point to executing Mission 3 by retreating and attacking the DK.

The DK is also a great target right now because he's taken some chip damage from my SP and his AMS is on cooldown. This swap will leave the Shaman in the dust, having to heal himself and his monk while I snowball our pressure onto the DK.

Moving on, remember back to when our Resto Shaman was put into a paralysis? Well, with Crowd Control landing once again on our Resto Shaman, we need to execute on Mission 1 to survive this upcoming kill attempt.

We've seen this once, we're seeing it again right now, and we'll see it again later. For now, because I'm out of defensives, we won't be seeing any preemptive usage of a cooldown from me.

However, if you're playing almost any other melee with much lower CDs, in a similar situation, seeing this paralysis land gives you reliable ways to react, using Feint as a rogue, Defensive Stance as a warrior, Bear Form as a Feral Druid, or even Mobility to get away, like Fel Rush on a Demon Hunter.

Continuing on, we see the most common way a DK and monk set up kills. They combine their Deathgrip and Leg Sweep to stun me and my healer together.

Again, since I'm out of cooldowns, our only answer for this one is Spirit Link Totem. You might be thinking you would die here if you were not playing a Rett, as I just dispelled my healer from a stun.

But of course, as any other melee, you have the tools to survive in other ways and buy time with your healer. Stuff like D-Stance, Feint, and so on.

So, we've survived, which is great, but it means nothing if we don't counter pressure during this window. Just like when they forced my bubble, we must counter pressure since we're another defensive down.

The two ways to do this are of course either Mission 2, which is to build or maintain pressure by hitting the healer, or we can follow Mission 3 and try to snowball by hitting the DPS. Which would you do in this situation?

Many melee players often get caught into the trap of just hitting melees that are hitting your teammates, thinking you're helping with passive pressure, hoping for your teammates to generate real pressure for you. But in this case, if I did that, nothing would happen.

My team does not have CC for the Shaman, and even if they did, the melees would be too tanky. Instead, I could solo generate meaningful pressure by being on the Shaman during our window, simply with the threat of my presence.

Forcing him to kite, heal himself, tank stuns, fake, and so on. I execute on Mission 2 here by chasing the Shaman behind this pillar.

So, we've all chased someone behind a pillar, died, and then been trashed by our teammates. It's risk free this time, because the Windwalker Monk only just used his Fist of Fury and Leg Sweep, which means his stuns are not ready, leaving me to freely chase with no risk of being stunned behind this pillar.

I'd have made this play anyway regardless of stuns, because I'd be willing to trade my Trinket to score pressure during this window. But with the stun being down, this is an optimal play.

I stun the Shaman, but he just put Earthshield up, which limits my pressure. The Monk has kindly retreated, allowing me to hit him right away to snowball my pressure, tying into Mission 3.

Though, if he did not come back, I'd still hit the Shaman regardless, to maintain uptime. This was a simple target swap to optimize my damage.

The takeaway here is that once you commit to hitting a healer versus a cleave like this, they're often far from their teammates, leaving you and the healer on an island, having to deal with stuff like Earthshields. Which is fine.

However, when a DPS is nearby and low health, and the healer has damage reduction up, it's a no-brainer to swap and maintain momentum. I end up pressuring the Shaman and forcing him to back off behind the pillar.

This gifts me with the chance to execute Mission 3, forcing the Monk to use Touch of Karma and the DK to use Icebound Fortitude, two of their biggest defensive cooldowns.

Trying to stick with Mission 2 here would have been a terrible decision, as I didn't have a stun or interrupt and the Shaman already started working on saving himself. So, after spending a while focusing on offense, it's about that time for the opposing team to put out some pressure of their own.

This time they don't start with their telegraphed paralysis, so without warning, me and my Shaman are put into a full stun. I act on Mission 1 and use a defensive to counter the Monk's Touch of Death and the DK's Pillar of Frost.

Because I'm a Rett, I have a really good chance of winning this game. I have a really strong answer to Touch of Death in the form of Blessing of Protection.

But no matter what class you play, you have to respect Touch of Death and trade a defensive before it expires, otherwise you risk being caught off-guard and dying. And much like earlier, I trade Eye for an Eye for the Pillar of Frost, but I should have waited for my Bop to get purged first.

Anyway, forcing them to use Karma and IBF has led to the game sort of resetting to an even state. So it's up to me to build pressure again, and there's no better way to do this than Mission 2.

I have my stun and interrupt shortly coming off cooldown, so I have all the tools I need to start rebuilding pressure. Before we proceed, I'd like to take a minute to teach every melee two invaluable concepts for using your stun.

Your first option is to first stun the healer and then hold onto your interrupt to prevent them from casting afterwards, while being sure to land your interrupt if they are not trying to juke you. Your second option is to interrupt the healer and then land your stun as the lockout ends.

Stuns don't just deny heal, they lock them in place, so stunning the rest of shaman right away is best, as it will allow my Shadow Priest who is behind the pillar to catch up. A different scenario where interrupting first is best would be when the healer is low and struggling to cast because of the threat of your kick.

Holding onto your kick and eventually using it while they're low and chaining a stun is a great way to keep your stuns down.

Now, although I have my interrupt ready and can just continue to execute mission 2, getting some form of follow up crowd control on the shaman would really set my team up for snowballing our pressure by swapping to the DPS. My shaman attempts to hex out of my stun, but is denied by the paralysis.

We know by now that when my shaman is in a paralysis, that the DK and monk will probably try to combine their leg sweep and death grip to set up a kill attempt. Well, paralysis has just been used on my shaman, so I can't really do much about it.

I'm just going to try to get my shaman to do a little bit of a stun. I'm going to try to get my shaman to do a little bit of a stun, and if you take a look at omnibar, you'll notice that leg sweep is no longer showing up, which means it's now ready.

In this situation, the priority is to move away to avoid getting double stunned with my healer. I react slowly to the monk sticking to me, but luckily get my freedom off in time, leaving the monk disappointed with a single stun onto my healer.

By reading the game here, I was able to execute mission 1 with the use of blessing of sanctuary on my healer without even having to use my PvP trinket. This is a retch specific mission, so I'm going to try to get my healer to do a little bit of a stun.

This is a retch specific move, but no matter your class and spec, the overall goal remains the same. Read the setup and try to survive.

Much like the trade I showed you at the start of this video, this one results in our team again getting crowd control on their shaman, this time with a fear. Mission 3 is now a go, and with both karma and ibf out of the way, our snowball is about to get huge.

If we were not able to get free CC on the healer, then it would be time for mission 2 instead. Extending our CC chain here is huge, because their lack of defensive means the shaman has to trinket, which now opens him up as a potential kill target.

As I mentioned with the first CC chain we saw, work with your team to extend CC out of your stuns, as this is a super reliable way to consistently score max pressure. To that end, my shadow priest follows up the shaman's trinket with a silence to effectively keep our CC chain going.

This play was opportunistic because of the CC chain onto the healer from my team, but it was a good move. At this point, we've generated so much momentum that the next swap onto the shaman won't be about pressure, it'll be about ending the game.

The dance between mission 2 and 3 to generate and sustain pressure has all built up to this. Their shaman is low and without a trinket, and their DK has used AMZ, which exposes the shaman as the easiest kill target.

The shaman then seals his fate with the dispel on VT, pathing him into my stun, and we finish the game. So that wraps up today's video, let's go over today's important takeaways.

We started by seeing my divine shield forced, but I made sure to counter pressure by attacking the rest of shaman, which caused their whole team to drop low. Whenever pressure was built on the shaman, I swapped onto the DPS while the shaman was still alive.

The shaman either had to focus on healing himself, or couldn't heal because of CC. This snowballed pressure and forced defensive cooldowns from the enemy team.

We then saw me swap back onto their shaman every time he started to recover the pressure on his DPS. Eventually, their shaman used his PVP trinket to keep up with the pressure, which led to us scoring a kill on the rest of shaman.

Okay everyone, I hope you enjoyed this video. Our goal is to create one of these videos every day so that you can slowly improve by implementing the missions we hand out into your own gameplay.

Be sure to make note of the missions in this video and try to incorporate them into your gameplay. Thanks for watching and good luck in the arena!