WHEN TO PUSH IN

WHEN TO PUSH IN INTRO

Welcome to our course on the green light rule. Confused?

Well, me too. Just kidding.

Don't worry, what does it mean when the light turns green you might be asking? Well obviously, it means go.

But where are the traffic lights in WOW? Well, they're a bit more hidden, and knowing when it's safe to push in or when you need to pull back isn't always obvious.

This course is going to help you identify those key moments, and as a result, you're going to start to make much smarter decisions with your positioning.

WHEN TO PUSH IN (THE GREEN LIGHT RULE IN WOW PVP)

Remember that innocent game you used to play as a kid called red light green light? Turns out you need to play it in wow too, but unfortunately there's no traffic light telling you what to do.

Around a week ago we showed you how to notice when it turns red and when you need to run away, but today we're going to show you how to recognize when the light turns green, because we are seeing a lot of players mess this up, so stay tuned as we show how to recognize your kill windows and when to push in to win the game.

Of course this starts by understanding win conditions, and before you say I know what that means, let's see if that's true with a game knowledge quiz.

To do this, let's take a step back in time to our road to glad series and see if you can spot the win condition for the most broken comp in the game, which of course is rmp. This should be easy, so let's see if you are smarter than a duelist.

We're going to pause right here, and if you are a smart player, you should instantly recognize that our team is going to win soon, but why? Rmp is broken, so this should be easy if you truly understand win conditions.

The first place you should have looked was here. Nobody on the enemy team has a win condition.

You should have also noticed that our mage almost has combustion ready, and when it's off CD, both blind and fear will be available. Finally looking at DRs, the shaman isn't on any diminishing returns, and stunned DRs are about to reset on the demon hunter.

So we have no trinkets on the enemy team, CDs are almost ready, and we will have cross CC available. This is the perfect recipe for a win.

Spoiler our team will win this game soon, but it will take them a while to actually do that. Instead of instantly recognizing the win, they do nothing for a while.

This means their kill window is slowly closing, and as this video will demonstrate, this delay is the problem you need to avoid. Of course you probably don't play RMP, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't pay attention to the win conditions for comps you don't even play.

Virtually every comp uses this formula to determine if a win is possible, and once all these boxes are checked, and if you aren't at risk of immediately dying, it means it's time to push in and find the win.

You might already know about your team's win condition, but in the heat of the moment, it's easy to get distracted and play too scared. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but I've been playing for a while now, and I've been playing for a while now.

This is a problem that affects everyone on the ladder, but is something we see more often at lower ratings. Reaching your win condition is a gradual process, and involves continuously using small moments to create pressure.

Problems can start very early in the game, like we will see here. Our warriors manage to survive both combustion and shadow blades while also forcing a trinket from the enemy rogue.

Unfortunately their healer trinkets sap, which probably wasn't needed since aegis and enraged regen are active. But despite having conquerors banner active and surviving the setup, our warrior decides to run away, only to get sheeped by the mage behind the pillar.

Why is this so bad? Well for one, this now allows the rogue mage to get a complete reset.

Our healer just committed their trinket, and we are on multiple DRs with one of our offensives active. The time to push in is now.

The rogue might have had evasion, but that doesn't matter. We have now let the enemy team dictate the pace of the game, despite the fact that we were in a position to reverse pressure immediately after surviving a deadly opener.

Aside from the early stages in the game, the mid game is also important for building your win condition and pushing in. Consider this game, where our team has managed to force double trinket early on into the game.

Not only that, but our hunter is about to have trap ready and our priest can fear at any time. And finally DRs are resetting.

Our warrior might be low on HP, but they have guardian spirit which they can use to heal themselves with a victory rush proc. Despite all of this, our warrior decides to kite away.

This means they are losing out on a small moment where they can actually reverse pressure and make their next setup more powerful. It might not seem like that big of a deal, but remember that win conditions need to be built throughout the game.

You need to recognize moments like this where it's ok to push in and reverse pressure. Let's look at one final example to see how important it is to build your win condition by pushing in throughout the game.

In this example, our team will waste nearly two minutes doing nothing when they could have been pushing in to land a kill. The game starts off amazing as they force double trinket on their opener and even manage to force pain suppression, touch of karma, and defuse harm.

This is a very important moment in the game. Even in the first few seconds of the fight, the win is already looking promising.

But this is where the problem starts. Our team will go for a reset, which they need to do anyway for DRs to come back up, but unfortunately it takes them forever to get a second opener.

At this point they are comfortably in the drivers seat and the enemy team is the one playing scared. But even with that in mind, it takes them a full 45 seconds to get another go.

Which they do here with a relatively janky cross cc setup. But why is this too late?

For one, even though they didn't have combustion. They could have been farming it during this whole time with a go once DRs reset.

This would have been a win win either way. Either they force a kill or more cds with a random go, or they just reset cooldowns for a go in the future.

And now we are about to discover two elephants in the room. For one of our rogues is under geared and secondly he forgot to have a dagger equipped in the main hand.

Which he finally fixes right here. Now you might be saying, that's why they weren't opening, the rogue is under geared, he will die instantly.

Well, not so fast. He still has both trinket and evasion available, and if things get really sketchy he could blind defensively if needed.

Oh yeah, we should point out that we are nearly 2 minutes into the game and blind has still not been used. And in this case being under geared doesn't change the fact that more setups were needed.

Remember our team is on a timer once trinkets and cooldowns have been forced. They need to make sure they are making the most out of their goes to make each setup incrementally stronger.

Eventually they wind up getting another go with combustion. But since so much time was wasted.

Diffuse magic. comes back. Off CD.

To block the kill. And by this time it is too little too late as trinkets are about to be ready for both enemy players by the time DRs reset.

By now it should be more obvious that win conditions are something that need to be actively built and standing around doing nothing while you're in the drivers seat is basically throwing away a free win.

This of course requires a bit of balancing on defense when needed and remember that there might be times where you have to pull away as a team even if you are in the drivers seat. Here for instance our team has managed to force double trinket and multiple sets.

But the affliction warlock on the enemy team has dark soul active and instead of trying to stop its damage or line of sight our entire team stays pushed in. Which of course is a convenient way to die against a free casting UA warlock.

It's also important to remember that pushing in often requires everyone to be on the same page. We're about to see how this can go wrong even with the world's best players.

Here we have calvish who of course is one of the best rogues in the world and his decision to push will backfire. He recognizes that DRs are resetting and his team has a go.

Which causes him to push back. He then tries to push in with his team but he's not able to push in.

He's not able to push in with his team and he's stuck in pre CC with his healer far away unable to help. This will allow the enemy team to get a setup essentially for free despite the fact that calvish was the one trying to be the aggressor.

This just goes to show how attentive you need to be to key momentum swings in the game and how you need to keep your teammates positioning in mind when deciding to push. So just to recap, deciding to push in requires you to recognize a few things.

In general don't run away if you don't have to and don't run away forever. If the enemy team can't punish you for pushing in and if you have enough to stay alive then it's usually ok to push in to start building towards your win condition.

And speaking of which, make sure you're always thinking of these check boxes to see if a win is possible. If you don't capitalize on key moments quickly the window of opportunity can easily escape you.

Of course we want to thank you all for watching and as always we'll see you soon.