A Beginner's Guide to PvP
Posted February 09, 2009 at 08:59 PM by Warpy
Updated February 13, 2009 at 11:37 AM by Warpy (error in level brackets)
Updated February 13, 2009 at 11:37 AM by Warpy (error in level brackets)
The place to start with inter-player combat (PvP), in my opinion, is in a battleground (BG): Warsong Gulch, Alterac Valley, Arathi Basin, Eye of the Storm, Strand of the Ancients, and, for all practical purposes, Wintergrasp.
- Dueling and arenas tend to involve experienced opponents in good PvP gear. It’s hard to learn from your mistakes when you are dead before you can do anything.
- Also, BGs involve new scenery, lore, strategies, and sometimes quests, which makes them more interesting to players motivated by more than killer instinct.
- PvP realms are even worse for beginners, because the experienced, overgeared opponents you face often outlevel you as well.
Battlegrounds will contain a lot of well-geared, experienced PvPers, sometimes in pre-made groups that actually communicate with each other, but these groups are now limited to five people. However, most BGers are either not very experienced, or not too keen on learning from experience. They don’t communicate effectively and PvP in ordinary questing gear. You may be able to kill many of these even more easily than they can kill you, and it will be fun!
You can start PvPing pretty early as you level, but don’t. Battlegrounds become are separated by level brackets: i.e. 50-60, 61-69, and 71-80 for Alterac Valley, but unless you are close to the top of a bracket, you are a liability for your team:
- Your health will be relatively low, so you are an easy kill.
- Your attacks are likely to miss high-level opponents.
- Between your relatively weaker gear and your lack of trained abilities, you just aren’t going to be as effective as you will if you level up.
Learn about each Battleground and its Objectives
A word to the wise: Winning a battleground is not about killing the greatest number of enemy players. It’s about achieving the objectives, which depend on the battleground, and generally involve controlling bases and/or capturing flags. You often have to kill other player characters (PCs) to accomplish this, but it matters greatly where and when they die. If you can heal, do it, again, strategically! Healing is often as important as DPS in accomplishing objectives.
- Blizzard offers descriptive summaries of each of the actual battlefields
- WoWInsider’s Zach Yonzen has a summary of Wintergrasp
Even once you know where everything is, how to cap flags, take bases, and/or operate vehicles, there are going to be finer points of strategy that take time to learn. Just because you’ve got the flag in Eye of the Storm, it’s not always good strategy to “cap” it immediately. There are lots of strategy guides out there, your teammates will type advice in chat (not always right, but worth listening to), and you’ll learn from experience.
- Casual's Guide to Winning BGs (Casual’s the name of Digo’s guild; they’re actually hardcore PVE)
- Very user-friendly guides from WoWInsider include:
- Alterac Valley has changed a great deal recently – make sure any guide you find includes at least the patch 2.4 changes.
- Also, check your favorite forums and blogs.
Find a group of teammates (especially ones who look like they know what they’re doing) and follow them. Help them achieve objectives and kill enemy players. Experienced players will sometimes solo objectives or guard bases, but there’s not much you could do if attacked except to tell your team in chat where the enemy is attacking you… and then it’s usually too late to matter.
If you are alone, and a group of the enemy catches you,
- The enemy will focus-fire you – that is, all attack you, and you die fast!
- You are unlikely to be able to defend yourself from more than one opponent at a time: crowd-control (CC), counter-spell, parry, etc. are generally most useful against a single opponent.
- One of them is likely to CC you so you can’t even run.
- The enemy is unlikely to focus-fire anyone. Remember, it’s a BG and people don’t communicate much.
- If they do focus-fire, and they target you, keep them busy while your friends kill them, or better yet while they rescue the flag or complete some other BG objective
- If you are not focus-fired or CCed, you can CC/damage/focus on BG objectives.
Most PCs can do a great deal more damage than non-elite monsters. Surviving long enough to actually make progress on objectives is the tough part. Stamina gives you more health, resilience reduces some of the worst damage you’ll be taking (from crits and DoTs).
If you are past level 70, you can buy tolerable PvP gear from faction quartermasters. These are five-piece rare (blue) battlegear sets (i.e. Dreadweave Battlegear). You need to be honored with the faction to buy the piece it sells:
- Gloves – Keepers of Time
- Helm – Cenarion Expedition
- Chest – Thrallmar/Honor Hold
- Legs – Sha’tar
- Shoulders – Lower City
Keep Moving
This is the biggest difference between PvP and PvP (normal questing and monster-killing): you need to be moving whenever possible. On my warlock, I could never quite understand why experienced players kept strafing around enemy, but when I started PvP on my rogue I realized why, it’s very hard to melee PCs who aren’t immediately in front of you. If you’re a caster, you should use rather different spells than usual, especially instant-casts that allow you to move.
Eventually, you’ll want to learn to strafe (move left and right) rather than turn, to turn with the mouse rather than with keyboard keys, and to gradually bind PvP-oriented abilities, like instant-casts and crowd-control measures to your keyboard, so that it’s easy to move and fight at the same time. There are a lot of great guides on hotkeys, turning with the mouse, and so forth, but I recommend shifting gradually.
Check out Thralock’s Movement, Hotkeys, Keybinds, Click and Control guide.
You’ll want to look at class guides and forums to see which abilities are recommended for PvP and for ideas on how to use them.
Total Comments 4
Comments
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Very nice beginner guide!
I agree with all the advice here, except that I would try to get to do as many duels as you can, preferably against players with similar gear. It is the only way you can see their abilities clearly and understand how to counter properly. In BGs, it is sometimes to chaotic to see anything clearly.Posted February 10, 2009 at 12:25 AM by Redmage
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OMG!!! Once i got far enough in the game i became shy to ask noobie pvp question. This is the answer to 99% of them. Thank you so much!Posted February 10, 2009 at 01:02 AM by Vanya<3
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I think its hard for beginners to find friends to duel with, and many of the strangers who accept duel invitations will be geared and experienced. Eventually, PvPers do have to learn what all the other classes can do, but I wouldn't necessarily startthere. :(Posted February 10, 2009 at 12:46 PM by Warpy
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Im so bad at pvp'ing, but im getting better, offcourse battlegrounds help to, but i get most out of talking to pepole outside stormwind when they Duell. A shaman was duelling me a long time, he and some other guys gave me advice, like i never knew to stay far away rom the poles he put out there, and so on. Pepole that are good at dueling often like to help and talk about it, especcialy if you find someone that has better gear and armor than you, then he enjoys killing me, or let me play around with him trying to hurt him as much as i can.
Most of the times you dont have to ask, i just hang around there and someone ask me to duell with him,, i explain that im not experienced but gladly takes advices..
Anyway,, happy gaming all
Posted February 11, 2009 at 05:11 AM by viceguy
