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[Pacobird]

Hello friends.

I am bored at work this morning so I will post the first of what may be several installments of formal, premade v premade BG strategy if I don't get tired of writing them.  If this post is even completed and makes it on to the board, I'd consider it an accomplishment. 

Anyway, we'll start with WSG because it's my favorite, I have the most success there, and my favored strat seems to be the least commonly-applied.

Warsong is all about movement.  Well, all the BGs are about movement, it's true, but WSG is definitely the most mobile of them.  What does this mean, though, and why is it significant?  Well, probably the best answer is that at any given time, there is only one objective.  You are either protecting your flagrunner or killing the other one, so usually 9 guys on a given competent team will all be moving to one perpetually-changing position.  Inversely, 90% of your losses in WSG will in some way involve trying to do both at once.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In general, I find the winning strategies for most BGs involve setting yourself up in a way so that you have to move as little as possible, and this actually goes doubly for WSG.  A moving (or mounted) player is vulnerable; if he is attacked, he has an objective other than defending himself.  He has to either forget about getting where he was going for a good amount of time, or face unfavorable odds as he tries to escape.  The key to WSG is not to run down the other team; it's to identify the only two people on the whole map who matter (their flagrunner and yours) and be where they need to go.

Basically, the key to winning WSG every single time is to fight in the middle and win.

Fighting in the middle gets a bad rap because it usually slows up games and results in people not going for the flag, but I don't recall the last time I actually lost even a pug WSG when the middlefighters were actually succeeding in efficiently killing the other team.  Dominating the middle accomplishes three things:

1) maximizes the distance the enemy flag carrier has to cover in order to get to safety and forces him to run through your whole team twice while minimizing the distance your own carrier has to travel and allows him to pick up the flag at his leisure

2) forces the other team to either spend precious time regrouping at the graveyard or spend the whole game completely separated and unable to lauch an effective offense or defense when it matters

3) prevents you from ever having to engage in a meaningful fight with fewer than 8 people on your side

and these combine to actually have a fairly significant psychological effect on the other team.  I remember running WSG with HWL grinders back in Vanilla and using this general strategy; Alliance players hanging out on our vent would talk about how incredibly demoralizing it was to come up against our team, because even the ones who could beat us in a straight-up fight knew they were going to have to wrangle their guys for several extended team fights a game.

Anyway, specifics.

The general layout of this strategy is one player on defense, with the rest of the team in the middle.  Flag returning changes significantly depending on whether you have a stealther (or particularly a druid) but it's not a huge deal. 

General flow of the game is as follows:

Gates open and everyone but the D guy immediately mounts up and moves to intercept the incoming zerg.  You pick people off; again, they are vulnerable because they are trying to get to the flag, not kill you.  Assist as normal and kill a few; 4 or 5 is ideal, but 2 or 3 is fine.  DO NOT CHASE THEM INTO YOUR BASE AND DO NOT KILL ALL OF THEM.  This is important.  We don't chase because central field position is more important; the survivors have to come back through us anyway after they get the flag.  We don't kill all of them because if we did they would just rez and do it over again; it's way more advantageous for us to divide their team in half than it is to kill them. 

Lone defender scouts/separates (I will talk about the defender in a bit), but the stragglers succeed in picking up the flag.  That's fine.  The central group falls back to right outside our base and mauls them as they try to get away, moving across-field.  Anybody on our team who died can assist the defender in separation but otherwise it's more important to link back up with the main group unless you're absolutely sure you can wipe out the stragglers.

Now then, where are we?  In this setup, we have midfield and can stop to drink/rebuff, while the other team is hopefully mostly dead, but more importantly on different rez timers.  Ideally they are not in a position to come at us with 10 unless they wait a bit, which is a perfect situation for us to move downfield and camp outside their base.  We can GY camp a little bit but at this point we shouldn't overcommit; we need our first cap.

At this point, offense comes in to play.  If we have a stealther (particularly a druid), that stealther should by this point already be in position at some point within their base.  Once we take the offensive field position, he can drop down, grab the flag, and sprint to the speed buff; if it's up, he should be back within the safety of the group by the time it wears off, meaning the time between him even making his presence known within the enemy base and him effectively guaranteeing a safe return of the flag with a full escort is under 10 seconds.

We escort our flagrunner back with a team of 9.  The other guys will inevitably attack us; keeping the FR up is the priority.  Try to stop OUTSIDE our base and send our own runner inside with a small escort of 2 or 3; we want to get good field position whether our guy makes it the whole way or not.

Now, the defender.  The defender's primary job is to kill or at least heavily slow people trying to ninja the flag (if he can't solo a runner, he should slow him long enough to allow GY rezzers to come in and mop up).  Warlocks and Hunters still work great for this.  For group offenses, any assistance he can give with separating flag runners from healing support is great, but his main job is to just be there and force the other team to commit multiple people to getting the flag; a divided team is a losing team.

I would get John Madden on your ass with MSPaint but I now have shit to do.

[Pacobird]

Also, applying to BGs in general: pick a main assist and assist him.  Always.  No matter what, even if you think he's picked a dumb target.  In a situation like a close BG where so much is going on, it's important to end fights quickly and decisively, and it's always better to kill the wrong target quickly than to kill the right one slowly or not at all.

[Rico]

GM Raxiaswarm?

[Friday]

Here, I'll do AB.

I used to grind with the Marshal Premade back in Vanilla, so I've probably spent more time in Arathi Basin than the average player has spent pvping entirely.

This strat will be discussed from Alliance side perspective, just reverse ST/Farm if you're Horde.

AB is basically won and lost based on knowing where the enemy team is. We used to beat other premades, horde pve BWL geared premades, because they'd rely on brute gear while we were constantly forcing them into fights they couldn't win.

First off, where to send your groups? The general strat is to send one to cap ST and defend it, 5 to LM, 4 to Mine, and 5 to BS. Then one from each of the groups stays to defend BS, LM and Mine while the remaining 11 continue forward to farm. This results in a five cap 75% of the time and a 4 cap that usually turns into a 5 cap later 25% of the time.

Obviously, break up your groups properly. Send at least one healer with each group, don't ever have healers on guard duty. One person running everything over vent helps.

Key point: If you ride up with your group and nobody is at your node, don't dismount. Just keep riding through. Vent leader should tell you if another node needs and assist, if not, ride straight through to farm. The only person who dismounts is the node defender.

Once you've got control of your nodes, the rest is easy. Every time an enemy player breaks off to go somewhere that isn't into the zerg, shadow him with exactly one guy. You don't need to engage him, just keep track of him. When he finally does figure out where he's going, you're going to have a 2v1 fight on your hands because the defender of the node is already there. Even if two players break off, you're going to end up fighting them 3v2. It's extremely hard, almost impossible, to win a straight up fight if you're outnumbered, regardless of gear advantage. Especially when the defenders are ressing every 30 seconds.

Meanwhile, you keep their main force busy fighting your main force just outside farm, or just outside their spawn, depending if you capped farm or not. If one of your nodes goes down for some reason, you should know exactly how many enemy players are there, and send the appropriate amount to deal with it. Like I said before, AB is about knowing where the enemy is. You don't want to send 7 guys to deal with 2, that will only result in you losing another node or two somewhere.

For other tough premades, the opening strat differs a bit.

Likely if you send 4 guys mine 5 guys BS and 5 guys LM you're going to face a fairly even fight at each node. You don't want this. You want assured victory. What to do?

Grab the bullhorns.

Send zero guys BS. Split those five guys up into your mine and LM groups. BS generally attracts the most players, so suddenly, the enemy team just committed 5+ guys to a node that has nothing for them to do. Meanwhile, your team has took Mine/ST/LM and is in the lead. From there, you can continue on to backcap farm, or pull back to defend ST, based on what the enemy players at BS are doing. Again, force unfavorable fights. If they send 5, have 6 or 7. This strategy works so well that in the entire time I ground in AB, I think I lost a grand total of ten or so games, almost always due to my team mates fucking off and not listening to the vent leader, or other premades doing the same thing we were, or both.

[Pacobird]

Interesting.  My AB is a bit different; one guy from Group 1 or 2 caps and watches Farm, Groups 1 and 2 go BS, and Group 3 goes LM.  The idea here is that these three nodes are directly connected to one another via the shortest possible path, so if you sit 3 people at each of them and the other 6 mounted at the crossroads between them (by the BS bridge; Alliance is the same but a bit further back), you can hold 3 nodes the whole game and react to any assault with a 9-man defense almost immediately.  The other team literally cannot cap one of your nodes without over-committing and leaving themselves vulnerable elsewhere.

I've tried the 4-node sweep before, and IMO it spreads you too thin to be reliable against good teams and shitty teams will get five-capped anyway so what's the rush?  Maybe I just play more conservatively than most but I would rather build up a couple-hundred point lead before I decide to find out whether the other guys are terrible.

I also prefer to not try to cap a defended node without a Hunter or Mage (or now a Demo Warlock; Hand of Gul'dan is ABSURDLY good for this) to run to the GY once people start dying and CCing/snaring people as they rez.  There's nothing more frustrating than getting tied up attacking a node for two minutes and losing because the other guys just kept rezzing and interrupting your cap.

GM Raxiaswarm?

GB2THEREALLYDUMBANDBROKENLEDGEOVERTHEFLAGROOM

[Pacobird]

EYE OF THE STORM:


Having a good strategy for EotS is particularly important, because everybody hates this abortion of a BG so much that no one ever bothered to figure out what the fuck they were doing.  That said, this strat has allowed me to meet with some success:

It's a modification on the AB 3-6-3 I mentioned up top, except now we're concerned with holding
                                          l
                                          3
two nodes and otherwise controlling our half of the map while semi-humping the flag.  Game starts, and we split 3-9-3 (or 4-7-4, but I think 3-9-3 works better) with two designated flag runners in the middle.  Higher survivability should go in the 4s, higher damage in the 7.  The 4s, predictably, will camp each node; after control is maxed, melee should head down the side of the node to square off against that node's bridge while ranged stays up top.  In fact, if you're feeling saucy you can spread into the bridge itself and eventually pressure the opposing node; the entire point of this strat is that you have sealed off the middle so attacks on your nodes can only come from one direction.

The middle 9 are a bit more mobile, immediately moving to get the flag.  Kill everything in your path and secure the flag area.  The first flagrunner gets the flag and heads to a node to cap, but DO NOT cap the flag until you get the go-ahead from the remaining 8.  Those 8 should make sure no opponents are around the flag before the cap comes down, and should be camped slightly ahead of the flag itself; ideally, they should seem like a threat to potentially attack a node so as to keep the other team defensive, but most importantly they have to secure that lane.

Once it's secure, the first runner caps and the second grabs the flag, the first running back to join the middle group.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

Now, the other team will inevitably attack one of your lightly-defended nodes.  In that case, call it, stay alive, and the middle group should come out and take the node from which the attack came.  Plant 3 there, send the rest up the attacking team's ass, profit.  Meanwhile, a flag runner should be holding the flag in a safe place to prevent the other team from taking it while the lane's unguarded.

Whether you want to try to hold on to 3 is up to you, but 3-1 is basically Lights Out unless something goes horribly wrong and much less is likely to go horribly wrong when you are turtling 2 nodes rather than extending to 3.  I would personally abandon that new node and shore up the initial position, but again, I am unusually conservative. 

Naturally, Mage/Hunter/Demonology GY bullshit is as great in EotS as it is in AB, perhaps moreso because line of sight means the GY fucking can occur without distracting the fucker from the actual fight.

[Friday]

I imagine the conservative strats are going to be more viable in the new rated environment. The rush back then was honor per hour.

[Pacobird]

It was like that for us, too, but Dethecus was at the time something like 70/30 Horde so we had hour+ queues.  We really couldn't afford to lose games we didn't have to.

[Rico]

But yeah, for any who started too late or didn't have enough decent buddies, BGs are awesome and you should try them in Cataclysm.

[Bal]

Bal's Official Eye of the Storm Strategy Guide:

Fuck Eye of the Storm.

[Pacobird]

The retarded baby BG actually sort of grew on me at one point, once I realized you could actually confine fighting to some seriously choked deathtrap points on the map.

I think the worst thing it's got going for it is that it came out after everyone stopped giving a shit about BGs in any real way, so it never had the chance to be anything more than a zerg.