In my opinion the most dynamic and interesting aspect of World of Warcraft is Player Vs. Player combat. The human element provides what even the most challenging Raids & Dungeons cannot, an ever changing experience without a formula or single strategy to follow. Still, PvP can also be the most daunting part of the game to the inexperienced, precisely because you're competing with other players rather than an easily understood monster.
Furthermore, it's not just the enemy team you're battling, but also your own side. Battlegrounds are a team experience and, regardless of your personal abilities, sometimes your team just isn't good enough. The worst losses come when you're stuck with random players while the opposition is an organized group communicating over voice chat. The result is often a frustrating steamroll where you struggle to emerge from the graveyard, much less put up a proper fight.
Still, sometimes all it takes is one capable player leading the way to change the tide of battle, which is why it's best to do all you can to improve your play, because the better you become the more often you'll notice yourself becoming the deciding factor in changing a likely loss into a total victory, even against a premade group.
1. Know Your Enemy
The most important part of PvP is understanding the situation, and by that I mean knowing what's happening and what's about to happen, knowing at a glance what spell an ally or enemy is casting and reacting appropriately, and anticipating the next move of an opponent so you can ensure you're prepared for it.
Understanding the abilities of your opposition can be done in a number of different ways, whether you simply grasp it by experiencing it in a battleground, read up on their abilities ahead of time to prepare yourself, or do as I've done and level up multiple classes allowing yourself to get a feel for how each plays. The latter is, in my opinion, the most effective way of learning and gives you the greatest sense of what you should be looking for when facing a given class. Once you've played a mage, you have a deeper insight into what an enemy mage is thinking and how you should counter it, because you've had the same done to yourself before.
2. Research Your Class
Understanding the enemy as I talked about above is important, but what is equally necessary is a proper understanding of your own class to be truly effective. Knowing your abilities is a start, but what you really want to learn is how and when to chain them together into deadly combos to kill opponents before a healer can react and save them.
Timing and anticipation are what PvP is all about, and just because your best ability is ready to be used doesn't mean you should use it as soon as possible, sometimes the best way to get a kill and take down a well supported flag carrier is to hold back your ability usage until a healer is distracted or your target has blown a defensive cooldown or two. Otherwise what you'll often find happens is that you use up your offensive cooldowns just for the target to go from nearly dead back up to full HP in a second or two as the healer counters your offensive burst with some cooldowns of their own.
Again, this is an aspect of PvP best learned by experiencing these situations yourself in battlegrounds, but it can't hurt to mentally plan out your strategy either before or during the battleground. Another great source for information will be online in the forms of guides and videos by players who've already gone through the tumultuous learning curve and figured out what works best for them.
You can apply the same research to understanding the key abilities of enemy classes and what to look out for by consulting guides for the classes you'll be facing, reading up on the strengths and weaknesses of a class from the perspective of those well versed in its use.
For example, if you're having trouble with mages, try looking for a mage PvP guide and see what they themselves fear so you can implement it as part of your gameplan.
3. Teamplay
As I mentioned above, battlegrounds are a team experience and not a duel, as ultimately you're battling to complete objectives rather than just to kill the enemy, although killing other players is inevitably a part of winning the battleground.
Even if you've perfected your play, you'll still more often than not lose when your team is overmatched and inexperienced or lacking in coordination. The simplest way to address this is to find yourself a group of players and form an organized PvP team. This is also the only truly reliable method of ensuring you aren't losing in spite of playing well individually.
The only other way is to try and lead your team yourself which is difficult at best as many players simply don't want to listen and those that do will still lack the added benefit of voice chat and experience playing alongside each other which comes only with time.
Being effective in solo situations and using your abilities to the fullest in a group environment are two very different things. It's necessary that you shift your play to best augment your team as I've often seen groups of random players waste every silence and stun they have available on a single player trying to stop one healing spell. This leaves a gap of time where with their abilities on cooldown the opposition can cast freely and save a flag carrier or decimate their enemies.
While you can't control what your teammates do, you can react to it and look for ways to synchronize your attacks to take down difficult targets or use Crowd Control to eliminate healers from a fight long enough to score some kills.
4. Hotkeys
Something of an aspect of learning your class, assigning keybinds and memorizing their placement will allow you to react instantly to enemy actions, and is essential to properly silencing, interrupting, and healing while in the midst of often hectic team fights.
There's no one best way to do this other than to ensure that every ability you could conceivably require in a PvP situation is bound to a hotkey, often placing the more frequently used abilities in an easier position to hit and the more obscure spells further from where your hand is on the keyboard.
In close battles a single miss-click of an important cooldown can lose what was a winnable fight so it's important that you practice your keybinds to ensure you can execute them swiftly and while on the move.
Actual reaction time will improve with experience as you become more used to PvP.
For more information on PvP visit Gotwarcraft
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