Looking to break into PvP

[Lyssy]

So, I started playing WoW in November with my bff. We ended up getting to the point of 8/8 DS but we need some time away from each other for a while. We only /ever/ played WoW together tho, so I don't wanna keep doing any of the things we used to do together unless/until we're friends again.

So, that leaves PvP; the one area we never ever played together. I think that could be a good way to spend my WoW time alone. I jus' don't know where to start. I'm a 394 Prot Pally with a sub-par Ret O/S. I'd ideally like to keep my Prot Spec intact for other stuff, so I have a few questions about getting into PvP.

Should I spec Ret or Holy?
Where do I start for gear?
What's really different in play style? I've only ever tanked. Ever.
What's the difference between Arena and BG's and RBG's?
Anything else you think I should know >.<

I started looking this stuff up on google but gosh there's jus' so much conflicting information and I don't know where to start. Any advice would be /amazing/.

Thanks!
~Pudz

[Deleted]

If you play alone, go as Ret. Do battlegrounds for honor to buy ilvl 390 gear in orgrimmar/stormwind. You will also get conquest points for better gear (but at a slower rate, way slower)

It's VERY different from any pve at all. Much more dynamic in my opinion.

BGs are just to collect gear and have fun strutting around with little to no tactica involved sadly. RBG is the same concept but with coordinated teams at both ends with a ranking system. Arena is another ranked system but with 2, 3 or 5 players on the team and on other maps.

Now you know the basics. As soon as you read this, write something about your first experiences and we'll take it from there.

[Temp name]

i agree a little with skrikspya, but i think (if you're in full pve gear) you should go holy, seeing as Holy paladins are really hard to kill even without pvp gear, this ofcourse requires you to have some decent pve gear for said spec. you can also try going prot in pvp untill you get some better gear. and yeah, pvp is more dynamic seeing as there's actual people on the other side and not just a boss that does everything on a timer (not bashing pve, still the content i enjoy more)

[Lyssy]

I've been BG's since making this post - as Prot. Figured I'll do as mentioned and save up Honor for a set of Ruthless gear for Ret; already bought two 403 rings are dumping my Valor to Conquest. So slowly working on gear.

I think my big issue is that I click everything. It's just how I've always been, and things move SO fast in PvP. Guess I'll need to learn to bind more, huh? >.< I feel very survivable as Prot, at least, but I'll rarely win against most other players. I find it difficult to spot healers in the mess of bodies, or to stay facing forward against whoever I'm attacking. It's certainly very different. Get feared and snared a lot, though I think I'm learning to manage that with Hand of Freedom and Divine Shield. Trying to figure out which Seal to use; my default is Truth because... well... I don't use anything else as a tank. But the survivability of Insight seems to be worth a look, I think...

Are there any addons worthwhile having that might help out? Especially in situational awareness with regards to a lot of opposing players. I find myself feeling overwhelmed more often than not and freezing up >.<

[MisterMustache]

You can stay Prot for farming Honor. I go as Dk in my Blood Specc and PvE gear and feel like a unstoppable Force. One or Two healer in my back and i can literally tank the whole BG in Eye of the Storm or Warsong and before the Revenge nerf i was critting 75k with deathstrike.

If you go Holy or Ret is your choise, do you like to Heal your Mates or do you like to Carry your Group with your Damage? Ret and Holy is viable for PvP, Prot is just a bit weak. Maybe as Flagcarry, but nothing else.

[Snuggli]

First off, sorry to hear about your time apart, but you seem intelligent so I'm going to dive straight in and try to cover as much of your post as possible.


Should I spec Ret or Holy?
Really good question! You can look at the pro's and con's of each, but what it boils down to is personal preference, what you'll be doing and how confident you are with the two specs. You should always be playing WoW for enjoyment.

Ret
Good:

• Ret is one of the easier classes in PvP right now, meaning less buttons for you - and more time to concentrate on what other people are doing. (Which is hugely important in PvP)
• Ret's rotation is somewhat similar to PvE and if you have experience with the basic playstyle it'll help a ton.
• Ret is good when you're by yourself, and when you're with friends. It's a really good all-round class.

Bad:

• Ret doesn't perform so well in RBGs or Arena currently. In Arena you're limited to very few compositions. (comp for short, it means the 'team' of classes you're running with)
• Ret's damage is really bursty. You probably know that from playing it in pve, but it means you need to know 'when' to use your CDs like Wings and Zealotry, and not just use them on the opener as you might get CC'd for the entire duration of your burst.

Holy
Good:

• Much like Ret, Holy is quite easy to get your head round. There isn't really much depth to Holy play so it gives you more time to understand whats happening around you.
• Paladins have amazing burst healing with Wings/Divine Illu/Gaurdian.

Bad:

• Holy is probably the 3rd best healer currently (overall). Obviously different healers perform well in different situations.
• Once you've used your cooldowns you're fairly easy to kill.

Like I said before, this is all personal preference. I'd personally recommend Ret, but other people will recommend playing Holy. It's whatever you fancy.


Where do I start for gear?
Not sure what you mean here, so I'll cover everything and assume you know NOTHING about gearing in PvP.

First off, assuming you're not Human - the first thing you'll want to be buying is your PvP Trinket. This allows you to break ANY cc on yourself every 2 minutes. It's fantastic. After that, you'll want to buy gloves with Honor and shoulders with your first week of Conquest (explained in a bit). After that, it's whatever you want really. You can go for 4set or get the on-use strength trinket (if you pick ret). Getting 2set and PvP trinket asap is ideal though.

Conquest Points
These are earned through doing Rated Battlegrounds or Arena, and are capped to an amount based on your rating. With less than 1500 rating in Arena or RBGs, you have a 1650 cap. CQ Point cap resets every wednesday, and it only takes 8 Arena wins to cap it (if you have <1500).

Conquest point cap graph

Note: Rated Battlegrounds give a higher Conquest cap than Arena with the same rating.

Conquests points are used to buy Cataclysmic gear (iLevel 403), it is currently the best PvP gear available. You can buy this gear from this Horde Vendor or this Alliance vendor.


Honor Points
Honor points don't have a weekly cap. You can earn as much as you want although you can only hold 4000 at any one time. (You can hold as many conquests as you want). So make sure you spend your honor before you reach 4000.

Using honor points you can buy Ruthless gear (iLevel 390). This set of gear is the second best for PvP at the moment and will be your first port of call when preparing yourself for PvP.

Tol Barad is the fastest way to earn honor points, so remember to do it whenever it is up. Other than that, the only way is to Battleground spam.

You buy honor gear from Horde Vendor or Alliance Vendor.


What's really different in play style?
The main thing to understand is PvP is a whole different ball game to PvE. PvE is very 'rotation focused', you focus what you are doing most of the time, rather than what other people are doing.

In PvP, that swaps. You have to do your rotation almost subconsciously, whilst paying most of your attention to your positioning, team mates, health, cooldowns and most importantly enemies. There's nothing I can say other than play as much as you can and 'practice'.

In Battlegrounds it's less important, but definitely in Arena, always knowing what everyone else is doing is what really makes you good.


What's the difference between Arena, BG's and RBG's?
Battlegrounds are the casual aspect of PvP. They are very rarely taken seriously and are usually used to gear up characters so they can Arena or RBG afterwards. Some people BG full-time because they don't the hardcore aspect of rated PvP, or are just practising new gears or specs.

RBGs are 10v10 and are played on battleground maps. (Warsong gulch, Arathi Basin etc). The objective in RBGs is the objective of the battleground that you're playing on. These are just like battlegrounds but rated, award conquest points, titles, mounts and are premade vs premade. They are taken more seriously than normal BGs and can be really really exciting. RBG teams normally consist of a tank for flag carrying, 1-4 healers and the rest DPS.

Arena's are 2, 3 or 5 players against each other in a small map designed purely for fast, skilled, death-match style play. The first team to kill the people on the other team wins. The cap on Arena games is 45 minutes, although the games rarely, if ever, last that long in 3v3 and 5v5. The games are really fast paced and in my opinion, are the highest skilled area in WoW.

In playstyle, RBGs, BGs and Arenas are very different. Like jumping between levelling, normal dungeons and raiding. The general idea is the same, but the situations are hugely different. In RBGs and BGs you rarely ever have the ability to 'line of sight', so often more damage is being flung around and more healing is needed. People often wear PvE gear in BGs and RBG's aswell, just because it allows them to put out more damage and they are less likely to be attacked.

There's a lot of discussion that could be done on all the individual differences between them, too much for this one post.


Anything else you think I should know
You were right when you said there is lots of information out there. And honestly, it's hard to filter out what is useful. I'll try compile a list of useful websites for you:

Ret

• Vangaurds - Youtube Channel. This guy is one of the best Ret Paladins in the world. It might be worth watching a few He doesn't really do 'informative' videos though, just montages and gameplay etc.

Holy

• Sacredheals - Youtube Channel. He does RBGs, Arena and information videos about Holy Paladins. He's really really informative and if you look through his videos I'm sure there is LOADS of useful stuff you can find. I've been watching him since WotLK when I didn't even play a Paladin!

Both

• Macro's. You may not use these in PvE, but they will be your best friend in PvP, especially Focus macros. (/cast [@focus] Rebuke, etc).
• Paladin subforum - Arena Junkies. Some useful threads on here, sometimes.

Find Paladins on your own realm and have a little talk with them, talking 1 on 1 is always good. Hope I helped, anyway. There is a lot of information to take in, and I hope I haven't drowned you in it, but PvP is really fun and I really hope you get on with it.

[Syfy]

Want to rape and never die and irritate the hell out of everyone else including me, go holy, holy all the way.

Ret

• Vangaurds - Youtube Channel. This guy is one of the best Ret Paladins in the world. It might be worth watching a few He doesn't really do 'informative' videos though, just montages and gameplay etc.

Does he still play, haven't seen a video in a while of his.

[Deleted]

Should I spec Ret or Holy? depends if you enjoy healing or damage
Where do I start for gear? battlegrounds and get weekly conquest cap in arena
What's really different in play style? I've only ever tanked. Ever. It is harder, more stressful, more fun
What's the difference between Arena and BG's and RBG's? Arena is fun with a friend(s) on skype. Much skill needed to be good. BG's is just some killing and stuff, RBG is like BGs but with ratings and tactics.

extra info: watch some websites
www.arenajunkies.com

btw. You can also do DS without your bff? lol

[niteline]

Personally I have always played Prot on my paladin, during wotlk with 2 tank specs, during cata I mainly had holy OS but barely used it.
Now with DS I have Ret OS and i personally enjoy it. Being a pala tank in my guild means you get alot of OS gear so basically my holy and ret gear are near 395 ivl
But we talking peeveepee here.
I play several classes casually in pvp and one of those is a healer. Its enjoyable but can be very very boring at some points.
Holy is very fun if you queue up with multiple other people and is alot less fun when you play alone.
Ret is fun regardless.

iWolf has given you some amazing details allready so i will just help you with the ret/holy part.
I will asume you barely have resi and that makes ret by far the better choice.
If you never played ret you should download clcret and do some quests, see if you like it. If not go holy
Ret seems overwhelming at the start and not the faceroll it used to be. But the numbers the shinies and the complexness caught my eye and i play most of the bosses in DS as ret nowadays. Where I used to be the one saying, hell no you go dps to my GM

[Snuggli]

Does he still play, haven't seen a video in a while of his.

Yeah, he releases videos on Evolve now though. He's also swapped to livestreaming instead of frapsing->releasing videos, more $$$ that way.

[Gotjuice]

You should probably go read Arenajunkies.com they have great starting guides for all classes and specs. Yeah you need to bind everything if you want to be competitive in PvP. Duel a lot, it will help you learn the other classes abilities and how to counter them. I also found the addon tidy plates helps you a lot switching targets and just being aware of whats going.

[Deleted]

Also start to use binds! It's crucial!

Use 1-4, Q+E to start with. Bind the abilities you 1. need to reach fastest 2. most commonly used.

After you get comfortable with your few binds, add some more. I use 1-7,F1-F3 shift 1-5, §, Q, E, F, R, G, T, Y and shift + Q, E, F, R, G, T, Y for my SP and my rogue for example. My lock needs a dozen more

---------- Post added 2012-04-18 at 04:26 PM ----------

And since you play a paladin. You are not a warrior with fancier animations. You are a paladin. You are a great support class who do great utility for your team and do decent sustained damage and quite pimp burst (if you can keep your wings intact). So don't prance around and try 1v1 vs healers etc, it's not your job by far. You are a swiss army knife, use all your tools - for that you need some buddies around you!

[Gotjuice]

You should probably go read Arenajunkies.com they have great starting guides for all classes and specs. Yeah you need to bind everything if you want to be competitive in PvP. Duel a lot, it will help you learn the other classes abilities and how to counter them. I also found the addon tidy plates helps you a lot switching targets and just being aware of whats going.

[Lyssy]

Thank you everybody, but especially thank you iWolfBanei; your post was just above and beyond <3 I'll update with how things go.
Tol Barad is faster for Honor? That's a really good thing to know.

[Wonderbred]

Thank you everybody, but especially thank you iWolfBanei; your post was just above and beyond <3 I'll update with how things go.
Tol Barad is faster for Honor? That's a really good thing to know.

TB usually nets me about 500 honor for a win. Plus there is a weekly quest at the camp where you zone in that rewards another 200 honor for a win. And on my server even tho its a 4:1 horde dominated server we still win more that we lose on ally side. But a loss will still net you over 200 honor with most games lasting less that 10 mins.

[TaurenNinja]

Just some basic tips on how to start:

- PvP is a lot different from PvE. Both can be challenging but PvP will always be *MORE* challenging at higher ratings, more dynamic and more unpredictable. 3v3 Arena is the real deal for competitive gaming in WoW. Even though guilds like Paragon et al are impressive, a legit Gladiator level team is much more impressive.

- Watch guides and videos on how to gear, spec and play your chosen spec (you should be either Holy or Ret).
Always watch video guides from top players (Gladiators, Rank 1 players). There's a lot on Youtube. Also you don't necessarily have to watch videos about paladin gameplay only. It will help you a ton to know how the other classes play as well.

- At first, do random battlegrounds to get a feel for your spec, and to farm honor to buy the "lower level" PvP gear

- Until you have enough resilience (at least 4000, most likely more (I run disc priest with 4515)), you should gem and enchant for resilience so that you aren't so squishy at the beginning. A fully geared player can pretty much one-shot a low resilience player. Later on you optimize gemming and enchanting for your spec.

- Once you're full Honor PvP geared, or at least close to full (sometimes, having a PvE item or two does make perfect sense, especially trinkets or weapons can be really powerful from PvE. Sometimes, having the 2T13 bonus is also great, but it depends on the bonus), then you start doing Arena 2v2/3v3 or RBGs casually just for getting points. On the lower ratings, Arena is very easy and casual. If you get too high and it gets too hard, then simply create a new team so you will start from 0 again.

- With the conquest points you gain from Arena, you go ahead and buy the "best" PvP gear. Start with the weapon (usually). Also don't forget to get hit-capped and spell-penetration-capped as soon as possible, and don't go any higher than that cap (5% hit for melees, 4% hit for casters (= 410), 240ish spell pen (having just one PvP cloak or necklace providing spell penetration is enough to reach the cap)).

- Once you've accumulated a bit of conquest gear, you can start aiming for the higher ratings in Arena.



- You shouldn't play tank specs in PvP. You can do it for fun in BGs, but it will not help you become better. In Arena it's useless, you have quite a bit of CC but no damage to do anything. A healer has CC + healing, a DPS has CC + damage, a tank has CC and ... nothing. A tank in Arena can be ignored or CC'ed until his mates are dead, and then the tank dies as well. Provides nothing. The only exception where a tank in PvP is strong is in Rated Battlegrounds for flag carrying. But the best class for this is protection warrior due to his mobility and escape mechanisms. All other tanks die more easily in a stun + smokebomb + focus fire on him.
- Be sure to have your keybinds in the most efficient and optimal way possible for you
- Be sure to have focus cast macros for all your CCs at least, such as /cast [mod:shift,@focus] Rebuke; Rebuke
- Addons which are very helpful if you're not really good already are: Gladius, DiminishingReturns, BattlegroundTargets, GladiatorlosSA, LoseControl, Juked
- Learn everything about the other classes. PvP in WoW is very knowledge-based. Know each spec's cooldowns and timings.

Good luck.

[Deleted]

Ret

• Vangaurds - Youtube Channel. This guy is one of the best Ret Paladins in the world. It might be worth watching a few He doesn't really do 'informative' videos though, just montages and gameplay etc.

watch Vanguards 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz1xgp0dR24 . one of the best things on youtube (last match )

[Tyrean]

On the lower ratings, Arena is very easy and casual. If you get too high and it gets too hard, then simply create a new team so you will start from 0 again.

- With the conquest points you gain from Arena, you go ahead and buy the "best" PvP gear. Start with the weapon (usually). Also don't forget to get hit-capped and spell-penetration-capped as soon as possible, and don't go any higher than that cap (5% hit for melees, 4% hit for casters (= 410), 240ish spell pen (having just one PvP cloak or necklace providing spell penetration is enough to reach the cap)).

Good luck.

Just to quibble a little bit, the first part about remaking an arena team to continually face low ranked players is not how the system works. You have three ratings, your team rating, your personal rating for that team, and your match making rating. Your match making rating never gets reset and follows you in every bracket, and that is how you are matched for teams. Destroying and remaking teams does nothing but make you feel better about getting 96 points for a win instead of 5. Besides, you are better off in arena finding a couple of partners and working with them on the same team to get better together. If you are constantly swapping people and teams just to get points then that is all you will ever do.

Also, about gearing you cannot buy the conquest T1 weapons until you have earned about 8k conquest. This means for most people about 5 weeks since they will never have a cap higher than 1650. Once you reach that mark you can then purchase the weapon. So what you end up doing is saving your 3400 points for the weapon but spending anything else on gear. Try to update your main pieces first that do not drop out of baradin hold and do that each week for a chance at gear.

Finally, I am somewhat confident that paladins do not use spell penetration in any form as there is no resistance to holy damage, so ignore that part about gearing.


The best piece of advice I can possibly give you is make friends. Run BGs with 2-4 other people and you will win most of the time. Run them solo and you will lose most of the time. 4 people working together in a WSG game can carry some bads and win themselves. If you are running with 9 other solo players you will almost always lose.

[Deleted]

Also start to use binds! It's crucial!

Use 1-4, Q+E to start with. Bind the abilities you 1. need to reach fastest 2. most commonly used.

After you get comfortable with your few binds, add some more. I use 1-7,F1-F3 shift 1-5, §, Q, E, F, R, G, T, Y and shift + Q, E, F, R, G, T, Y for my SP and my rogue for example. My lock needs a dozen more

---------- Post added 2012-04-18 at 04:26 PM ----------

And since you play a paladin. You are not a warrior with fancier animations. You are a paladin. You are a great support class who do great utility for your team and do decent sustained damage and quite pimp burst (if you can keep your wings intact). So don't prance around and try 1v1 vs healers etc, it's not your job by far. You are a swiss army knife, use all your tools - for that you need some buddies around you!

While it is good to keybind, far superior to clicking in every way, some people are not accustomed to certain keybindings.
Me for example, I refuse to bind QE to other abilities because it feels really awkward to me but I use shift, ctrl, alt modifiers, f1-f4 and so on.

OP should apply some, but the others he doesn't feel comfortable on then it doesn't matter....or he has a naga for easymode.