World of Warcraft is, despite appearances, not a game about swords and magic.  It’s a game about mind-reading.  It’s about being able to predict what your opponent will do next and act to counter it before it even happens, if possible.  It’s about knowing that you’re about to eat a Blind because your trinket is down and your partner’s hots are about to expire – given what you know, right now, what do you do next?

A tip that I wish to offer pvp healers: turn off friendly nameplates.  The way they float on top of the action encourages you to focus on them instead of the enemy.  Get Grid instead.  I cannot praise Grid loudly enough – friendly targets that are out of range are dimmed, so you have an at-a-glance overview of everybody in range of your heals, and you can tuck it somewhere out of the way so it doesn’t unnecessarily distract you.  It is indescribably important that you watch the enemy for clues to their intent and begin acting before they have all their debuffs in place and can start dishing out insane damage.

I’d also like to say a few words on game balance.  World of Warcraft is, for the most part, pretty well-balanced.  I have one or two major reservations on that theme, though.

For instance, at the present time, Destruction Warlocks are out of their skulls with power.  See, this system of mind-reading only works if the skills involved are weighted properly – a certain attack (or set of attacks) with too much weight break the system.  Chaos Bolt’s cooldown doesn’t justify the extreme amount of damage it can do, especially when combined with Conflagrate, which hits absurdly hard for an instant.

See, Warlocks are very squishy at the moment, and tend to die rather quickly.  To fix this, the balance team tweaked and twisted and made one rather large mistake:  rather than increase the Warlock’s survivability by giving them more passive defense, they shot their outgoing damage through the roof.  This breaks the delicate mind-reading game:  Warlocks do so much damage, and take so much damage, that the best tactic in the majority of cases is to focus-fire the Warlock.  This takes away a lot from the opposing team, because their opening gambit is no longer a variable; they are going to shut down our Warlock, and that gives us an edge because we can now predict the match.

In general, I approve of WotLK’s higher burst damage – killing a high-resilience healer in TBC was a nigh-impossible task.  But as usual, the balance team tweaked too far – there are times I’ve been insanely nuked by a destro lock, through hots, before I was even given the opportunity to cast a real heal.

When I do battlegrounds, it is my distinct misfortune to bear witness to a great deal of disorganization.  Whether it is my own faction (which is easy to observe, just check the map) or the enemy’s (like when you watch the same two opponents come back to the same flag guarded by the same pair of rogues and resto druid, over and over, every time they rez), I can’t help but feel that this would be a lot better if people made some kind of plan in advance and tried to think broadly instead of trying to figure out which button to press next to make the yellow numbers appear.

For instance, take the AB that I /afk-ed out of last night (I seriously don’t do this often – I feel that once you involve yourself in a fight you should stick with it to the end, but… there are exceptions).

It started out looking like we were going to steamroll this one and crush the opposition.  We rode out at the speed of an Aura Mastery’d Crusader, mercilessly threw the enemy back, and managed to capture 4 of the nodes!  It was looking good – there was defense at the node I was guarding, we’d even captured the enemy’s main node – no mean feat – and my map showed that our entire force had pushed them back into their starting graveyard.

Well, then it all went to hell.

The Enemy managed to gain a foothold and repel our force to a point exactly equidistant from 3 other nodes (i.e., fighting in the freaking road), and apparently at this point my entire faction got totally baked or something, because then I was to bear witness to the most embarrassing failure of Arathi Basin 101 (gives me an idea for a new post, hmm) that I have ever barely managed to restrain from gouging my eyes out after observing.

Everybody has been that lone defender that gets Sapped while the enemy destealths and attempts to capture your flag (and if you trinket the Sap, you get blinded and ninja-capped anyway – which you can fix by not standing directly on the flag in the first place, so the rogue wastes time in transit), but that wasn’t what happened, no.

Earlier, when I said our entire force pushed the Enemy back into their GY?  Well, once that failed, instead of moving on to the next plan, they all – to a one – kept riding back to the same equidistant-from-everything spot on the road and tried to push them back again.

Anyway, the node ninjaing was performed not by a skilled rogue, but by a mage with 15,000 health, because our impressive 4 nodes were undefended in the slightest.  We went from 4-1 to 1-4 inside of a few minutes (including our own main node) because none of our people could tear themselves away from this epic road-fight to GO AND RE-CAP OUR NODES.

Going by myself (resto druid lol) would not only be suicide, but as I was one of only two people on the entire battlefield defending anything at this point, getting killed and having our final node re-capped would only be the 5-capped icing on this failcake.

Once it became clear that my faction had silently admitted defeat and was reduced to trying to farm honor in the middle of nowhere while the Enemy giggled, I couldn’t bear it any longer and /afk I went.

Now, everybody who plays this game thinks that their faction is the worst at everything.  Different people deal with this different ways – the majority swallows their words and says nothing, a relatively few decide that the best way to alleviate their frustration is to get on /bg chat and tell everybody that they are the worst thing since that olive loaf stuff.  The saddest part of this mentality is that as obviously damaged as it is, any attempt to correct the complainer is met with greater hostility, as though enough verbal razing will somehow make the situation better.

I’ve had a few people tell me “your horrible” and “uninstall the game pls” because one of my pasttimes is to flame the people in chat that take this route of brainless harassment – grammar aside, it’s obvious that they realize that their behavior is wrong on some level given the manner in which they defend it:  “You are bad at this game because you dare to call me wrong, and I am the best there ever was,” said to derail the conversation rather than face criticism of their own.

There is a third option here, taken by virtually none – constructive criticism.  The /bg assault is partially to blame for this;  people who might have a good idea are afraid to voice it because an acrid retort is too often the reward.

Basically it comes down to this:

• Keep an eye on the world.  Heading directly back into the Enemy zerg is often not the correct maneuver (not always, however, it is a valid delaying tactic sometimes) – undefended nodes are bad.  If there’s a node that you own that nobody is watching, consider all the options before riding back unto certain death.
• COMMUNICATE.  Nobody does this – at its most generous, every once in a while you’ll get lucky enough to see “INC BS” while there’s still enough time for it to matter.  Guarding a node alone is a fool’s errand (unless you can reliably perform a 1vX, which even pro pvpers admit requires luck).  Get in /bg and say so.  This is a tip best combined with the first one – pay attention to what your compatriots are asking for and consider the alternatives of rushing back into the Enemy’s ranks.
• Use all of your abilities!  Same as for healers, if you have a crowd control ability and you see a use for it (for instance, say you’re a Mage.  You see a priest winding up a huge heal – counterspell and sheep his priestly ass!  For improved results (if you can spare the time), throw a few ice lances at him while he’s silenced to make Polymorph harder to dispel through all your garbage.
• Watch for opportunities to chain CC.  If you see that priest is about to pop out of Poly and you happen to be a Warlock this time, drop a pair of fears on him.  I say a pair because priests have Fear Ward (and some of them have WotF, too) – this relates directly to bullet #1.
• Protect your teammates.  An individual scrum in a battleground often revolves around numerical superiority.  If you stand idly by and let Enemies eliminate one of your friends while you keep attacking the same guy that nobody else is attacking, the balance of power has shifted in the Enemy’s favor.
• Focus fire.  Instead of randomly attacking names clicked out of a mess of them, click your teammates instead and attack their target, even if they aren’t attacking the “smart” targets – double dps on one target is more effective than split dps on two.  Ever heard of Binding Heal?

1200 words is enough for one beastly long post.  My last piece of advice is, don’t be that jagoff cursing out your team in /bg chat, because there’s a very good chance that you’re much more useless than you seem to think you are.