Commander Camp 12: Winning World vs. World Fights

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Hey everyone, this is Sheff, and welcome back to Commander Camp. In today's video, we're going to tackle a topic that I've had on my mind since making the very first Commander Camp video, and that's about how to win a fight against another organized group in World vs. World. Now, we've touched on some elements of taking and winning fights in previous Commander Camps. Commander Camp 2 was about positioning, while Commander Camp 6 was about making squad comps, and you might want to re-watch those videos before this one to refresh your memory, as we're going to use some of the same principles in this video as well. But what we haven't done yet in this series is explicitly gone through winning a fight step by step. Now, this is a big and complicated topic, and there's no way to cover everything in a single video, no matter how long you make it. So instead, we're going to talk about the most basic parts of organized World vs. World fights, and in future videos, we can break down each of these parts further, and explore them in more detail. My intent for this video is that it serves as a foundation that we can build on for later, but gives enough information that you can start to apply some of the things that we talk about here in the squads that you command. As always, if there's a specific topic that you want to know more about, you can use the video timestamps and chapter markers to navigate to where you want to go. So with that said, let's dive in.

There are four steps to winning a fight against another organized squad in World vs. World. These four steps are the pre-fight, the spike, the downstate, and the refresh. All else being equal, things like group size and relative group skill, the squad that is better at executing these four steps will usually be the squad that wins a fight. Your own strategy for approaching each of these steps will depend on your preferences as a commander, and the way that you've built your squad, but they follow the same general rules.

The pre-fight step involves finding a good position for your squad to fight, applying boons like Might and Swiftness before the fight begins, and making sure that players are stacked on your tag and ready to move at the same time. It's during the pre-fight that you want to make sure that you aren't fighting under siege, like Arrow Carts or Cannons, as these can shred your group if you get pulled into combat near them. Similarly, you want to make sure that you are minimizing your chances of having to push through a hard choke, up stairs, or around difficult terrain, as these are all places that can split up your squad. Long-duration boons like Might and Swiftness are good to stack before you start fighting, and can also help remind people that it's time to focus up and that there's a fight in front. I personally like to call for blasting fire fields before a fight starts, as a general call that lots of professions in my squads can contribute to. But you can also stack Might with Guardian Staff 4, or with For Great Justice on Warrior, or whatever else you use in your comp. It also pulls people back to tag and gets everybody stacked up and ready to move -- if players in your squad aren't on tag when you are preparing to fight not only are they missing out on boons, but they're also making themselves easier to target when a fight actually begins.

The key to success in the pre-fight is awareness of where your group is, and where enemy groups are. You are trying to maneuver your squad into the most favorable position that you can find in terms of positioning and boon uptime. If you imagine a case where you catch an enemy group completely by surprise, with something like a portal, or a veil push, or hiding around a corner, you've denied an enemy group the opportunity to apply boons or stack to tag at all, and as a result, that group will be much weaker. This is one of the easiest ways to get an advantage over another group, but you can also watch the boon bar of an enemy squad as you're looking for good positioning, and you can think about pushing more aggressively if you notice that they aren't stacked up, or applying any boons of their own. In the following clip, I'll show you an example of my pre-fight decision making, the kind of terrain that I'm looking for, and the calls that I'm making in Discord to get people focused up and ready to fight.

[[ fight clip, 30-45s ]]

After the pre-fight comes the spike. This is the portion of the fight where your squad has committed to casting high-impact damage skills, like Necromancer Wells, or Scrappers' Napalm and Acid Bomb. It's also the point in the fight when your supports are rolling their strongest cooldowns, like Guardians' Stand Your Ground or Druids' Celestial Avatar. The goal of a spike is to put enemy players into downstate by removing boons, applying hard crowd control effects, and applying overwhelming damage, all in a very short amount of time, with the goal of generating downs. Groups will often spike very close to one another, with one group initiating a spike and the second group counter-spiking in response, after avoiding or mitigating the initial hit. So in this portion of a fight, you're balancing your attention between the best time and location to spike, with making sure that you aren't standing in the spike of the group that you're fighting. It can also be useful to mentally keep track of big cooldowns that you've seen an enemy group use, so that you know what else they have available and when their cooldowns are likely to be up again. The decision to be the initial spike or the counter-spike is usually something that comes down to how you build your squad, and how you are most comfortable commanding. As an example, Ruthless, KnT's main commander, is very aggressive. He will lead a fight with a spike right at the start, and force the other group onto the defensive early. On the other hand, I'm a more passive commander, and will wait to fully commit to a spike until I've seen an opponent make a mistake in positioning, waste their own spike, or see a split in their squad's movement. When you decide to deploy your spike is up to you, but the spike phase of a fight also means recognizing when your opponent is choosing to use their biggest cooldowns, and either mitigating or avoiding that damage through positioning, dodging, heals, and condition clears.

The key to a good spike is getting players in your squad to use their damage skills at the same time, and in the same place. Similarly, the key to avoiding a good spike from an opponent is dodging out of red circles, playing tight, and spreading out damage across all players in your squad. If you think about two 25-man groups fighting, most current World vs. World squads will run one Necro per party, which means a spike is usually going to be five sets of wells. If your squad isn't stacked up, those wells are more likely to hit a few specific players in your squad who aren't on tag for a lot of damage, rather than hitting everybody in your squad but minimizing the damage and boon removal per individual player. Your goal in choosing when to spike is picking a point in a fight where your enemy is a little spread out, and you can catch people who aren't on tag with a lot of damage, while at the same time avoiding the same thing happening to you. In this clip, I'll try and point out the things that I'm looking for when I'm choosing to spike an enemy group.

[[ fight clip, 30-45s ]]

The third stage of a fight is the downstate. The winner of a World vs. World fight isn't decided by who does the most overall damage. Instead, it's decided by which side is able to generate and convert the most downed players, while avoiding their own losses. If your group has a successful spike it will result in enemy downs, but these downs must still be converted to full deaths before they can be rallied or resurrected. So it's in this stage of a fight that rez utility skills like Warriors' Battle Standard, Druids' Spirit of Nature, and Tempests' Glyph of Renewal have the largest impact. But outside of these utility skills, you can also hand-rez individual downed players, or those downed players can rally if a corresponding enemy down is converted to a full death. You may have heard other players in the game talk about a "rally war", and that's the point in a fight when both sides have downs on the ground and are struggling to rez allies and convert enemies, and it's these points that truly dictate the overall outcome. Speed is everything here, as most groups will focus damage on enemy players in downstate, or precast rez utilities to catch their own downed players early.

Decisions that you make in the downstate stage of a close fight are some of the most challenging decisions that you'll make as a commander, because winning the downstate stage of a close fight rewards both aggressive as well as defensive decision-making. If you trust the offensive momentum of your group, sometimes it's correct to simply sit on an enemy clump of downs until they are converted, putting the full weight of incoming damage onto your healers and support players. Similarly, there are times when you need to sit on top of your own downed players to help spread out and mitigate incoming damage so that they can be safely resurrected. It's generally a bad decision to pull off of a spot when you have downed players from your squad, because it almost guarantees that they will be converted or put back into downstate if they do get rezzed. But there's also times when it's a bad decision to try and stick resurrects on your downed players, because the incoming damage is too much for your squad to sustain and the players in downstate were already stuck in a bad position. In general, there's no safe heuristics to use here, and the only way to improve at this element of fighting is through repeated experience and reviewing your own past decisions. Sometimes you can use downed players as momentum, or a turning point in a fight, and sometimes you have to know when to cut your losses for the sake of better chances later in a fight. In the following clip, I'll point out some of the things that I'm looking for and paying attention to during this portion of a fight.

[[ fight clip, 30-45s ]]

Finally, we have the last stage of a fight, the refresh. You may not always reach this stage in a fight -- sometimes you have a good pre-fight, a good spike, and clean downstates, and a fight is over after a single push. But for close fights that drag on for awhile, the refresh is an important step to regroup and turn a fight in your advantage. You can think of the refresh like a small reset button. It's a chance to make space between your squad and your opponent's squad, to recover cooldowns, and to make sure that impactful damage and support skills are available so that you can try to spike again. There's a delicate balance in choosing when to refresh your squad, because refreshing does two things for your opponent -- it signals that your group is vulnerable because it's running low on cooldowns, and it also gives your opponent an opportunity to refresh as well and reset their own cooldowns. Some groups may see you attempting to refresh and use that opportunity to continue to push. And because a refresh usually means moving away from an enemy, it's a point in a fight where your squad may not be stacked tight on tag, making it easy to pick off stragglers.

As a result, the key to a successful refresh is all about timing. You want to pick an opportunity to refresh when your opponent will have a difficult time following up with their own damage, but you don't want to refresh for so long that the fight completely resets and you're back to square one. A well-timed refresh is an opportunity to take back the momentum in a fight, and potentially build a mismatch in cooldowns where your group has a spike ready before the opponent does, but a poorly timed refresh can give away your momentum in a fight completely, and turn a close win into a close loss. At any rate, after a successful reset, you should be looking to start this process over from either the pre-fight or the spike, depending on how long you refreshed. And you can go through this sequence as many times as you need to -- spike, downstate, refresh -- until a winner has been decided. In this final clip, I'll show you how I approach the process of resetting mid-fight.

[[ fight clip, 30-45s ]]

Like I mentioned at the start of this video, we've only just barely scratched the surface on what goes into commanding close, competitive squad fights against another comped group. And in future videos, we're going to dive deeper into the decision making, squad comping, and general awareness that goes into each of these steps. But I hope that at least for now, this gives you a basic template to look at your own squads, and start to figure out where and how you can improve. If you're enjoying Commander Camp and you want to see more videos like this one be sure to subscribe to the channel and like the video, and if there's anything you didn't understand, or wanted to see covered in this video, drop me a comment to let me know. I also play World vs. World on Twitch, so if you wanted to watch me command over there I try and stream every Tuesday and Wednesday evening. But until then, I've been Sheff, and enjoy the rest of your day.