Eric Replied

The “Hard Counter”
You’ve probably heard the term thrown around before: the Hard Counter (HC). The concept brings fear and pain to most teams. It is the team setup that has a strong advantage in several aspects against your team: mobility, healing strength, CCs, and DPS.

Hard Counters are somewhat debatable. What one team perceives as “easy” another might label it a Hard Counter (a little misuse of the term, but I’ll allow it). I know when I go into a match, and I see “Shadow Priest, Warlock, Rogue,” I cringe a little. You might be thinking, “Great, Shin, now how do we battle back. How do we win?” (Okay, you’re probably not really thinking that.)

No Hope Doesn’t Mean Give Up
I think the best response quote would be, “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.” The fight should not revolve around “hoping you win.” Every action you make and every tactic you take (good song lyrics) generates an almost automatic response from the opposition. Everything comes down to perfect execution (or awfully close to it) and tactical game play.

Here’s some general guidelines:

Heavy DPS or Burst Teams:
Force them to spread their damage out over time instead of in bursts. DPS Heavy teams thrive on the fact that they can burst someone down before a healer can pull off a heal.
Team Examples: [Spriest/Lock/Rogue], [Rogue/Warrior/Druid]

Heavy Drain Teams:
Play hard into their healer. Most Drain teams revolve around the priest’s mana burn and some form of Drain Mana a long with Viper Sting. Stopping or even slowing down the mana burns increases your heal time. It helps to even have your healers also play burn back or to even have your healers run DPS on the healers. Aggressive play forces them to play defensively as they can’t easily go back onto the offense.
Team Examples: [Priest/Warlock/Hunter]

Dot and Run Teams:
Cleanse everything. Yes, I realize that it’s easy to heal through the damage. This isn’t the point though! Things like Siphon Life and Corruption give Warlocks practically endless mana, and instant Shadow Bolts.
Team Examples: [Warlock/Rogue/Druid]

Chain CC Teams:
Abuse the fact that they’re looking to CC you. Make them come to you. The best bet is typically to aim for their worst CC’er and try to pressure him into playing offensively.
Team Examples: [Priest/Rogue/Mage],  [Druid/Rogue/Warlock]

At the End of the Day
If it comes to fighting the dreaded team over and over and over, it might be better for the long term to retune your team composition or just stop queueing for the night. It’ll save you some sanity, some effort, and your points.

-ERP-

What’s with the lack of WoW Images?
Well, I was feeling a little more creative than usual, so I decided it’d be fun to change the imagery a little bit by introducing some non-Warcraft images. Source for the image in this post came from Apple (in case you didn’t know who they were, the guy on the left is a PC, and the guy on the right is a Mac).

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 3:57 pm.
Filed under 2v2, 3v3, 5v5, Theorycraft, WoW PvP.
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