I do a lot of battlegrounds, seeing as I'm working on my battlemaster title (not currently, dead computer and all (helped by the shameless donate button to the right, 40$ (thanks Blarr) out of 120$ towards the goal of a new motherboard) and be it on my hunter, rogue or baby shaman i see a lot of bad trapping/obvious trapping. plain and simple: THEY'RE FUCKING TRAPS. I would have liked to make a video for this, but you'll have to deal with my poorly drawn MS paint pictures.
Trap leading 101:
Leading:
You can either be the kiter, or the kitee. Whoever you're kiting is going to follow you out of necessity and normally in a straight line. This is why trap placement is important and why leading plays a large part as well. we'll start with the most important, freeze trap leading. let's look at the first example:
if the trap is laid by the hunter (SV tree icon) while kiting to try and LoS the target (blue square)
The target is going to follow your kiting path and take the most direct route and follow to where you're going
where he'll bypass your poorly laid trap
You're going to the pillar/rock/wall anyway, so just keep going and concussive shot to get a little breathing room. Lay your trap around the back.
bait your target with an arcane (MM,BM) or explosive (SV) shot and run back behind the LoS, you now have two means of trapping your target. Whichever way he goes around said LoS you have a chance to trap.
Now is your chance to gain some distance and continue the kiting process, if he trinkets the freeze trap you can now scatter shot to negate it and take off (my favorite: feign death and mount). Once you hit about 35 yards you can break your freezing trap and keep kiting.
We'll take a brief recess with some tips:
- Jumping is a part of kiting, but it is also a part of trapping believe it or not. When you lay traps you perform the /kneel animation, most don't pick it up but many do. Lay your traps while jumping to mask that animation.
- Do your damnedest to get rid of mark of the wild with tranquilizing shot, you're going to hit a lot of very annoying resists due to traps going off the spell hit table (hurp) and not being effected by spell penetration (durp)
Funneling:
In a way, the best trap is an obvious trap. Not to contridict myself from earlier though, obvious meaning "why the hell wouldn't i put a trap there". Funneling is taking away the option of not eating that trap. let me show you a part of my favorite area in the entire game
The doorway that leads to blackrock depths (big thanks to Shirco of RH for the screenshot), a trap here is like laying a trap in the center of the chain, you have no way to avoid it if you're chasing. When you run through a doorway in any battleground you can lay a freeze trap there and know that your eating/bandaging/drinking won't be interrupted while you sit out of LoS (barring rogue disarms, but you had a flare covering the entire outside of the door right?)
now get out there and make Admiral Ackbar not know what hit him!
questions, comments, you know where they go.
