STAGE 1
- Stomping
- Rezzing
- CC
- Communication
These are SO important. You need to learn to analyse the situation, but these things are the most important in Tournament PvP. If someone is down and an enemy is too, get the turnaround by stomping the enemy. If the enemy is stomping our player first, CC him, then deal with the situation by either rezzing our player or using stability to stomp theirs. This brings me on to the next point. If you can, bring some CC, bring some Stability. I roll with a Stun on one weapon set and an AoE knockdown on the other. One of these will ALWAYS be up as a get out of jail card for my team if someone is being stomped. My utility 7 is Stability, and although I don't expect everyone to have it on my team, at least two need it. Your Bunker Guardian really comes into their own when they have stability to Stomp and a cooldown or two to help Rez.
The communication comes into this part of things when you are ABOUT to go down. You will never hear me going under 20% health without saying "I'm about to go down" and moving towards someone. You will never hear someone saying "I'm about to go down" without my team's bunker Guardian moving towards them ready to pop a protective cooldown and get them up. This is good play. Think about it and practice it.
STAGE 2
- Targetting
- Fighting on point
- Communication
When you feel like you have mastered the awareness of the downed state, the next step is how to get people there, and more importantly how to get them downed whilst still holding the point. Targetting is self explanatory. Focus fire is needed to get anywhere. An example is one player immobilizing whilst the main DPS unleashes cooldowns. I've done this a few times with individuals on my team and the targeted guy is down in 3 seconds.
As well as this new players need to get better at fighting on points. If you are in a 1v1 or even a 2v2 you need to focus on keeping the point, just in case you lose the fight. This means watching out for engineer big bombs, using your CC to not get knocked off the point and most importantly NEVER get caught fighting out in the middle of nowhere.
Communication, again. Team mates want to hear people telling them numbers of enemy, class of enemy, if you can take them 1v1 (if not then say so and a member of your team should come help! don't be embarrassed about it.), when you're dropping your big cooldowns, when you're dropping combo fields and MOST importantly when you are using hard CC on the target.
STAGE 3
- Theorycrafting
- Maps
- Tactics
- Communication (is anyone noticing a theme here?)
This is the last stage. Once you have got everything above nailed down. Do not try and do this all at once. This is the distillation of a number of posts I made to my guild over the course of 6 weeks or so from launch. It is like building a house. Get the foundation right, and then build it tall.
Get to know your class. I don't mean what you think I mean. Obviously you all know your class and by this point will have played it a fair bit. What I mean is know it in SPvP. Read blogs, look at builds, try them out. See what other people are finding success with in Tournaments and try it yourself. Work out if something you haven't tried before might be amazingly useful to the team, broaden your skillset.
Maps and Tactics are quite similar. Firstly, know the map from your own point of view. Can you break LoS on Keep? Can you jump up to Clocktower using the houses on Khylo? Do you know the best place to stand to watch Graveyard and Quarry on Foefire? etc etc. The Tactics side of things is watching videos online, playing games, making mental notes of things that worked against you well.
Communication...... Talk to your team. Get practices going. Share build ideas. Create builds WITH each other to get real synergy. If someone is struggling with a build, spend 30 minutes with them on mumble talking to them and helping them out.
Have a go at getting these nailed down step by step and it will really help you get out of hotjoin and find a good Tournament PvP team!
