Wintergrasp: Offensive Tactics

This is a continuation of my general series of Wintergrasp guides; this installment involves the offensive team in a Wintergrasp match.

For the remainder of this post, I will be referring to Outer and Inner courtyards and walls. The Inner Courtyard is marked in red on the map above; the Outer Courtyards in yellow. The walls surrounding the Inner Courtyard are, predictably, Inner walls; the ones which follow the perimeter of the fortress are Outer walls.

Ten Goals and Backing Into Them
Let’s start with something simple. The ultimate goal of a Wintergrasp Offense? To win. And how do we do that? We channel the orb. So.

Step 10: Channel the Orb.
Step 9: Clear the Keep, engage all the living defenders, or sneak a stealthed player in and hope they don’t get noticed until the capture is complete.
Step 8: Breach the Keep.
Step 7: Clear the defenses of the Inner Courtyard enough to get a vehicle through to attack the Keep door.
Step 6: Break through to the Inner Courtyard, preferably from multiple directions.
Step 5: Destroy enough of the defenses in the Outer Courtyards to attack the Inner walls from the Outer Courtyards.
Step 4: Breach a wall into an Outer Courtyard. Best done from multiple spots at once.
Step 3: Clear the wall defenses enough to get a vehicle next to the Outer walls.
Step 2: Sieze and hold the midline workshops.
Step 1: Rank up enough to take control of a vehicle.

On Being Sneaky
It is a huge advantage to be in the battleground before the fighting starts. You can’t do this in the Battleground system, but Wintergrasp does allow for this kind of trickery. You can get yourself into a good spot before the fight officially begins. As offense, I find the best trick is to pick a wall- the ones circled in red in the illustration are good ones- and camp yourself there just before the match starts.

Wintergrasp is brutally hard to fight without rank. Rank is achieved by kills. If you’re standing next to a deserted wall when the match starts and the turrets spawn, you can kill them quite rapidly. What does this mean?

You’re now a Corporal. Oh, and there’s an underdefended keystone wall. There’s goals two and three out of the way within ten seconds of the match starting. Now run back, capture a midline workshop if your side hasn’t already, and get yourself a catapult. Oh look, there’s objective one and you’re now equipped to work on four.

What is a Keystone Wall?

The walls circled in red in the illustration above are the west and east keystone walls. Why do I call them that?

1. Each has a relatively safe approach, denoted by the red-dot paths. These are by no means foolproof approaches, but they do have the advantage of shielding you from some incoming fire via terrain or range.
2. Each is underdefended. Even if you haven’t stripped all the turrets off the walls- which is one of the few things infantry truly excels at in the early game- there are only three turrets (marked as yellow dots)- which can bring you under their guns.
3. Each provides easy access to one of the outer courtyards. The other possible approach to an outer courtyard is of course the South Courtyard, but that is extremely well-defended.

Breaching either of these walls will get you objective 4 and provide a serious advantage to your performance in objective 5.

Stopping the Crush
So you’ve breached an outer wall. You’re in one of the outer courtyards. Now what? Well, if you’re in the South Courtyard (marked as the yellow dot)… you may be in for some trouble.

See the two vehicle factories in the East and West Outer Courtyards? Those are going to keep pumping out vehicles.

“No big deal,” you scoff. “I’m in another area entirely.”

The orange and red dots are vehicle-usable teleports. Driving a vehicle onto the orange dot places you at the black circle. Driving onto the red one places you at the gray circle. Now, if you, as the offense, are at the yellow circle with a breached wall behind (or worse, beside!) you, vehicles will shortly teleport outside the keep, come pouring through the breach, and hit you from behind… and then set up a defensive blockade you’ll have to fight through.

Instead, focus on breaching one of the side courtyards, and then destroy the factory inside it.

I cannot emphasize enough how important this is to proper offensive strategy in Wintergrasp. Destroy the factory in whichever side you manage to penetrate..

Why? Simple. The most efficient ways to destroy a vehicle are a turret or another vehicle. Turrets are immobile, non-replaceable and highly vulnerable to infantry. Vehicles have none of these weaknesses- they are the bigger threat. If I am in the West Courtyard and destroy the West Courtyard Workshop, any vehicles that wish to attack me must construct in the East Courtyard, drive to the red dot, get teleported to the gray dot, and go all the way around the keep to use the breach that I’ve made in the wall. This gives me a lot of time to wreak havoc on the walls and defenses in there. If you manage to destroy both workshops, the defenders literally cannot bring vehicles against you as long as you hold the midline workshops (which, naturally, you will always want to do!). Oh, hey… that’s objective 5 gone. That means it’s only a matter of keeping the infantry off you long enough to smack down an inner courtyard wall… and there’s objective 6.

Courtyards and Chaos
The Inner Courtyard is going to be chaotic. There will be possibly enemy vehicles, depending on how well you destroyed the vehicle workshops. There are definitely going to be enemy players and quite powerful NPCs attempting to kill your vehicles before they reach the keep doors. There are turrets. The Inner Courtyard is not a hospitable place.

Your job is simple. Get a vehicle to the Keep door and destroy it. In execution, perhaps a little trickier.

Demolishers and Siege Engines shine here. A turret-cannon can sweep great crowds of defenders in two or three shots. Demolishers, meanwhile, are lobbing fireballs into the fray and if you have a couple ranged classes in the cupola they can pick off turrets and infantry while you rumble towards the Keep door. Both vehicles, on reaching that objective, can do extensive damage to the door in only a few seconds. Catapults drop in usefulness in this phase- while one or two of them provide excellent anti-infantry support, they do not have the siege damage necessary to punch through the Keep door in a hurry, so attempting to mob the Inner Courtyard with them is a bad idea.

Then We Take It, and Probably Run
Once the Keep is breached, catapults begin to shine again. They move faster than the other two classes and require only a single pilot, and are excellent anti-infantry. This is important, as the typical defensive strategy at this point is to swarm in the orb room attempting to tag anything that comes in. Four catapults can clear a wide enough swath for a player to run in and attempt a capture.

If you are heavily outnumbered in the Keep, it might be good policy to hit the portal to Dalaran located in the front corner as soon as you have a confirmed win- that, or dive through the raid portal at the back of the room. A victory announcement in Wintergrasp is typically followed by a purge of the keep by the mass of players on hand, and the Tenacity buff vanishes when one faction is ceded control of the zone. This means that your five valiant Night Elf Demigods with their 12-stack Tenacity are going to be reduced, abruptly, to victorious but once-again merely mortal players who are surrounded by two dozen very angry Horde who can’t raid the Vault, can’t farm Elements, and are just itching to do something to avenge the loss they’ve just suffered.