Learn essential World of Warcraft PvP strategies, including crowd control, team focus, defense, and gear optimization for level 80 players. Dominate battlegrounds!
Almost all of PvP boils down to stunning, fearing, or freezing someone. Once you do these to a player they are almost certainly dead. Only healers can stay alive for very long, while paladins can stay alive for any amount of time and cause lots of damage, so go figure.
Everyone has a way to break these effects using the trinkets sold by PvP vendors in your faction's capitol where you buy the other gear.
The main idea in PvP is to not take on a losing fight. Sometimes you just don't know how dangerous a fight is, but you never want to take on more enemies than you are bringing. It's a bad idea to think that just because you see enemies you should attack them. BUT of course this does not apply to pallys, as they can stay alive and hold 4 players on them, all by themselves for a good amount of time.
Part of PvP is the art of decoying/baiting. Just as you don't want to engage in a losing battle, players are also a bit to anxious to chase down a single enemy with four players. If there are 10 players in a line casting or fighting enemies in front of them, and you ride your mount straight through that line, I promise that over half of the group will turn around and either focus on you or if they can't stop you they will chase you. Most Arathi, SotA, and AV turtlings can be helped by just not fighting and breaking enemy focus by just spreading out.
NOTE: Turtle means when one team is stuck in one spot, it means that team has lost 99.99% of the time. 0.01% of the time all the turtling players will realize that spreading out and not engaging the attackers head on is the only way to take the enemy off of you.
There is a hard-to-explain key to battlegrounds, and that is one team's overall focus. Take Arathi Basin for example. The horde team may be better (aka they have more pallys), but if their best players are roaming in one large group and hording to one node while the best ally players are spread out, then the horde team will lose because while they may have more kills, they are not defending. While conversely, if they are spread out and failing to solo a node and dying in the process, then their team will be behind a lot for it. Take 3 rogues for example trying to solo nodes and failing, they are making it 12 vs 15 for the rest of the map. Basically, all nodes really need equal numbers defenders and attackers, and whichever side wins more battles, that team will win quickly.
And all the BGs will say this, but defense is the key. All nodes, which are areas fought over, should not be left unguarded, even if it's just one player to stall the enemy from a capture. However, 3 players defending a node either squashes solo attempts, or has the other team ask for more attackers. If 5 players attack 3 players at one node, sure, the 5 will win, but for the rest of the map it's 10 on 12.
One final note is for level 80s. Once at 80 you should have a set of gear for dungeons, quests, and raids, and also a set for PvP. All the PvP comes from PvP vendors and sometimes from raid drops. But if you use these for PvE, at some point they will be replaced with true PvE gear. This means you should put resilience enchants and gems on all your PvP gear; even if they already have good stuff, you need resilience. Of course there is a great balance between res and stuff for tanking/dps/healing, which is to have at least 600-800 res and then go all out for whatever; with crits being not so important for PvP. And finally, you have Elixirs of Ironskin and Lesser Flasks of Toughness for added res.
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