Warrior PVP Guide: Eye of The Storm – How to be successful in WOTLK PVP Part. 6

Eye of the Storm is basically a hybrid of WSG and AB. It’s capture the flag + king of the hill all rolled up into one convenient package.
Objective: Capture the flag and be king of the hill

I’m going to assume you know the layout for reference I’m going to use the terms Upper Left(UP), Upper Right (UR), Lower Left(LL) and LR(Lower Right) to denote the 4 different towers. I’m doing this because if you’re horde your LL is different from alliance LL as the map is flipped. I’ll also use the term MID to denote the flag spot.

Eye of the Storm is very similar in nature to Arathi Basin a semi decently coordinated offense can generally beat out a “lets cap and defend” defense, and once again communication is the KEY.

I’m going to break down some pictures for you...keep in mind I’m not an artist. :)
Step 1 – The Setup
You want to have 8 guys(represented by circles) go left, 2 guys go middle and 5 guys go right. Cap LL, LR towers. You want to do this because traditionally people go to their STRONG hand side; you want to play on this weakness and meet their main force and crush it with your 8 forcing it to res at the UR.
A key component here is the 2 guys going middle. They are not there to get the flag. They are there as a decoy to prevent people from breaking through the middle.

Step 2 – The Left Side Strong Side
Because you sent 8 to cap the left side it should cap significantly faster. Once this is capped ALL 8 players need to go attack and cap the UL tower. The 5 Players at the LR tower need to Defend the LR tower. The 2 in the middle still need to keep up the charade that there is a force in the middle. Usually people are so excited that they are getting the flag they will just stand there...let them they will be dead soon. BUT if need be the 2 need to go help the 5 defend the LR. It’s ok if you leave the middle as the Left strong arm should be sending people to the GY faster than they are able to send people through the middle.

Step 3. - The Hammer and Anvil.
Once your 8 cap the UL you should have a makeup like my picture here. I’m gonna go ahead and assume some of you died in the process. Because of the res you should have roughly 4 at UL, 4 at LL, and 7 at LR.
It is extremely important that at this point EVERYONE charge the UR tower.
The 4 at the LL need to go up the middle to clean out anyone who might have tried to come up the middle DO NOT STOP FOR THE FLAG OR IT’S FAIL Continue up to help the 4 at the UL

The 4 at the UL need to push towards the UR with any luck the 4 from the UL and the 4 from the LL will meet somewhere between UR & UL.

The 7 at the LR Needs to push north. Leave no DEFENDERS NONE. You have to do this part fast too because you’re depending on the Res timer to allow you a full on ZERG at the UR with not so many people.

So this is a very strong opening move and I’ve actually seen much success with it, or variations of it. As always you need to adjust to the situations at hand but the overall goal should be to cap 3 towers first because with 3 towers capped you can effectively control the roads and defend just 2 towers while holding three.

So what happens if the opening move fails?
Again you should always strive to work off the simple premise that MORE beats less. You will always have an advantage so long as you IGNORE THE FLAG. The flag is nice to have if you’re at a 4 cap otherwise sending people to focus on the flag only eliminates your strategic control of the field.

The other VERY important thing is to NOT fight on the TOWERS....I know this goes against’ conventional wisdom but here’s why you want to fight in the zones that are red in the pic below.

By bringing your battle lines up to the red zones you can control the movement of your enemy. The black lines in the picture below are your enemies coming from UR as you can see they CANNOT go around you, they CANNOT cut down the middle and they cannot get to LR without going through you.

“Buh buh buh what about the towers Blackthought, wont they get capped?”
No, no they will not. See the grand thing is that because I’m gonna go ahead and assume some people on your side are going to die we’ll let them spot check the towers as they res. IF when they res and a tower is getting capped they need to first call it out, and second, attempt to stop it. More importantly they need to call out the number so everyone can know how many people are there and if there are enough people to recap. If you do not post your position where the RED SPOTS are basically what happens is that instead of going to attack UL and LR where your forces are gathered they will go cross country and head straight for LL. Fighting on red gives you such an advantage once you’ve gotten the upper hand that it’s very hard for people to break through it.

So like I said this is best case scenario and obviously VERY optimistic in its hopes of people listening and executing things right. If people aren’t getting with the program then like I said before play to your strengths and work in large groups.

This works really well when you’re in a premade, when you’re not chances are you’ll be the only enlightened soul so we’ll cover what to do when you’re in a good ol fashion pug.

In a pug EVERYTHING I just went over is the exact opposite of what you’re group is going to do. They will split up almost evenly half left, half right, half up the middle (I’m an Orc what do you expect), they will continually try to cap the flag while their towers are being ransacked, they will run straight at defenders and when they do have a slight upper hand instead of pressing the attack they will allow for the other side to zerg one tower and cap it and it turns into a large mess. If you’ve ever seen the movie 300 you might recall a scene where they let the Acadians help in the battle and Dilios, the one eyed narrator, basically calls them sloppy with how they hack about wildly more brawler than soldier. Well this is how I feel in EOTS more often than not.

Knowing your pug is going to do this you MUST fall back on communication to help give you that edge.

As you’re having to play to the pugs style it’s often best to push for them to cap 2 and keep taking the flag. The easiest way to do this is to have a smaller force at each of the two towers and then a “mid” force that takes the flag and responds to zergs. In a pug if you can’t cap and hold three just stop and defend the 2 you have because if you keep going for the 3 cap and it’s not working this strategy can make EOTS go on forever.

So there it is the EOTS strategy. Not rocket science and I would say of ALL the BG’s it’s the one most difficult to control because it’s the easiest to have everyone spread apart doing their own thing.

Next we’ll be going over AV. As this is the fourth of July weekend I’ll most likely be celebrating by blowing something up...or killing a gnome...oh I know. I’ll blow up a gnome, it’s the best of both worlds.