Extensive human positioning guide and theory

Abusing your range and enabling your teammates to do the same is the most important task of a human to ensure an advantageous fight.
In this guide we'll go in depth on what the humans can use as a basis for their decisions making regarding positioning as well as using concrete examples taken straight out of (now old) competitive games.

This guide is aimed towards newer players looking to gain an understanding of the game as well as experienced players looking to improve their decision making skills.

An introduction to the guide

Hello people!

Today's guide is aimed towards beginners looking to build an understanding abotu the game as well as experienced players looking to evolve their decision making ingame. It is a longer one and includes a lot of theory. That's why, if you for any reason don't feel like reading through all of it, I've written a short "dumbed down" summary at the end going through the absolute basics of positioning.

The first part of this guide will be all theory, then how to make your positioning decisions based on said theory. We'll finish with analyzing a few examples of commonly seen competitive positionings.

Disclaimer: The ideas and positions suggested in this guide may not work against every vampire consellation, but I'm going to try to cover as much as possible to the extent that it's not getting stale and boring.

Let's get to it!

Part I: Human theory, what every human player must know

The human side of Nosgoth may seem simple at first, but to take full advantage of every human class you will need to have knowledge about the following terms and how to abuse them while playing.

The importance of teamwork

To understand the theory behind Nosgoth you must understand that Nosgoth is balanced around teamwork. This means that everything you do in Nosgoth must be for the greater good of your team. You can play Nosgoth as if it was every man for them selves and get a fantastic score compared to your teammates, but it will be on their expense. They will die more than you and get a lower score than you, because they where not given enough room to properly play their part. In the long run this will cost you the effiency of your team and give your team a lower total match score. This applies to both vampires and humans.

Now let's get to the good stuff!

Line of sight

This means to be able to see - as well as help the other humans from where you are.
It is absolutely vital for the humans to always have a clear line of sight to each other while in a fight. A good rule of thumb is for each human to always have at least two others withing their line of sight at all times.

Effective range

Every class in Nosgoth have different effective ranges. This is the "kill zone" where they pose a lethal or devastating threat to a vampire. The effective human ranges are much bigger than the vampires.

Here's a comparison of the difference effective ranges. The stronger the colour, the more effective the class is. This isn't fully accurate but serves to help visualise that different human classes need to stand at different positions compared to the others to use their full potential.

This leads us to the most central part of playing human:

Kiting

Not to be confused with harassing/chipping, kiting is the act of abusing your effective range to deal damage while you are outside of the targets own effective range. Usually this is done as the target is trying to reach you.
In short kiting means keeping the vampires in line of sight and at a distance ]while still being able to shoot them but, they can not hurt you. In few games is this as visible as in Nosgoth when a vampire attacks a human. To max out the distance you kite the enemy you will need to ensure you have space to backpedal as the vampires try to reach you.

This is the essence of playing human, we will return to this later on.











Example of kiting in theory. Kiting space (red) is maintaned by backpedaling

Harassing/chipping

Harassing and chipping are two words for the same thing: Doing small amounts of damage at a time from a position where they can't hurt you back. This is usually done while pushing or defending aggressively. You want to maximise the amount of chipping done before a fight to gain an advantage. Chipping is mainly done by aggressive prophets, hunters and sometimes scouts.

While chipping is done before a teamfight, kiting is done during the fight.

Area denial

Area denial means to keep your opponents out of certain spaces or areas in any way possible. In Nosgoth this is usually done by guarding an open spot, choke point or entrance. When done this creates a line that must be broken for the vampires to get to the humans and if done properly it's next to unbreakable without teamplay.

Claimed space/lethal space

In red, a place of no return for vampires, this is a specific space held by the humans. A lonely vampire within this area will die within seconds. You usually position yourself around this space to enable kiting during the fight. This is also where the humans aim to take the melee part of the fight.
Eventual volleys, fire wall and other AoEs goes here.

The locked off space is the central determing factor when it comes to positioning yourselves. We'll get more into this in part II.

Part II: Positioning and defending - the good part!

Playing different roles

Effective human positioning requires a few different roles to be assigned to the four of you to ensure you can support each other even is a difficult fight. To easier relate to the roles we're going to use soccer terms

• Defender - Stays the furthest back of the bunch. Main objective is be a safety net and defend the team's lethal space
  
• Midfielder - Act midway between defender and attackers. Main objectice is to support teammates.
  
• Attackers - Does the pushing/chipping and form a front line to defend your lethal space.

Depending on where you're defending and what classes you're using you will need more or less of the different roles. Some times you might not need a defender, some times you might all want to be attackers, etc. There is no perfect way of positioning your team that's safe from everything.

Positioning

Now that we know what any human team needs to abuse their range we can finally start talking about the actual positioning. When positioning yourself as a human you always aim to maximise your team's effiency in every way. This is done by simultaneously filling these criterias:

• Protecting each other. This means to always be withing or close to another humans effective range.
  
• Having each other within proper line of sight. This is so you can react to unexpected situations without them being fatal.
  
• Enabling chipping. You stand aggressive so that the humans are ready to spot and damage vampires without risking being killed off.
  
• Enable kiting by locking upp space. You defend a claimed/lethal space used for kiting when thhe vampires attack. You also make sure AoE attacks can be used there during the fight.
  
• Enable pushing. At least two humans are aggressive enough to push eventual vampires neaby while still being supported by teammates.
  
• Being spread out. I can't stress enough how important it is! The humans need to be spread out enough so that one vampire attack can't ever hit more than one player at a time. Take as much space as you possibly can!

Being ready to rethink

For example, if your opponents run one or more decievers with dominate mind or your team experience problems with sentinels you will need to rethink a bit.

To counter dominate mind the entire team needs to be able to react as quick as possible. This means to stand more agressive and placing two attackers fairly close to each other to stop the deciever.
To minimilise the damage done by sentinels you need to make sure that none of your teammates can be lifted away to a place where they cannot get back in the fight in time. Stay away from walls to closed spaces and pits.

This kind of damage control is exceedingly important since there are many combos enabled with these two vampire classes now that the summoner is out.

I'm going to show a few common competitive position choices and the reasoning behind them in part III.

Part III: Analyzing two common competitive positioning strategies

In this part will be analyzing and explaining a pair of common competitive positioning choices for humans, using the previously explained theory from part I and II. I'm only analyzing two, more would be overdoing it. These are purely for the sake of examples and could be done differently.

The Fane, "Best Spot", two hunters, one prophet, one scout

This is a very common human positioning strategy. It enables control over a big area, plenty of chipping capabilities and provides the scout with enough room to be able to get a charged shot off and throw his volley in a a fight. They claimed area here is the "red stairs" where the fight is aimed to take place. It limits the vampire's possible directions of attacking as forces them to take clumsy routes to initiate.

Attackers
One of the attackers (the prophet in this case), is standing aggresively to control the yard area. He is also able to chip any vampires trying to move through the Blue tunnel or Heal tunnel, the Donut (Kain Statue), and vampires climbing to the Prison ledge. The only area around him not fully covered would the the entrance to the prison through the City Gates.

The second attacker is defending the scout from threats coming from the Shrine. He pushes and chips campires trying to get close from this direction and has full support from the midfielder and the scout. However he can have issues helping the other attacker if needed.

Midfielder
The midfielder is a safety net and ready to CC and damange any eventual threats posed to the attacker. He can also help push shrine and has a good view over both the Yard and Prison. He's got almost as good chipping capabilities from here as the attacker, however he needs to be more mobile to protect both the scout and the attacker.

Defender
This scout has all the room he would ever need to get fully charged shots in on attacking or passively sneaking vampires. He has the ability to protect all his teammates with a fully charged shot if needed and poses a threat for any mobile vampires trying to take positions. When needed he can drop a volley on the Red Stairs area.

Pros:

• Forces vampires to attack from difficult spots to reach
  
• Strong control over a huge portion of the map
  
• Easy to defend claimed space for the team fight

Cons

• Humans easily cut off from each other with devastating results
  
• Takes a lot of teamwork. The team needs to fall back closer to each other if they fear any vampires are too close.

This strategy requires that every human slowly falls back towards the scout as he will use his volley at the Red Stairs during the fight. While doing this you may never go to the Healing Stairs or the Best Spot Heal or you will most likely ruin the teamfight at the Red Stairs since you will not have time to react from where you are. A warbow shot here can be devastating for initiating vampires.

Valeholm, inside of the wall. Four hunters.

This is an interesting one. Since this is such a closed space the hunters will easily cross fire on attacking vampires for an obnoxiously high damage output per second, as well as having the advantage of standing on ledges.

Attackers
The two attackers on the wall have plenty of chipping capabilities and make up a denying front linem which cuts the vampires off from to the inside. Any attacking vampires will have to deal with them first. If attacked these two hunters can jump down into the inside of the wall and carry out the fight in there with help from the other hunters who will be on a height advantage.

midfielder
The midfielder on the stairs provide protection for all of the other humans as well as enables chipping. The position on the stairs enable plenty of kiting room when the vampires attack.
By placing the defender in the back corner you almost guarantie to always have a vampire-free player when attacked.

Defender
The defender in the corner spot on this map is difficult to reach and is provided with huge kiting room and a clear view on the fight as it happens. The offensive humans will attract eventual AoE attacks at vampire initiations making supporting easier for the defender.

Pros:

• Difficult for vampires to initiate.
  
• Extremely high damage per second output in teamfights

Cons

• Hunters on wall vulnerable to dominate mind
  
• Narrow spaces, the vampire's AoE attacks can hit several humans
  
• Can actually be considered bad mannered or trolling. Maybe not something you do to your friends.

Multibows and regular bolas would increase the cross fire effect in this strategy. Multibow for damage, bolas for eliminating enemies as you focus on another.


I hope this has been to any help. It really was a long guide this time, and as usual -
happy fraggin!

Love,

zzott

TL; DR - A short summary of everything we've learned

The impatient player's dumbed down guide to positioning.

This is only for anybody who didn't feel like reading the entire guide. If you have read the entire guide up until now, sweet! However, this is only repitition of the absolute basics.

> Pick a spot
> Spread out a lot around said spot
> Be super aggressive, but ready to fall back
> Make sure you can see each other
> When the vampires attacks, fall back to said spot where you place AoEs
> Hunters, prophets and vanguards like being in the front
> Alchemists and scouts stay in the back of the spot

Why? Because otherwise you will not use the human classes full potential.

If they have problematic sentinels and dominate mind decievers, stand so all of you can react fast to them. Also stay away from walls to closed spaces and pits.

This (image) is a good example of well thought out and safe positioning. Here the humans enable each other to move freely and chip vampires, since they can all see each other and are spread out enough to get room when other humans are attacked. They have control over a huge area and limits the vampire's possible directions of attacking. When attacked they kite towards a defended area (red) where the volley will be thrown to ensure an advantageous fight.

If you wanna know more about why any of these things are or why certain spots are chosen to defend, go to part I, II & III.

Happy fragging!

Love,

zzott.

[SweatyGoatBoy]

My only issue with this guide is that you can tell when some of these bad kids just read it. Try to tell you to do X or Y but they still don't play right.

[T.lx ∞]

y, this is something what i've tought too. I see so many people just rushing off to die as a human instead of setting up great defense...i like to use vanguard since he can provide healing and can interrupt any reaver with the battleaxe and the shield bash is extremely helpful when vampires try to trample humans with Zerging. Positioning depends on what vampires there are, usually i stay on the front and others "hide" so that they can see me and i see them but vamps only see me not the others, and BOOM, they attack me, shieldblock and others shoots the silly vamps off me :) oh well, not gonna make a guide for this, but something to think about...And dont lure vampires with shooting randomly before everyone are in position, and the vanguard should lure/taunt them out, not others...ofc no tactics work when people dont listen/understand or even dont want to play as a team.

[Devolve_or_DIE]

nice logically explained tactics, i hope to use some of this in future matches, thank you.

[Cdott]

Good player giving a solid guide everyone should read.

[Spymen2]

nice, very interesting

[KentimusPrime]

Loved the guide. Can you do one for abilities? Pros, cons, situations to use them in. Great guide man, well thought out and solid strategy.

[Baldwin IV]

A really good guide as always.