The Late LordFergos FFA Bible

[io[DressA]]

The guy that wrote this guide died about two years ago. He was the best players on Warcraft 3 FFA when he came to HU! Thx for the guide LordFergo RIP

Fergo’s FFA bible.

This will be a guide to human ffa so’s you guys and girls will stop asking me for advice and concentrate on worshipping me
Also we need more human pwnage on the ffa ladder.
Ok here we go…
OVERALL HUMAN STUFF
Human in FFA have two main strengths.
1. Mass Teleport
2. Ability to counter
Humans don’t have any specific overpowering strategies (eg. Chippo, mass bats) however they have an extraordinary ability to counter all the other races with a core army and various strategies. This guide will teach you about these counters, the base units you will need to win in ffa and, much more importantly, a little behind the thinking mentality of the best human FFA’er out there – me

HEROES

1. ARCHMAGE: The most powerful hero in ffa. This is because of mass teleport. Mass teleport means you can control the entire map. You can force all battles and direct the course of play. Also without his brilliance aura other heroes and castors are useless.
Skill distribution: Water Elemental, aura, aura, blizzard, blizzard, mass teleport, blizzard, water elemental, water elemental. Reasoning: WE’s are great for creeping, but lategame blizzard is a much better skill. Aura is required for mk, pally and castors.
Items: Teleport scroll, invulnerability potion, health increasing items, scrolls of healing/protection.

2. MOUNTAIN KING: A beast. Combined with the paladin this guy lays down serious ownage. He also had the only spell stopping ability of all human units. Clap + blizzard + holy light from the paladin will dominate a lot of ground armies.
Skill distribution: Clap. Bolt, Bolt, Clap, Bolt, Avatar, Clap, Bash, Bash, Bash. Reasoning: Clap is best for creeping small stuff, plus easily get up to level 2. After this bolt is the more deadly skill.
Items: Invulnerability potion, mana increasing items, boots of speed.

3. PALLADIN: The support hero. His main job is to keep the mountain king and archmage alive with holy light. He also stores items.
Skill distribution: Light, shield, light, shield, light, resurrection, shield, aura, aura, aura. Reasoning: He’s there to heal the other 2 and stay alive, not for his aura.
Items: Teleport scroll and all aura items as he will most likely be the last of your heroes to die. Scrolls too and boots of speed.

UNITS

Peasant: Humble little guys with docile voices. Always fast expand with em.

Militia: Only useful for quick expanding.

Footmen: Grab 3-5 for early creeping then kill em off. Useless late game.

Riflemen: Not enough DPS to be useful against big ffa armies. They do make great creepers. Gradually phase them out of your army the longer the game continues.

Knights: Breakers are better because of abilities, but if you’re getting swamped on the ground, this is the only meat shield human has.

Priests: A must have. Required for on the go healing and dispel. Innerfire is lovely too. Innerfire also has a psychological effect on the enemy. Not nearly as scary as bloodlust but still gives pause for thought.

Sorceresses: Slow rocks. Polymorph such things as frost wyrms. Invisible mks clapping are fun.

Spell Breakers: Fantastic unit. One of my favourites. A must get if there’s an orc in the game. You can steal healing wards, stasis traps, sentry wards, bloodlust, fairie fire and all sorts of juicy things. Immune to magic hence make fairly decent meat shields too. Have the advantage over knights that they cannot be hit by chims, frosts or griffins.

Gyrocopter: Excellent scout. Fastest unit in the game. Nothing can catch it. Also detects invisible units and wards. Always have one in your mix as it has a massive sight range which will allow you to see your enemy before he/she sees you. You can also keep tabs on your enemy by keeping it just out of their site range and microing it carefully. Tip: Send one around the map with a spellbreaker to pick off sentry wards.

Mortar teams: Another favourite unit. Make sure you get upgrades – flare is excellent and fragmentation shards also rocks. Faster than tanks. They counter dryads beautifully, plus they’re Scottish.

Tanks: The unit players fear most from the humans. They rip through light air and even vs chims and frosts will lay down serious hurt. The best way to think about how much these things own is to do the math. Example: 8 tanks vs 8 chims. 18 damage (avg) per rocket x 8 rockets x 8 tanks. That’s over 1000 dmg per barrage of rockets. Each tank can do up to 200 damage per barrage… Pwnage… Most important thing is positioning. They’re useless if they’re only firing 1-2 rockets per barrage. Chuck em in the front so’s they reach their full potential. Only 3 food too. Learn to love them.

Dragon Hawks: Excellent for cloud. Not much damage per second but shackles is another great skill. If someone’s air harassing your expansions grab a few of these. When the harass occurs aim your tp for the air units and immediately shackle the fleeing units. With the aforementioned tanks they cannot turn and kill the hawks. Very fast unit.

Griffins: The highest damage dealer of all human units (except for tanks vs mass air). High magic damage beats down heavy ground and most ranged.

COUNTERS

Tree hugging hippies (aka elves):

There’s really only one strat for elf… Chippo. Tanks > all air. It’s as simple as that. You must learn to position your tanks so that they hit all air units. Slow and polymorph helps a great deal. If they got dryads, use the old scroll of protection trick - pop one just before battle and dryads will attempt to auto abolish it, using up all their mana.
If they go Bears dryads then grab some breakers, knights and mortars. I love exploding dryads with my little Scotsmen.
Mass archers is a surprisingly tough strat, especially early game. Make sure you’re not surprised by it and aim to get high level blizzard and clap as well as griffs and mortars. Even though blizzard only hits 5 units these days, the mass archer player will get scared seeing a massive purple graphic hitting his archers and will usually panic and run or reposition (which is also good cos the archers aren’t firing). You must decide at the start of the battle whether u can kill his dh or not. If you get it down to red but it’s still alive, your entire army will be dead however if you kill it, you have a free reign on his archers. Only go for the DH if it’s a low level and you have at least level 2 bolt or if it’s too far in front of the army letting it get surrounded.
Not much beats down mountain giants – micro around them and kill em after everything else is dead.
If an elf starts next to you on a small map, scout a bit and if there’s no-one else around then tower rush the bastard. Great fun. If you let him live he’ll prolly midgame push you with a mishmash of units. Tough for us humans as we need time, gold, and xp to reach our full ownage status.
Keeper and priestess are wimps. Bolt and focus fire them to hell. If you’re trying to kill a demon hunter and/or warden you should wait till the enemy puts him/her too far forwards or trap him against his own army. Don’t let him get away because he heals so damn well at moonwells.
Watch out for level 6 priestesses. Sometimes you will accidentally hit a chim or a hippo with your bolt while trying to stop starfall. If you suspect they're going to let it rip, use the page down key to get under the chippo mass. Check she doesn't have an invulnerability item as if she does you must be very careful. If she's got an anti magic potion, dont worry so much, just make sure you quickly dispel then bolt her. If they let off tranquility and starfall at the same time - bolt the priestess first.
Grab a mechanical critter and whack it behind their tree of eternity. Great teleport pad for later. I remember one game in RoC where I hid a farm behind the tree (before trees attacked when rooted). The guy left after 4 hours of searching for it.
When assaulting an elf base, be very wary of moonwells. They are horrendously strong. A high level DH or warden will not die if they’re near wells. Bolt and ignore them. Get your tanks to hammer away on moonwells but for the most points, bust out the teleport to the above mentioned critter and start a forest fire.

The dirty unwashed scourge (aka. Undead)

The power of the undead comes from the death knight. Thankfully, as human we can nuke that sucker. Bolt and holy light him as often as possible. The other strength of the undead is their fast movement speed. Thankfully their dispel sucks ass. Because of this you should have a lot of sorceresses in your army. Polymorph works great on frosties.
Mass gargs is easily countered by tanks. Make sure you slow a few of em too and grab towers in your main and expansions for those pesky hit and runs.
For mass crypt fiends blizzard and clap is again your main solution. A strong mix of knights and breakers will help in breaking their front lines. For fiends + Aboms grab the same as above plus polymorph a few of those aboms.
For fiends + frosties use breakers + castors + tanks + rifles. The problem with this strat is that the fiends web your griffs. This severely hinders your ability to micro so try to force a battle so you can get your tanks hammering away and sorcs polying.
For necrowagon use griffs, mortars, priests and a high level mk pally combo. Without the high mk your front lines will break and you’ll be in trouble. When going against this strat take advantage of all choke points. Don’t fight in the open against it.

The green hordes (Orces)

These bastards are extremely tough. They have the best air anti air (AAA) in the game and the toughest ground. Back in the good old days orcs didn’t have bats or berserk mode on their trolls so all u needed was 7 griffs and it was literally gg. There was absolutely nothing they could do against em. These days though it is a different story, they have a wide variety of strategies which can give us noble humans a headache or two.
Note: Your best friends vs the orcs is the spellbreaker. He completely negates their castors. Awesome.
Early game if you’ve spawned next to an orcie, he may be tempted to gruntapult you. This is very unlikely and has only happened to me in a handful of games. I don’t have a concrete counter strategy to it, just forget about tanks and attempt to survive. Towers are your friends in this situation, as are breakers and griffs (if you can make it to tier 3). Highly improbable to happen to you at high levels.
Assuming he hasn’t done the above, all orcs will do one of 3 things. These are Mass air, mass zerker, or mass tauren with either batts or zerker. Mass air: Thankfully as humans, our towers have heavy armour so we don’t need to worry as much about the base and expansion hit and runs that bats are so damn good at. Grab some tanks and hit his main. If you feel u can out micro him, griffs will really help you here, but make sure the bats don’t get em. Force him to fight you and make sure those tankies are hitting all his air. Try to kill the shadow hunter.
Mass ground: Ouch. Get griffs and use slow + micro to keep em alive from the batses. Use chokes well, blizz and clap his ass. Steal his spells, use poly on the taurens.
Mass zerker: A few extra knights work quite well with Innerfire, etc. Keep blizzing and clapping.


Noble human v human…
A most fun match up. Centers around micro. 90% of humans go archmage mk pally so it’s a competition to see who can mass tp the best and who can kill each other’s archmage. This is the only match where knights come in very handy.

An anti human army should consist of:

1. Knights and breakers for the meat with the mk and pally
2. Castors for Innerfire and slow
3. Mortars to kill his castors and tanks
4. Tanks to kill his air.

Rifles are good, but knights are stronger and will put more pressure on their front lines. Griffs get owned by tanks. When battling a human you must kill their archmage. Assuming you both have level 6 archmages, whoever’s archmage stays alive will be able to kill all the other’s expansions and probably win the game. Unless your opponent has put his archmage in a bad position, to kill the archmage you must usually kill the palladin first. Knight, breaker FF does this magnificently. Ignore his mk.
Usually a one battle fight so make it count. Whoever wins the first clash will usually win the game with mass tp (assuming there’s only the 2 of you left).

ARMY MIX

Early game grab 3-5 footmen, then mix in 2-5 rifles as well as mk and castors. You should stay under 50 food unless you’re trying to take someone out early.

Nb. Jumping quickly to an 80 food army and killing off a teching / hoarding neighbour is very effective. Especially if the spawning points encourage two 1v1s. You sacrifice gold and items however this is more than justified by the amount of experience and security rewarded. You will also lose less units and have less units to replace as you will have a 30 food fighting advantage which equates to almost double his army when you factor in builders (ie. Wisps, peons, peasants).

Kill off footmen if needs be. Scout often and when you start to feel weak and/or see players with 80 or 100 food army, grab this:

Archmage – 5 food
Mountain King – 5 food
Palladin – 5 food
Three expansions – 15 food
Shredder – 4 food
Five Griffin Riders – 20 food
Four tanks – 12 food
Two priests – 4 food
Two sorcs – 4 food
2 breakers – 6 food

That’s your basic 80 food mix. It is the basis of your army however the rest of it depends on what your opponents have. See above for appropriate counter suggestions.

My Hotkeys:

1. Mk, pally + foots + griffs + knights. If room for all breakers and knights, they go here too else they go in group two.
2. Archmage + castors + mortars
3. Steam tanks.
4. Spare slot for when army doesn’t fit in 3 control groups.
5. Main hall
6. Blacksmith
7. Arcane towers and goblin shop (reveal hotkey)
8. Arcane Sanctuaries
9, Barracks, workshops, griffin aviaries.
0. Altars.

These are just personal preference. They allow for all unit replacements to be made whilst still concentrating on the battle. If the map has no tavern, it is extremely important to immediately start reviving heroes if they are killed as high level heroes take a very long time to revive.

The Game

Ok I’ve gone over the unit counters to what you’ll usually see in FFA. Now for the important stuff – thinking mentality. You can have the best micro in the world but if you don’t have the right FFA thinking mentality you’re still going to lose. I’d say FFA’s are more than 70% in the mind, not in the battle. I’m going to try and give you a feel for how I think during the average FFA and when’s a good time to do what. This is difficult to do in a written strategy guide without replays so eventually I might do an audio commentary too depending on the feedback this guide gets.
Nb. Times are for guidance only. Don’t take them for a rigid guide of what you should be doing when… this is the worst thing you could possibly do. Get a feel for what the other players are doing and work them into your game plan.
Tip: Nerves. The load screen used to show levels and names. For many people this was very intimidating. Back in my noob days whenever I saw a gosu player or a high level I freaked out and started playing piss poorly.
I remember when I was playing a solo tourney against a top 10 soloer – ocrana.d-link in a money tournament. I got so nervous I built a second barracks instead of an altar completely screwing my chances of winning.
To get around nerves you’ve got to think to yourself that the other person has exactly the same units to play with as yourself and even though they may have much better micro than you, their units are still killable – they don’t have god mode enabled. During ffa against Bei (my hero at the time) nerves got to me so much that I turtled hardcore in my base. Useless. The aim of a game is to have fun, not to win… what’s the point in playing if you’re not having fun. Once I realised how lame it was being afraid of a freaking computer game I didn’t build a tower for a long time. This forced me to fight and generally have a much more enjoyable time.

First 2 minutes: Building. Grab those foots, lots of peasants.

3 minutes: Scout find out if there’s anyone near you, decide if you want to fast expand or not, creep some small creeps.

4 minutes: The feeling out stage. If you’re going to be hero harassed it’ll be by now. Hero harassers are stupid. Usually solo players having a bash at ffa. They don’t understand that by creeping they will get much more xp, items and won’t piss you off. You’ve got to make them know this by overreacting with militia and/or towers. You’ve got to scare them off as hero harass will not allow you to creep which humans need to do as their heroes are so weak low level. If they don’t get scared off ie. Come back with units and attempt to rush you, you must abandon your lategame plans and kill the noob.
Also by this time you should have decided whether or not you’re going to fast expand based on your scouting you should have done earlier.
5-6 minutes: Everyone is out creeping. Usually with around 40 food armies. Some people will have fast expanded (hopefully you) giving them a massive advantage for later. You don’t really want to fight people over creeps at this stage. You will want to keep most/all of your units intact due to still being quite weak from your fast expansion. Creep as fast as possible and watch for people thinking of attacking you. If you find someone overaggressive towards you, you might want to bust into low upkeep for the extra security or build a few towers at your base. Try to buy a shredder now if the map allows.

6-10 minutes: The teching stage. You’re still creeping with a few foot, rifles, a couple of castors and your mk, but you’re hoarding like a mofo and building your aviaries and workshops.
Tip: As soon as you get your workshop built, get a gyro. Scout it around the map and try to find if there’s any more creeps. Sometimes people will just assume everything’s been creeped but there’s usually a few pockets left. Once checked for creeps, use it to check up on the other players.
12 minutes +: All the creeps are gone. It’s all up to you now. If you’ve survived this long it’s time to crank out the ownage. Many people suggest staying in 50 and hoarding for a while, however I’ve found if you get a third expansion, it’s much safer to grab the 80 food army. This allows you to control the map and gives you free access to marketplaces, taverns and goblin shops. If you only had 50 food you’d have to sneak a hero to gain access to these resources and would have to watch you didn’t get jumped on the way.
Stock up on the items for all your heroes at the shops at this time – mainly a invulnerable potion on your archmage and mk as the palladin will not have a high enough level heal to save him plus they’re not yet high enough to defend themselves.
14 minutes: By now you should also be thinking of expanding again. Three expansions will really set you up for the long game. Breaking into high upkeep and attacking someone once you’ve secured that third expansion is usually a great idea.
Best outcome: You’ll kill someone off with modest unit lost and will gain massive xp.
Worst outcome: You will lose all units. No biggie here as your 3 expansions will provide you with more than enough gold to rebuild fast. Also you’ve tested the waters and been the aggressor. Tis always better to be the most aggressive – they will be afraid of you, make micro mistakes and tend to play defensively.

This goes for all play. As long as you’ve got the mental upper hand you’re in control. This can be obtained by never running from a fight and aggressively chasing your enemy down. It doesn’t matter if their army could actually rape your army, as long as they think that you’re the one in control they will not attack you. Dontcha love human psychology.

Mass teleport
It is also interesting to see the effect mass teleport has on players. Once I’ve attacked them a few times in their base with mass tp, most players will get very defensive. They will usually tower up and base camp. This allows you to expand all over the map as long as you keep your opponent paranoid about the security of their base.
Very Important: Always have a normal teleport scroll on at least one of your heroes if you’re exploiting mass tp. The archmage’s mass tp spell can easily interrupted by hex, entangling roots, cyclone, sleep, silence, inferno stone and many other things. You will be in the mind frame of hit and runs so when your escape route is blocked your army will usually get raped. I like to keep a teleport scroll on my archmage (as when activated gives him invulnerability) and my paladin (just in case my archmage is killed),

Good things to teleport to:
1. Critters: Best ever. Very small and can be hidden behind many buildings and treelines. Don’t require food.
2. Critters in zeppelins: muahahahaahahahha
3. Invisible water elementals: good, but have slow speed so can’t exactly teleport to the other side of rock quarry with em.
4. Farms: Get peasants to build em in sneaky places. Also whack em near marketplaces, goblin shops and taverns. They make great scouts too and are only 80 gold.
5. Paladins with divine shield activated: Great if someone’s towered the entrance of their base to hell and is killing everything that tries to sneak thru.
Reminisce moment: I remember a custom FFA on Divide and conquer was back in RoC some time. There used to be an item that dropped from the middle golems which would allow you to control another player’s unit. Similar to charm. I creeped the golems, grabbed the item, stole an acolyte and teched up to shades. To my delight I found I could teleport to them...
Tip: If it’s lategame, you’re very low on gold and/or it’s a base killing competition don’t tp to a critter in your opponent’s base. Tp to a critter just outside his base sight range and walk your army there. This will allow your archmage time for the 20 second mass teleport cooldown to wear off should he decide to tp back and defend, thus saving you 350 gold on a new teleport scroll. Also having a critter just outside his base sight range means it’s far less likely to be spotted and killed.

Marketplace whoring.


Great fun. You can make an 80 food army easily equivalent to a 100 food army if you get the right items. Here’s what you want to get:
1. Ancient Janggo of Endurance – easily the best item for a human army. Adds to the main weaknesses of humans – Increased Damage Per Second and movement speed.
2. Legion Doom-Horn – Stacked with the above, your army will terrifyingly fast.
3. Pendant of Mana – Whack it on the mk and he’s got unlimited bolts and claps. Brutal.
4. Khadgar's Gem of Health – Give to archmage and mk.
5. Warsong Battle Drums – Another 10% of army from one item.
6. Alleria's Flute of Accuracy – Even another 10%... isn’t stacking fun.
7. The Lion Horn of Stormwind – Don’t need to feel guilty about not getting the pally aura. Combines with innerfire nicely.
8. Staff of Silence – Negates all heroes. Buy it.
9. Invulnerability potions – Much cheaper than resurrecting.
Plenty of other nice items in there, but these are the best items in the game.
Diplomacy aka. teaming.
FFA means four or more players enter and one player leaves victorious. You can team all you want, but at the end of the game, only one person is going to win. You’re eventually going to have to backstab that person you teamed with. Blizzards stance on teaming is that it is a legitimate strategy. No-one has ever been banned for in game teaming.

History lesson: In the bad old days many friends used to search games together and then team on everyone else in the game via whispering to each other and private chat. Blizzard has now make FFA’s anonymous and I live in hope that they will eventually get rid of private chat too. (Nb. I want public chat to stay.) Anyways blizzard eventually classed preteaming as griefing and banned most of these people. Preteamers are now are very small despised minority of FFA players on battlenet. Note the difference between preteaming and in game teaming.

There are many players who utilise teaming. Many players raised it to a new art form. They would manipulate less experienced players into attacking what the manipulator suggested was the greatest threat. Personally I detest this. Although I can see the fun in manipulating people to do one’s bidding while secretly plotting to annihilate them, I much prefer to test my micro skills, army balance, scouting know-how, expanding abilities, base building designs and general strategy rather than attempt to chit chat my way to victory. For this reason I do not team at all any more, and haven’t done so for a very long time.

I will never agree to team a stronger player, however I will always do what’s in my own best interest. In high level FFA with experienced FFA’ers this will usually result in the strongest player being default teamed as everyone realises who is the threat without having to chat about it. They have such good scouting skills and feel for the game that they know what path the game is taking. This happened many times in games with myself, hunters, shadowsoul, hexic and inferno. Games like those are the most fun of all FFAs. I hope my strategy guide will help get more of these happening.

Nb. Clan Lone was created as a protest against teaming and bane (refer to my history guide). By it’s very name (based on alone) it goes against teaming. It is also the reason why blizzard has not banned us, as it has banned many other preteaming FFA clans.

Ruthlessness.
In my early days when people pleaded for mercy to leave a farm so they could “watch the replay” I used to leave a farm. Unbeknownst to me, they were usually frantically rebuilding in a hidden corner on the other side of the map and would usually come back and attack my base just as I was finishing the 3rd player. This happened to me many many times. These days I show no mercy. It doesn’t matter how much they beg, plead or threaten, if I have the advantage I try to eliminate them. That’s the goal of FFA after all. Be ruthless, you’ll enjoy the game much more.

[DarkOwn]

this guy died crazy =/ he made a good ffa strat

[Memories]

Originally Posted by DarkOwn

this guy died crazy =/ he made a good ffa strat

not just good... its amazing