Overview
Wargs are the stealth melee classes, hit and run are their specialty as well as pouncing freeps and siabling minstrels with interrupts and silences. The warg also makes an excellent scout with their speed and stealth, use them liberally to watch critical approach corridors to set up ambushes for roaming freep groups.
Skills
| Skill | Effect | Cost | Duration | Cooldown |
| Claws | 159 common | 77 | ||
| Crippling Bite | 25% cripple | 50 | 30s | 10s |
| Disappear (R2) | +10 stealth | 10s | 10m | |
| Eye Rake (R6) | Interrupt | 42 | 15s | |
| Pounce | 138 common, stun if from stealth, chance for knockdown if crippled | 42 | 10s | |
| Savage Fangs | +10% attack duration, -22% block | 65 | 20s | 10s |
| Sprint | +100% run speed | 50 | 20s | 10m |
| Stealth | Stealth, decreased movement speed | Toggle | 10s | |
| Tendon Shred (R3) | 138 common, 5s knockdown | 65 | 5m | |
| Throat Rip | Silence | 65 | 1m |
Traits
Class Traits
| Trait | Effect | Rating |
| Enhanced Skill: Sprint | -300s sprint recovery time | 4/5 |
| Enhanced Skill: Stealth | +3 stealth, +20% stealth run speed | 5/5 |
| Long Strides | +5% run speed | 3/5 |
| Rallying Howl | +273 morale + 273 every 4s for 20s for group | 5/5 |
| Resistance Boost | +3% Song, Cry, Physical, and Tactical Resistance | 1/5 |
| Shadow Fang | Sets damage type to shadow | 5/5 |
| The Element of Surprise | +20% crit chance when attacking from stealth | 4/5 |
Recommended Corruption Traits
[Chenobyl, Elendilmir]
As a warg, you want to do a great deal of damage from stealth in a short period of time then get out of there before being killed. As such, slot anything that gives more damage such as Damage for Power, Health for Power, and Damage for Health. For the last two traits, consider slotting Physical Resistance and Tactical Resistance. Those two together boost each 5%, handy in resisting loremasters more frequently
Tactics
[Vyxe, Elendilmir]
From the raid leader perspective, Wargs are the scouting and melee crowd control class of the creeps. With the enhanced stealth trait and a full set of maps, they can observe even heavily tracking freep groups and keep tabs on them. Disperse them freely to find contact points with the enemy but remember to recall them back to the fight as they bring valuable skills to the battle.
In raid against raid combat, a warg excels in the following
- First Strike: The shock of an immediate attack right on top of you can make the enemy suddenly turn to run, expecting a larger attack. This works with smaller groups
- Lockdown: The Pounce stun + Tendon Shred gives about 8 seconds of stun time, enough time for the raid to catch up and to apply DPS to destroy the target before it can run away or use an escape mechanism (last stand, feign death, desperate flight, etc). Wargs are also critical in pursuit with their sprints and cripple/pounces to prevent the enemy from running away. They should cripple/pounce an opponant then try to catch another one, letting the slower raid behind them crush whatever they have slowed.
- Silence: While minstrels have a skill to remove silence and LM stun immunities cure silence, enough applications by wargs of silence can either very temporarily or for a reasonable duration cripple the minstrel's healing capability.
- Harrassment: Their escape skills allow them to operate away from the main raid and in the back of the freeps where their minstrels are often found.
- Ranger Duty: Wargs can severely reduce the ability of rangers to operate with stuns and interrupts. Sometimes it is worth detaching a warg to deal with rangers attacking your healers
[Roktata, Brandywine]
An alternative method of creeping for wargs is the warg pack. As a pack leader, I have found many tricks and tango's that one has to learn. Being part of a mixed raid and a warg pack are two separate concepts, and the difference between is almost like night and day. In order to be a good pack warg there are things you have to learn, how to deal with lack of heals, how to focus and move quickly, and all in all be a much sharper player than usually necessary. The following is my guide on warg packing, this is written from a leader's perspective but gives good insight on how to be a good pack warg.
1. Heals:
Managing without a healer is pretty tricky, as you know at rank 5 wargs get rallying howl, a HoT that heals the whole group and stacks with itself. So having 3-4 howlers in a single group (meaning 3-4 rank 5's) is ideal, but of course not always possible. Once you start getting a steady group of higher ranked wargs, (at least 5 and up) you can start to rely on having a decent amount of howlers to keep you alive. I usually have my howlers use their howl immediately after the first kill, that way you can use it again soon after when the 30s cooldown is up. Since its pretty easy to run out of power, at least for me because I tend to spam my claws, having a mana pot is good for when you've killed something and don't have enough power for the howl. Howl costs about 120 power, the lowest based mana pot is enough to give you this, so no need to blow all your money on higher pots if you don't feel the need to, just have the pot there so you can use it for your howl. That way you aren't wasting your mana pot just to spam claws some more.
2. Targetting Priorities:
Targets are tricky at times, when I'm in a fight I usually try to take down the LM's first. The success of a warg pack is completely based on the amount of LM's are in the opposing group, they throw down that tar, use that AOE stun that incapacitates an entire pack, mass roots, etc. They make wargs hurt, so killing them first is the ideal choice. I've wiped full freep raids because we took down 2 lm's before the freeps even knew wtf was going on, then killed the other 2 before they could do too much damage. After LM's Its typically minnies or hunters. If they don't have a lot of minnies go for the hunters, they are squishy, easy to kill, and if they have no DPS they cant kill you. After that its usually champions, pretty easy to kill, and like hunters its taking out dps. Then you can go for the captains, though they probably will just pop last stand, if they do just switch to a different target and come back to them later. I usually save guards and burglars till the end of the fight. Guards do no damage and take a long time to kill, and burglars have too many escape skills to bother with till the end of the fight. Guardians before burglars, then you can take a whack at em. I'll tell you how we take down burglars later.
3. Taking Keeps:
Taking keeps is something you might wanna hold off on till you get some expierence, and till you can get a bigger pack. Even taking LC or isen takes about 3 groups min (at least if you want to take it without anyone dying). Once you feel confident enough to start taking keeps start with Isen and LC, and eventually work your way up to the bigger keeps. Always, I repeat, ALWAYS, warg pull the CG or kill the first marshals before you fight the CG. If you fight them WITH the CG, you are going to get yourself killed. If you don't know how the warg pull works (not saying you don't just never know) have a warg who has dissapear drop group, unstealth in front of the CG (do not attack it) run away, have another warg hit the CG and the CG only, pull it aside, and have the original warg who was running away dissapear. All the other mobs will reset, but now you will have the CG by himself off to the side where the pack can safely take him down. You are always going to have to have some weak mobs nearby (coldfell hunters, champions, cave claws, etc) that you will have to pull in the middle of the fight and kill to let the howlers get their heals off. Another reason why you will need a decent of howlers if you hope to run an efficient pack.
Once you are fighting a CG, (I do this with Goldi and Gulloval and An as well) you are going to want to get as many bleeds on the target as you can. It does tremendous damage, they stack, and plus its just really cool to see 2-3 bars of bleeds ticking away under a mobs health.
Follow these guidelines and LC and Isen are cake, TR and Lug are a bit trickier, trying to get to the top and take down the CG without the freeps noticing is a challenge, but its also a lot of fun. As of yet I've not successfully taken TA with the warg pack, we tried twice the other night, first time a group of freeps came in while we were on the CG, and the second time we would have taken it but a troll came and helped us out. So it didn't really feel like we did it by ourselves.
4. Unity-
Nothing gets under my skin more than a warg who thinks he can do his own thing. This is NOT a normal raid, wargs need to stick together at ALL times unless the pack leader tells someone to go scouting for the pack. Pouncing targets without permission, following the creep raid instead of the warg pack, not staying on target during intense fights, all of these are NOT helping out the warg pack. One pounce, 23 claws out of stealth, dead freep. You only need ONE pounce, as the pack leader I usually designate myself as the pouncer, everyone else can claw out of stealth. Wargs tend to get a little frisky at times and will pounce people and run away, I call these playful pounces, but often times a warg will do this and either A) get killed, or B) the person he was pouncing was the target I wanted to kill and not everyone was in position. Early pounces offers escape for the freep, don't get pounce happy out there folks, the pack needs to work as one, 24 wargs, one mind. (Or how many wargs there are in the pack, :D)
5. Other tips-
A. Killing freeps in general-
Pounce is your best friend. To be most effective, have a single warg pounce, and everyone else after claw out of stealth. As you know, claws out of stealth do more damage, and pounce takes away their ability to block, evade, and parry. I always have the pouncer on crippling bite duty, after the pounce has hit, that warg then puts the crippling bite on the target. If you have the whole pack using pounce out of stealth you will literally stun them into immunity, what with DR and all. Much more efficient to have one pounce and the rest claws. Make sure you make it VERY clear that savage fangs is NOT allowed. Bleeds are fine on NPC's, but there's nothing more frusterating than when someone bleeds a freep and they end up getting away because the crippling bite was taken off. Not to mention crippling bite allows for another pounce when the temporay immunity period is up.
B. Killing burglars -
Burglars are a bit different. I bet many people tell you NOT to pounce burgs whatsoever. This, however, is not as bad a thing to do as it seems. Burglars are almost always going to use their find footing when you pounce them, fair enough, just keep attacking them, but have one warg stay in stealth for when the temp. immunity status is up, and pounce him again. Now they are stunned and their Touch and Go is useless, (remember when I said stun negates any ability to evade parry or block?) this is when the whole pack spams their claws like crazy. Bingo, dead burg. If the burg is already low on health and you know they haven't popped their find footing yet, just claw them down. Better that then having to beat them back down again because of the full heal they get. Some burgs, however, are smart enough to use dissapear as soon as they pop find footing. No need to fret about that, they just popped 2 of their escape skills to get away, whether you got the infamy or not, you won. However, if they are a hobbitt, you can track them. I usually keep about 20 hobbitt trackers on me at a time (the ones that track in stealth). I usually only use them to find a burglar that just hipsed on us, once I see his red dot on the map, I will sprint to him to attack him, otherwise they might just go back into stealth and break your track. If its a man burglar, however, you are out of luck. Another good habit to try and do is to bleed burglars, ONLY freep anyone is allowed to bleed. If they hips, the bleed will knock them out of it after a few seconds.
C. Killing freeps in a big fight -
The previous two notes were primarily notes when ganking a target, but when fighting in a big cluster of freeps its a bit different, because you only have the advantage of surprise at the very beginning when your stealth is yours, but after that you have to work with what you got. For every target you see, crippling bite + pounce for the stun is ideal. I physically call these out, "Lets get a crippling bite on him please, ok now everyone pounce." Once he's down he is not gonna be jumping around like a juiced up frog on a hot bed of coals, making it harder for you to kill them. Tendon shred is also Ideal for this, its quicker than crippling bite + pounce, but not everyone has that, its also on a 5 min cooldown. But out of the 24 that I usually have, at least one has their tendon shred up. Throat rip is ideal on minnies and LM's, especially when you are trying to kill an LM, because this blocks a bunch of their skills that they use to stay alive. Its usually pretty consistant, you get a bunch of wargs on one target and they are gonna run around like a chicken with their head cut off, they want to make it as difficult on you as possible. They will run through tar, blow aoe stuns (if they have them) minnies will feign death, captains will pop last stand, champions will blow sprint. It is very, very important that you keep that crippling bite on them at all times. If a minny feigns death, switch targets. If a captain blows last stand, switch targets. Sometimes you'll just be unlucky, usually if 2-3 targets in a row use an escape skill of some kind forcing you to switch targets, that will be the death of the pack. I usually like to go for a hunter once any target uses one of these, because they are quite easy to kill. Of course they may df, making it even more important to stun them and take them down quickly so you can get your howls up.
D. Captain and Guardian Protection - Captains and guardians will both use their protection skill to save minnies (I once saw a guardian use it to protect another guardian, was kinda funny.) They have two different icons, so you have to pay attention to the buff/debuff bar under their name. If you see the blue shiny shield of captain protection, might as well switch targets, because the captain will just pop last stand just like if you were on the captain himself. If you see the green rock thingy of guardian's shield wall, however, just keep burning through the target, because the guardian is taking all the damage based on the TARGET's ability to block/evade/parry. So if you are hammering on a minny with shield wall on them, that 4k guardian is going to go down like butter. Then you can kill the minny as well.
Last but not least I would like to enforce the importance of listening to the pack leader. There is usually one, and only one, pack leader, and people must realize this. I, myself, usually name a luitenant to help me out, to rally on when I am dead and coming back from the rez, or when I am AFK. But if anyone else starts shouting out orders, I tend to get a little cranky. It is my wish that every warg should experience the excitement of a warg pack, its not for everyone. Some people just don't care for it, nothing wrong with that. I will say this, warg packs do not get as much infamy as the main raid, but almost every warg I've had under me says its much more fun.
One quick note: the Guardian's skill "Turn the Tables" is a ~melee range skill. Thus, for non 1v1 situations, it can pay off tremendeously to "pounce and run" as, not only does the guard lose all BPE, but they also stay stunned for the duration of the effect (vs. using Turn the Tables which unlocks them right away). This usually allows other group members to burn him down quickly. I have yet to pounce a guardian who was quick enough to "Turn the Tables" before I got out of melee range.