I love these articles, as the level of incompetence in BGs sometimes can be really frustrating. I know this series of articles is more aimed towards new players, but there really needs to be a mention of Focused Assault. This is a stacking debuff that is applied to flag carriers (FCs) as long as both flags are off the pedestal. FA increases the damage the FC takes and a high enough levels limits his move speed.

With the increase in tank-spec FCs in random battlegrounds (and despite the nerf to vengeance) killing a flag carrier becomes a far more elaborate affair, especially if he has competent healers. At low debuff stacks you should find the weakest healer or DPS (HP totals are a good clue, anything below 120k unbuffed or 140k buffed is kinda soft) and try to burst him down. If he turtles up, switch to another player. Basically try to muddle the healer's focus by probing for weak links in the defense. You're probably not going to kill the FC anyway at low stacks, so your goal should be to make the healers and tanks use their cooldowns so that they aren't available later when the flag carrier has high stacks of focused assault (5 stacks basically means they have 0 resilience). When that happens, you apply as much cc as possible and then just tunnel on the flag carrier, and hopefully if you've burned enough of the enemy teams' defensive cooldowns so the FC will die.

The take-home message when trying to kill a FC is: if at first you don't succeed, try try again. I can't tell you how many times I've seen DPS fail at killing a flag carrier, give up and decide to turtle the game, which inevitably results in your own flag carrier dying once he has sufficient stacks. Even if you barely made a dent in the FC's HP pool the first time, a few stacks of FA plus a trinket on cooldown makes a huge difference.

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