General rules
1. Always assume your opponents will make the best possible move. Never base your play thinking that they’ll do the wrong thing. This is like chess. You may often win quickly by assuming your opponent will make a mistake. When it works, great. But if they do the right thing, you’re screwed.
2. Avoid complexity, especially if you’re not on a coordinated team. You have to keep it simple. No fancy stuff like “5 to mid!” or “4 to far, 1 to mid!”. Barring the other team being truly worse than you, such strategies require constant communication and are not suitable for soloers.
3. If you have a decapper on your team, leave him alone. Don’t go messing with his rotation, trying to help him etc. Let him die alone in peace tying the enemy up. That’s his job.
4. If there’s a decapper on their team, you simply must have a dedicated DPS class to keep rotating back and helping the close holder to kill him. If you don’t do this, you will lose. End of story. Perfect for this is a thief or a portal mesmer with boon stripping and non condi dps for obvious reasons.
Forest
1. Make sure they don’t zerg close at start. If you’re ready you can win the match right here. But if you’re not, it can badly throw you off balance and you’ll never recover. Before going mid or creature, always check for inc on the side.
2. As a general rule, don’t kill the creature at start. The other side will take mid and you’ll lose momentum and have a psychological handicap that you might never recover from. This is specially true if they have a thief who may try and steal creature. The dedicated close holder is in the best position to kill the creature after the cap and is reasonably sure that there are no incoming players. Or you can kill creature after the mid fight is over.
3. This is a map where one person just has to afk at close. The distance between your close and their spawn point is too short to risk a decap. You must always play as if your enemy will do the smart thing, not assume they’ll play badly and not decap your point as soon as its left undefended.
Again. Never…ever..leave close undefended.
4. Lots of people labor under the illusion that once a point is capped, it will defend itself. Not just close, but even mid. After a long grueling battle to fight for the keep, I’ve seen people just leave it! One person (preferably a heavy) has to always stay on an empty point in case just one person shows up. If more than one person comes, you should have time to call for help or run. Either way, don’t just leave it. Seeing an empty capture point should cause something to die inside your heart.
Foefire
1. The only map where the close holder can help at mid and still keep an eye on close due to the open spaces and direct line of sight. Not much of strategy here. A ranged close holder with AoE like a necro or a grenade engi really shines. So does a berserk ranger. The idea is always to keep an eye on close in case someone comes. On this map you can see them coming a long way off.
2. If you’re winning, ignore the enemy lord. It’s a risk and you don’t want risk. Win on points whenever you can. Go lord only if you’re desperate. It’s a team tactic and if you’re PUG’ing in solo or teamq, avoid complexity.
3. Two people should always go close at start in case the enemy team decides to send one or two people. If no inc on the horizon, the extra can make their way to mid.
4. There is a point on foefire cap points where a decap engi will have difficulty knocking you off. It’s in the cup of the fence on the left facing the point from mid. It’s still possible, but he’ll have to get close to you limiting movement and even then you can out manuever. It’s still possible for him to pull you and then knock you off, but this requires a lot more skill and they may not be able to pull it off.