Ancient of War Creeping

Ancient of War (AoW) creeping has revolutionized night elf creep patterns and build orders. Proper AoW creeping is vital to learn after learning the basics of the game. AoW creeping allows the NE to begin leveling extremely quickly because you can kill the creep quickly and also tank damage on your AoW that your archer or hero would have potentially taken otherwise. This then allows you to continue creeping quickly or go straight into harassing. Furthermore, you can even heal most of the damage on your AoW via eating trees and you do not have to waste too much in resources in repairing it with wisps (although this is necessary sometimes).

There are many important nuances in regard to AoW creeping, including the timing at which you place your AoW, the positioning of the AoW, and when you uproot your AoW to name a few.

Here are several resources which will explain exactly how to AoW creep. The first few videos include general information and are followed up by videos discussing AoW creeping on some specific maps.

*Note* These videos and google doc are somewhat outdated and some videos make reference to maps that are not currently in the map pool. But the principles are the same and there is also a lot of information on some of the maps in the current map pool as well.

It is imperative that you as a night elf learn how to AoW creep or else you will always start from behind. But be warned, while all of the above sounds great, many things can go wrong while AoW creeping. Here are just some of the things that can go wrong:

• First, if your AoW last hits a creep/enemy unit your hero does not get experience. Thus you must be sure that you do not last hit the creep with your AoW.
• Second, if you build too close to the creep, your AoW may die. Thus, knowing how close you can get to each respective creep is very important. Alternatively, if you build too far away from the creep it will take a long time to creep and defeats the purpose of AoW creeping.
• Third, you must make sure that the creep itself does not kill your AoW or else you may be behind.
• Fourth, there is always a possibility that your opponent may send a worker or ghoul over to your building AoW and pull the creep over to kill/cancel the AoW. There are ways to counter this as well. When you see this happening you can your own wisp over to get the creep to chase it instead of attacking your AoW. This takes practice.

In the end you will need to practice this in order to perfect it.