Yavin Ruins is a player-vs-player Warzone in Star Wars The Old Republic. In this guide we’ll be going over how to gain points in this type of PvP map, how to capture and defend the turrets, and how to understand where you are on the map.
Yavin Ruins is known for being a “reskinned” version of the Alderaan Civil War map. Their map shapes are almost the same, and their turrets and points function the same, but their are some key differences, including the fast capture buff and some extra shortcuts!
Contents
Map
The Yavin warzone map is pretty simple – it has an objective in the center, and one on the east and one on the west. You’ll load in on either the north or the south side with your team.
Advanced Map:
The match starts in a waiting room with a timer. When the timer runs out, you will want to right-click the blue speeder that appears as soon as possible, so you can get to the main map.
Objectives
In the Yavin warzone, your goal is to capture at least two of of the three objective points on the map.
You can see which objectives have been captured on the scoreboard – there’s three turret symbols, one representing the west turret, one the center turret, and one the east turret.
If the turrets are gray, it means they are uncaptured, if they are yellow or purple, it means a team has captured them.
To find out if your team is yellow or purple, look for the tiny yellow or purple Republic or Imperial symbol on the left of the scoreboard – that’s your team’s color, and your team’s points. The purple team will always be on the top of the scoreboard, and yellow at the bottom, but which team you wind up on is random each match.
Above: My team is yellow, because I see the Republic/Imperial symbol is yellow on the scoreboard. I see my team in yellow has 436 points, and the enemy team has 428 points in purple, so we are currently winning by quite a bit, but the other team could still win if we aren’t careful. I see the three turrets have all been captured because none of them are gray – and that we in yellow have captured the far left turret (which represents west), the middle turret is captured by the enemy, and that we have also captured the right-hand turret (representing east).
If you are colorblind or are having trouble remembering which color your team is, if the turret icon is pointing up means your team has captured it, if the turret icon is pointing down, the other team has it, and a sideways turret means no one has captured it yet.
Capturing an Objective
Your team only gains points when you have an objective captured, so your goal is to capture at least two of the three objectives so you gain points faster than the other team.
To capture an objective, you need to stand within 4 meters of it, so quite close, and right-click the glowing blue turret when your mouse cursor turns orange. You need to stay still there for about 8 seconds without moving, using any abilities, or being attacked by an enemy, to successfully capture a point. As you or your team mates try and capture the turret, the other team may try and stop you by attacking the person channeling and capturing the turret – so you will need to either distract your enemies, stun them, or kill them so that the channel can complete its full 8 seconds uninterrupted. You will know they turret has been successfully captured when you see your team’s color in a symbol above the turret.
The other part of capturing a turret that hasn’t been captured yet is making sure the enemy doesn’t grab it first.
If an enemy is trying to capture the turret, they will glow blue, have a blue glowing beam of light shooting up from their body, and they will have a cast bar over their head. To stop them, you can actively attack them or hit them with an AOE attack, stun them, push them, or pull them. Even your basic attack is great to use to stop them. If they are behind the turret, make sure you are in line-of-sight to actually hit them! Even if you stop someone, they will probably keep trying, so make sure to keep your eye on the objective even after an unsuccessful attempt.
Jungle/Mid/Relic Objective Points
At the beginning of a match, most teams have one or two experienced players to the object point “left” of where they start the match, and everyone else runs to the objective point in the center. After that, players will travel between the three objectives, attacking and defending.
[[SCREENSHOT – make map for yavin 4]]
If you aren’t sure where to go, the center / mid objective is usually a good bet!
You can also keep your popout map open to easily identify east and west – west is on the left of the map, east is on the right.
In this match type, as players often struggle with remembering whether they are in the east or west, some people call the west turret “jungle” and the east turret “relic” based on what the terrain there looks like.
Mid
“Mid” or “center” is the large structure in the middle of the map.
Jungle
At Jungle / West, the ground is covered with green grass and dirt entirely with no stonework on the ground, and has more trees and no statues or light poles.
Relic
At Relic / East, there’s only a single tree nearby and there’s some large statues nearby, there are some funny little lightpoles on the node and there’s lots of stone and the grass doesn’t cover everywhere – there’s lots of exposed stone.
Defending an Objective
Once an objective point has been captured, it is very important that your team defends it. It is harder to capture an objective than it is to protect one you already have.
To defend an objective, you just need to interrupt any enemies who are trying to right-click the glowing blue turret. Enemies have to be pretty close to the turret to capture it, but will often hide “behind” the turret, so keep your eyes open for them, and stay close to the turret your are defending. Don’t let them lure you away from it.
If an enemy is trying to steal your objective, they’ll glow blue, have a blue glowing beam of light shooting up from their body, and they will have a cast bar over their head. To stop them, you can attack them, stun them, push them, or interrupt them in any other way. If they are behind the turret, make sure you are in line-of-sight to actually hit them! Even if you stop someone, they will probably keep trying, so make sure to keep your eye on the objective even after an unsuccessful attempt.
The other part of defending an objective is simply killing enemy team members who are trying to capture it – they can’t capture it if they’re dead.
To find out if your Objectives needs help, try and keep your eyes on it, so you can see any red names that are over there. You will also want to watch chat – the player defending the objective will often call out that they need help, and if you see anything that looks like an acronym, number or request for “jungle” or “relic”, head over quick and help stop the enemies there from getting your objective!
Guarding an Objective
During a match, at least one player should always stay behind to guard a captured objective point. This player is often someone who is familiar with how to guard an objective, and keep it safe long enough for reinforcements to arrive. There are lots of different tips and tricks to guarding the turret, but they all depend on what class you are playing. For example, stealth characters can use their crowd control to put enemies to sleep without ever revealing themselves, and non-stealth characters sometimes have abilities they can use to interrupt the enemy even if they are stunned.
The hardest part of guarding an objective alone is dealing with enemies in stealth – an unprepared player can get double stunned with no way to stop the enemy from capturing if they aren’t familiar with their class and their abilities.
Above: My character has been stunned! I heard a little “dart” sounds, my abilities are greyed out on my bars, and my character is rolling around in a daze with little sparkles around them.
If you do wind up defending an objective alone and aren’t ready yet, you can ask in chat if anyone else can guard the objective because you are new, and another player will likely come take your place, allowing you to run off.
One of the most important parts of guarding the objective is to call out in chat as early as possible if you see any enemies running towards it, or if you get get stunned by a stealther, or get any hint that there is an enemy nearby. That way, your team knows to come back you up. All you can do is try and hold the objective long enough for your team mates to hopefully show up! Knowing your class’s abilities will help you stay alive longer and buy more time.
Getting Around
Yavin Ruins does have some tricks for getting around the map quickly, to attack or reinforce and defend a turret.
If you are in the center, there is a ramp that leads upwards on each side, and each side has a small passage way that leads to a set of stairs going down, leading to the west or east objective point faster than running all the way around through enemy territory.
Those same stairs can be used to quickly travel from the side turrets into the middle area.
If you’re running the longer way from the side turrets to the middle, there is a fun little crack in the wall you can jump through to save time, if you’re careful.
If you are near the east or west objective, rather than in the center, there is a tunnel that runs under the center of the map, to the objective on the opposite side of the map.
While you are down there, if you run over the glowing green symbol on the floor, it will give you a temporary speed boost to run through the tunnel faster.
There is also an orange buff down there called the Fast Capture buff – it will help you capture a turret in 4 seconds instead of 8.
Points
You can see the points for the match on the scoreboard in the top right. Don’t forget, your team’s color is the one that matches the little Republic or Imperial symbol on the left. Points are represented both as a number, and as a colored bar that shows the amount of points the turrets have left before they are destroyed.
Both teams start at 600 points. Whichever team reaches 0 points first loses – there’s no timer.
When an enemy captures a turret, your points will start going down. If your team captures a turret, the enemy’s points will start going down.
If your team manages to capture and hold two turrets for a majority of the match, you will win, because your double turrets will destroy the other team’s points faster than their team’s single turret can destroy yours.
Medals
You can learn more about earning medals in the Yavin Warzone in my Medals guide!
Buffs
There are four types of buffs hidden around the Yavin Ruins warzone, including one unique one not found in any other warzone.
Fast Capture Buff (orange with arrow shapes, above) – Reduces the time it takes you to capture a node by half, from 8 seconds down to only needing to right-click channel for 4 seconds, which greatly increases your chance of being able to capture a turret from the other team. It lasts a minute and 15 seconds, and will respawn about a minute and a half after a player picks it up. The buff does not last through death. There are two of these orange fast capture buffs under the middle of the Yavin Ruins map, in the tunnel, on opposite side of the small tunnel room.
Speed Boost (green, above) – Run at 200% speed for 15 seconds.
Damage Boost (red, above) – 15% bonus to damage and healing, while fighting other players for 25 seconds.
Health (aqua colored, above) – Walk over it to heal 75% of your health.
These buffs will respawn about a minute and a half after being picked up by a player.
More Info
- While this warzone technically does not have a timer, it will automatically end after 48 minutes. That’s a really long match! Whichever team has more points left wins.
- After a turret is captured, about every 20 seconds the enemy’s points will go down by 12. Each turret is on a separate timer and each one’s timer counts down and reduces points separately. So if you captured all three turrets at the same time at the beginning of the match and never lost them, the match could take as little as about 6 minutes plus the waiting room time. The average match time, if a team captures 2 of the turrets early on, would be 8 – 10 minutes.
- In Yavin Ruins, because you still lose points even if the enemy has only one turret, if you are far behind your team can lose even if you’ve managed to capture two turrets late in the match. This means you would need to fully capture all three points to win, to prevent the other team from getting any more points at all. This occurs when one team has “double” the amount of points compared to the other, for example, 300 point vs 150 points. At this point, unless you feel your team can capture all three turrets (which is unlikely, but not impossible), you may wish to choose to work on gaining medals rather than trying to win the match.
- Would using a DOT (damage-over-time) ability on someone stop them from capturing the turret? If you apply it after they start clicking the turret AND it has front-loaded damage, yes, a DOT attack is fine. But if you applied the DOT before they started clicking, and it’s ticking on them, the additional damage will not interrupt them from capturing. You would need to use an additional attack while they are clicking to stop them. If your DOT does not have damage right away, but is only ticks of damage, it will not work. Check your tooltip to see if there’s front-loaded damage or not.
- Do time-delay attacks like Sticky Dart stop someone from capturing the turret? If you throw a sticky dart at someone, and then they start capturing, the explosion a few seconds later would stop them, but it won’t “stop” them until it explodes. It’s not recommended to use time-delay abilities on someone capping as your time-delay may be longer than their time to capture the turret.
- Can you use your actual “Interrupt” ability to stop someone from capturing the turret? Yes, but it’s not recommended. This is because if the person has interrupt-immunity, a normal attack will still work, but your interrupt ability won’t.
- What if the person trying to capture the turret has damage-immunity? They may take no damage when you attack them, but an attack will still interrupt them from capturing.
- The proper names for the turrets are:
- West/Jungle/Trees/Grass/Yellow-Team-Ours: Jungle Turret
- Mid/Center: Palisade Turret
- East/Relic/Ruins/Statue/Stone/Purple-Team-Ours: Relics Turret
- No one ever uses the proper names because they are long and hard to remember.
- The Yavin Ruins warzone map is almost exactly the same as the Alderaan Civil War warzone map. They are shaped mostly the shape, and each have three turrets that function the same for points. Yavin Ruins is different however, as there are some additional routes and passages that speed up movement between the turrets including stairs on the outer edge of the “mid” walls, and some gaps in the walls heading towards mid from either side turret. In addition, Yavin Ruins has the Fast Capture point, where Alderaan does not.
- Want to learn more about tactics for Yavin Ruins? Here’s some guides by other players:
- PvP Yavin Ruins Map Guide by Vulkk on vulkk.com
- Yavin Ruins Warzone Overview by Dulfy on dulfy.net (older)
Warzone Guides
Want to learn about the other warzone maps? Take a look at these guides!
Questions or comments? Feel free to send me a message on Twitter 
Voidstar Warzone PvP Guide
Ancient Hypergate Warzone PvP Guide
Huttball Warzone PvP Guide
Novare Coast Warzone PvP Guide
Odessen Proving Grounds Warzone PvP Guide
Alderaan Civil War Warzone PvP Guide
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