PvP Night

On Sunday I spent the morning reading everything I could get my hands on about Enhancement Shaman PvP. I devoured the thread at Elitist Jerks as well as the one at the official WoW forums. I checked out specs on Push, Diivide, and others. I made new macros, retooled my bars for PvP, re-gemmed, and changed some enchants on my PvP set. I was stoked.

First I had to MT at Kara run on my druid for some guild alts, mains (that want badges), and some guild friends/family. It was nice to actually see gear get used and have people /roll for it rather than just send it all to the disenchanter for voids. Normally we just farm that place on the weekend for badges.

But I digress. After kara I got together whoever was available for some 5v5. None of my arena teams are anything special, I've just been point farming since near the end of season 1, but now I'm committed to being a damn good enhancement Shammy in arenas. For this group we had an unusual but surprisingly good setup (for the lower brackets anyway). We had a resto shaman, prot pally in healing gear, marks hunter, MS warr, and me. Basically the shaman was in charge of healing with the pally dispelling, bubbling, and backup healing. We went 7-3 on the night and stopped there. Our first loss was to a full s3 team that FF down the hunter, the warr, then me. They kept one healer cc'd with a sick cc rotation of sheep, cyclone, hammer, lather rinse repeat. It was over before it started.

The wins were coming frequently though. We would mostly run a "shock and awe" campaign with the warr going in first or charging up the right-hand side of the BEM map, picking up a warlock and MSing him right away. The rest of us would follow the warr except the resto shaman who would be the only one to go left with the intention of holding a pillar and staying out of the action. That worked very well as we were well coordinated, focused fired, and didn't give the other team a chance to setup. We didn't have any cc other than the pally's HoJ.

I did enjoy my new shield when I was the FF target. That was one of two major changes to my strategy: rather than try and heal through a rogue or warr on me with points in Healing Focus, I opted for a Gladiator's Shieldwall which effectively doubles my armor to nearly 13k. That extra staying power helped the healers keep me up through a few rogue/warr or rogue/hunter combos on me. I popped on my shield, cleansed myself and enjoyed the heals while still chasing around whatever target I was on.

The other major change was no more 2H. Dual wielding is hands-down proven to be far superior to a big fat 2H. I shelved my Axe of the Gronn Lords permanently.

The resto shaman and I each set up a focus-interrupt macro, I would call out a healer that we were going to set as our focus interrupt target and with the help of Quartz add-on and Perl Classic I could keep track of the healer and interrupt as often as possible. The macro is:

#showtooltip Earth Shock
/clearfocus [modifier:alt][target=focus,dead][target=focus,noexists]
/focus [target=focus,noexists]
/cast [target=focus] Earth Shock(Rank 1)

I had it bound to my fifth mouse button and between the two of us it allowed us to stop a few key heals and turn the tide in a few matches.

For our final game of the night we went up against 5 rogues. I'm not even going to say how horrible and disgusting that team setup is. I'm not going to even say anything about how we lost either, and how pathetic it was of me to be running around in Ghost Wolf form scouting them out only to get chain stunned and ripped to shreds. I don't want to talk about it.

Ah well, back to raiding this week. Tonight we're taking shots at Lady Vashj again. I'll post about my Strider kiting strategy later.