Kiting Coilfang Striders

Last night was our third attempt in 8 days at Lady Vashj. The fight is nasty. Phase Two is pure unadulterated chaos. Everyone is doing at least two things. Some people are doing three or more. We are struggling with this fight right now and only have two barriers down in our best attempt. My role in this madness is that of the Coilfang Strider kiter.

I run the fight in full PvP gear, except with Shard of Contempt instead of Battlemaster's Determination, and I start with both my left and right Fists of Brutality. (The Medallion of the Alliance helps in the first phase if someone in melee range gets static charge while we are rooted.) When phase two starts I have time before the first strider appears so I get prepared. First I click off salv--actually I made a macro for it because one attempt I forgot to do it right away and was frantically clicking off buffs while I was running to the strider. I ended up clicking off my flask and Blessing of Kings. The macro is simple btw:

/cancelaura Greater Blessing of Salvation

Once that's done I equip my s2 axe and my s1 shield. My armor goes up to 13k and my resilience to somewhere in the 320 range. This will actually allow me to absorb a hit from the strider if something goes horribly wrong, or suck up a cleave if a naga is too close to the edge. We've found that a loose strider is a guaranteed wipe so I do everything in my power to stay alive.

The other thing I have prepared for the fight are Swiftness Potions. They are very easy to make and saved my butt in a few close calls. While I'm waiting the 50 seconds for the strider to pop up I spend my time dodging Vashj's forked lightning. I need to keep my bearings because when the strider pops that side will call it out "Strider at west!!" and I need to be running to the west and not the east. A split second can make a difference in keeping that thing off a healer. Everyone is instructed or net or stun the strider as soon as it shows up on their side giving me an extra few seconds to pick it up. And then the fun begins.

Constant Frost Shocks on the strider keep it slowed and angry at this ol' shaman. I drop Earthbind Totems whenever I have the chance. I always kite clockwise so that when the 2nd strider pops--we are not yet strong enough at this fight to get 1 down in 50 seconds--the 2nd kiter can pick it up and also run clockwise. For most of the fight I can walk backwards and frost shock while keeping it at a safe distance. I found that running from it required me to run back to it when I needed to frost shock. Now I just calmly walk backwards along the the platform doing my best to keep it off the edge where the healers are standing and acting as Tainted Core relays. And also keep it out of the middle where the healers (shield clickers) and melee wacking away at the nagas are standing. Everyone that can net the naga does. Everyone that can dot the naga needs to do so and for the most part does. I frost shock every 6 seconds, walk backwards at a nice pace. If I think it's getting too close I will drop an Earthbind, turn and run about 20 yards and then wait until it's 25 yards away to continue my cycle. And yes 25 yards on my shocks, not 20, thanks to my S3 gloves.

That's the plan. Following that I'm able to stay alive and keep the strider focused on me, consequently giving more time for the raid to kill those tainted ele's and loot their cores.

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.

Turtling In the Turtle

Tonight I was PvPing with my late night PvP partners--normally a hunter, fire mage, MS warr, and drood. But tonight the MS Warrior was playing his wife's resto shaman and the drood was AFK.

First we grabbed the daily--Eye of the Storm--and hopped in. There was a larger premade than ours (we had 4) so I knew we were off to a good start. We stayed on offense the whole time and quickly 4-capped pushing the horde back to their starting gy where we just farmed kills until they broke through. Quick win.

Went for a second EotS and I was leader meaning we had the biggest group joining that instance. It started out bad with 2 towers each and most everyone fighting in the middle but horde always coming out with the flag. After some chasing and pleading to stop fighting on the flag--at this point we were behind in points--we got our first 3 cap and started to press the advantage. Again staying on offense the whole time and murauding across the battlefield we were able to hold at least a 2-1 and usually a 3-1 advantage. I think I had 9 kills on a single warlock, 9 on a mage, and another 7 on a priest. Another win for the night.

Next we popped into AV. For the first one we decided to ping pong between SH & IW, playing defense and trying to hold those two for the alliance as long as possible. We ended up losing IW but holding SH. Our MS warr playing his wife's resto shaman was really getting a feel for the OP-ness that is resto shammy. Meanwhile the hunter and I were having fun putting the pointy ends of sharp things in horde. Unfortunately we lost that AV due to the horde being able to take Van despite the extra battlemaster.

For the last AV of the night we lost the fire mage to sleep. So the three of us got the queue. In the bg I let the lock and resto drood know we were rushing RH. They were down. When we got to RH there was a huge defense so I called out over vent to take the east tower. Really I wanted to pop in there and use it for cover. That worked. Only a warrior, pally, and mage follwed us up to the top. In the close quarters the mage couldn't kite and fell quickly to my blades. The pally was squishy and I forced a bubble, switched to the warr. He must have been prot bc he was doing no damage and taking even less. Back to the pally... Windfury CRITS! Stormstrike, let him flash heal, wait for the Holy Ligtht, there it is EARTH SHOCK for the interrupt and WF for the finish.

At this point someone below took FWGY before RH ( /sigh ) so the turtle was only going to get worse. Wave after wave or horde crashed upon our shores. Spriest (2H Windfury procs ftw). Druid (purge purge purge). Pally back for more. But with 8 totems down the tremors tick fast, the poisons go byebye. We held the east tower in the midst of a nasty turtle. Then jumped down, grabbed west and did the same. The best part was that we eventually broke the turtle, got RH and took down Drek amidst half a dozen horde in his room.

All in all, a very satisfying night of PvP.

How am I going to get to 1750?

How AM I going to get that rating?

I don't know how I caught the PvP fever, but I've got it bad. I think one of the things that happens with end-game raiders is that you run out of things to do that are worthwhile and/or interesting once you get deep enough into raid content. There are fewer gear upgrades for me; most of which come from badges or SWP crafted (once someone starts selling them on our tiny server). And I feel like I've run every instance 100 times. But once I got into PvP I discovered a whole new world. It's always new and interesting (except when I get chain stun locked by a mace spec rogue named Stabuxyz for the billionth time).

I started doing arena just to get the gear for PvE. A fellow guildie convinced a group of us to start a new team each week. We'd spend 40g apiece and pretty much go 0-10. Hey we didn't care as we were getting loot out of it--eventually. And somewhere along the way, something changed. I started trying to win. We started rejoicing in victories and pondering over defeats.

Now I'm an avid PvP'er with 3/5 vengeful, 2/5 merc, a merc MH axe, 2 vindicators, and my battlemaster trinket. And I only use 2 pieces of PvP gear for PvE now.

But I've never been on a team rated higher than 1650.

Looking down the road to Season 4 I'm wondering how the heck am I going to continue to gear up without having a decent team? More to the point, I wonder how am I going to be competitive as an enhance shaman?

Resto shaman? They rock PvP. MS Warr? A must have in arena. But enhancement shaman?!? No friggin way. Not a top-of-the-chart spec for arena and with little hope of any changes coming to correct that. In fact, Blizzard has stated that they do not intend every spec to be viable in PvP. I'm not saying anything you, the well-read enhance shaman, doesn't already know.

So how am I going to get to 1750? I am going to try two paths: 3's & 5's. On the 3v3 we have a top rated resto shaman, an MS warr, and me. On the 5v5 we have 2 holy pallies, 1 frost mage, 1 fire mage, and me.

The strategy in the 3v3 is shock and awe. Warr charges in first, I follow close behind. We pick a target and MS it right off the mount. I pop heroism and drop a WF right away (he'll have some WF left from the totem be down in the prep stage). Then resto druid pops out of stealth under the cover of the chaos we are sowing in melee. That's the idea....

For 5v5 I picked that setup for 2 bubbles, 2 healers, 2 ice blocks, and I'm kinda the odd-man out. Actually, the frost mage is instructed to drop frost nova every time it's up so I get kited less. And one of the Paladins is cleansing me and giving me blessing of freedom so I get kited less. That's the idea there...

Problem is that we've not put it all to the test. I'll keep you posted.

The start of it all

There's nothing quite so refreshing as a first blog post. This is my third blog--the other two are still quite active, but are more photo blogs than editorial. But tonight after a rock solid weekend of PvE and PvP on my shaman I started looking for some more PvP information about enhancement.

Everyone knows (or at least they should) that Elitist Jerks are the foremost authority on Warcraft theorycrafting. Their thread on Enhancement Shamans changed the way I gear, gem, 'chant and play my class. I can thank them for helping me become a top DPS'er in our T5 level guild, Unorthodox.

There's so much to cover here, I think I'll just start with some basics and an introduction.

I've been playing WoW for almost two years as of this post. My first character, first 60, and first 70 was Finnmaccool, a Night Elf Druid.I raided MC as resto--back when your raid role was predetermined by your class choice 59 levels earlier. Truth be told, I was a hard-core noob for a long time. Leveling as balance and considering myself an off-tank in the likes of ZF I even had Steel Weapon Chain on my Arden Custodian. Yes yes, go ahead and laugh! Later I even had Crusader on a different mace. But I digress. I hit 60, joined a raiding guild, and became resto to heal in MC. A fellow drood, Cusper, took me under her wing and taught me much about about healing. Soon I was MT healing in Majordomo and other fights. Then came BC. I leveled Finn and decided I wanted a shaman.

Along came Stoneybaby. Hitting 70 in only 13 days played marked the start of the Stoney OP-ness. After hitting 70 the pre-BC raiding guild I was in had pretty much folded so I packed up my two 70's and moved over to Unorthodox, making Stoneybaby my main in the process.

That's the history, sort of... for the most part... or at least enough for now. I'm enhance for life. I primarily PvE. My off-spec gear is PvP. I don't roll on ele or resto gear "just for kicks" because I'm enhance. period. end of story. And so it begins, the *Windfury Crits* blog.