Season 4, Week 2

Week 2 is behind us as of this morning, though my struggles and frustrations continue. Stoney is now capped on arena points but lacks the rating to even get the Brutal Linked Leggings which only require the basic 1550 rating. In fact the source of my points for the week was the 5v5 team which and it's crappy 1420 rating. We did 7 games with what was supposed to be our "good" group and got eaten alive by full Vengeful teams still in the 1500 bracket. We finished out the week with three games going to a "throw-away" group just to get points on some of our alts.

I think I will end up spending the arena points on the Vengeful helm and the Brutal Gloves, just to get some sort of an upgrade. To say nothing of the 40k+ honor points sitting there.

Nix is another story: 1577 rating on 3v3 after only 5 games but only 197 arena points (before today's reset) and a constant need to bring honor. Thankfully it was AV weekend and I could bang out AV's all day Saturday to grind enough honor to get Nix his Guardian bracers. But it is so frustrating to have the rating and not the points on one toon, and the opposite for the other toon.

Ah well. I'm off to DC today to catch the Dropkick Murphy's and Mighty Mighty Bosstones in concert TOGETHER! Two of my favorite bands in one night. I'm stoked. It should wash away my PvP point woes.

Start of S4 on the 5v5

We kicked off season four last night on our 5v5. We rolled with the Disc Priest, Holy Pally, MS Warr, Hunter, and me. We went 6-6 on the night and ended up with a grand total of 1506 rating.

As I expected there were some sick teams. We got rolled by a few with full S3 gear who must have just started their season as well. There was one 4 dps / 1 healer team that decided to FF me down first. They charged across the bridge in the BEM map and I started dropping totems. By the time they got to me I hit Heroism and as my health was dropping I popped Shamanistic Rage and I was toasted before that GCD was up. It took two GCD--three seconds total--for them to rip me to shreds. ouch.

And then there were some teams trying to make their way like us. As the gates opened on our 2nd battle there was no one to be found. We speculated the possibilities: all rogue, all druid, druid/rogue, or stealthers + Shadowmeld. The priest got sapped so we started beating on that rogue who popped up behind enemy lines, and then our Proximo's lit up: five rogue team. It's both my dream come true and my worst nightmare all rolled into one. If our team was a 4 dps team or if the rogues had their stunlocks down better they probably could have stunned the pally, killed the priest and then made trouble for us. But being rogues they are not required to have skill or strategy so they didn't have their act together and we picked them apart one by one. Mmmmm DELICIOUS. With rogue blood on my blades we looked for the next challenges.

I made two tactical errors that at worst cost us matches or at best made the loss go down faster. The first was on a two healer team I had us going after a dps first. It was a Pally, Disc Priest, SL/SL Lock, Frost Mage, MS Warr team. A pretty vanilla combo for 5v5 and one that makes choosing a target tough. I picked the Lock and chose wrong. Mental note and 5v5 Arena Rule Number 1 for our setup: On two healer teams, take a healer first. We could have very easily attacked the pally, forced the bubble, have the priest dispel it right away and finish him off. Then we are free to dps through the Priest's heals.

The other tactical error I made was choosing a 2nd target on a very unusual team combo: Disc Priest, 2x MS Warr, Resto Druid, Feral Druid. We got the priest down first and fast. Then I called out to go for the Resto Druid because I recognized the Kodohide Spaulders and thought he would be very weak. But he did an amazing job of kiting using Cyclone, roots, cheetah, and pillars to save himself. At that point the three physical DPS had taken down the priest, even after a bubble, and then the hunter. Props to the druid in crappy gear, goes to show skill+spec > gear. Of course it helped the rest of the team had full S3 gear including shoulders and weapons. That resto druid was the natural choice, but he sure had some great people carrying him.

On the whole it was a tough start to the season, but in the end we fared... well, mediocre. Maybe we'll get a crack at it again today or tomorrow.

Arena Update

I did a good amount of arena between Sunday and Monday nights. Both 3v3 and 5v5 matches. I would say it was a good weekend for arena, not just because we gained points on two teams, but because I got to smash a lot of dirty filthy rogues.

On our 3v3 we climbed 30 more points to 1576. We faced a wide variety of teams and for the most part we did a great job with it. Schlimmy our resto druid pointed out that we had gotten away from our Shock & Awe campaign. Sitting back even for an extra couple of seconds gives the other team a chance to assess and setup. We are a burst DPS team with limited CC and being all melee, we need the element of surprise. We agreed that even if we are attacking the "wrong" target from the beginning that's OK, just get in there and sow chaos. So this week we dropped the defensive stance we'd been taking and got on offense and it had a positive impact.

Riddaren, our MS warrior, was a hamstring maniac. I was giving him WF as much as possible and using my Rank 1 Earth Shock macro to interrupt healers as much as possible. I think if we played a few more we could have gotten back up over 1600. But we called it a night as it was late on Sunday already.

We had 1 heart-breaker of a match. It was an RMP combo, we wasted the rogue as soon as he popped but they took down Ridd a split second later. That left Resto Druid/Enhance Shaman vs Disc Priest/Frost Mage. It was a long long fight with the Priest and Mage both going OOM countless times. Perhaps the most annoying part of it all though was the constant Sheeping by the mage. I thought you were supposed to go immune due to the diminishing returns effect, but there I was, bleating away for 8 seconds throughout the fight. It seemed that after an "immune" to the cast the diminishing returns reset. Then it was 8 seconds of sheep, 4 seconds, 2 seconds, and then it seemed to start all over again. I suppose those 15 seconds went by fast enough to reset the DR effect. Unfortunately it took me away from the priest long enough to let him drink up, and then I made the mistake of going after the mage, who just kited me despite being practically OOM--I guess just enough mana left for Frost Armor and Frost Nova. Ah well, the right play would have been to stay on the Priest, and work him down. In the end we lost but only lost 5 points. I must say I'm pleased we held up so well against such a highly ranked team.

As for 5v5 we once again coordinated a throw-away team for points and then tried to make a "winning" team. The final 7 games were Resto Shaman, Holy Pally, Hunter, MS Warrior, and Enhance Shaman. Again we are limited in CC so we went with another Shock & Awe strategy. Also, Ridd and I are accustomed to running like this so it was an easy transition. We faced this one team 4 times out of 7, beat them the first time and lost the next three. They were: Disc Priest, Holy Pally, MS Warr, Warlock, Feral Druid. The first time we beat them I was left alone and pounded the everliving crap out of them all, doing around 50% of the total damage. Thus the next three times we faced them they FF me down right away. I barely had time to pop Sham Rage between the stuns and fears before I was toast. Ah well, in the end the team went 6-4 on the night and climbed 26 points to 1540.

We decided that we are going to start a consistent 5v5 team and try to bring that rating up as well. The hardest part with that seems to be getting the right 5 people online and able to do arena matches at the same time. We want to go with a 2-healer setup with Awl (Holy Pally) as our anchorman healer. We would love to find a PvP geared Disc Priest to add to the team as well. We will have three healers and four dps to choose from, but the key I think will be to have Ridd on for his MS. Here's what we're looking at right now:
Heals: Holy Pally, Resto Druid, Disc Priest (need to find one)
DPS: MS Warrior, Enhance Shaman, BM/Surv Hunter, Mage, Warlock (depends who's online)

We'll see how it all pans out.

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.

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.