The Second Most Important Thing

What is the most important thing to topping the DPS charts? For enhancement shamans I’d say the most important thing is gear. Well, gear and spec. OK, gear, spec, and constant shocks & Stormstrikes. One could say that makes what I’m about to say the fourth most important thing, but realistically if you are serious about raiding as an enhancement shaman you should have the spec and the shocks/Stormstrikes down pat, no questions asked. That again makes gear the single most important thing with what I’m about to say the second most important thing. Moreover, what I’m about to say as the second most important thing trumps spec and spells, because without it everything else goes to waste. What is it?

Staying alive.

A dead dps’er does no dps. Watch the 0/21/40 Warlock rip aggro too fast off the tank. Watch him die. Watch him continue to be dead and do no damage. Same goes for a bad enhancement shaman that Stormstrikes too early in a boss fight, or maybe even just starts out too early gets some unlucky windfury crits, rips aggro, pulls boss, and in a best case scenario dies. In a worst case scenario the tank can’t recover aggro, the Mage Ice Blocks, three healers die and it’s a wipe.

Similarly, Blizzard is quite fond of the “stay out of the fire/void/water/lava/poison/etc” type of encounters. Gruul: move out of cave-ins. Lurker: get under the water. Zul’Jin: avoid cyclones in phase 3, get out of the pillars of fire in phase 5. Rage Winterchill: run from Death & Decay. And along those lines there are whirlwinds to avoid on bosses (High King, Zul’Jin, Leo), times when aggro is dropped, and adds to pickup, kill, and/or avoid. Not to mention environmental damage.

All this adds up to a lot happening to everyone in the raid, and lots of hurt for the healers to fix. You might not get a timely heal so don’t take chances. Instead take measures to ensure you stay alive. Here are the things I do to be sure I’m up and about throughout the entire boss fight:

1) Don’t start until the tank is good and ready. On fights like Gruul and Void Reaver I wait a loooong loooong time. I know I’m going to out-threat at least 1 of the 3 or 4 tanks. I want them to have as much of a lead as possible.
2) Use health pots. Sounds logical right? You’d be surprised how many dps’ers don’t show up to raids with health pots. Or that don’t use them. Buy the mats on the AH, find a potion master in your guild and have them make you stacks—procs FTW.
3) Healthstones. In my guild we call it “Stoney Crack” because I’m addicted to healthstones. I ask for fresh HS after every wipe and before every boss fight. I want to be sure everyone in the raid has every opportunity to stay alive, but also, the HS is the first thing that I use.
4) Lesser Healing Wave. Yeah, you can heal yourself! Go figure. In fact, if you are spec’d right you even have +healing based on your AP. Throw yourself a heal.

Seems logical right? Not breaking news here; not telling you anything you don’t already know. But how often do you pop a HS, a pot, and throw yourself a LHW? If you die on a boss fight with either HS or pots on CD then you've failed--except of course for those 27k Hurtful Strikes. ouch.

I’ll throw out one other tidbit. OK two-—I’m feeling generous, maybe it’s the Guinness talking. First, hot key your means to heal. Be it HS, pot, or LHW, keep them close at hand. I learned this in the fall as we were taking on Lurker. After taking a Whirl followed by a Geyser (or vice-versa) then scrambling to get my mouse over to the health pot section of one of my action bars as my life ticks away 500 health at a time from Scalding Water and a close call or two and a death or three, I decided to make full use of my mouse. I have a 5-button mouse and in real life the two thumb buttons on mapped to Ctrl+V and Ctrl+C for quick copy and paste functionality as I’m Excel-ing my way through the day. So in WoW I have them bound to my HS and health pots; occasionally to a auto self-cast LHW. Pressing a button is 0.5 to 1.0 second faster than seeking and clicking—-and often makes the difference between life and death.

Finally, I have a WTFOMGHOLYS#!& heal macro. The macro pops everything I have that can possibly heal me in one click. I stopped using it in raids where healers are quick to respond and a HS+pot combo results in about 3 subsequent over-heals, whereas popping a HS will save my ass long enough for the healers to react and top me off. But, if you want the macro it’s something like this:

/use Master Healthstone
/use Crystal Charged Focus
/use Cenarion Healing Salve
/use Bottled Nethergon Vapor
/use Super Healing Potion

The “Master Healthstone” will use any of the three levels, and since it shares a CD with Crystal Charged Focus you won’t burn both. Next just for laziness I include the two instance-specific heal pots followed by the general one.

Happy dpsing with your new-found extra long life. LHW FTW!

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.