Easy baby, easy

I’ve held my tongue for long enough. I’ve not participated in the endless rounds of proclamations, declarations, and other things that end with –ations. The topic has been beat to death, Ankhed up, beat down again, battle-rezzed, and completely destroyed yet again in the WoW blogosphere. And I kinda told myself I wouldn’t post about it, ever. But I’m kinda about to break that kinda-promise to myself. Right now.

Raiding in Wrath = easy.

Easy like Sunday morning. Easy like the bake oven. Easy… like really, really frikkin easy.

Case in point: last night we downed Maexxna with 19 players. Six people got locked out of the room at the start, DPS and healers alike. But she/he/it went down like a vir... (ok I’ll stop the bad metaphors).

Second case in point: Heigan went down with half the raid dead. We used 2 ankhs and I think one B-Rez and it took us 13 minutes, but a kill is a kill and a 1-shot is a 1-shot, even if it is a ghetto kill.

HINT: for phase 2 of this fight use Alt-Z to turn off your interface and just watch the lava/plaguethingy bursts. I died the second time we hit this phase then popped up and survived all subsequent phases by turning off my UI and just observing the action on the ground. Remember: a dead DPS does no DPS.

Third case in point: Last week between 2 ten man groups we cleared every raid instance, and Naxx10 twice.

This was our first night in Naxx25 and we cleared 6 bosses in 2 wings with all 1-shots.

Thankfully Patchwerk finally gave us a challenge last night. Once we figured out we needed 3 tanks because he chains his Hateful Strikes we had a successful kill. Of course until then it was pretty funny as the melee dropped like flies on the first few attempts. BAM! Warrior dead. Then me. Then a rogue. Next Warrior. Next Rogue. Dead, deader, deadest. All within the first 10 seconds of every fight.

In retrospect it was kind of funny and we were thankful for the challenge. Even with 3 tanks the healing output was incredible. You could hear a pin drop in Vent during our last, and successful, attempt of the night. Great job to Unortho healers in that fight!

So there you have it, my contribution to the “raids r ez” rants of my fellow bloggers. I’m ashamed of myself for posting one, but really, I do crave a challenge. How are your guilds doing in progression? Similar experiences?

Bloodboil Dead & Why I Hate Him

We smashed down Gurtogg Bloodboil last night bringing the guild up to 5/9 in BT. Congrats to Unorthodox on this kill! It took us a few weeks but we downed him last night in what would have been a nearly flawless kill, if it wasn't for me dying early on to a Cleave. There's so much bouncing of aggro between the tanks that it is hard to avoid if you end up in the wrong position, which I did once and I saw a rogue do once as well. But this isn't the reason I hate Bloodboil.

The reason I hate him is that I have to stay below the threat levels of not 1, not 2, but 3 tanks. You can't be below 2 and slightly around the 3rd. In fact, you can't even be anywhere close to the 3rd tank's threat level.

At one point I was well below the Druid and Warrior tanks and hovering slightly below the Pally tank. The Druid called out for a BoP to wipe the debuff stacks he had so Gurtogg switched to the Warrior. The Warrior got knocked back out of range so he switch to the Paladin. I saw this happen and saw I was way too close in threat. I stopped swinging and started backing up. As I'm backing up out of melee range he decides that in fact I am too close in threat, bounces aggro to me, one-shots me, then proceeds to one-shot a holy Priest and a Warlock before the Paladin can get control of him again. All of this happened in about a 2 second timeframe. BoPKnockbackPallyBackupOneshotOneshotOneshotPally. BAM!

Every attempt after that I sat back until the first Fel Rage--one full minute cooling my heels. Totems down for the Rogues but otherwise just one full minute of watching the threat meter and yelling at the hunters to Feign Death.

The Fel Rage phase is supposed to be there for the dps to pound his brains out without consequence, but until we brought in an extra healer I spent most of those phases healing the Fel Enraged person. I noticed that when I was not helping out with the healing the target died. My meager 1250 LHW's might not be much but I'm spamming them as fast as I can and it made a difference. Once we brought in that extra healer I was able to actually do some damage during that phase.

All said, this fight is a perfect example of the hate on melee.

Archimonde Fight

Last night we spent three hours working on Archimonde. I must say it is far more fun than the Lady Vashj fight. Though we wiped continuously for three hours it was very easy to see what was causing the wipes: usually the first person to die. Unlike the Vashj fight where there are 6 groups of people, each responsible for 2 or more things and when you wipe it is difficult to know what exactly went wrong, that is not the case with Archi and is a nice change.

Our best attempt was 43% and I think we were all so surprised to have him down that low that we all got excited and took our eye off the ball. Other than that most of our attempts were in the 60-70% range. We tried a few different variations of strategies but decided the best route was to have range stay clustered together around their healer & decurser, but still stay spread out enough to avoid multiple people being Air Burst.

I must say this is a great fight to be a shaman; this is the kind of fight where the utility of the class shines through. With my spells, totems, and talents I was able to support my party as well as keep myself safe and healed.

I had down Tremor Totem for my melee party and it saved me during fears quite a few times. When I got Air Burst after I landed I was able to heal myself up before getting back into the fight. Also, Insta-Ghost Wolf was awesome to get away from the Doomfire.

As for damage, well that doesn't really matter. Archimonde is pretty squishy and goes down fast. The trick is to be sure that NO ONE dies. We did have a few attempts where we lost someone early but were able to hang on and recover. But for the most part one death means two which leads to three, four, five, ten, wipe. And almost that fast.

Once I was the first to die--my mouse froze up and I couldn't click my Tears of the Goddess. It was early on so there was not much chaos and the raid was able to recover nicely from my untimely splat. After that I keybound the tears to prevent further hard landings.

I'm disappointed the raids reset this morning, I would go back in and fight him for another three hours tonight. I guess Archimonde lives to drain the tree another week...

Controlling AV

After clearing 3 bosses in Hyjal last night a big group was up for some PvP in order to get their trinkets for the Archimonde fight on Thursday. We had 8 people at one point and let me tell you that was more than enough to completely control the battlefield. It's amazing that only 20% of the total raid can make such a huge impact but having such a well coordinated force (with plenty of healers) makes all the difference between an otherwise ragtag bunch.

We were rolling with:
Enhance Shaman (yours truly)
2x Hunters
Rogue
Holy Pally
Resto Shaman
Resto Druid
and after a he leveled his axe skill... a newly minted Enhance Shaman (guildie mentioned here who decided to roll with the true spec of hardcore gamers)

Yes that's 3 healers and 4.5 DPS (sorry Last, but with only 10% crit rating unbuffed you're only getting credit for 1/2 of a dps'er!!) What a difference having multiple healers makes. Here's what we did.

First few matches it was the textbook Alliance AV win strat. We rushed RH because you can count on everyone else going to Galv first. If there was no defense then we split up and capped the flag and the towers. If help was needed at IBT, TP, or FWGY after we capped the southern points then a few of us broke off to help, with the rest staying behind at the flag and the towers to prevent ninja capping. Then after the last or 2nd to last tower capped we'd call for ALL IN and take down Drek with ease.

This went on for maybe 5 matches. All lightning fast victories. It's great... for a while. Then it gets boring so we tried to mix it up. Next match we hopped between Stonehearth and Icewing. We actually went down to IBT first, capped it and chilled out down there until we saw SH get capped by the Horde. Then we rolled en-mass to SH and laid waste to the two defenders there. Of course at that point IW was capped so we went there and took that. We spent the rest of the fight bouncing between SH & IW, holding on to those for the duration of the fight. When Alliance was All In we ran back to Dun Baldar to mess with the Horde in Van's room. It was an outstanding victory with plenty of bonus honor for saving 2 towers.

For the next match we decided to have a bit more fun and defended Belinda. I think though we played our cards wrong and gave away not only that there were Alliance waiting in her room, but A LOT of Alliance. We only met sporadic resistance for a good five minutes in there. So we broadened our defensive strategy, moving between SH, IW, and Belinda. We let the Horde keep the SHGY because it not only gave us a bit of a challenge but also provided us with plenty of fresh HK's. In fact at one point we had both towers safe and decided to just farm people coming out of the GY.

But soon we realized that the Alliance had no forward graveyards... NONE. And the entire Alliance force was on defense. We had forced a turtle. The only ray of sunshine was that IBT & East FW tower were destroyed. Other than that, no other towers were taken by either side. This is where things got fun for us.

We popped back into Belinda's room to thrash the five or so Hordies that were trying to tackle her, recapped SH, then all eight of us rolled straight south. We picked up the Iceblood GY and asked two alliance there to guard it. More alliance were joining the offensive push and some took TP. As for us, we ran down and just completely mauled the resistance at FW. We got split up into two groups in inadvertently with two Hunters, rogue and Pally getting caught between FWGY and the bottleneck. Me, the resto shaman, and the resto druid rolled up into West, capped it and held it against two rogues and a pally. The other half caught up with us and the fighting was intense at this point. Horde had a Warrior, 2 Rogues (you know how I feel about rogues), Mage, Warlock, and Pally. We pushed them back deeper to the RH GY and then capped RH. They still had FW and were making a push on to us, but at this point a few more Alliance joined the fight and kept the horde busy down there.

With towers capped we would have called for the All-In but there was only the eight of us and one more resto Druid. We were feeling bold so the healers told me to strap on a shield and get to tanking! There was some horde resistance inside who we dispatched with ease. Our rogue and hunters pulled the dogs off and killed them. I saw misdirects from the hunters, and constant heals coming in from four different sources. It was brilliant! I had down Stoneskin, Grace of Air, Healing Stream, and Searing totems to help with the defense. I popped Heroism and Sham Rage right from the start to help with the initial chaos and until we got settled into position. I never dropped below 50% health with all the heals, and down went Drek.

Here are two screenshots of me tanking the Frostwolf Clan leader:

and



It was a 26 minute AV with 520 bonus honor and I must say it was the most fun I've had in that BG. I can honestly say in that instance the eight of us controlled the flow of that battle entirely.

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.

Azgalor Down

3 wipes. 4th attempt = kill



The 4th attempt was spot-on. We SS'd the healers that got Doomed. The shaman's used Ankh for self-rez, and the druids brought up those healers that went down and we couldn't get an SS on before they expired.

We did something different than the bosskillers.com playbook. We tanked the boss at Thrall and the Lesser Doomguards at the Tauren Warriors. We had 3 OT's for the dooms, 3 dps, and 2 healers. The Doomguard dps was all melee in an effort to reduce chance of Rain of Fire on the main tank. The ranged and healers we split into two groups and given general areas where to stand then instructed to spread out from those points. Resto druids were reminded to keep the tank HoT'ed at all times, especially as the silence CD is up. A quick reminder that the MT is the main healing priority of ALL the healers and off we went.

The trash was rough, as always. But we made it through, as always. The first Distract was successful, buying us a few more seconds to get HS, top off mana, and get into position. But the 2nd distract was resisted and so we engaged.

The fight was very well executed by the whole raid. Everyone was doing their job: Healing, DPSing, tanking, running out of Rain of Fire, running to the doomguard section when Doomed.

By the end of the fight the Tauren Warriors and the 3 OT's were completely overwhelmed. At that point Azgalor was at 3% so I called for the rogues to sprint over to Az and help finish him off. He went from 3% down to 1% very fast, and like all 1%'s on bosses that lingered for a while, maybe just a few moments longer than it should.

And then he fell.

We got 2 Gloves of the Forgotten Protector and 1 Gloves of the Forgotten Vanquisher. I was the one taking tells for the Warr/Hunter/Shaman gloves and when that went out my screen lit up with 8 tells from people wanting to spend DKP to be one of the first to get T6 in Unorthodox. As for me, my Gauntlets of Rapidity rate 175.15 EP versus versus a meager 156.92 for the Skyshatter Grips. It's simply not worth it for me to spend the DKP.

We then went and practiced wiping on Archimonde. Fun! Congrats to Dwarfknight, Shawck, and Siobhann for guild-first T6.

Recent Stats

It took me half an hour to crunch the raid numbers from the last few weeks, but here's the results of some recent raids:

ZA Run
938 Overall DPS
19% of total damage, just edged out by a damn good Warlock
Breakdown:
44% Physical (38% Crit)
27% WF (36% Crit)
7% Stormstirke (35% Crit)

Hyjal
We took down Rage (1 shot), Anetheron (3 attempts), and Kaz'rogal (1 shot, guild first kill) this night
1233 Overall DPS
6% of total damage; beat out next nearest melee by 1.2 million damage
Breakdown:
38% Physical (33% Crit)
24% Windfury (32% Crit)
13% Fire Nova Totem
7% Magma Totem
7% Stormstrike (30% Crit)

That was the first run that I started twisting my Fire Nova in with my Magma totem and it had a huge impact on my overall numbers. What is interesting is that the Fire Nova Totem nearly double the damage of the Magma totem. I was cognizant of the Fire Nova cooldown and used it as often as I could--to great effect.

The next night as we took on Azgalor and his trash the numbers were not the same. Earth Shock, Stormstrike, and Fire Nova were all at 8% of my total damage. This is due to the nature of the trash mobs for that clear. More Gargoyles=less AoE on the ground. And more casters=me and the melee team picking up some and trying to bring them into AoE range.

Haste Potions

I woke up early this morning to see the girlfriend off to work, then got to work myself... farming Terocone. The stuff is a pain because it gets over-farmed very quickly. But waking up early and spending 30-40 minutes circling Terokkar nets me about 50, as opposed to the same route in the afternoon gets half of that amount.

I use the cones for Haste Potions. Mmmm, delicious. With haste gear, Heroism, Drums of Battle, dual Mongoose procs, DST proc, and a Haste Pot my weapon speed drops from 2.60 to 0.92 or lower. That 0.92 is the lowest I've seen but I'm not always staring at my character screen as I would like to stay alive in boss fights and stay out of the Rain of Fire/Death & Decay/Infernos/Whirlwinds/et al. I'm sure there's an add-on out there that will display my swing speed, I'll see if I can find one.

If you are not using Haste Potions, give it a shot. Like everything with haste it's important to stack lots of it. I'll see how low my weapon speed can go and report back.

Just a quick post today. I've decided to get a job, so off to do some job hunting.

Kaz'rogal Down

This week is Mount Hyjal Week in our guild, Unorthodox. We are dedicating ourselves to getting to and killing Archimonde. After the reset yesterday morning we marched in there last night and took down Rage, Anetheron, and then finally Kaz'rogal.



We had a clean one-shot on Rage, followed by a wipe in Anetheron then a kill and then off to the horde camp. We saw Kaz on Monday as well, but I was tanking in Finn so I didn't get to experience the unique boss fight from a mana-user's perspective. Tonight I did get to face him on Stoney.

If you haven't faced Kaz, here's his gimmick: Mark of Kaz'rogal. It drains 3000 mana and then if you dont have any mana to drain, it turns you into a bomb. I must admit I was a bit off my game last night and I wasn't prepared for the fight. However, here are the tactics I did use:
1) Only dropped 2 totems: WF for my all-melee group and Mana Spring (duh)
2) Stopped shocking, need to conserve mana
3) Kept up Water Shield - his War Stomp procs 1 consumption so thankfully I was eating those water globules quickly.
4) And of course Shamanistic Rage and Mana Pots.

I still ran out of mana with about 15% health left on him so I think I could have played my cards better. My strategy was to wait until my mana pool was about 50-60% then pop Sham Rage. That turned out to be too late. At that point I was marked again and was losing mana faster than I could gain it. In the end I was too low on mana to risk being in melee range so I ran out and away from everyone, then my Sham Rage CD was done but I couldn't get back in melee range in time so I just had to sit outside away from everyone and blow up.

Next time I will pop Sham Rage earlier in the fight, maybe around 75% and as I'm marked. Then I will pot at my first opportunity. Hopefully between totem and Water shield I will be able to keep up for 2 more minutes, then drop Heroism when the Sham Rage CD is up again.

Either way, we're on our way to Azgalor who drops the Bow Stitched Leggings and the token for the T6 gloves! I'll probably let someone else get the gloves, but I want those legs!

Going Downhill

We had a really rough arena day yesterday. We went 5-8 and drove our rating down to 1566. It sucked completely. At one point we were up to 1603, but we only had 9 matches so we had to play again. We lost that match and lost 18 points... ouch. So we played another, lost it but only lost 3 points. Another against the same team and lost 3 points again. Then we lost one more, lost a ton of points and had to call it a day.

The damn friggin rogues were ripping us apart. We need a strategy to beat the teams with rogues. I spend most of the fight with my shield on unless they are not hitting me. But when the team pops out they only see a warrior and a shaman so naturally I'm the target. I start with the shield, get totems down quickly, then back into Ghostwolf to avoid at least a Sap. But with us playing defensively we're giving the other team the opportunity to mana burn, mana drain, and do big damage. There are just so many tricks up a rogue's sleeve they don't even have to be well geared to compete against an S3 team. We focus-fire on them and they Shadowstep away or Cheat Death, Blind, Cloak of Shadow, Vanish, and get a heal. Then we are starting all over again. Even with Faerie Fire and dots up on them that Cloak of Shadows gives them the chance to get away.

If they are on our druid it's twice as bad. Our damage is wasted and our healer is going down. Nasty nasty nasty. We were all bent out of shape yesterday after arenas.

We are working on some rogue strategies. First of all, we're going to have the warrior Intercept when the rogue is on our druid. We're toying with the idea if we should Intervene as well. That would mean lost rage for him as he switches in and out of stances, but it might help with a timely Intercept/Intervene. We shall see.

The other thing that becomes clear is that if we are going to FF on a rogue, we have to keep after it. After he blows all his cooldowns, we have 1 minute to burn him down again or all those cd's will be back up again.

Another strategy is to kill anything that does not have a life-saving effect. That means no targeting mages, rogues, or paladins, and avoiding warlock and priests (assuming they are SL/SL and disc, respectively). That means we kill hunters (we loooove killing hunters), shamans, druids, and maybe even warriors. In fact, that's a thought. I wonder if we should take down a warrior first if the group has one? I can pop a shield and Shamanistic Rage to help mitigate the increased damage I'd take, but that could work if we face a warr/rogue team.

With summer here our druid is out of school and we will have more time to get in more arena matches. I'm glad because I hate having to do them at the last minute. I was also talking with a guildie that has three teams over 1800, including a 2000 rated 2v2. He says the best times he finds for arena is early in the morning and late at night. I'll be keeping track and we'll see when the best times of day are for 3v3.

I Love My Shield

I love my shield. I picked up the Gladiator's Shieldwall a few weeks back and created a simple macro to swap between that and Fury. (Yes I still use that and not a S1 or S2 OH.) Recently in AV's I've found myself in small groups leading the charge to RH as 25 people go to Galv and 10 are botting/AFK. Being in the front of the charge means that the Frostwolf Bowman switch targets to me first. As soon as I hit IBT I pop on that shield and get ready to take some damage. By the time I'm past TP I usuaully dismount and heal myself then mount up again and keep moving. That's the first use of the shield I get in bg's.

Then throughout the rest of the bg as I'm facing off against Warrior, Rogue, Hunter, or Enhance Shaman I pop on that badboy and get to dropping the right totems. Boosting my armor up to 13k and my resilience to 329 makes a big difference in those fights.

If you are an enhance shaman you need a shield, period. I find myself using it over and over again. I use it as I'm running for my life (eqiup shield, Grounding Totem, Earthbind Totem, Insta-Ghostwolf and RUN!) and as I'm facing down one or more melee targets. Using that tactic I find I'm staying alive longer, which is always a good thing.

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!

1608 - The climb begins

It was a good night for Stoneybaby over all. We did a Kara power-clear for a quick 22 badges, followed by 3v3 arena where we went 13-5 and took our rating up to 1608, then had some consecutive AV wins to round out the night.

The 3v3 team consists of Riddaren the MS Warrior, Schlimmy the resto Druid, and me. Schlimmy is an amazing arena healer and a flawless kiter. Ridd is an extremely smart player and though still working on his pvp gear goes blow for blow with me in there for damage output.

Our strategy is Shock & Awe--charge in and get on a clothie before the other team can adjust and set up a strategy. The hardest part of this for me are the initial 10 seconds of the fight. I have to get totems down, get my healer focus-target set, Frost Shock our dps target to keep it slowed, and pop Heroism. Even without dropping totems, just a Frost Shock and a Heroism is 3 seconds worth of fight. I also try to drop WF totem right away to help the warr. That's 4 seconds of GCD used. If I'm stunned or spell-locked those 4 seconds can become 6, 7, 8 or more. Then add in if I become the focus fire target of two melee or a hunter/melee combo I immediately have to put on my shield and pop Shamanistic Rage. That may not seem like much time, but in one of our wins and one of our losses the first to die was within 3 seconds of engaging. And believe me, you lose someone that fast you know it's over at that point. Deciding what to do first is a split second decision and can be crucial.

Here were the matchups we had tonight (listing healers first)
Pr-Pa-Wr -- W
Pa-Sh-Wr -- W
Dr-Wl-Wr -- W
Pa-Hu-Ma -- W
Pr-Hu-Wr -- W
Pr-Ma-Pa -- W
Sh-Hu-Ma -- L
Dr-Ro-Wr -- L
Pa-Ma-Wr -- L
Pa-Ro-Wl -- W
Dr-Wl-Wr -- W
Dr-Wl-Wr -- W
Ma-Ro-Wl -- W
Pa-Sh-Wr -- L
Pr-Pa-Wr -- W
Sh-Hu-Wl -- L
Sh-Hu-Wl -- W
Pa-Sh-Wr -- W

We set a goal of 1600 rating on the night and were within 5 points when we took our fifth loss. It was to an all-dps team that zerged me and ripped me to shreds. In that fight we chose the Warlock to kill first but afterwards we talked about it and decided if we got them again we should go for another. He was SL/SL and so would not be doing much damage and and would take too long to kill. We figured that we should have gone for the hunter first if we faced them again--and we did!

Same team for the next match, I equipped my shield before we began, knowing they would come for me again. Ridd charged in, I got off heroism before they got to me, and put down a grounding and a tremor totem. I probably should have popped Shamanistic Rage before the totems because by the time I did pop it I was already below 50% health. But we had the hunter down low, too. It was a DPS race and though we only had two DPS to their three, it was all tied up. Schlimmy, left to his own devices, was spamming Regrowth on me trying desperately to keep me up. I was taking a beating even with the shield and Sham Rage. The hunter Feigned Death but we were wise to it and both got crits off on him to finish him off. And then immediately after I was down to a Lightning Bolt from the opposing shaman.

It was now two against two and they went for Ridd next. He was low at one point but Schlim got off a Swiftmend bringing him back to above 50% health. During this the warlock had stopped casting/dotting and was chain-fearing Ridd. Eventually after so many fears Ridd was immune and thus free to beat the shaman down to a pulp, which he was doing to the best of his ability between fears. The warlock tried to solo those two but to no avail. We took the win and recouped some of the points we lost to them in the first match.

Our last match of the night proved easy. We went for the shaman first--of course everyone does! He was squishy and the paladin was late coming out of their starting area. It was over before it started with a fast Heroism, some Windfury crits, and wicked execute by Ridd. BAM! 1608 on the night.

I'm feeling good about this.

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.