Does it burn when you PVP?

I haven’t done much PVP since Wrath came out.

I did go to that first vehicle battleground a couple of times, and occasionally would stand around frozen in place in WinterLAG. But basically I kept away from PVP.

That’s mainly because I don’t have time anymore to grind for honor and resilience gear on top of my raiding needs. It’s hard enough to get the gold needed to cover my repairs, gemming and enchanting.

But I do like PVP.

Back in Burning Crusade, I did pretty good on arenas. My lock was pretty active on 2v2, playing a SL/SL + Disc priest combo. We even got the Rival title on Season 3 (I think). Not THAT impressive, but not bad.

Wang saw some arena action also, on all brackets. But the fun times were in a burn team on 5v5, with me as the solo healer, an elemental shammy and 3 BM hunters. Bloodlust + Bestial Wrath = win.

I did battlegrounds often, and had some ok gear on all my lvl70 toons.

Now… I don’t have a single resilience piece on any of them (actually, I do have some gloves I got from Vault, but it’s not even enchanted/gemmed). That makes it quite hard to live through any kind of burst damage in PVP. And my skills are definitely dorment at the moment.

But this week we all had to PVP (in a way). The Faction Champions were on the Menu of the Week. And that demanded all those skills that were left behind.

A lot of people can say the encounter is way too easy on Normal mode. But for a group with very little experience in PVP, it can be quite a challenge at first. But it can also be a lot of fun.

We only got to try it on 10 man so far, so I don’t know how it works on 25.

We faced some nasty champions. Druid and priest healers. Mage and warlock (with fel puppy). Rogue and Bizarro Wang (enhance shammy). I’m sure there are worst compositions though.

I was originally tanking for this group on my warrior Grisen, and we easily got through the Beasts and Lord Jaraxxus. Then, the PVP wiping began.

I started as prot (for the stuns and interrupts), while Tigerfeet went kitty to try and add some dps. We had one other melee dps (Death Knight), 2 Locks, a Shadow Priest and Pilsner, our boomkin. Healing team was Pally and 2 priests.

We tried to set up some crowd-control rotation, especially to keep the healers under control. They do heal for a whole lot. But we did not have many options… The druids had some tricks, the locks could banish the Tree druid and fear some around. Priests could do some screaming. A couple of stuns and snares, and that’s it.

We tried to micro-manage some CC abilities for several attempts, but we could not pull enough dps to burn a healer, while keeping the other targets under control (especially the other healer), and keeping ourselves alive.

I tried going Arms for Mortal Strike, but my gear is really sub-par, so that wasn’t so helpful. Tiger and Pils asked me to bring Wang, for Bloodlust and the extra dps and interrupts. We tried like that some more, and started getting the first one killed, but diminishing returns on our CC abilities made it all go wrong after that.

We got a tip from our other 10 man group that taunt worked (though the mob would change targets shortly after), so Tiger switched to bear and started to keep the melee busy, just taunting them away from clothies and healers. That strategy seemed to work better. We focused on the priest, while keeping the tree banished/stunned. Forget about CCing the damage-dealers.

But the dps would occasionally tear someone down. The rogue can definitely be a pain, especially after blinding a healer. And that damn warlock does not stop with the hellfiring. And it hurts like hell.

We tried several little tweaks in our strat all night long. Everyone was throwing ideas, and it was pretty fun to see people engaged in trying to get that done. We got close a couple of times, but couldn’t close the deal that first night.

So we had to go in there the next night. I switched back to Grisen, as prot, so me and Tiger could protect our dps and healers with taunts and stuns. We had an ele shammy with us this time, so she was in charge of Bloodlust. We also decided to go with 2 healers, so one of our priests went shadow.

And it worked great. I did not worry about dps, just kept trying to control them. Charges, Intercepts, lots of Taunts, Mocking blows, Concussion blows, Disarms, Shockwave stuns, Shield bash on that annoying mage! It was a blast!

They went down. And I renewed my interest in PVP. I even spent some time on the battlegrounds this weekend. And with the announcement of rated BGs, and the chance to get some gear even when playing casually, maybe I’ll spend some more time in there.

Well, when I’m not leveling my Worgen…

Fast Finger Action

“If you’re looking for some Fast Finger Action, Wang has just the thing for you!”

No, not that kind of action!

This is supposed to be about your necessary skills as an enhancement shaman, so get your filthy mind outta here.

Anyway, this past tuesday we welcomed Lord Jaraxxus into the Crusader’s Coliseum and I gotta say: it feels good to be enhancement on this fight!

We can play a key part on our raid’s strategy, as long as we can keep up with the fast finger action needed to take care of the job assigned to us.

What kind of action? Lightning speed, multi-fingered, completely focused gameplay!

 ”From the same guy who brought you the Wind Blower!”

Here are the details: Lord Jaraxxus has a good amount of abilities. It can take some time to understand all of them, and learn how to counter each one, but once you get it, it’s not a complicated fight. Only the learning process can be a challenge, especially when all you have is one German video and a list of those abilities.

It’s a healing intensive fight for sure, and your healers will need to adjust really quickly to random sources of damage to the raid. Not only damage, some abilities are pretty unique, like Incinerate Flesh. This spell will place a magic effect on a random player which will cause him/her to absorb all healing done to them, and debuffing them with 50% less damage done.

The trick is: the effect will break after 12 seconds and deal a good deal of fire damage to the whole raid over the next 5 seconds. So, to avoid this unnecessary raid wide damage, you need to heal the affected player something like 60k, which will cancel the spell and save you the trouble.

But you won’t actually be doing any healing to the player, because he will be absorbing the heals, so you just gotta spam heal until you see the effect icon go off. Because the target is random, and you all have to stay spread out to avoid the Fel Lightning and Touch of Jaraxxus, you can’t really have healers assigned to dealing exclusively with Incinerate Flesh, because they might not be in range of everyone.

So, your healing team needs to shift focus constantly, keeping the tank and the off-tanks up, while healing the raid and dealing with that nasty spell. They got their hands full, so it’s our job to take care of some other abilities he throws our way.

“Are you looking for a way to deal with all those nasty little abilities?”

First would be the Fel Fireball, a heavy hitter with a dot component that will bring trouble to keeping your tank up. Fortunately, it is interruptable, and there’s no one better suited to deal with that than your fellow enhancement shaman, or the Interrupting Machine!

“The Interrupting Machine is brought to you by the 3.2 patch and WIND SHEAR, your new and improved interrupt. WIND SHEAR, a caster’s worst nightmare!”

No other class have an interrupt as efficient as our new Wind Shear. A spell on a short 6 seconds cooldown. Off the Global Cooldown. And now without the shared cooldown with our other shocks, especially Earth Shock in the case of Enhancement.

Therefore, every 6 seconds, our interrupt is ready to be fired. And Jaraxxus does not cast his Fireball faster than that (and apparently General Vezzax might also not do it anymore). So, a single enhancement shaman can be in charge of the interrupts and lock out that spell out of the picture. Your friendly tank and all healers will appreciate that.

“But WAIT! There’s more!”

Lord Jaraxxus has one other ability that can become a huge ordeal. He occasionally* buffs himself with Nether Power, which increases his magic damage by 20%. That would be only a slight problem, if he didn’t get 10 stacks of it. Yeah, it’s actually a 200% damage buff. And yeah, it hurts!

* I’ve seen this ability related to the summoning of the Mistress of Pain, so it would come up when he opens up a Nether Portal. I could not confirm this, because I could not pay attention to that. But the two could be linked.

Anyway, 200% damage buff is hard to deal with. But Blizzard is not that psychotic… The buff is removable, dispellable, spellstealable or…. yeah, PURGEABLE!

“Here he comes to save the day!”

That’s another job for us! Watch out for the buff icon, and fire away those purges like a mad man! You will take two stacks at a time, so you can’t do it by yourself, at least not fast enough. Other shamans, priests and especially mages should help you out. Spellstealing the buff is awesome, so make sure you let the greedy mages have their fun.

 To sum it all up, here are your assignments for this fight:

1. Interrupt all those Fel Fireballs.

2. Purge the Nether Power stacks when they come up.

3. Watch out – if you’re hit with Legion Flame, make sure to spread out the patches of fire… away from people plz.

4. Keep your totems down (your group might need Fire Resistance).

5. Oh yeah – DPS the boss.

 

So, if you think that’s easy, let’s review your spell needs:

1. Wind Shear

2. Purge

3. Call of Elements or whatever you set to be on your totem bar.

4. Stormstrike

5. Lava Lash

6. Earth Shock (yeah, interrupting doesn’t hurt your dps no more!)

7. Lightning Bolt (or Chain Lightning if there’s an add on range)

8. Chain Heal or Healing Wave (if things get ugly, be a good hybrid and help out a bit, at least with instant heals from Maelstrom Weapon)

9. Lightning Shield (keep it up, will ya?)

10. Magma Totem (don’t forget to renew it)

Is that enough for you? See why you need some Fast Finger Action? That’s a lot of button pushing and/or mouse clicking!

Wanna know what really made it complicated for me, and made me miss one or two fireballs? They put me in charge of calling out in vent when Nether Power came up, so the other dispellers could do their thing too. Yeah, the push-to-talk key was one too many for me to deal with flawlessly.

Well, all I can say is that it was the most fun I’ve had in a long time. Got a bit of a headache… but that’s no big deal. When we got him down, on a bad attempt actually (with only 3 people left alive in the end), the guild exploded on vent and it was just incredible.

“So don’t forget! Order your Purging/Interrupting Machine today! And get rid of those annoying bosses!”

Reticent Crusader

I don’t like the Argent Tournament.

I still don’t see its purpose in the lore of this expansion, the daily quests are just boring and jousting sucks.

I actually avoided it completely for quite some time, much more interested in Ulduar or leveling an alt. But I feel some kind of obbligation to seeing every kind of content available in the game.

So I decided to push through the daily grinding. I was also in need of some gold, so that was a plus…  it did get me to some financial stability, at least for a while, so that’s ok I guess.

I got Wang and my warrior alt Grisen through the starter quests and the first grind to champion. It took quite a while, cause I don’t have enough time to go through all the dailies every single day, but I did in a couple of weeks or so.

Good thing is that it opened the champion dailies, and I finally saw what that infamous Threat from Above was all about.  The rest of the dailies were a let down though, all replications of the valiant ones. Nothing really interesting…

But the gold was nice, so I kept doing some of them on Grisen – it gave her a purpose, since I wasn’t raiding or doing anything really with her. She went on to become a champion for two more cities, but it was still a bit far from done.

But the whole thing just wasn’t interesting enough. It got boring so fast… And there were no real rewards from pushing through it. Not besides some level 200 gear and some vanity items.

Ok, if you’re into the whole mount or pet collection mayhem, this may keep you busy and interested. But I’m not! I do like certain pets, and some mounts look cool (though I can never get the ones I’d really like), but I don’t need dozens of them, and I’m not spending a whole lot of time going after every one of them.

So, besides the gold, there was no real reason to go after the Crusader title… that is… until 3.2 hit… and now I know I’m again missing some content, through the new dailies only available to the Crusaders! And I must see them, even if only to bash them later on how unnoriginal they are.

Yeah, Blizzard keeps throwing the bait and I keep going for it.

The new dungeon and raid on this patch also appealed to me a bit. I had fun with the Beasts and I’m looking forward to the rest of the encounters. By the way, I love Anubarak and I’m glad we weren’t done with him – though I do think he deserved a spot in Icecrown Citadel, not in some filler raid.

Anyway, I picked it up again with my dailies, but I still don’t like them. And I still don’t like the Tournament. Can we stop this non-sense and go after Arthas already?