1800 on all 5 shammys

[Zappy]

This is playing with a druid healer and swapping my guys in and out of matches throughout the night to keep them close together in points. I knew it would take a little longer swapping them around, however the wait was worth it. I'm actually looking forward to doing some BGs and WG now after finally getting rid of titansteel. :D

Right after I got weapons and shields on all of them:

http://www.garysdecks.com/WoW/1800.jpg

I was up late enough for the points to switch over, so I upgraded my chest as well:

http://www.garysdecks.com/WoW/Chest.jpg

After all the upgrades tonight I went from around 2400 SP to almost 2700 before TOW after and gained another 100 resilience sitting close to 950 now. How much +hit should I be aiming for? Right now I'm @ 101 (~3.8%) + 1 point in ele precision. I picked up the dominance neck piece and have been considering swapping it for the ascendancy piece.


On a fun note, we were talking in vent that we were surprised that we haven't seen another boxer on our battlegroup this season, then this team popped up out of no where:

http://www.garysdecks.com/WoW/Boxer.jpg

Good luck to you guys and stick with it.

[Multibocks]

By their name it appears they are in it just for some points =D

[Meshuggenah]

This is one thing I haven't attempted yet. which is strange because I started out with a focus on PvP, and somehow got side-tracked into raiding.

Im jealous. What sort of gear did you start Arena in, and how long did 1800 take?

[Ualaa]

Congrats on 1800 and the upgrades!

[Zappy]

This is one thing I haven't attempted yet. which is strange because I started out with a focus on PvP, and somehow got side-tracked into raiding.

Im jealous. What sort of gear did you start Arena in, and how long did 1800 take?

I've been going back and forth between this team, and two ally teams on Tichondrius (71 hunters and 73 DKs), so I was a little behind on gear this season. I knew once 3.2 hit, we'd be back in business, so I started arenas back up the first week. Basically, I had all the WG gear, and a mix between deadly and hateful when I started this season, and all the basic enchants, blue gems. The first week we got up to around 900, then the following week we approached 1500, so I bought the furious shoulders. We didn't know what to expect, and if we were gonna be stuck around 1500. With that, we were honor grinding like mad to buy as many accessories as we could each week, then gemed / enchanted everything with the best stuff. The following couple of weeks, we were finishing just above 1750, so we knew we could at least buy all the relentless accessories.

The biggest challenges we've had so far is picking the correct 1st target. On a 3 dps, 2 healer team, there were many times were we would make the mistake and cook one of their healers, but what we found is that the 3dps was still too much to heal through, so we would still lose a fair amount of games. By taking out one of their dpsers, we're usually able to heal through the damage and slowly work them down. The other biggest challenge is the other team getting off rezzes. With asonimie's wind shear idea incorporated into the macros, it's a lot easier now to stop them from getting the rezzes off which helps a lot. The only real problem here is when the 2nd target dies, if the corpses end up in a bad spot, it's very hard to watch both of them for interrupts.

The most disappointing match was one of the last matches last night when we faced a 2360 MMR team (paly, priest, lock, hunter, druid). They waited for a while, and finally mounted up to launch an attack from both sides (nagrand arena). When they did this I nuked the paladin in a very nice spot, and camped out on his corpse. The warlock and hunter kept steady pressure on me and were slowly eating my mana never allowing me a chance to get mana back other than water shield, and the priest and druid kept attempting rezzes. It's very nice to be able to focus either the lock or hunter, and still interrupt both rez attemps. After 3 minutes of this, i was finally able to nuke the priest. This proved to be a lot more challenging as the priest died opposite a pillar where the paladin died, so I had to constantly move around to interrupt the druids rez, meanwhile they kept enough pressure on me. As I was killing the hunter, the warlock timed a nice shadowfury right as my healer got out of line of site. My healer died right as their hunter died. Now it was my 4 guys which were all nearly OOM, vs the druid/warlock. After several more minutes of constant running around and trying to interrupt the druid, he got smart, and stealthed up. When he came back up, I never saw the rez attempt, and I had about 5 seconds left on my nuke, but this time the druid finally got the hunter back up, then it was all downhill from there. :(

What I learned that match was that, yes the gear does help, as there have been many times that my nuke target lives with under 2k HP, however, we've finally played enough matches together to where our play style and confidence is starting to pay off -- 586 arena matches so far this season!!! LOL

[Zappy]

Almost forgot, but the real point of this post was to get an idea of how many 5box shammy teams are left. I can't imagine I'm the only 5shammy team that arenas with all 5 by swapping them around.

One of these days, I'll get some fraps of some of the good times. I can farm gundrak, drak'tharon, UT keep heroics all day long and am very close to getting UT pinnacle down. I haven't really tried anything else, other than ToC normal which is actually quite easy on the shammys.

[Gares]

I've all but given up on trying because I can't find a healer.

[Kromtor]

that's got to be a horrible pain trying to do it on all 5 only playing 4 at once

[Zappy]

that's got to be a horrible pain trying to do it on all 5 only playing 4 at once

Definitely a lot harder than doing 4, but surprisingly, it wasn't all that bad. Once we hit around 1700, we started playing close to a 50/50 win/loss ratio, so after swapping a few guys here and there to make sure they were all within 100 points of the team and to make sure they had their 30% games, they didn't seem to deviate more than 50 points.

By far, the worst part about it was having to achieve 1800 3 different times. When the team first hit it, only 1 of my toons had the PR. My healer and two of my shamans were @ 1799, then we lost a few, but quickly got back to 1800. The 4th took another good 20-30 games to reach it, and the 5th another 15-20 games. We were definitely questioning whether or not the last two were gonna get the gear.

BTW - Your team inspired me and I now I have a DK and 4 rets. :) I didn't realize how painless leveling would be with them as I leveled the DK to 60 for D&D, and I've been using him to boost the palys. Started on Saturday and the palys hit 21. Definitely a very fun team there. :)

[Eloxy]

Welcome to the 1800 club m8 =)

Nice to see you do 5 shamans! Patriot! :D

[Clovis]

Grats on 1800 :)

Why do it that way though? The whole swapping in the 5th -- I have a 5th shaman too but I pretty much abandoned her =P The 4 I actually play all have 2950+ SP while the 5th is around 1700 or so, I bring her along on PUG raids at the end of the week when the pickings of available players get thin.

[Fat Tire]

Grats on 1800 :)

Why do it that way though? The whole swapping in the 5th -- I have a 5th shaman too but I pretty much abandoned her =P The 4 I actually play all have 2950+ SP while the 5th is around 1700 or so, I bring her along on PUG raids at the end of the week when the pickings of available players get thin.

My guess is zappy like to play 5 shamans in BGs and this is the best way to gear them all out at the same time.

[Bettysue]

I have my 5 shamans at 1450 right now, trying to finish up the relentless honor pieces on all of them, after getting the temp ban thing straightened out, I should be able to make 1500 this week. I play all 5 all the time...no pocket healer makes for some interesting times. I have several 1v1s resulting in wins now. I just stacked SP to get to where I am and now I'm moving the focus to hit and s pen. Resilience doesn't seem to make a whole lot of difference in 5's if you have about 750 so I don't gem for that anymore, and will be moving those points into hit, s pen, and SP in that order. I will get more resil through gear to help me push a bit higher. I'm hoping to hit 1600 solo this season...I guess I'll see.

[Zappy]

The real fun has been entering BGs. I get the "OMG.. Another afk botter. report him afk". Then someone else chimes in.. "How the fuck do you have that much relentless gear on them?" Then after that, the BG seems to warm up rather quickly.

I can't even imagine running 5s without a healer.

The bottom line is that I love my shammy team. I run heroic drak'tharon, gundrak, UT keep, and am very close to getting UT pinnacle down. I need to go back and try some of the other ones, as I seem to fly through em now. I can farm ToC normal without too many headaches, and want to try it in heroic soon. The fun factor for me is BGs, WG, and blowing up alliance towns. In BC, I focused on 4 shammys, while 1 was behind in gear, and what I found was that the enemy was a lot smarter and would always wack the one that was behind. Now, they can't do that anymore.

I finally started frapsing some stuff, but I need to convert the videos to something manageable, as I run high resolution (2560x1600), and my main window is frapped at close to that size (2100x1570 or something like that). Once I figure that out, I'll post up my UT Keep and CoT run.