4 shaman + pally experience
I've found a good s2/s3 geared paladin to play with my 4 shaman. We've put in about 60 games in the last two weeks. We're having a hard time getting to 1600. The shamans are in various gear, with spell damage ranging from 700 to 780 (unbuffed and without spell damage totem).
Our general strategy has been to setup totems and then wait for them to attack, but that hasn't worked out as well as I would have hoped.
Common problems:
1) The enemy doesn't engage right away, but takes its time taking a look at our setup. Then, after about 3-5 minutes, the entire enemy team attacks all at once on a single target. One shaman or perhaps two gets locked down hard for a few seconds, and then someone dies. It seems that our hanging back and being passive let's them put together a solid game plan for taking us out.
2) Hunters. They can just hang back out of range and still hit me for damage that I can't always ignore. I have to either just sit there and take it, or try to move closer to him, and moving the totem farm makes us vulnerable for a moment as well as uses mana.
3) Melee right up in my face. I know this will always be a challenge, but I'm working on it.
I suppose my big question is that I'm not certain that setting up totem farms and letting them decide when to attack is the smart thing to do. It feels like I'm providing them with too much opportunity to coordinate things in their ventrilo about how to take our team apart. The alternate I suppose is to engage relatively quickly, the biggest downsidce that I can see from that strategy is that we'll be vulnerable to fear until a few tremor totems are put down.
I know the general consensus strategy for 4 shaman arena teams is to hang back and wait for the enemy to attack, which I guess means that other folks are more successful in handling that first damage spike than I am. One game last night, the enemy team waited 15 minutes before attacking, and when they did one shaman got stunlocked by a rogue/warrior and destroyed while cyclone and fear was chain spammed at my paladin. That sort of coordination doesn't happen often, but it seems like I'm providing lots of opportunity for the other team to get coordinated.
I suppose other explanation is that perhaps my shaman's damage is a little on the low side, and I'm not able to quite a large enough alpha strike as I need to generate to win.
Interested in otherrs' thoughts, but particularly if anyone has some success with rushing in, or at least not huddling in the totem farm as much.
