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While waiting, I've had some success with a few baiting tactics. My favorite is...
We keep playing cat and mouse with me purging them (a la Ellay) or flinging out a lone spell volley or two. I can tell they're waiting for a good moment and talking it over via ventrilo. So I'll lay down a totem farm, then take one of my alts and sorta run him 2-3 yards ahead of the group and off to one side. (I'll switch to his client, and just run him a bit say 30 degrees to the right.) This breaks his /follow, and then I'll re-control my main and start jumping up and down and trying to move over there to "pick him up" again.
I fake a technical difficulty where I have a rogue alt, basically.
This will sometimes encourage them to attack "hey, he's got a problem, let's go now". As they start moving in, I mash my follow macro and Mr. Troubled Alt snaps back into line and it's time to kill them. I think I've done this 4-5 times now and it's worked all but once. It certainly isn't going to work more than once against most teams, but it's worth trying to be sneaky a bit and try to get them to fight on your terms and in your totem farm.
Use your partner for bait a bit too. I destroy any warrior who charges my Pally partner first. Love it when that happens.
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Gallo -- yes, I do try to use fire nova, but that doesn't save my shaman from dying in these situations.
The "purge while you wait" tactic mentioned by Boylston and Ellay is something that I had not considered, and is definitely something I'm going to try tonight, and it sounds like sometimes it's acceptable to just sit back and heal for a moment or two.
Boylston - thank you for providing your numbers, that's very helpful.
Thank you very much for the replies.
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Muhahaha, I've done the technically difficulty error before on a bait and it worked. I made all of my characters run into a wall faking a DC on all, after about 10 seconds then came strolling in and I blew them up :)
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I really want to try the "lie down in the spawn area, all spread out" tactic. Would be fun to see a 4xChain Lightning from the prone position to the first curious person.
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5/5/08 Update:
We are much more comfortable in Ruins of Lorderon and the Blade's Edge Arena. Our win rate in Blade's edge is very high now, since it really does force the teams to fight on terms that are good for us. Ruins of Lorderon is becoming more comfortable as well.
The Nagrand arena is stifling us a little bit if we face a ranged team and decide to stay put behind a pole. Melee teams where we use the "nook" continue to be just fine from a setup/positioning perspective. If we are stay behind the pole and wait for a ranged team, then better teams are simply LoSing and pole dancing before I can finish them off. I don't know if I'm staying TOO close to the pole once the battle starts, but we fought many battles in the last two weeks (against better teams) where I would get someone to 50% or so and they would run around behind the pole before I could finish them off. If I pursued, it almost always went badly or the entire enemy team would rotate and just hug the pole.
Ellay/others--- Any tips for how to best play around this damn pole? I feel like I'd be better off in the melee nook at all times!
The good news is... We've played enough now that other teams are trying to outlast our patience. We sat for 27 minutes last night behind two poles before the other team decided to attack. We lost though... :(
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Please keep the updates coming Boylston...its great to read.
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Some day when I'm at 2000 rating, we can all look back on this thread and chuckle!
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Haha, seconded Boylston.
I'm recording all my games from now on and I'm going to 1.5x speed them, add commentary, and post'em up here. I think that's the best way to get/give advice at this point.
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Update 5/19/08
We finally broke through the 1600 barrier successfully a couple weeks ago. Shamans each had about 700 spelldamage (main slightly higher) and we started to feel like we were doing better. We are still struggling with teams who come in and heavily AoE the team (mages are a pain!), but both me and my partner were happy to end a week with the higher points generated with a 1600 rating.
Last week was awful, as we fought the same team 5 times in a row and lost them all. They are only rated 1650 or so, but the team makeup was:
Holy Priest
Resto Druid
Resto Shaman
MS Warrior
Warlock
Basically three healers and 2 DPS. I couldn't burst down anyone. If I selected the Warrior or Warlock, they got enough heals that killing them was damn near impossible. If I attacked a healer, they bolted for the hills as soon as the first volley landed. We did kill the Warrior once, but the resto shammy rezzed him from behind the Ruins of Lorderon tomb (I got AoE feared for just long enough to prevent me from going over to stop him). They basically outlasted our mana. I have no idea what we'd do differently to beat them.
Anyway, dropped back down to 1550 rating as a result.
All of the team is now at 360+ enchanting, so average spell damage went up. I think the team is now at 750,735,735,755. We're hoping for better draws this week to regain our rating and start pushing towards 1700.
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I've been getting some footage here and there, haven't looked at it yet but I'm trying to record against all the popular combo's.
The Triple healer Warrior/SL lock is amazingly fun to play against! I love getting those teams :) Just burn that warrior, keep chugging LB's on him.
