Shamans in Arena - week1, my thought

I really am enjoying arena. Played games 5 boxing my druid + 4 shammies and a few games with a priest friend and my shammies to get him his conquest points for the week and raise his cap (I even asked him to go shadow).

Just my thoughts/observations...

• Mana is an issue... a big one. I've completely dropped chain lightning from my rotation because it's just a mana hog and find myself popping water shield for the passive regen when I can. I can easily attest 50% of my losses to simply running out of mana. I can have it down to 3v5 but if there's a feral druid or warrior up, they can keep me in combat and do enough damage to keep me mana starved and slowly take me out.
• Resilience, obviously, is necessary. Teams that had resilience were REALLY tough or beat me completely. Also, with my 500 resilience 5% damage reduction, 10% damage reduction from casting I still got hit with a freaking 34k heroic strike.
• Stacked Healing Rains = OP as hell.
• Ring of Frost... not as big of a concern as I thought. I can't confirm but I think grounding will absorb the freeze effect and as long as you don't move, you don't get refrozen (or people kept breaking them with aoes).
• Curse of Gul'dan is groundable, but will drop a circle around your totems.... I try to drop my groundings a little to my left so I'm not in the circle o'stun.
• No one can heal over steady burst. Double healers were still unable to counter the constant burst, unless I gave them time and stopped to heal. 150k prot warriors were still dropping pretty fast.
• Spiritwalker's Grace - absolutely amazing. If a shaman/mage/hunter try to run out of your range, pop it and take them out. It's better than EM imho.
• Feral druids suck. They can easily drain my mana and a single healer can out heal my damage with their reductions, cc drs, and melee dancing.
• With mana an issue, it's almost imperative to kill non mana using classes first because they will just keep you in combat and prevent any drinking.
• Bring lots of water. You will need it, even for a just a few seconds to let that water tick.
• Need to test out stoneclaw absorb, but can't figure out a glyph to drop for it.
• Glyph of Hex is really really really nice.
• Need to get spell penetration, bad. Resists are going to be a big deal.
• MMR is broken beyond belief.

On a side note, my druid right now has more AGI than INT since he's in mostly tank gear (didn't take too much int get questing up) so he's just there to solar beam & instant root... his damage is useless, but moonkin form is a pvp taunt and i can't tell you how many teams focus fire him down over and over again.

Ended over 1300 which was #2 on the fail BG that is retaliation.

Oh, and my priority kill list based on what I've seen teams do to me so far:

Warriors > Feral Druids > Hunters/Deathknights > Enhancement Shaman > Elemental Shaman > Healers > Balance Druids > Mages > Warlocks > Ret Pallys > Rogues

I gota say man... that just amped me up for arena!

I have been leveling my shammy's for the sole purpose of Arena. A friend of mine is leveling a Holy / Prot pally right now. Level 84.5, but going out of town for a week :(

Are you in mainly quest gear / heroic PvEs? Or do you have any PvP gear?
Also, did you try Enhance?

I played with it a little in WotLK (Never got to arena as I hit 80 post Cat patch). It seemed relatively powerful. I was surprised that I was always able to keep my guys together in BGs. I'm not sure if it has the level of raw damage you need as a boxer though. None the less, 8X wolfs all stunning would be a Healer killer. That coupled with stacking Storm Strike debuffs + Earth Shock.

since we are talking about shamans, I have one question


Say I am a rogue on the opposing team. You come out and set your totem farm. My teammates of 4 come out hide behind a pillar. I stealth up to you at 20-30 yard right in front of you. My teammate charges in. At 30 yard, I use smoke bomb right in front of you. You are not in it. My teammates are all protected by it for 10 seconds. For 10 seconds, you cannot target me, and I get to nuke your team for 10 seconds.

How do you counter that. Run up and thunder storm ?

This is obviously theory crafting.

smoke bomb reference

http://www.wowhead.com/spell=76577

Niiiice write up, thanks for that. I'm wondering how much resilience we're gonna get and ofcourse how much damage reduc it will be, once fully geared.

Because i think the currenct lack of resi situation could be in our benefit. Unless AoE still hurts like a truck.

Did a couple of games today, I dont see any problems to get 2k or 2.2k with shamans in a couple of days but I'm switching to the death knight team for arenas because once everyone has ~30% damage reduce the damage is too low to beat the high rated teams with shamans(no more instantlava kills). I think death knights are the ultimate arena boxing class now, stacking necrotic strike is really retarded now and if blizz doesnt fix that death knights aboslutely have gladiator potential

btw ring-o-frost is srsly overpowered

jk grounding totem

A team did exactly that yesterday, while you cannot target into the smoke cloud, you can make their lives hell for doing so. Immediately dropped healing rains and treants for passive healing and then hurriquaked into their smoke bomb. While I cannot target them directly, you can AOE. I have hurricane glyphed for 50% movement reduction to anyone affected & earthquake x4 with the chance to knock down is pretty damn nice. Effectively ruining their 3 minute cooldown and putting their healers at a massive healing deficit across their team. Soon as smoke bomb ended I was still over 60% health on all my guys and their were under 60%. Immediate em/lava burst and then it's 5v4, hexed the hell out of them and then spiritwalkers graced and ran away from their melee while nuking down their priest (mana burns hurt a TON). 5v3. Then mop up.

Enhancement is a pita imho. Roots will effectively kill you. While it's hard to peel a shammy off because their can remove snares and/or ghost wolf. They have 0 defenses against roots. A single frost mage will make your life a living hell imho. I much prefer elemental.

I'm mostly in PVE/Heroic/Justice gear and had a whopping 500 resilience yesterday. After the conquest reset, I'll bump that up to about 900 tonight.

As an FYI - I fought a warrior with 150k health, 1.9k resilience (20% damage reduction) and had him completely dead with the initial volley (fs -> lvb -> lb -> thunderstorm) in a number of matches. I fought them about 7 games and went 2-5 against them. Prot Warrior/Ret Pally/Feral Druid/Arcane Mage/Resto Druid. The single deciding factor in that game is the damn feral druid. I couldn't take the time to nuke anyone down because I was constantly having to deal with his bleeds ticking for 6-9k while being arcane blasted when groundings were down while the resto would toss a few heals and then wild mushroom spam.

Most of my losses were to this team, a double feral druid team, or another team with a feral. I'm just having a hell of a time dealing with their damage and balancing that and focus fire. As I get more resilience to manage their bleeds, I think it'll be a ton easier - not saying easy, but better than it is now.

Good stuff, that clarifies the "smoke" problem for me. I was having a bit of doubt due to the smoke bomb for shamans.

As I also mentioned in another thread.

Feral is broken. It almost counts as 2 persons. When you focus burst him, you better kill him quickly. Or he comes back with that 40k Mangle in bear.

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Originally Posted by remanz

Good stuff, that clarifies the "smoke" problem for me. I was having a bit of doubt due to the smoke bomb for shamans.

As I also mentioned in another thread.

Feral is broken. It almost counts as 2 persons. When you focus burst him, you better kill him quickly. Or he comes back with that 40k Mangle in bear.

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And if you keep attacking him in bear he'll barkskin/survival instincts/frenzied regen while you feed him rage while attacking him.

sounds good so far.
i bet when everybody's in resilience gear though it's going to be a whole different game, they'll be able to heal through it and it'll be a question of who oom's first. if people end up doing endurance/drain teams and there's no GCD kills it won't be good for boxers.

edit:
i used to be in retaliation but i left cause there was so little 5v5 activity. i went to shadowburn which is marginally better, but if you really want good 5v5 you have to go to bloodlust which is west coast with shitty pings for us east coasters.

So long as you don't run into a BE DK multi-box group you should be ok :)

I was gonna say something when you come out calling zappy on the forum. Is this your first arena season or something ? never fought another boxer before ? Don't come out here show your immaturity.

you use some combos that have advantages over the shamans. That doesn't mean much.

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Originally Posted by remanz

I was gonna say something when you come out calling zappy on the forum. Is this your first arena season or something ? never fought another boxer before ? Don't come out here show your immaturity.

you use some combos that have advantages over the shamans. That doesn't mean much.

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Who are you raging at?

My first week in arena was very bizarre.

First of all, I hit 85 on everyone at the last minute. My main had been 85 (due to some instance-runs with guildies) and had some honor/blue starter gear, but the rest of the team jumped into the arena with ungemmed items and unenchanted stuff, etc. Main had only 104k health / 1300 resilience, alts were 98k health and 400 resilience (IIRC).

First game was an instant win due to the other team not being present. Yay!

Next 4-5 games were mostly against the same team, who CCed all the shamans for what seemed like an eternity. I was, at best, able to get off one volley of spells, then the whole team was shutdown for 10sec or so. This generally didn't kill anyone, but my healer and I had to go into emergency heal mode to save people and I was never able to put good DPS on the other team. (More on these guys later)

I then won a game against some OK players. I think they had good gear, due to the difficulty in killing them, but they were very disorganized and I was able to just wail on them one by one without much trouble.

Lost a few more games, then had a funny situation. Our arena queue popped, but one of my shaman was stuck in that worm-thingie that swirls you around the caverns in Deepholm. He couldn't get out of combat and thus we started the match 4v5. I figured it was a total loss, but we actually did well and won the match. As fun as that was, it became annoying that one of my guys didn't get conquest capped. :(

Anyhow, I left the session feeling OK. I know my gear will get better, but so will everyone else's. I share Kromtor's concern about OOM and scaling issues.

My #1 biggest concern about arenas is that CC is so, so, so prevalent, and even mediocre teams can pull this off well. Shamans have good DPS and burst, but not when they're CCed and not against teams that are swarming them. I think the 4xDK setup has some huge advantages in that regard-- if a DK is able to attack, he's swinging at the target or gaining ground on the target. There is little micro-management involved, you can wail at your Attacking button(s) and they automagically home in on the target. They also do well against situations where multiples are swarming you, I suspect.

If the threat of getting insta-gibbed by a multibox shaman team is diminished (and I think it is), then people will infiltrate your group and swarm more often. This might be an issue with the team in arena. While I'm still optimistic about the shamans' ability in BGs, I think hardcore arena multiboxers may want to gravitate towards the FOTM DKs setup.

Yes, the awesomeness that is the swarm of melee toons is why I probably wont be doing arena seriously on my shaman.

Being swarmed as a caster in turret mode was always the way teams really beat me, even when the casters would move in and swarm around me. Mana being an issue is the real reason that melee start to shine, since no melee toon will ever be out of resources, even the ones that use mana.

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Originally Posted by BrothelMeister

Who are you raging at?

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directing at someone who have to build his confidence in arena by beating another shaman team and brag about it on the forum

this

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So long as you don't run into a BE DK multi-box group you should be ok http://www.dual-boxing.com//images/smilies/smile.gif

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I must have missed where I was called out, but it's all good - hopefully I'll face him again on my other team. :)

I just hit 85 on my shammys on Saturday, and wanted to try to get enough games in to hit the weekly point cap. Having no resilience was a pretty hard beating to take - i think my final numbers were something like 6 wins to 30 losses. A few things I learned is to switch my heals to use healing wave - mana is a huge issue now. Not only for us, but i could see our opponents having the same issues. Healing rain stacked is a must once the dps race starts. I was shocked how well that keeps up my team. But again, the biggest problem is running out of mana. I had one match where I killed their entire team except for one feral druid, and I must say, that it's quite funny and embarrassing to watch 1 feral druid kill all 5 of my shammys due to being OOM. I'm curious to see what kind of mana pool or issues a fully geared shammy will have.

The DK team looks very interesting right now, so you may see a few more Skippys running around. I'm also considering switch my 80 boomkins to feral and begin the leveling process with them. If they don't get the nerf bat soon, that looks to be one hell of a good team too.

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Originally Posted by Zappy

I'm also considering switch my 80 boomkins to feral and begin the leveling process with them. If they don't get the nerf bat soon, that looks to be one hell of a good team too.

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this.

My experience was... Queued into double feral tripple healer teams 2 of them like 4 games in a row.

Said I'll wait till next week when there are more people playing.

Did some rated bg's and 3v3 (on 1 toon) and I must say getting gear isn't going to be hard. It's retardedly easy we had a guy in greens on our 2k MMR 3s team and we were still winning. Got our pally his epic healing mace already.

Ring of Frost... not as big of a concern as I thought. I can't confirm but I think grounding will absorb the freeze effect and as long as you don't move, you don't get refrozen (or people kept breaking them with aoes).

Ring of Frost is my main issue, even if i trinket i get refrozen again. Its a bitch. Also if they start pounding on one of my toons, he gets out of ice but the rest is still in ice, so i can't heal myself/do damage.

Also having problems with prot warriors and rogues.

I'm trying to get the tazik shocker on each toon, got 1/4, thats really a must for arenas

Quote:

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Originally Posted by remanz

I was gonna say something when you come out calling zappy on the forum. Is this your first arena season or something ? never fought another boxer before ? Don't come out here show your immaturity.

you use some combos that have advantages over the shamans. That doesn't mean much.

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Grow up. There was nothing hostile about the post it was simply a comment on how unfavorable the matchup was for him being that I had 5 AOE 2s silences.

You should get a clue about friendly banter pertaining to my first post in this thread, or not take yourself so seriously, I didn't even direct the comment at this Zap guy who I didn't know was on these forums. I don't think you have any clue what calling someone out is, all I did was recap an incident with a shaman boxer team to relate how successful the DK team can potentially be in arenas. There was nothing offensive about what I said, I didn't say he sucked. I don't know what has your panties in a bunch. Now, if you want to talk about "calling" someone out, your post, that is calling someone out. You're calling me out. The only person acting immature here is you. You're raging over an innocuous comment. Perhaps it is your struggling grasp of English that is the problem here. Maybe you misinterpreted what I said, if that is the case I forgive you.

As to your questions. Is this my first Arena season? No. Have I ever fought a boxer before? Yes.

Now answer my questions. What other MMO's have you played? What e-achievements do you have that entitles you to come down from on high with poor understanding of what was actually said and act like a douchenozzle?

For those wondering, here is the highly offensive comment made in another thread as I related my first real arena run with the DK's.

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Originally Posted by Mercbeast

I also ran into a 5 box shaman group named Zappity or something similar. That didn't go well for the shamans, who did pretty much instantly blow up one of my DK's. Once I got into them however, arcane torrent round robin left them helpless. I wonder if Zappity is on these forums.

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highly offensive indeed

on a serious note, the MB on MB crime rates are alarmingly high as is the rate of fatherless MB children. we need to clean up our community and stop championing pimp and gangster culture.

http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:A...St9UTNIEe6oZaX

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Originally Posted by Kromtor

on a serious note, the MB on MB crime rates are alarmingly high as is the rate of fatherless MB children. we need to clean up our community and stop championing pimp and gangster culture.

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+1 unfortunately.

glad I'm running feral and resto team lol.

BTW the skullbash is very handy. I gotta figure out a nice round robin style for my pvp setup.