PvP happened - didn't do so bad

Just for fun I did some 5's last night while streaming. I have only 1 piece of Malevolent on my characters, which isn't the weapon so to say the least my characters are quite undergeared for what I am going up against.

I won my first 4 games though and ended up going 7-9. I was extremely pleased with these initial results and very happy that I can cap my conquest points that much faster.

Currently composition is RDruid / 3x Frost DK / Enh Sham.

Some of the fights I lost horribly and couldn't do anything about, I am hoping to chalk it up to a gear thing both in survivability and in offensive DPS. The ability rogues get as a baseline giving AoE stealth for the group at the beginning of the fight is massive. Annoys me to the point I almost think about dropping a DK and adding in a Rogue just for that opener. I would gain an MS this way but not sure it's worth the tradeoff at the moment.

On the fights I did win the players were typically below average, not popping defensive cooldowns. I did win two games where their gear was far superior than mine. Somehow I was queued up against some teams with an MMR of 1850. They wiped the floor with me and I'm not sure if a gear gap will fix that. I can't even imagine trying to play 4x Ele Shamans back in the day with the amount of CC EVERY SINGLE CLASS has these days.

I do see the value though of Enhancement Shaman burst but the damage done after every fight, the DK's - all 3 of them do twice as much as the Shaman each. I realize some of that is AoE but AoE pressure is important. I run their healers out of mana extremely fast.

Notes for improvements:

• Gear is an obvious one
• Better Healing Rotation on Druid
• Work in offensive Cyclones somehow

Surprised you got queues, grats though. When 5.2 comes out will be very surprised if anyone gets any qs in 5v5.

Queue's took 3-5 minutes per pop. This was a Friday night and I faced about 8 different teams. Ranging from 1350 mmr - 1850. so there isn't that many running but it's something.

Congrats on your victories. Ive tried healer and melee combo but i really suck at it. I activate click to move and hotkey iwt. But the melees go ape shit if i button mash and run off in random directions. Do you mainly drive the healer and if so, how often do you press iwt hotkey?

I hit IWT probably 5 times a second. The melee's are on their target like bread on butter. IWT works so well it's almost hard to go back to a caster team. I drive with the healer and feel that is the optimal way to play. I need to work on keeping my healer out of the fray though I end up running in head first.

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Originally Posted by Fat Tire

Surprised you got queues, grats though. When 5.2 comes out will be very surprised if anyone gets any qs in 5v5.

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People queue 5's, just have to be on the right battlegroups for active queues.

Btw, loving BG's now. I don't even have the PvP weapons but it's much more enjoyable.

Is the temporary suspension issue resolved?

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Originally Posted by Chivalrous

Is the temporary suspension issue resolved?

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Nope, still happening.

Boo :(

well you guys are braver than me! More PvE here I come.

Have not had any issue with the temp suspension and I've done two sets up to full bg honor gear. At this point I'm also stomping players pretty badly already with no gear.

In my stream last night I think I was 21,19,18,14 and 0 deaths on my DPS. Let me see if I can pull the VoD.

Here we go. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azBoy1HrAGw

How exactly is your healing set up? It doesn't look like you're doing the traditional click healing you see with stationary healers (grid+clique or VuhDo) as you seem to be using your mouse pretty freely and being able to kite and play a mobile healer properly. You have one of those hand keyboards or mouse buttons to heal each toon while being able to move your healer and select targets?

Your pretty damn good at micromanagement. I would not have chosen a druid healer, but watching you makes me think i should. Great stuff!

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Originally Posted by heyaz

How exactly is your healing set up? It doesn't look like you're doing the traditional click healing you see with stationary healers (grid+clique or VuhDo) as you seem to be using your mouse pretty freely and being able to kite and play a mobile healer properly. You have one of those hand keyboards or mouse buttons to heal each toon while being able to move your healer and select targets?

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He plays a druid for the on the move style of healing they produce.

Different buttons to focus your target and a macro for your normal healing as well as one i assume for burst healing during tree form.

I just saw this post, and will reply to it when I get back - wife kicking me off. But Druid is extremely strong for healing, after trying out a stationary healer like Resto Shaman I think Druid is possibly one of the strongest boxing options. (for PvP)

After watching the stream, I agree. It's amazing how well your druid is healing versus my disc priest. Like night and day. So much mobility!

The Druid healing rotation I have isn't perfect but it's on my to do list. Priority currently is to fix the Shaman somehow or replace from the other thread. I also find it oddly enough the best time to think about strategy for a character is taking a nice run or in the shower... Seriously.
So this is what I whipped up.

Num1-5 is my characters and through jamba they always show up in the same order so if char 3 is taking heat I push 3 and it /focus that character. If I push the same button again or spam it I will also try to cure/dispel that class. Less buttons is better right?!

An issue I ran into was swiftmend. It pre requires rejuv on the target. So my main spam key the first thing I have it do on priority is throw a rejuv on each character and it resets after 15-20 seconds to do it all over again. I keep modifying the time frame here. This also gives a nice aoe heal of sorts. Rejuv is on a 1 second gcd so they go up fast. Placing it on 5 targets may seem like a large chunk of time but it turns out to not be. Can even reduce it to 3 if you know the top 3 characters that end up being targeted.
Next is a priority sequence. These will all be targeting your focus so whoever you target you are free to choose, able to heal without too much thought process which I notice other healers required more.
Lifebloom was a bit tricky to work out but I think I found the biggest bang for the buck. This is the next highest priority item, get the glyph where it expires in 10 seconds but heals at the end for 50% more. Make a cast sequence to spam the lifebloom button for 3.5 seconds... I'll have to double check this number I'm on my iPad but this should put max stacks without wasting any gcd's. set another macro key that does nothing and does not advance for 10 seconds. It's will perfectly time the bloom and reapply.
The other option is to have the glyph that transfer a triple stack to the next target you select. The problem with this is how can you tell your easy to spam macro hey this guy only needs 1 lifebloom cast to refresh the whole thing? At this time you can't :)
next is Swiftmend every time it is up, then wild growth, barkskin and... I'd have to look at my bars.

The emergency heals are NS - healing touch on a 1 min gcd
incarnation which turns you into a big tree, and just spam regrowrth. I picked up the glyph for this which takes off the hot but it's 100% crit chance.

That's pretty much the heals, everything I do I can run around and do it. The heals aren't massive and by no means Op but it's extremely fluid and makes you feel like you can focus on other things instead of heals.

on top of all of this you can be offensive. I have my Druid cast typhoon whenever it is up as well as the roar that disorients. If it hits yay if it doesn't oh we'll, with how much is going on its not a make it or break it.

I have a mouse over cyclone macro which you can make within wow and whenever nothing else important is going on just spam the button while trying to target and enemy you aren't actively killing.

That's my super secret list! You aren't getting anymore out of me today :) I still have my dk macros I hold dear but that'll wait for another day.

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Originally Posted by Ellay

I still have my dk macros I hold dear but that'll wait for another day.

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Oh man, c'mon... share the love... :)


On a serious note, I was watching your streams tonight and I was wondering how do you control your melee team? Do you toggle Jamba Auto-follow the team leader or do you press a key to have them follow your leader after each kill? Also, are you spamming your heal macros as your spamming your melee macros? And last question, on your DKs, do you cast outbreak as your first spell or do you just go straight into Howling Blast and then Obliterate?

And thanks for the streams, good stuff and I agree with your wife, you should talk more :)

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Originally Posted by Ellay

The heals aren't massive and by no means Op but it's extremely fluid and makes you feel like you can focus on other things instead of heals.

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Definitely the feeling I get from the druid. Not so much with an rsham which I spent about 10 hours leading with over the weekend. The stopping and hard casting heals, although they're HUGE (healing surge can easily go 150k, and greater healing wave 350k), felt like a huge distraction. I'm still trying to break the habit of running in with my healer as I spent 80% of this expansion leading with the DK, but invariably you have to move around a bit. I'll be testing the druid more, but I think the key to making a hard caster like a resto work is a good 20-30 yard range from the melee allowing easy peels with death grip.

I'm still watching how you control your druid though, very well micromanaged. When I lead with mine and start shifting, using displacer beast, etc. I can lose track of the melee pretty fast.

Gonna try some movement tweaks for the DKs while the healer is doing his thing... IWT -> melee during heals and/or backpeddle and strafe when move a lot on the healer to prevent losing the melee. Targeting is a huge issue sometimes especially with the druid... you displacer beast in the other direction or kite around and your melee is no longer in your view so you can't select new targets... runaways or they do nothing.

Just thinking aloud at this point maybe a /targetenemyplayer, then IWT on the DKs bound to some of the druid's cooldowns? I've also heard of some using follow strobing on the melee, or a separate re-follow a random melee key bind when your healer is way out of range. One problem with always using a movement key to stop your IWT runaways is although they stop moving, they're often all spread out, stuck on terrain, etc.

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Originally Posted by Ticks

Oh man, c'mon... share the love... :)


On a serious note, I was watching your streams tonight and I was wondering how do you control your melee team? Do you toggle Jamba Auto-follow the team leader or do you press a key to have them follow your leader after each kill? Also, are you spamming your heal macros as your spamming your melee macros? And last question, on your DKs, do you cast outbreak as your first spell or do you just go straight into Howling Blast and then Obliterate?

And thanks for the streams, good stuff and I agree with your wife, you should talk more :)

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I'm mixing in the healing with the damage abilities at the same time. I want my entire focus to be on target selection/ emergency heals/ CC pressure in that order. So when I run into a BG / Arena, I pick a target, check health, if both of those are fine work on various forms of CC.

I have the /follow command through jamba as one of my mouse buttons. I just spam it whenever I need it. I don't use strobing. I need my melee on the target 100% of the time without follow messing it up.

Not currently using Outbreak at all. I use Unholy Blight in my opener which seems to suffice for great AoE pressure and getting those dots up even if they try to dispel them.

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I'm still trying to break the habit of running in with my healer

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I have the same issue, you're not alone.

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I'm still watching how you control your druid though, very well micromanaged. When I lead with mine and start shifting, using displacer beast, etc. I can lose track of the melee pretty fast.

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As long as you have a target selected, they are doing their job spamming DPS.

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Targeting is a huge issue sometimes especially with the druid... you displacer beast in the other direction or kite around and your melee is no longer in your view so you can't select new targets... runaways or they do nothing.

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For arenas where target obtaining is most important I've been using the arena bars on the side to select my targets. No more tracking them down!

To the guy losing his melee you should assign a key to the mouse that when fired, or alt-fired, presses back on all your melee toons.

A single fired instance won't cause them to walk backwards. It will however put the brakes on a runaway toon.


Edit: Forgot about the keyup event on the forward key sometimes being missed. Make sure your keypad down is accompanied by an initial keypad up. That will stop the runaways for good.