I may have gotten the WoW itch, tell me what's happened in the past 2 years.

[Kromtor]

I've really only been playing about 10 days. The first group I've messed around with is my tried and true 4 ret 1 blood dk. They are very strong. The rets heal like crazy and it's easier than ever to multibox it since you slap on the glyph of battle healing and let your seal of insight heal efficiently just as a percentage of your damage. In the past I sacrificed a lot of DPS for the healing when playing rets but now it's actually a bit less. You lose a good chunk from having to use seal of insight (especially hurts your single target DPS), but it's not as much as I lost before when I rarely could use a templar's verdict since HP was always was used for word of glory.

The blood DK is a great tank that self heals/shields like a beast, and his DPS is incredible. He will often out DPS your rets even on single targets simply because he gets so much extra atk power from taking damage.

The fact that they're not really viable for top tier PvP is simply due to lack of magic removal from cleanse (but that nerf happened a long time ago) and the plethora of AoE CC and damage that's now available to every class.

I'm probably going to test 4 DK 1 ret/prot, simply because DKs have a bit more in the way of getting out of CC without sacrificing DPS and have some interesting delayed burst stuff. I still don't think it'll work out in arenas and it'll a bit harder in PvE since DKs can't really heal each other like they used to, but I'm sure it'll be fun and easily heroic viable.

[Kruschpakx4]

I do suggest you to play quad enhance, sustain damage and healing is really good, the oneshot macro is like those from elemental shamans back in bc, no travel time, no gcd between and a guaranteed kill, I'm currently always lurking around between 1,6 1,7k , for sure I need either a good resto shaman or druid (currently have neither), some major problems are getting fixed with 5.1, maxing out gear will ofc also have a big impact on the comps performance, once I'm not getting oneshoted within the first 2 seconds of the fight by bm/war/war/x/x comps then quad enhancement is high rating viable due to retarded amounts of healing+stacking healin stream glyph, ofc mastering primal elementalist is necessary

beside that its also incredible strong in small battlegrounds, like ele shamans in s8, may not as strong in 40 bgs as elemental because ... well because melee..

[Kromtor]

I haven't looked into enh so Krusch may be on to something, especially if they have a reliable insta kill shot - I didn't think anybody had that anymore at least not at range. Another grind to 90 followed by an honor grind I suppose.

[Ualaa]

If you're horde, strongly consider Magtheridon <The Zerg>.
We have 18 active boxers, at the moment... I think four of them are 10-boxers.
Camping the Stormwind AH has been fun, and <For the Horde> runs too.

If you're alliance, take a hard look at Kil'jaeden <Legion of Boom>.
Again, a lot of boxers, which is rather fun to play with.

Pretty sure you're US based.
If you're EU based:
Alliance > Outland > Autobots Roll Out
Horde > Grim'Batol > GIMP

Playing with other boxers absolutely rocks.
Going with 30 boxed toons, into an AV or IoC is quite fun and devastating for the other side...




You get Honor points from winning battlegrounds, or achieving objectives.
You get Conquest points from winning random battlegrounds, from rated battlegrounds and from arena.
I believe you also get some Conquest from whatever the Call to Arms BG is.

You can blacklist a couple of BGs, which you'll never get from "Random", unless they're the CTA for that period.




The advent of Real ID and Battletags is great too.
As Horde, you can do RathStrat AV's (where the goal is HKs) and the win rate is close to 99%.
Alliance can do QQ (or it is QueQue?), which is similar.

You real ID friend request the wait list holder.
Join their vent.
Basically get invited after 30-45 mins wait.
Then run as many games as you'd like.

Worst case scenario, you're not terribly interested in this type of play...
But it will get you full Honor gear, without a lot of pain in the process, and likely in a relatively short period compared to running BGs on your own.

[heyaz]

I haven't looked into enh so Krusch may be on to something, especially if they have a reliable insta kill shot - I didn't think anybody had that anymore at least not at range. Another grind to 90 followed by an honor grind I suppose.

The reliable insta kill shot is within a 3 minute window when you are in Ascendance and not CC'd. Stormblast (stormstrike under ascendance) hits for about quadruple and is all nature damage, bypassing armor. Correct me if I'm wrong but outside of that, enhance damage with stormstrike and lava lash is like auto-attacking compared to other melee. The kill shot with elemental back in BC was CL + ES. In wrath it was 4x lava burst + 4x FS/ES and or CL to connect at the same time - but this could be repeated every 10-15 seconds or so, you didn't need to wait for elemental mastery to come back up although it helped.

How do you kill anything quickly outside of ascendance every 3 minutes? You need a lot of uptime (not something you get often these days) to get kills after that is over. You need lucky windfury procs, stormlash, and some big stormstrike/lava lash hits to put out any real damage and it's not reliable. Correct me if I'm wrong but that was my limited experience with enhance, they've always been a CD, 2-3 minute cooldown class with mediocre damage in between.

As far as I can tell, elemental just doesn't have an insta-kill, period. With maxed pvp power and high spell power you may be able to get a good 200-250k hit with ele blast + earth shock but players have 350-400k and ele blast has to be hard casted unless you took Ancestral Swiftness. It's not a guaranteed crit and shaman have negligible crit with good gear (around 12%)
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...s/Novoz/simple

Ascendance + lava burst in ele can score a kill but that's just because you can rapidly launch wet noodles for 15 seconds until something dies. But you get cc'd the second you pop it and need a good 5+ seconds (an eternity in arena) to get off that many lava bursts.

[Shodokan]

I do suggest you to play quad enhance, sustain damage and healing is really good, the oneshot macro is like those from elemental shamans back in bc, no travel time, no gcd between and a guaranteed kill, I'm currently always lurking around between 1,6 1,7k , for sure I need either a good resto shaman or druid (currently have neither), some major problems are getting fixed with 5.1, maxing out gear will ofc also have a big impact on the comps performance, once I'm not getting oneshoted within the first 2 seconds of the fight by bm/war/war/x/x comps then quad enhancement is high rating viable due to retarded amounts of healing+stacking healin stream glyph, ofc mastering primal elementalist is necessary

beside that its also incredible strong in small battlegrounds, like ele shamans in s8, may not as strong in 40 bgs as elemental because ... well because melee..

DKs will also be much more viable as soon as BM/Warrior burst gets fixed

But honestly warrior damage is so dumb that you can play wheelchair cleave in 3's once again (rshaman/hpal/warrior) and wait for a 5 stack of Taste For Blood and kill someone in a single heroic strike. If that doesn't show you how dumb this expansion is then I don't know how else to explain it.

5's have high representation on bg9 but every other bg seems to be super prone to win-trading (my old bg shadowburn as a perfect example, when i queued above 2200 i'd get ddosed by the r1 team if they were playing because they straight lost 100% of games they played me last season)

If you want to do 5's I'd highly suggest a multi-class comp. Enhance and dks will be okay especially if you GRIND with the mmr changes next patch. But with that said... higher rated players who play more will always out-scale you.

[heyaz]

i'd get ddosed by the r1 team if they were playing because they straight lost 100%

How exactly are these teams getting your IP address to DDoS you?

And not to mention, people are serious enough about this now to rent time on a botnet to perform a DDoS? That kind of thing used to be expensive and was used for taking down websites for either financial gain or to make some kind of protest. I didn't realize it was so commoditized that some wow jerk offs can rent one to ddos a someone at will.

[Fat Tire]

How exactly are these teams getting your IP address to DDoS you?

And not to mention, people are serious enough about this now to rent time on a botnet to perform a DDoS? That kind of thing used to be expensive and was used for taking down websites for either financial gain or to make some kind of protest. I didn't realize it was so commoditized that some wow jerk offs can rent one to ddos a someone at will.

Skype was the easiest way, but now there are more advanced ways and really its pretty common knowledge. Tech has really come along and you dont need very much at all to cause someone to disconnect from wow, even if they log right back in by then you will have killed their team. You dont have to flood an ip with packets from a shit load of bots the way people do to take down large websites.

[heyaz]

but now there are more advanced ways and really its pretty common knowledge

indulge me then

Tech has really come along and you dont need very much at all to cause someone to disconnect from wow, even if they log right back in by then you will have killed their team. You dont have to flood an ip with packets from a shit load of bots the way people do to take down large websites.

You could take down a host with 1 packet 15 years ago, it's not "tech"
again, specifics?

I still feel like they probably obtained the IP prior when you were on Skype, Vent, visited their web site, or whatever. Not through wow directly, but again since it's common knowledge maybe someone could share it with me.

[Fat Tire]

indulge me then



You could take down a host with 1 packet 15 years ago, it's not "tech"
again, specifics?

Are you seriously asking how to ddos other players? I dont think the mods would like that, but grab a shell booter, I got the script.