Shaman love

[Bradster]

So just recently hitting 70 I decided to jump in BG's for a few hours of fun. Working on my gear and its come a long way already for just being 70 for 2 days, but that said I entered BGs with pure PVE greens and blues. Now before I start I should note I've done the entire honor grind on my warrior with the exception of 1 trinket in that time the horde lost 80% of the time in our battle group at my times of play. In fact the last time I won an AV game was back in February.

As the gates open I decide that I should play D, Not many enjoy playing D and I may be most effective here with the snaring and focus fire. Plus the added bonus of everyone all tightly packed nice and neat for chain lightning sounded appealing. So I setup, place my totems and wait a few minutes. I see the map and see all the nodes turning blue making its way down to me like every game. Then I see the first wave.

I refresh my totems and I think to myself, man I’m going to get rolled, that’s way to damn many. I say to those around me, kill anyone that slips through I'll hold them off! Boy I sure did too. Man I'm telling you it was at that moment all the hours of hard work and boxing in all this time paid off at this exact moment. HK notices are popping up all over my screen as I'm dropping my fire elemental totems and chain lightning and lightning bolt spamming my ass off with a Bloodlust up. Wave after wave I continued to plow them all down. A few slipped past but backup crew was waiting to soundly punish them for making it past.

Between waves I had time to drink up to 50% and continue, heart beating faster now they’ve made at least 5 goes at this so far. Then all of a sudden it stopped! All of them completely gave up and went to play D lol. I jumped on my mounts and cleared and back capped the rest of the nodes and did my best to hold any off from getting past. People are following me, praising me and screaming follow the honor train as we ride over Gnome corpses. As I reach the bridge it looks like a old TM battle with a AOE light display that would shame Pink Floyd. I healed up the front line and moved in to offensive and the was over. The Horde won, and that was my first AV with the shams.

I played 4 more games we won 2 they won 2. We lost to a full premade, the other I had placed all tremor totems without putting down a grounding so they blew past me. I was able to prevent them from entering the room but we ended up losing out on resources.

God I love these shamans, it’s really renewed my spirit hitting 70. After going at this for a 2nd time grinding the exp without RAF or any of that fancy stuff. The really fun part is finally here.

As an added bonus (I didn’t know this at least) Rep gear that only requires you to have honored, has been changed to PVP gear with Resilience on it. I’m currently working on the rep I need to polish off here and there. Then after grinding some daily looks like I’ll have 138 Resilience which isn’t bad just starting out at 70.

With the Xpac just around the corner, I’m just going to break up the game with Daily quests, BGs for fun (going to save the tokens and honor tho) and hopefully manage to get Nether Drakes. Once I finish off the Rep gear I think I’m ready to give the Arena a go.
I realize that I won’t make it that high because of the gear but I’m just interested to see how it works. To be honestly I love fair fights but I hate playing “ring around the line of sight”. I saw that a bit when I tried it with my mage long ago, if it’s still like that then it may not be the E-sport for me.

[Mystrana]

Not to bad in lower ratings but once you hit 1700 or more the teams Poll hump like mad ....as far as i have seen (ret pally arena) and heard on the forums just wait em out they will eventually come to you.

[Otlecs]

Great read, Brad - had me grinning from ear-to-ear

[blast3r]

Such a great story it made me think of dropping RAF for a bit and getting my shammies from 60 to 70.

BTW, I wonder what will happen to AV when Lich is out. Wonder if it will kill it. If so I need to take that into consideration because I love AV.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Such a great story it made me think of dropping RAF for a bit and getting my shammies from 60 to 70.

BTW, I wonder what will happen to AV when Lich is out. Wonder if it will kill it. If so I need to take that into consideration because I love AV.

Unless lake wintergrasp is the best thing since sliced bread and does NOT crash every 30 minutes, they'll just add another 71-80 range for AV and it will carry on bidniss as usual. :P

[BobGnarly]

Lake Wintersgrasp has a lot of bugs on beta, and that could be affecting the way its being played atm.

That being said, progress in the fight is currently gated by siege weaponry, which I view as problematic, and especially so for multiboxers. As soon as they can, every tard in the zone goes and creates a catapult "cause it's neat". I'm not sure what 5 siege weapons rolling up to the front gate will be like.

So, not sure this zone is going to be a lot of multiboxing fun. Have to see on live to know for sure, though.

[Xar]

Congrats man...defense is my favorite thing to do in AV because I can do well at it. Offense is ok too but harder without a healer keeping my group up when there's a large crowd that I'm attacking.

Suggestion...start an arena team right away even if you end up trying but losing all the 10 games a week. They go fast and you'll still get arena points banked to get a couple of nice things before hitting 71 (arena points are wiping at 71). If your rating falls too low just disband it and start a new team, I asked Customer Service and you can do this every week if you were willing to spend the 200 gold. Customer Service said no problem. Just don't intentionally lose, try and play it. As my gear got better I was able to finally take out 2 of 5 but never won one on my own. I eventually re-teamed with 4 + healer and we almost got to 1700 one week. This past week was kinda bad for us but we had not been playing at all for the week and my partner is busy with levelling his mb team and I've been busy with trying to get the coin for my epic flyers.

[offive]

Shammys are great, no question. Doing RAF at the moment and after boosting to 35 or so... running quests was cake all the way to 60 with a quad box. I am toying with the idea of 8 boxing dps classes in lvl 80 10 mans.

DKs, the release honor wipe, wintergrasp, base lvl 80 PVP gear requiring Honor and Arena points... all having me scratching my head on how it will all unfold at 80. I think those arena boxers who get to 80 fastest will be able to make great headway in gear rapidly as the playing field will shift to boxer biased. And since a lot of end game things are still going to be gear biased the faster you get the gear the more dominate you will be. I do think the move to requiring honor and arena points for base PVP gear is a bad choice since it will likely remove some of the lower bracket players from arena. I guess all of this can change, who knows.

Yes I got into beta, and yes I have played the lagtastic wintergrasp as a DK, Sham, and Hunter (single box). Still there are a lot of other areas / fights on the WG map that boxers will like. Best part I think for boxers is no flying mounts allowed. I foresee ambushes galore. Just watch for the death grip that might break your followers off.

It looks like lvl 80 will come with a price tag, as a lot of buyable nice things in beta have big costs right now. It could all change but some of it seems like Bliz will keep it that way. I guess we will see in 48 days?

[elsegundo]

follow the honor train

lol loved it! love the read. thanks man.

[Shadraak]

marks and honor are being reset when exp hits so spend it while u can