Melee

[Nafos]

Hi i was just wondering how you guys solved melee vs 5x shammys. I was resently sapped by a rogue and he took down my alts then me.. Yes he was 70 and i was 64 but still!
Later a full brutal enh shammy came and mowed me down.

I'm not doing all bad tho :P . Downed several 70's easy. A group of 4 actually xD . They sucked tho. Or well they must have.

Back to the point! Melee. How do you handle them? When they are running around you its kinda hard to get the slaves to cast a spell on them. You need to run in circles around your slaves on your main to get them to turn >.< ..

Thanks all!

[Bravo]

Earthbind, lightning shields and frost shock might mess with em, you could even kite them around with earthbinds and use firetotems to hurt em along the way. just make sure you don't run too far from a war or he'll intercept you

[blast3r]

You can also 'melee' him back. With practice this can be very useful. I'm leveling a 5 rogue team right now so am getting a bit better with melee. I'm currently using the regular method that follows a 'main' if it is alive but am going to change this soon to the leaderless setup which will make it even better. That way if someone saps or traps the 'current main' I can just switch to another on the fly. I have had several shaman teams (currently have one on Mag at level 60) and use melee pretty much all the time. Kind of wish I would have leveled taurn shamans instead of trolls for the round robin war stomp, though. That would be a perfect weapon against a rogue. Thinking about it now I may try and roll a team of those before my RAF runs out!

[emesis]

Hi i was just wondering how you guys solved melee vs 5x shammys. I was resently sapped by a rogue and he took down my alts then me.. Yes he was 70 and i was 64 but still!
Later a full brutal enh shammy came and mowed me down.

I'm not doing all bad tho :P . Downed several 70's easy. A group of 4 actually xD . They sucked tho. Or well they must have.

Back to the point! Melee. How do you handle them? When they are running around you its kinda hard to get the slaves to cast a spell on them. You need to run in circles around your slaves on your main to get them to turn >.< ..

Thanks all!

If the gear differential is such that a rogue can talk out one of your toons in a couple of seconds, there is very little defense against a good rogue. General important points against melee:

1. You have to get good at switching control to an alt. If you don't have this set up and aren't smooth at it, you are always going to get picked apart. It's pretty easy to tell a lead toon and a rogue will usually open with sap on him.

2. I like to drop 5 Fire Nova totems first off. If my cooldowns are up and I'm getting gang banged by more than 1, i'll drop all my fire elementals for the additional chaos instead. Fire Novas at least give you some guaranteed burst damage against melee. I also have a "PvP" totem dropping macro that I'll click a couple times first if it's a multi-player ambush; the most important thing about the macro being that it drops some temporally-spaced Tremor Totems. Rogues don't have fear, but seems like everyone else does, and boy do they love to drop em on boxers.

3. Blow cooldowns, obviously - EM or NS if you got em. NS is huge against a sneak attack where you need to burst some guy before he picks your team apart.

4. Moving to target = fail in my experience. A good PvP knows your guys are on follow and will dance around behind you. You'll never get a spell off. I think the best thing is the "defensive box". Set up a macro to split your guys in a diamond, for instance, with main in the middle. Then tap your follow button to bring the team back facing the middle. In this position 3/4 of your outside shammies will be able to cast no matter where the attacker is. You can mouse turn the middle shammy. That gives you 4 shammies that are pretty much guaranteed to be able to cast.

[suprafro]

Starting next week with 3.0 we get thunderstorm, hex, and super fire nova totems.... I think melee is going to go from being annoying to becoming pretty much a joke from that point on

[Dominian]

Hi i was just wondering how you guys solved melee vs 5x shammys. I was resently sapped by a rogue and he took down my alts then me.. Yes he was 70 and i was 64 but still!
Later a full brutal enh shammy came and mowed me down.

I'm not doing all bad tho :P . Downed several 70's easy. A group of 4 actually xD . They sucked tho. Or well they must have.

Back to the point! Melee. How do you handle them? When they are running around you its kinda hard to get the slaves to cast a spell on them. You need to run in circles around your slaves on your main to get them to turn >.< ..

Thanks all!

Still with 10k armor, 8k hp and 200 resillience (yes its not much but alot better then your gear i assume) good geared rogues and enchanment shamans hurts like HELL! The burst can totaly destroy a shaman in seconds!

Most likley the shaman will pop bloodlust in a case vs a boxer so be ready to purge!

[Dominian]

Starting next week with 3.0 we get thunderstorm, hex, and super fire nova totems.... I think melee is going to go from being annoying to becoming pretty much a joke from that point on

You dont get hex before 80..

[cherzra]

4. Moving to target = fail in my experience. A good PvP knows your guys are on follow and will dance around behind you. You'll never get a spell off. I think the best thing is the "defensive box". Set up a macro to split your guys in a diamond, for instance, with main in the middle. Then tap your follow button to bring the team back facing the middle. In this position 3/4 of your outside shammies will be able to cast no matter where the attacker is. You can mouse turn the middle shammy. That gives you 4 shammies that are pretty much guaranteed to be able to cast.

This sounds like a really good plan. Any chance you can provide the details, or a subject for another post to use the search option with?