Dear pvp junkies!

[Eloxy]

Out of curiosity, what are you up to these days?
Are you working on a new team, playing main team? Post here so all can know what people are up to =)

I myself having fun in bgs and maxing my honor, and getting some more clips for mah next movie (though it could be cool to try a mele setup out, but non raf leveling = poo)

[Ogloo]

my shammies! rockin and rolling with them still in arenas i wanna do a 5 druid team for pve but again no RAf, i wonder howmuch longer it takes without.. because i mean after 60 the Raf is gone anyways

[Multibocks]

its about triple the time to level 1-60 without RAF. It takes me about 13ish hours, I think been a long time, to level from 1-60 with RAF. So plan on close to 30 hours to hit 60. Sucks and I would rather /wrist than do 1-60 without it.

[asonimie]

My 2 cents on leveling: I've been leveling toons since closed beta 5 years ago. I leveled my shaman team and said "thats it I hate this shit." Why? cause I was in a rush all the time. Couple months ago I leveled my warlocks, and I did it slow and relaxed, and I actually had a lot of fun. I was very surprised by this and since I have decided to level a melee team as well.

It's really not that bad. My suggestion is - don't count the hours. Boost SM or w/e for a couple hours, and have a movie on the next screen. 1-60 ain't that long anyway. Doable without RAF casually in a week easy.

Good luck!

[Jubber]

Don't forget to get the heirloom shoulders and chest pieces... Makes it better.

[Svpernova09]

Not exactly a PvP junkie, but an amusing PvP encounter: I rolled a DK to test out Kil'Jaeden PvP server (it's PST located, I'm CST so I wanted to test latency) and I'm running around hellfire doing the initial quests out in front of Honor Hold killing orcs, and an 80 DK drops down and starts in on me. So I throw chains of ice on the DK and run my gnome ass away. I spam Chains of Ice and every so often turn and death coil to catch what I can for heals. He couldn't kill me, or even catch up to me. at one point he finally realized he too had chains of ice, it was both of us spamming chains on each other. The amusing part comes in when I kited him all the way into Honor Hold and he got destroyed by the guards.

So the 80 that couldn't kill a 58/59 and let himself get kited up to guards and killed so he had to take durability hit.

and I thought *I* was terribad at pvp.

[Iceorbz]

Leveling 4 Paladins and a DK here soon lol. Paladins are now level 52, tired of running stratholme so I was paying people 160g a run to do it for me.

[asonimie]

Not exactly a PvP junkie, but an amusing PvP encounter: I rolled a DK to test out Kil'Jaeden PvP server (it's PST located, I'm CST so I wanted to test latency) and I'm running around hellfire doing the initial quests out in front of Honor Hold killing orcs, and an 80 DK drops down and starts in on me. So I throw chains of ice on the DK and run my gnome ass away. I spam Chains of Ice and every so often turn and death coil to catch what I can for heals. He couldn't kill me, or even catch up to me. at one point he finally realized he too had chains of ice, it was both of us spamming chains on each other. The amusing part comes in when I kited him all the way into Honor Hold and he got destroyed by the guards.

So the 80 that couldn't kill a 58/59 and let himself get kited up to guards and killed so he had to take durability hit.

and I thought *I* was terribad at pvp.

Just beautiful.... /tear

[mrmcgee21]

My teams floating from 1950-2100 as it has since s4. I've leveled druids up and tried them very little in pvp, I just couldnt see them measuring up to what shamans can do in anyway which just irritated me. But maybe if you give it a really honest attempt you could find ways to make them work, I see potential in them but one fundemental issue I had in all phases of pvp was having to lose basically a gcd everytime i wanted to heal ( cast a heal lose boomkin form, reboomkin .. nuke .. get hit hard again .. repeat ) also the massive amounts of damage you take while out of form stinks.

I really feel like shamans could go higher than where I have been in LK given a very "fertile" BG, ie put a very experienced arena-shaman boxer into a bg that hasn't ever had one ... you could probably spike quiet high(maybe not quiet to a glad cutoff though .. not sure). Much like Kromtor has with his paladins, should someone be willing to invest the cash. I would say don't bother trying this until your breaking 2k on any BG, as your only going to get a short window of games before teams figure out how to counter the comp(probably want to take your healer with if possible). Some teams will never be able to counter us due to lack of skill or coordination, but I believe any glad level team should be able to figure it out in a matter of 10-20 matches TOPS and start winning games consistantly.

4 shamans have always been beatable by good teams, it was MUCH harder to beat a good boxer pre LK but still very very achievable. Now though it takes much less skill, due to many people having aoe cc, to work up a good CC rotation to give your team time to land kills within the safety of several strong AoE cc's .. followed by many strong defensive cc's. You had all of this in BC but, it was much less prevalent, only 2 or 3 class's had ways to live through a good volley then AND there was much less AoE CC around ( shadowfury was NEVER seen in arenas due to destro being god awful in pvp).

Also something else that can hurt us in PvP is how lavaburst works, its absolutely terrible with 4 shamans. 4 flameshocks announce our intended target as soon as they are activated on another player, even if we do it from a focus key, also a good priest/paladin team( almost everyteam has one or maybe both in some cases ) will dispell them long before your LvB hits. Another issue is the travel time in LvB, should a team be so careless as to not dispell quickly enough, the massive ball of molten lava skipping across the screen is another early warning sign to the healer, and the intended player-target that its time to use a defensive CC ( if they failed to either dispell the 4 flameshocks or LoS you at this point ). Frankly I have started degenerating to just Lightningbolt - CL spam more often now because it makes my target switching much less transparent. My healer is really who pointed this out, one match I got a quick kill on the other teams ret paladin when we charged them in nagrand ( mounted ) and he said over vent ( god it feel like it takes forever for those lvb to actually hit him ), noting how his health kind of dropped to 60% or so, then sat there for another 1-2 sec as my EM-LvB combo traveled across the arena and finally landed the killing blow. This was against a 2100ish team.. even with a near perfect execution of my combo that ret could have very very easily prevented his death, even if he didnt know where I was .. he can see the 4 flameshocks .. he can see the 4 lvb moving toward him .. as can his entire team. This is where good players win out, 1-2 sec is enough time for most skilled healers to react. But this is exactly what every instant LvB kill looks like, flameshock hits andevery member of their team see's it on party frames, so they all know whats about to happen(insert any aoe cc here), .5 sec passes LvB launches, .5-2 sec pass ... LvB lands, thats pretty darn slow.

Lets compare that to our oldschool combo of BC Channel LB ( could be going to any member of their team thanks to focus nuking so theres no prehealing this bad boy ) LB launches - EM/CL HITS - .5-2sec pass LB HITS - ES ( or FS ) HITS. Thats why pre LvB shamans did more burst dmg, hard to believe maybe at first but in BC y ou had all this dmg hitting any given target on their team seperated by .5-2sec max. Infact I might try abandoning LvB altogether in a few games this week but the sad truth is they nerfed LB and CL dmg coefficients hard in 3.0(to counter for LvB coming in) so its probably not going to work well anymore.

So, that ended up being very lenghty but, I think its a pretty accurate description of the 4 shaman team in 5s right now at least. Also a little cross Xpac comparison for those of us who where around for S3 and S4.

[Eloxy]

Yeha gotta agree on that tbh, kinda silly that we have to "announce" ur kill before doing so.

then again i tend to flame shock all around, and keep pressure so they dont have time to cleanse. then go in for a KABLAM Altso ima try to use more hex in the future, sudanly im meeting mele cleaves again for some reason ^^ (gief btw)