How is Losing Possible with this Setup?

[Boylston]

Ellay, when you get a melee on you, I see in your winning videos that you typically drop Fire Nova totems and then shock generally.

Is it better to deal with the melee since they're not going to outrange/grounding/etc you, even if there's going to be some delay to reposition your main/alts? Or do you just let your healer friend heal you through 1-2 melees and stick with your current target list?

Thanks for posting a little bit of your strategy. I am curious at what rating level you started to see real resistance... I can imagine that the rush in and blow up their first member strategy might work really well if you're playing teams in the 1750-1800 rating level. Maybe it's not a valid tactic past 1600, I don't know. The teams I play on my main character that are in the 1500-1700 range all seem like they contain someone dumb enough to rush into the hornet's nest of totems and eat some LB+CL+Shock love...

[Ellay]

Whenever a melee drops in on me I instinctively drop the Fire Nova totems, it's an extra 4k damage non crit at least to anyone within the vicinity. Just an extra step to soften up targets forcing them to play in defensive since they lost 35-50% of the health and the healers occupied with heals instead of offensive debuffs.
Usually I try to stick with my 2 intended targets that I've picked out, but within a game I'm very unpredictable myself and I drop who I identify will not be able to stop my damage at any given moment. So if I have no idea whats going on, they definitely don't
The biggest factor against other teams is dropping their damage dealers ASAP. Healers usually can't overcome the damage potential you carry but their DPS is what does you in. So dropping the Mages / Ele Shaman / Hunters, anything that says ouch - pushes you one step closer to victory. The paladin that couldn't kill you with his hammer even if you went afk for an hour usually isn't the best approach to ensuring victory with an instant kill.

[Slats]

How do you do your targetting macros Ellay?

One of my bigggest problems in PvP is how slow focustarget is to update. I am curious as to how you do your macros - would be awesome to speed things up a bit.

[Ellay]

Focustarget and /assist work at the same speed. There will always be that 1 second maybe even 2 second delay for the target to udpate. I'd prefer to say 1 second but it feels like an eternity I know.
I have all of my characters using /focus instead of /assist, so if one dies I can switch easily by making another character the new main through focus.
Your main though does not need to utilize focus. Thus leaving it free to set as a primary target or secondary.
Other than that I target via tab targeting, clicking, pushing the I'm feeling lucky button (aka instant kill). It's always wonderful when someone flops and you never had the targeted due to /assist or /focus not updating fast enough or Chain Lightning arcing over and splashing them with wonderful colors.

[Boylston]

Maybe we need a "How does Ellay do it?" thread.

As for targeting, sounds like Ellay is NOT using the /cast [target=focustarget] type functionality a lot of us use, since he makes reference to picking one target and then switching to kill his focus.

I actually think Tab targeting (or selecting closest enemy) might be worth playing with some for arenas, or even some /target [target=focustarget] type functionality where you pick a target and stick with it. Tab targeting is nice because that delay isn't there as much, provided all your guys have the same nearest target (which is often the case).

Tell us more, Ellay!

[Boylston]

Your main though does not need to utilize focus. Thus leaving it free to set as a primary target or secondary.

Interesting. I have all my shammies set up with the exact set of macros/assist stuff. Probably because I didn't pick slightly different names, so I like the prospect of my "main" not being the character that they may think it is. I've even gone so far as sticking one of the alts out in front in world PvP situations where I know I'm gonna get jumped so that they pick him first.

What's the latest version of your instant CL macro? I'm considering making a separate one that just picks nearest target, trinkets, and goes boom. May avoid the assist delay issues.

[Ellay]

I still utilize the /cast [target=focustarget] functionality.

As for my macro layout on CL looks like this.

/cast Elemental Mastery
/cast Nature's Swiftness
/cast Blood Fury(Racial)
/cast Icon of the Silver Crescent
/cast Battlemaster's Audacity
/cast Chain Lightning
/cast Attack

[Sanctume]

A charging Warrior hotkeyed to Shield Reflect.

[Diamndzngunz]

Wow Ellay thanks for explaining each class in an arena. I get a better understanding what I am up against.

My problem and for some reason I can not understand it to save my life is the whole /focus macro. I don't know how many time I have been told what focus does but for some stupid reason I still don't understand it, and seeing this I only know I am doomed to fail seeing I do a /target (toon) /assist. Damn.

[Ellay]

It's really not that difficult, in the macro you just said you can also drop the /target piece /assist does it for you.

Basically start off when you log in with /focus "main char name"

then on your other characters when you want to do an action it would look like this /cast [target=focustarget] and just add something to the end of it such at Lightning Bolt. So it would now look like this:
/cast [target=focustarget] Lightning Bolt

Now say the main character dies, you push your macro button to /focus "second char name", now you can use all the same buttons and the are assisting the new main leader instead of having to have dozens of pages full of /assist macro's for each in case the main dies