5v5: thoughts on S4 and dealing wtih "The Super Fast Rush"

[Elektric]

The DMG/Defense/DMG/Defense works great against these Full S3 teams rushing us up and coming "Ellays."

There definitely is an art of using our burst dmg with the 4X shaman setup. I find that finding the softening up the target with Purge pays huge dividends! Being able to soften a target up, check to see what kind of healing attention theyre going to get, lowering their dmg, and having them potentially blow their Defensive/Offensive cooldowns is priceless (Mages Iceblock real fast after getting hit with purge...). Using purge has really increased my Dead Target to Nuke ratio to around 95%. As long as you drop that first target it gets much easier from there. Heal through their damage, toss some more purges around and find that last target.

The Last target is usually standing right in the middle of the arena, they've long gone into tunnel vision while trying to nuke you down, and you let them have the old Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, ES combo. Against a 2 or 3 healer setup Im OOM 99% of the time at this point in my fight. The great part of the DMG/Defense/DMG/Defense strat is now they have at most 1 dps up. I work on regen and heal as necessary, with one dps its laughable the amount of dmg they can do with 5 healers. After regen (It still tickles me today that shaman have regen after playing them before the expansion, OOM use to mean Game Over!), sometimes my NS+EM+CL is up again and I enjoy punishing the last DPS target, and 99% of the time the Healers leave the arena. Some important things to remember are to try and kill the DPS in LoS of each other. This allows you to make sure your searing totems are up and you're stopping the potential rezzes.

Mind you I feel kind of bad for the other team, but after waiting for them to zerg for 5 minutes I do get an evil grin knowing I've got it in the bag!

I'd Say my wins aren't nearly as clean as they need to be. But if anything at all its supporting Ellay's theory that killing the DPS first leaves them with almost zero options to Win the match (watch those rezzes!).

So I'm sure I haven't told you anything you didnt know, but hopefully I've helped share with the community what works for me.

[Boylston]

The great part of the DMG/Defense/DMG/Defense strat is now they have at most 1 dps up. I work on regen and heal as necessary, with one dps its laughable the amount of dmg they can do with 5 healers.

I've lost two close games now where my healer and one shammy were taken out, and it was down to 3xShamans at low-to-no mana vs. 1 SL/SL warlock. Talk about humiliating...

[Ellay]

I've lost two close games now where my healer and one shammy were taken out, and it was down to 3xShamans at low-to-no mana vs. 1 SL/SL warlock. Talk about humiliating...

Spam water shield, drop 3x healing stream and 1x mana regen. Refreshing groundings when able. Use healing wave when mana permits, should be able to hopefully survive, I've been in similar situations.

[Vyndree]

My team gained 100 pts last week simply because I went from 5-manning my own 5v5 to using Suvega's priest as my healer.

Let me tell you, knowing that a Iceblock/Bubble is not going to stop me (Suvega just mass dispells) is priceless.
He's also a dwarf, so he chastizes my spike targets if they're trying to pillar hump or other such nonsense.

My groundings/tremors help the fact that he's squishy, and he specced pain suppression to deal with spikes. We did have issues with a couple full aoe groups (as well as a 1 paladin/4 rogue group -- can you say "anti caster"?), but I think with the 4/5 spell pushback resistance bonus from PvP gear I might do a bit better on that. I also need to re-gem for more spelldamage.

We did have a case where I was going oom but laying 4 grounding totems (only casters left) and taking a nice cold sip of Star's Tears fixed that.

[Ellay]

omg 4 Rogues?!!??! AAAHHHH

[Vyndree]

omg 4 Rogues?!!??! AAAHHHH

Yea, I think I managed to kill maybe... one?

I couldn't see much through the massive amount of kicks and stuns.

[Alemi]

My groundings/tremors help the fact that he's squishy, and he specced pain suppression to deal with spikes.

How do you find it works with pain suppression over circle of healing and spirit healer? My priest is afraid to spec for pain supression over circle from the double aoe mage teams. And spirit healer has saved our butts more times than I can count. Let priest die when oom, 15 seconds of uninterrupted healing, force team off you, rezz healer.

And I too have faced a 4 rogue/1 resto druid team, 2 - yes 2 - with dual warglaives. I think thymbul lasted about all of 2 seconds before I saw a spirit healer. And then it was blind 3 shaman, kill one, vanish, run off... at that point, i just said screw this and left.

@Teht - I do feel kind of bad for some of the teams in our battlegroup since they have 4 multibox shaman teams that I know of to deal with.

[Boylston]

Spam water shield, drop 3x healing stream and 1x mana regen. Refreshing groundings when able. Use healing wave when mana permits, should be able to hopefully survive, I've been in similar situations.

Problem is they Siphon Life on all three guys and Life Tap to get their mana back much faster than I can get full mana. It's almost easier when there's only two of my guys left rather than 3-4...

[Depherios]

A note on Pain Supression:

As I tend to spam the crap out of my Lightning Bolt button, I've been considering using /castrandom to toss in random purge like... 1/10 times... Not even sort of a high enough level to give that a shot yet. But I figured I'd just throw that out there.

[Boylston]

I use hotkey "2" to cast LB and "Shift-2" to 4xPurge. I want reliable, on-command access to purge/LBs... so I don't want to necessarily be Randomizing when it happens.

But I use Shift-2 so it's not something I get tunnel vision about and forget that I have at my disposal.