My fights look nothing like Ellay's

[magwo]

Well vs AoE, it's all about gear.. if you have the toughness to endure it, np.. nova totems, shocks, meelee, stay alive. If you're already in S2 armor, you should focus on S2 mainhand.. makes a huge difference. Then go for S2 shield or guardian gear.
Also, I like to gem/enchant for maximum spell damage on my slaves, and maximum stamina/resilience on my main, where possible - for example leg enchants and so on.

This makes you more durable because many teams will go for your main.. it's a good practice to make him tough as a nugget.

[Mercurio]

i could say im having similar experiences, i've been working my balls off over the last month of so gearing up, im now in full s2 with s3 chest, have neck, belt, bracers, s1 wep, s2 shield, 41 badge trinket and the 30k honor trinket with the +dam on it. I sit on 880 spell damage and 380 ish resi. Now, thats not bad tbh.

This week i've managed 5 : 5 in arena, i started on 1377 points and now im on 1401 exactly. The first game i won got me 23 points, i think i played it really well, the others i won were quite close, but the 5 i lost were all over the place, but the team make up i found v hard to beat, i had people ressing on me and all sorts, dam priests, druids and warlocks giving me the run around, a complete loss of focus fire :/

Bless you, Tizer. My shammy gear and stats are very close to yours and I'm sitting at around 1450.

I thought I was the only one that sucked that bad. (No offense, I'm refering to my own suckiness.) Makes me wonder if those of us in killer gear that are getting our butts handed to us are the silent majority. Still, it is odd just how much better some people do with comparable gear.

[Kicksome]

If you want to get good - you need to play about 100 games then play 100 more, then you can think about getting a good ranking. I don't care how geared you are - you need to learn to play the arena's and different team compositions first or you'll get rocked by any decent team. I have all 1000+ spell damage gear and 400+ resil on all my toons - almost as good as Ellay (he's got about 20 more spell damage on avg with each char than me) and I got rocked today because I hadn't played in 10 days and I was rusty. I had to calm myself down, get myself together, and start thinking about what to do vs. each team we played. We won the next 5 games and got back to 1700 rating - one game lasted 23 minutes. Ellay makes it look easy - but it sure as hell isn't. It takes a ton of practice and experience to know exactly what to do when.

[Tizer]

Im in total agreement with you kick, i know its all about practice, i dont dispute that for one minute. I've never been a huge arena fan but if i want the gear i need to do it, so i've got onto a rather huge learning curve. I plan to spend a few days doing nothing BUT arena. I think some of theone of the biggest lessons i've learnt this week along is that purge > * and mages need to die pretty quickly Closely followed by making sure your insta kill doesnt get wasted, because there are plenty of teams that know about this ability now and lots of players tease you into using wasting it.

[Elektric]

Purge and not missing the nuke are Fundamental in beating any team. Mastering these things take time and practice. Purging effectively, remembering to do it, getting of as many purges pre-opener are all things that slowly put the odds in our favor.

I rarely miss a nuke on those Mages, man are they annoying. The Purge definitely ensures that I take them down with the nuke. I have also started to use the 1 button nuke, rather than a castsequence macro. I don't know what I was thinking but never realized that you need the "/stopcasting" in your nuke for it to go off instantly. I still spam the button but it definitely seems to land more.

The stopcasting in that macro also lets me stop a lightning bolt in mid cast and throw down the nuke. With mages the biggest problem I use to have after purge was I'd cast Lightning Bolts and then throw the nuke. I think mages are watching my casting bars and in an effort to squeeze out a little more damage they dont iceblock until they see the lightning bolts flying at them. Since my macro stops the casting of the lightning bolt they never see it coming. I have ran into a couple mages that can survive the nuke totally purged but I try to follow with an earth shock and it has been taking them down with no problems.

Mages have incredible damage and there's not a class in the game that makes me worry like they do. So if a team doesnt have a mage Im not so quick to throw the nuke out. Realizing that lesser healing is one of the highest healing spells in the game (terribly mana efficient) 5 healers can last through almost anything. Many of my wins are happening from letting them blow their cooldowns, sneaking in some purges, and then destroying the softest target. I then continue to heal through their damage and at some point Im really low on mana, thank goodness for Star's Tears, I drink up and kill the last 1-2.

Ellay's stratedgy on taking the DPS out of the fight is so unconventional, but so is 4 shaman and thats why it works. 4 lightning bolts is enough to keep any great healer busy. Add in our ability to switch targets and lay down the nuke and I am a believer there is no counter. Sure spam fear is a PITA and AOE silence is annoying but as long as you land the nuke its one huge step in the right direction. 4 beating 5 is very unlikely.

[magwo]

Cool! I can see the big advantage of having a /stopcasting in your CL/alphastrike macros.
Will definitely try.

I've also been appreciating CL+shock a lot more lately.. I think that when you hit 70 and try it, it doesn't kill stuff... but 5-6 pvp items later, your CL+shock combo kills anything but locks and discpriests.

[magwo]

But wait.. when you talk about nuke, do you mean EM+NS+CL?
I'm currently running with TOWs.. finding them quite awesome for that extra punch to take out really tough targets on a regular basis in BGs and so on.

So I don't have an instant nuke.. and I like to spam my alpha strike button.. so I shouldn't have /stopcasting in it right?
It's not possible to do a conditional stopcasting right? Like for example /stopcasting [!Chain Lightning] or something?

[Elektric]

"/stopcasting" does not work with button spam. It essential executes everything at once. If you hit it twice it will interrupt your casting.

ToW is great for gearing up. It makes heroics ez mode and gives you a ton of lasting power in burning down people in AV. It doesnt work so well in arena...simply because the chance of winning a 5v4 fight is much higher than a 5v5 with 12% more crit and hit. Hence why landing the nuke is fundemental and is many times the difference between winning and losing.

Maybe I didnt describe what I think is happening when I light up the mage with NS+EM+CL. The mage is casting, burning down my grounding totems, While I am purging everything off of them. At the same time making my way closer so that distance isn't an issue with the nuke. When all the buffs are off the mage, by this time my grounding totems are gone and the mage is in the middle of casting another fireball/frostbolt. I then start to cast Lightning Bolts. The mage feels safe because they now they can finish their cast and Ice block before my lightning bolt hits them, because normally the you can watch the lightning bolts fly through the air. I then hit my /stopcasting NS+EM+CL macro and the lightning bolts get cancelled and instead a totally debuffed mage feels the wrath of 4Xcrit CLs INSTANTLY (there is no travel time for CL) followed by whatever ES I can slip in. Its gg about 90% of the time.

I dont believe conditional macros work in BC.

[magwo]

Ok, I will consider the stopcasting macro once I get enought spell damage.
There are some conditional features of macros.. for example combat/non-combat.. and all the conditions on targets, and some other.

[shockernub]

I think you really need NS for arenas, that alone will make up for a lot of gear. I have crap gear, had even worse gear last week and still went 3-7 in my first attempt at arenas. The wins mostly happened as a result of vaporizing the first target incoming, a LB, NSCL,ES/FS seems to do the trick on most non-mage/pali targets.

I couldn't imagine doing arenas without the insta nuke.

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