[Shaman] PvP + Enhancement = ? - Page 28

Thugosaurus · 04/17/08, 3:09 PM

Originally Posted by Stoical

To Thug: I don't know about people just ignoring you, that's obviously rude, but if you want people to seriously give you a shot despite your being new to the arena scene, you need to take the gear you do have and can easily improve more seriously. You have no enchants, not even on your 3 pieces of s1 gear or your s1 weapons, an empty meta socket, a whole bunch of empty gem slots, no PvP trinket, no honor gear, and a healing relic. The gems you do have socketed are common strength or crit. Even someone who might consider trying out a team with someone new is probably going to run for the hills after they inspect you. You're going to get brutalized with 8k health and 200 res, and people recognize that and don't want to subject themselves to it.

My advice: You don't need full s3 to start trying out arena, nor do you need 400 res, and if random arena partners expect that they're deluded. You do need to get the honor gear, enchant your stuff, and gem for survivability. If you had a bunch of honor gear and had done what you could to get yourself ready, and people were still being dicks and not giving you a shot simply because you're new, then that would be a different story.

ah thanks for the reply

yes im working on vindicators gear as of now, its just so bleeping hard to win eots nowadays

but the criticism i was talking about was the same toward a lot of enhance shamans on the server. ive talked with a few who have tried to get a team, even resto shamans who said they were enhance and got put down b/c of the blind speculation on enhance shaman.

but i do appreciate the advice. i allow constructive criticism, and i like to get the knowledge from the best. ill get prepped up as best i can, get full glad + shield and maybe pick up a 2h from kara for fun.

the question i had though, is i am close in points to grab my first set of s3 gloves. should i still grind honor for the s1 gloves, or just wait a week and keep focusing on vindicators gear?

Stoical · 04/17/08, 3:44 PM

Originally Posted by Thugosaurus

the question i had though, is i am close in points to grab my first set of s3 gloves. should i still grind honor for the s1 gloves, or just wait a week and keep focusing on vindicators gear?

I wouldn't spend honor on s1 gear at all, I would spend those points on honor gear. You can fill your other slots with blue pvp gear as needed, and upgrade those to s1 gear once you have all your honor pieces, or s3 pieces as you save enough arena points.

Jack Burton · 04/17/08, 3:56 PM

Has anyone tried enhancement/rogue/resto druid combo for 3's? My bro's currently do 2's with a ss/hemo sword rogue and resto druid and do pretty well. I want to try adding myself as enhance to the grp and try some 3's and was just wondering if anyone had some success with the combo and if so had any tips?

In my head the combo sounds great - bloodlusted rogue, purging shaman, wound poison, cyclone, hot's. My lack of shammy arena experience makes me a little apprehensive to the practical application though.

callidas · 04/18/08, 10:38 AM

Not tried rogue/resto druid/enhancement, but been playing warrior/resto druid/enhancement a little lately (got a 1400 team to 1700 in an hour or two), and it has been great fun

We went up against almost nothing but PMR teams, and it felt like pve tbh. zerging the mage (+cyclone the priest) forces an ice block/PS, and then heroism takes out the mage. Toughness/imp GW are great for getting back on target after a rogue stun session (nearly every game I was tanking the rogues - 436 res (inc shield) is great.

I imagine with a rogue it would play in a pretty similar manner, with the rogue ShS instead of intercepting back to the mage, and wounding replacing MS, although I'm not sure WF+rogue+heroism would be quite as op as with the warior sundering.

EDIT: As far as what to do as a new enhancement in the arena, I would give a few guidlines:
5) Learn to love your shield - You will end up tanking a fair amount of the time, and Stoneskin/GoA/Shield/Shamanistic Rage adds up to a whole lot of mitigation. While you are being focused the rest of your team can get to work. In the same vein I would recommend gemming for stam/resilience until you have a decent set of pvp gear (>S1) as it makes a massive difference when starting out.

4) Focus Earth Shocks - it is easy to get caught up in dps cycles and not pay attention to the bigger picture. With a focus target you can earth shock and grounding totem a lot of incomming cc / outgoing heals, and it only takes one earth shock at a critical time to score the kill

3) Do Something - When waiting for shocks/stormstrike to cooldown there are loads of things you can be doing, or when hamstrung and the druid you were tartgeting runs off, change and hit someone else. Even just dpsing a warrior a bit so the druid comes back into range (and the rogue can start the next CS/KS cycle) is better than doggedly trying to catch up with the pillar kiters.

2) Don't forget your totems - It wasn't until I heard a warlock cry "I'm not going in there, he has all his totems up, he will massacre me!" that I realised quite how important they are. There is almost always a better configuration / location for you totems, so whenever there isn't something more urgent then you should be thinking about improving your farm. Frost resistance, Windwall etc can all be outstanding and are often underused. Bonus points for figuring out how to abuse Sentry Totem

Our dps cycle is laughably trivial, so there really is no need to pay attention to what/how you are dpsing, it is everything else that makes up the difference between good and bad players...

Number 1 tip) Bind purge to mouse wheel up, and don't stop rolling it till they are all dead :P (Excepting ofc druids using 1 stacks of lifebloom) removing BoP/PW:S/PoM etc the second they arrive is awesome.

I am sure many of you will find fault with some/all of the advice here, but it is just a list of things that I do far better now than I did when I started arenas, and anything I can do to save people from respecing resto has to be worth it.

Malan · 04/18/08, 1:32 PM

Out of curiosity, does anyone ever find a use for windwall totem?

Rhagok · 04/20/08, 6:13 AM

Well I at least don´t find use for it, if a hunter is nuking me or someone else they are doing something wron, hug either a pillar or the hunter and you should be realtively save. With GoA, Grounding and Spelldamage as options, I'd definitely never drop Windwall

Lumb · 04/20/08, 8:51 AM

How far realistically do you think we can get as an Enhancement shaman / Rogue combo, with little to no pvp gear? The idea is that with our huge burst damage we can stun + burn down one target with ease, meaning pvp gear that gimps certain stats will be a weakness in certain respects, at least for my rogue partner.

At the moment we are floating around 1.5 - 1.6k, do you think it's possible to get any higher given the current situation?

thevidon · 04/20/08, 10:28 AM

Originally Posted by Lumb

How far realistically do you think we can get as an Enhancement shaman / Rogue combo, with little to no pvp gear? The idea is that with our huge burst damage we can stun + burn down one target with ease, meaning pvp gear that gimps certain stats will be a weakness in certain respects, at least for my rogue partner.

At the moment we are floating around 1.5 - 1.6k, do you think it's possible to get any higher given the current situation?

I hit 1710 running that comp.....you can beat up on bad teams, but not really viable in the higher brackets from what I could tell.

Juice · 04/20/08, 11:27 AM

Originally Posted by callidas

Number 1 tip) Bind purge to mouse wheel up, and don't stop rolling it till they are all dead :P (Excepting ofc druids using 1 stacks of lifebloom) removing BoP/PW:S/PoM etc the second they arrive is awesome.

Why exclude lifebloom from your purge targets? Enhancement shaman rape resto druids because of purge spam. I lay on purge every constantly while on a druid, only using GCDs for frost shock/earthbind to keep them in range for white damage. I don't even stormstrike while pursuing a druid, because if I miss a revuj/swiftmend combo he'll heal himself for 4k. Without mortal strike, the key to stopping druid healing is purge.

Malan · 04/20/08, 3:58 PM

What do you guys do when you face another cleave team? It seems like it comes down to who was better geared and blows someone up first, but we keep getting torn up pretty bad sitting just below 1800. We run with a resto druid so when we face a conventional cleave team with a priest we're at a slight disadvantage since they mass dispel bloodlust off pretty fast. Regardless though we're finding them incredibly difficult to beat.

Hailbringer · 04/20/08, 4:16 PM

Hi All

So far this thread is a great help in what to do in arena.

I would like to get some clarification here thou;

1. Would it be better to use a fast one hand (main) and then a slow one for off and know the theory for better WF proc, but I realize everyone uses a 2.6 for both.

2. I don't think the question was fully answer about using a healing/reg shield which is better.

I've just pretty much started arena and using a rogue for my 2v2. I told him he would have to be the CC for the grp and gave him some hints and it work out not too bad yesterday.8:5

I'll add my experiences at a later date when we progress better.

panny · 04/20/08, 11:06 PM

So last week I tried a new 3v3, a pretty simple variation on RMP (Enhancement instead of Rogue). Despite our Mage still using three pieces of S1, we managed to break 2k in two play sessions. We even beat a Quality Control's RMP team (Isolee/Frst/some other Priest) till Isolee respecced Shs from Mut.

The general strat is to sheep the opposing dispeller or Warrior, and attack someone squishy while using interrupts on a healer. While our team doesn't have the awesome CC chains of Blind/Poly/Sap/Fear, we can do a pretty good job with focus shocks. Purge spam also tends to wreck druid healers. Enh/Mage seem to go together pretty well, with me able to pressure Warlocks/Druids for him, and him being able to help lock down/burst targets.

Something that surprised me was the amount of healing that I did a few matches. Our priest ate one of those huge CC/interrupt chains and I was able to keep our Mage up long enough for DR to set in on our Priest. If season 4 doesn't kick in soon, I'll probably buy a S3 healing weapon.

fauxpas · 04/21/08, 9:10 AM

Hey everyone, i am new to this forum (well, i read quite a lot about shamans here but never bothered to post) and new to playing an enhancement shaman in PvP.

I've played my Shaman as Resto in S1 and S2 (2k Rating at the End of S2), Elemental in S3 (~1850 rating but never played that much) and now i switched to Enhancement. We originally played 2345 in S3 but due to the Paladin dropping out of the team we decided we could finally get a team running where a good friend of us (a rogue) could participate as well and thanks to Serennias Video we decided to go for the "Cleave" Setup. Everyone on the team is pretty well geared except for me. Since i just recently switched and didn't have too many points left i'm currently running with 4/5 S1 (+S3 Gloves) and S2/S3 Honor Gear. My weapons are Claw of Molten Fury and S3 Offhand. So my gear is not too bad but not really top notch either, especially with my being cheap on enchants/gems on my s1 gear. I've got 10.7k HP, 390 Resilience, 1132 AP, 28.46% Crit and hardly any Armor Penetration/Hit Rating.

We made our switch 2 weeks ago and played 8-4 on our first week even though we had a disconnect in one game (which we still won :P) which made us pretty confident. This weekend was the first time we actually go to play more than a few games but we sucked and went 27-33 (starting with 0-8, yay) and thus our rating dropped from 1870 to 1754 (although we should be at 1780ish, we had our last game basically won but our priest disconnected and we lost 18 points). We were getting a little better in the end but there is still a lot to be improved.

Armory link for our team (we used 2 different rogues, one of them has access to T6 gear and has a Warglaive Mainhand, the other guy sadly is stuck with PvP gear but a little bit more experienced in PvP)

Our main tactics were:
- All DPS on the squishiest clothie we could find
- Assign the rogue to lock down some enemy dps, warrior and me on squishiest clothie
[- some weird stuff like going for a hunter when we were getting desperate against a team running Warrior/Eleshaman/Hunter/Paladin/Priest .. lost quite a few games against them)]

Both strategies were successful sometimes and abysmal other times. When we simply zerged someone down it sometimes worked but often times our zerg wasn't successful due to BOP/PS and by the time we switched to someone else i often find myself dead. And with the second strategy we often can't put enough pressure on the enemy team for some reason (me hardly getting any dps-time due to cc etc) and once our healers somehow get interrupted/ccd/drained badly ... I die.

I have to say that since i am new to playing melee in Arena I sometimes simply screw up switching, can't find the damn nameplate of the guy i wanna switch to or just run around like a headless chicken. That is getting better, though. Another problem i have is not knowing whom i should interrupt .. whether its enemy dps, heals or ccs .. no matter what i do, it's just not enough)

I really don't know what exactly we're doing wrong. I find that often I die without getting BOP or healed by our paladin so it may be that he isn't good enough. Sadly we don't seem to have other options.. the guy we played with in S2 quit, the guy we played with in S3 focuses on Sunwell now.. our current Paladin should do just fine though. He is pretty good in PvE and seems like a quite intelligent guy. The other 3 guys all had team at about 2k Rating or higher if i remember correctly so they shouldn't be the problem either.

Since I feel that I write a lot without really getting a point across i'll just stop here and hope someone can give us some good advice, maybe some general outlines about how we should play and stuff since we're all really new to the team. I would also love to see a video of the cleave setup from a Shamans point of view (or maybe a slighty different setup, just to see how other shamans deal with the problems i face .. i downloaded a video by zangine but it's just 3on3

)

Thanks in advance for any advice you guys will hopefully provide me with.

Malan · 04/21/08, 9:47 AM

fauxpas I've found sort of the same results that you have. A few weeks ago our team was doing pretty successful with the cleave setup and almost hit 1850 by using a split dps strategy. Last week and this week though the tactic proved unsuccessful and we had to put all 3 dps on a single target, which worked sometimes and failed miserably on others.

I'd say that going for the hunter initially might not have been the best choice for you in the team that gave you trouble. Leaving an elemental shaman uncovered means that he's free to wreak havoc on your team while the hunter kited your melee around, and probably gave their priest time to mana burn too.

fauxpas · 04/21/08, 10:01 AM

Yeah, that's pretty much what happened, but it was some kind of last resort for us. I mean those guys are playing at 19xx according to the armory and it was probably stupid of us to queue up against them again and again but still, that is the rating we want to reach as well.

Initially we were going for the usual rogue on ele shaman and warrior+me on the priest but their dps was able to kill me way before we could drop their priest. It's probably due to us not playing together that long and thus lacking in communication/coordination. It was just shocking to nearly drop below 1700.

I played a couple of matches as Enhancement/Discpriest which was pretty fun. We mostly won because teams didn't know what to do i guess and we actually beat a Warrior/Druid-Team (well, when you play Warrior/Druid <1700 you probably suck

). Surprisingly i wasnt ccd as much as i expected.

Malan · 04/21/08, 10:04 AM

Were you focus shocking their paladin while you were on the priest?

fauxpas · 04/21/08, 10:30 AM

Good question, I think I did the one time we actually killed the priest.

edit: Wait, I think that time i was just spamming purge while pounding on the priest and the paladin got caught offguard in a fear or something, dunno. Must have been their mistake cause it only worked once.

I need to start frapsing my games ... but on weekends I'm mostly stuck with my laptop

Malan · 04/21/08, 10:54 AM

Yah the big thing is that you need to save shocks to interrupt the 2nd healer while you're killing the 1st healer. Your rogue/warrior/whoever that's on the same target should be interrupting that guy, while you use tremor/grounding to eat fears and CC.

Get yourself a macro to shock your focus target, and at the start of the match focus the healer that you're not dpsing.

fauxpas · 04/21/08, 11:05 AM

Heh, of course i have a macro for that

Has anyone ever tried 4 DPS-Melee-Zerg-thingy like Warrior/Rogue/Retribution Paladin/Enhancement Shaman/Discpriest? When our paladin left and i decided to go Enhancement we were trying to get 10 games somehow so i could get points and we had this retribution paladin who was Gladiator before he transferred to our realm and with me being Elemental (and quite useless except for heroism/purge cause everyone and their mom seemed to have a rogue in their team that day .. they are the bane of my existence

) we still did quite well. Might have been just a lucky day like we had before but it was kinda fun to play apparently (except for me not being able to do anything for 3/4 of every game). Sadly he left for another team and and the retribution paladin we know who actually has decent pvp gear has to time to play currently.

lizard · 04/21/08, 11:52 AM

ok, so after searching for half an hour without any results, i decided to just ask and risk the flame:

does anybody know FOR SURE if the 5% snare resist from surefooted enchant does stack with the 5% from enigmatic skyfire diamond? concidering instant ghost wolf, run speed seems pretty useless in pvp, while 5% stun resist rarely makes any difference...

aquacadet · 04/21/08, 3:12 PM

I'd be careful giving up run speed in PvP. Even if you have instant ghost wolf being forced to use a global cooldown to catch up to someone who is just out of melee range can be the difference between a kill and a narrow escape.

lizard · 04/21/08, 4:47 PM

it's worth a try. 10% snare resist sounds quite nice, concidering that one of the main concerns of enhancers is kite-a-bility.

panny · 04/21/08, 9:20 PM

No, it's a bad idea. Run speed is too vital. Every GCD you use on Ghost Wolf is one you don't use on redropping totems, purging, or proccing WF. Rely on your teammates to help you from being kited.

lizard · 04/23/08, 10:22 AM

still, does it stack? simple yes/no question

Herrera · 04/23/08, 10:36 AM

Originally Posted by lizard

still, does it stack? simple yes/no question

Yes, [Enigmatic Skyfire Diamond] and [Enchant Boots - Surefooted] stack for a boost of 9.6% snare/root resist, and no, it's not a bad idea to have them both and dump run speed. It all depends on the lineup you play.
I'm going for the all snare/root resistance combo, as well.