The Daily Quest : shaman

5 Ways to Survive Alterac Valley

matticus — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 14:12:00 GMT

Before I played my Priest, I had a 60 Paladin. My first guild was Micro, a PvP group based in Twisting Nether. My time on WoW was spent running organized Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch for hours on end. This was before the battlegroups concept was introduced into WoW. You may consider me a hardcore raider, but I’m no slouch in PvP tactics either. The mechanics of AV has changed. What's the general premise? Beat the crap out of the other team before they do it to you.

Two Methods to Victory

Killing the opposing team’s General -OR- Running their reinforcement counter to 0

As healers, we will often be one of the most sought after targets. Not all of us have full Season 2 gear with 400 resilience. If we want to give our team even a remote chance of winning, we need to survive. If we can survive, we can heal our own knuckledraggers pew-pewers. Remember, every death sustained is one point taken off of our reinforcement counter. With that said, here are 5 easy ways to live and support your side.

1) Use terrain to your advantage

When a player goes out of your line of sight, your spells automatically cancel. No other battleground or arena has much junk to hide behind. If you’re on the frontlines and you know you’re being targeted by range, duck behind a tree. You can move behind a tower. Don’t just stand in the open and give their mages easy Frostbolting action. Line of sight THEIR spellcasters. If I’m healing a Warrior, I will dismount behind a tree. All that crap you learned in Grade 10 math pays off here. Set up a triangle. You can see the warrior. Enemy mage sees the warrior. You can’t see enemy mage, therefore enemy mage cannot see you. Mage blasts warrior, sees heals, tab targets to you, realizes you’re not in line of sight, gets crushed by Skillherald. And all you had to do was park yourself next to a tree.

2) Do not mindlessly charge into the enemy

If I had a copper for everytime I’ve seen this happen, I’d be able to quit school and sell WoW gold for a living. In a game where every player’s life is precious, people who randomly charge into the horde with no support behind them are pissing away reinforcement points. Please do not do this. Do not stay mounted and numlock your way into Frostwolf Graveyard while realizing that there are 4 players of the opposing faction guarding that flag. If you’re going to go in on the offense, tag along with a few other players. Odds of survivability greatly increase with your proximity to other players.

3) Cut your losses

If your offense is stalling and you’re not able to sustain the health of players around you, do not hesitate to cut your losses and fall back. Being able to think on a macro scale and on a micro scale is an asset. If six players are rushing up the ramp into Tower Point and you just capture it, there’s no way you can hold out that long for four minutes. Forty seconds maybe, but not four minutes. Better to drop a psychic scream, jump off the tower and fallback to the IB graveyard. Because if you think about it, you can either lose the tower and two reinforcement points or lose the tower anyway and come back later with some fire power.

4) Maximize your range

What’s the difference between healing at point blank range and healing at maximum range? Whatever your health is. If your at max, you’re not likely going to be targeted because the opposing team is busy with groundpounders that are smashing their face up front. That leaves you free to drop your renews, healing waves, shields, etc. Use the players your side as a barrier. Keep them alive and they will in turn protect you.

5) Stalling tactics

We have defensive measures at our disposal that we can use to evade enemy attacks or make us stronger. When you’re falling back, slow down the other side. Keep using your global cooldowns. Shamans should be dropping earthbind totems and grounding totems as much as possible. Priests should be tossing up shields, screams, and stoneforms (Dwarves only). Tie up the enemy as long as possible. Delay them. Do whatever it takes. If you see a mounted Tauren ride by, frost shock him. This especially holds true when you’re assaulting a graveyard. Don’t fight ON the flag. Fight between the graveyard and the flag so you can tie up and stall the players that are ressing. Think about it for a moment. What is your first inclination when you see an opposing player that is trying to tag your graveyard? You are going to do whatever it takes to get that player off the flag, right? Exactly. The reverse holds true.

Follow these simple concepts and you will help your side see success in AV. At the very least, even if you don't win, you won't die as much.

Matticus raids on a his Dwarf Priest and PvPs on his shaman. When he's not doing that, he maintains his own blog over at worldofmatticus.com. If you like what you read, come by and read more!

The 12 Hour Raid

matticus — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 01:41:43 GMT

I didn't really want to do it. It just... happened! Honestly!

12 PM to 330 PM

Keruen and I set up a half Carnage raid to go in to Zul'Aman (We didn't actually start pulls until 1 PM). We spent a few hours in there downing Bear Boss easily within three shots. The Robes of Heavenly Purpose dropped. Unfortunately, I was on my Resto Shaman so they went to Keruen since he was the only healing priest in there. I think we're a few weeks from being able to go for the time trials. We don't have a consistent number of personnel to go in with at the moment. Then we tried clearing to Lynx, but we had a number of players drop out. By then it was around 315 and with our SSC raid starting in a few minutes, we had no choice but to abandon it.

330 PM to 9 PM

Spent the 30 minutes getting something to eat and getting flasks and such (By the way, you know all those Apexis Shards you have? There's a use for them now at the Ogrila Quartermaster as you can use them to purchase Level 55 Potions for 50 shards and some silver).

Lady Vashj started off well enough. We were able to get her consistently into Phase 3. The main things that were killing us was a combination of Static Charges and poisons. After some more minor adjustments, Lady Vashj went down fairly cleanly as evidenced by my new Flickr shot. Her loot? Well, nothing I would be interested in:

Vestments of the Sea-Witch Krakken-Heart Breastplate A Champion and a Defender token

Then we jaunted over to Tempest Keep and here's where the fun began.

Al'ar went down after two shots. Void Reaver apparently has been modified or something. I noticed his bolts now come at us in an arcing fashion. I don't know if that has altered the speed at which they arrive, but we had some issues with him for tonight and wiped about 4 times before we killed him. By this time, it was about 830 PM and that gave us only one shot at Solarian.

We didn't get her down sadly. I really want her Ethereum Life-Staff. It's a fairly sizeable upgrade over my Crystalheart Pulse-Staff. What I plan to do is slap 81 Healing on one of them and Spellsurge on the other. I haven't quite yet decided which for which.

9 PM - 12 AM

My real life friends and I decided to go in and tackle Zul'Aman. This time, I would go in as my Priest. We came, we saw, and we conquered the Bear Boss after 4 attempts. Ironically, the same Robes that dropped earlier in the day dropped for me again and the other Priests were kind enough to pass them (We had four, COUNT 'EM FOUR Priests).

After that, we strolled over to the Eagle Boss. We didn't have a Rogue and could not exploit the gauntlet, but we did discover something intriguing.

One of the Shadow Priests had the brilliant idea of mind controlling one of the spawns that come up behind us. Shortly thereafter, the gauntlet waves stopped. The Troll he mind controlled disappeared. We were initially stunned at first but continued to press forward. Sure enough, the Troll on the steps who we're supposed to kill was not there. Like the Rogue infinite sap technique that GMW informed us about, I fully expect this one to get fixed at some point in the future. It was an interesting bug, to say the least. We didn't let it to go waste either.

Eagle boss went down in one shot. The Mojo-mender's Mask dropped. It went to our Elemental Shaman. Sweet deal indeed. We started plowing on over to Lynx Boss but we alas, we could not complete it due to people having to leave again.

Aftermath

I still had plenty of energy. I haven't done one of these in a long time. I know there's no way I'd be able to consistently do something like this. But it was fun all the same. Most of my work was completed on Saturday so I had the entire Sunday free. All of that just to upgrade my PMC Robes.

By the way, for all you aspiring Priests out there, I made my Primal Mooncloth Robe since the end of March. It is now halfway through November. Those Robes lasted me seven and a half months before I upgraded to the ones I have today. I cannot stress the uberness of those Robes anymore then this.

Sure you can try to gun for the Opera ones, but really the odds of that dropping have been quite minor for me. I have never seen it drop on my Priest. Not only do you need to get the correct boss, there's the item randomness factor. So bear that in mind if you decide to wait.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, we raided Zul'Aman with four Priests. One of them was Discipline specced with Pain Suppression. Amazingly, he worked out great! On bosses like the Bear where tanks were taking enormous amounts of burst damage, he activated Pain Suppression which made healing much easier. There were a lot of clutch moments. His healing wasn't terribly gimped either. I encourage more raiding groups to consider the viability of a Discipline priest until we can fully ascertain it's benefits. But for the most part, it looks good. Real good.

Matticus is currently sitting at school praying he doesn't get snowed in. Read move over at worldofmatticus.com.

Raiding with an Alt character

matticus — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:05:59 GMT

I just received clearance from my GM to raid in SSC with Saphfira. I know the last couple of posts had me express disappointment in my class, but that's not the case. Mallet is my favourite character out of all of them. Let me explain the situation here. It only recently occurred to me that Carnage raids with four active Priests. Three of them are Holy and one is Shadow. I've never really played a DPS class at all throughout my WoW career. Even right now, Saphfira is Restoration specced. We only have one Shaman and she's Enhancement. We've been sharding a ridiculous amount of mail healing gear. Last night in SSC, 3 mail healing items dropped (also 5 of 6 SSC bosses dropped within 3 hours which is a big plus in terms of progression).

Luckily, Maeve understood the point I was trying to make so I didn't have to waste my breath explaining my situation. But here was the argument I was going to make: Three Holy Priests means theres going to be more competition for gear. Having a Resto Shaman would increase the diversity of the raid and not allow healing loot to be wasted. It's basically another group getting totem buffs. Healing power isn't going to go down a whole lot. It's not like I'm requesting to swap Mallet for an Elemental Shaman. So it's a pound for pound trade of healer for healer.

Is this something I really want? No, because I absolutely love playing my Priest. But having three Holy priests in the raid means its going to take three times as long for us of them to get geared up.

But we spent so much time gearing up Mallet and he'll be wasted

Well no, it's not an either/or situation. Mallet is clearly a superior healer in comparison to Saphfira in every respect. I think there may be certain encounters where having a Wrath of Air totem and a Mana Spring might provide some extra punch. It's not like I'm going to stop raiding with both of them. Healing has always been my calling. Even back when I played Guild Wars, I had a Monk/Elemental (In PvP, I'd make an E/Mo which still cracks me up every time I see it). It's also not like I'm going to be competing with another Resto Shaman in raids for gear either. There isn't that much of a loss that's occurring. It will be a huge benefit for everyone else because then I will be spending my DKP twice as much.

That's another interesting ethical question that I've also had to wrestle with. How do I deal with gear? I've always been for progression. There will be mace and shield drops and that there is direct competition against Paladins. I'm fairly certain that I have more DKP then they do. But it wouldn't be right for me to exercise option and bid. Damn all of these morals and ethics courses they make us take for Criminology.

I'm worried that there might be some contempt or that raiding with Saphfira would raise a few eyebrows here and there. I sincerely hope not. Really though, I'd rather prefer to raid with Mallet if I could. But raiding with four Priests made me think that could I not be utilized better if I brought a Resto Shaman instead.

In any case, it will still take some time before she's up to SSC status. Here's the highlights of her gear right now:

3/5 T4 (head, gloves, shoulders)
Nightbane's Healing Staff and Neck
5/5 S2 Gear (Just for the pants)
Netherspite's Mail Chestpiece
Gruul's healing trinket

Saphfira presently sports approximately 1550 +healing. That is nowhere near high enough for Mag+ raids. There are some improvements that can be made:

A better mace to go with the Chess Shield (Essence Focuser)
Honor Hold head enchant
81 Healing enchant to weapon

That should shoot her + healing to around 1660 and should last against encounters such as Mag, and VR.

Has anyone else had similar cases where they wanted to raid with alts? Did your guild shoot you down or guilt you into not using your alt? I'm lucky to be playing two support classes. I'm also lucky to be in such an awesome Guild where the leadership can understand what it is that I'm offering.

This brings up another question. How do Guilds handle alts for loot? Do they draw from the same character (IE, both Mallet's and Saphfira's DKP are cumulative) or are they separate (Both Mallet and Saphfira earn separate DKP and are exclusive from one another).

Matt's bitchin' about lectures where people don't leave early enough. You can read more over at http://www.worldofmatticus.com.