After some coaching from Ellay, a fantastic shaman multiboxer, my partner and I gave it another go last night. We gained 80 or so points of rating and went 17-12 on the evening. The last two games were both heartbreaking 19 point losses, so if we had quit sooner we would have been up 120 so rating on the evening. We feel that our gameplay is much improved!
Here’s what we incorporated:
1.) Patience
2.) Patience
3.) Anti-Rush setup. This involves setting up totems when the 15-second alert goes off before the match, popping our first Bloodlust at 2sec before the doors open, and generally being alert to if they’re going to rush. We were also mounted up (or mounted+ghost wolf) for the start of every fight. Rushes against us by well coordinated/geared opponents are still problematic for us (more on this later), but this helped a ton!
4.) Better bloodlust awareness and grounding totem re-application, particularly mid-fight. This is related to being “patient” as well– I have convinced myself that it is “OK” to waste a couple GCDs on having everyone buffed and protected, even if we have taken a kill or two.
5.) 4xPurge on: the first target to kill, people who dart in and out of range to try to bait us out of our setup, and anyone else who becomes much squishier without any buffs (priests and SL warlocks, as examples). In prior weeks, I had not been too concerned with purging people since I thought I would just burst through their protection or extra HP, but I am now a believer in taking a GCD to purge them. Do the math on how much health a warrior has with and without Blessing of Kings, Fortitude, and the Warrior Shout buff, and you’ll become a believer yourself.
6.) My awareness of when a 4xEM+NS+CL combo will have a 95% kill outcome has gone up. This has become EASIER since I’m purging people and I have a better idea of what their baseline HP should be.
7.) I took Blood Fury (the orc racial) out of my 4xEM+NS+CL combo for the time being. I think I am doing enough damage to not need it, and I think it’s allowing my partner to deal with incoming damage much easier (particularly on alts).
8.) I am becoming better at knowing when to move the team and when to stay put and keep pumping out damage.
9.) We really got better at identifying and killing the DPS threats. In the absence of a mage that is trying to get into AoE range, I am loving a Hunter as my first target. They don’t have any immune-granting powers and generally go down fast. When I start on one, I hover my mouse over their location and expect the feign death. I simply target the corpse and keep pew-pewing until they’re dead. Compared to mages/warlocks, they also tend to stand in there and hope they get healed.
10.) Resetting. My partner and I have both gained the patience and discipline to tell each other, “OK, let’s reset out positioning/totems”. This means disengaging, not chasing, and regaining our original position. Totems go back down, water shield up, and we will do the same routine all over again, but just 5v4 or 5v3. We had one fight where they rezzed our first kill, so I’d love some feedback on how to best keep that problem down to a minimum.
Non-Rushes - Results:
We have gotten much better at waiting on the enemy team to make a mistake and then methodically picking them apart. We are better at Nagrand and Blade’s Edge arenas in this regard, but using Ellay’s positioning for Ruins of Lorderon is helping. We are favoring the charging warrior as the first target, and are getting much better at the following technique.
Warrior charges in, I purge off everything as my first cast, my partner attempts to stun him to keep him in one place. I then cast a LB, then start on a second cast. If his health is around the 60% (or less) mark, I will jump to cancel the second LB and pop 4xEM+NS+CL to blow up the warrior (I may add a /stopcasting into that macro, thinking about it more). Once that target is down, I switch to my second target, which is generally whoever may have been tagged by Chain Lightning on the first kill, since that tends to knock them down quite a bit.
Alternatively, if there’s a mage closing, I purge, cast one lightning bolt, and then immediately pop 4xEM+NS+CL so that both land at the same time and he dies before ice blocking. If the mage simply walks into range and stops to begin casting, I will purge, LB, but be a little more careful about burning my burst combo since those mages tend to Ice Block as soon as they see a volley headed their way.
Short story is, we learned a lot from Ellay’s video. We fought two or three matches in the Nagrand arena last night that looked almost like Ellay’s first match in the training video (except my targets don’t die *quite* as fast as his).
Getting Rushed - Results:
This is our biggest area for improvement, I think. We did get better as the night progressed, but Crusader Aura+Mounts in BE, anti-rush setup techniques in Nagrand/Ruins, and some practice/confidence have really helped. I really need to have BL going, a purged target, and some good positioning… but if this is in place, there’s a good chance we’ll blow up a melee DPSer quickly. Ironic as it is, if the proper setup is in place, then patience is also seeming to help me with being rushed. It’s much more important for me to have the right target acquired, get them debuffed, and make sure as many shammies as possible are facing them in these situations.
The ruins map is a little frustrating, since we had some fearbomb events that caused LoS issues right in and around the doorway. There are also some better teams that like to hide in a little nook just on either side of the doorway. By staying in Ellay’s spot, we took away the tomb from LoS issues, but created a problem with having people dancing in and out of those nooks. Argh.
Overall, we feel greatly improved and the rating should now slowly climb up. We are beating teams that are a little better geared than us, which feels good. When the team gets more geared, I think we will be in a better situation to rapidly gain rating. This has been much better practice, since I think we are going to build good habits and are starting to understand how to force teams to play into our strengths.
