Another long absence

Well, As you can see I haven't posted in forever.

After the Holiday break Kara stopped running on a regular basis. Our guild was just too small. As it was, we had to bring in 2 - 3 non guild members per run. When our small core stopped attending with regularity there was just no shot.

We have since merged with a new guild and are waiting to see how it all shakes down. They all seem nice and value the same things the previous guild did, the major difference being they have many many more members.

The one hiccup could be that they tend to raid on weekends. Our core group were almost exclusively weeknights. I hope that there are enough people that had wanted to go during the week but couldn't from the new guild that the two groups can come together and pull it off.

I'll keep you posted.

In addition I respecc'd out of Resto. At the end of it my healing was a tad below 1800, my mp5 was over 135 unbuffed and my mana was over 10k. I just got burned out on healing. Like nearly every other guild we were short on healers and if I didn't want to heal it basically meant the run didn't happen.

As it stands now when I put my healing set on I'm at 1599 healing and close to 120 mp5 unbuffed.

The second you start having to ask yourself, "Am I in this for me because I want to have fun, or am I in it just so I don't ruin someone elses good time only?" You're pretty much screwed. So I respecc'd elemental while I farmed PVP enhancement gear. PvP'ing as a shaman is hard enough, trying to pvp as enhancement when you don't have any pvp gear is just about as laughable as is humanly possible.

Thats an exstensive and entirely separate topic right there, but I'll sum it up in a couple of sentences and hope to delve in to it deeper in the near future. To sum up, Enhancement Shaman suck in PVP. Fighting an equally geared player of virtually any other class is highly highly difficult. We have no CC, we have no escapability. We have limited ways to break CC on ourselves, our ability to close on targets is dang near impossible (Frost shock and Earthbind ftwtf??), and we are easily focus fired in PVP and arenas. Huzzah! Is that a whine? Yes it is. Am I complaining about PVE ? nope. But in PVP we just don't get it done. Although pwning those new to PVP and undergeared is still satisfying it isn't the same.

So anywho, I farmed a bunch of gear from PVP so I can PVE. Basically aside from Tier gear there is no mail gear tailored for Enhancement shaman. There just ain't. Not in Kara, not in ZA, hardly anywhere. We derive our AP from Strength, good luck finding mail items with Int, Str, and Crit in Kara. You can't because they don't exist. In addition to this, we aren't terribly close to clearing Kara and moving on to 25 man content. So rather than make due with hunter or druid gear, I decided to go the PVP route, yes I lose some stat points due to an abundance of Stam and Resil but I still come out way on top when it comes to AP and Crit compared to someone at the same level of progression that neglects PVP.

Right now I have 8600 hp, 26% crit, and 1228 AP. Also keep in mind that because of my reward choices while leveling my trinkets suck. I'm working on getting the Bloodlust Brooch and The Darkmoon Card Crusade. If and when that happens you can basically tack on another 200 or so AP. Also, I'm rocking a bunch of green gems because I've been focusing on the PVP and enchants and money is tight. (Some stats may be off because I can't access armory at el worko)

Problem is, I haven't been able to see what kind of PVE numbers I can put out because we haven't been running Kara. Thats supposed to change tonight. I'll be running a webstats for tonights raid and will post results tomorrow.

So why didn't I post while all my Enhancement research and PVP adventures were going on? Well I'm lazy and because I need a new logo and sig I decided to hold off until I was ready for the big switch.

I hope to be back with more regularity (this is like the 5th post I've said this in) and that all my hard work wasn't for naught.

My Name is Ashuna and I suck at Arena

I figured the support group introduction would be appropriate.

The title pretty much says it all. I'm good in BG's, I don't die terribly often and I'm good at keeping others alive.

So first a rundown of some pertinent facts.

I am on a 3v3 team.

I have like 50 resil, but it doesn't really matter because our ranking is so low that our opponents have sucktastic resil as well.

I have a tad over 1700 healing and a bit under 700 damage unbuffed.

With that said, I am lost as far as how to be competitive in the arena. I lack any HoT, Instant cast heal, or shield.

My 41 point talent (Earthshield) is gone almost the second I put it up. Usually I try not to start the fight with it up so as not to give up my spec right off the bat. I cast soon after combat has commenced in the hopes that a dispeller will miss it.

So what I need to figure out is, aside from more resil gear. What should I be doing?

What classes have good synergy with Resto Shammy's in 3v3. What tactics should I be employing?

For totems I usually rock Grounding for casters, Earthbind or Tremor to slow people down or mitigate CC, Magma totem for AoE and to break invis opponents, and mana spring/mana tide. (mana spring first to see how fast it gets nuked. If it stays for a couple of seconds I usually drop tide.)

I also drop Heroism fairly early on.

If I get jumped by say a rogue, what is the best way to stay alive/keep teammates alive?

Even if you aren't a resto shammy yourself, have you faced any in arena that were effective? If so, how?

In reality I'm in the "welfare epic" category. The current plan is to farm arena to get the healing chest and then from there gain the points to put together an Enhancement set.

Kara + Badges suck for Enhancement shaman. (And Ret paladins while we're at it)

All the mail gear is for hunters. AGIL / INT /AP. Nothing that is STR/CRIT/AP / INT. It really kind of sucks when you look at it. I don't know why they did it that way. I'm getting off topic here.

So, My name is Ashuna and I suck at Arena....

Admitting you have a problem is the first step in getting help right?

I need Meg from OOM to read this, she seems to have loads of teh knowledge about this stuff.

Aran sucks

I haven't posted much because not too much has been going on.

We're through Curator pretty easily and are working on Aran. He sucks, actually, it isn't so much him as it is us.

We're working on the strat and such but there are a lot of moving pieces. We'll get it, it just takes some time.

Things I think we need.

1 - everyone to have a firm grasp on what to do and when to do it.

2 - A third dedicated healer

- we have 2 locks so when we get to the elementals they can be banished. The trick is to remember to get the banish off and continue paying attention to all the other crap thats going on.

We'll get it, it just takes some time.


Other notes -

A new graphic is incoming - I don't look like that anymore.

Also I plan on posting a pic of my updated paper doll. Yeah there's a link to my armory, but this is more fun.

Kara This Week

We started on Tuesday and cleared Attumen with no problems,

Moroes we stumbled once and then downed him on the second try.

We moved on to Maiden, we were without our paly, we were heavy on Melee. Made it a challenge.

We had -

Prot Warriors x3
Warlocksx2
Myself
Holy Priest
Rogue
Hunter (Shadow Priest for Moroes)
Mage

The repent sucked and we just weren't pulling it together. We decided to hold off on Maiden and head to Opera. We got Romulo and Julianne - I heard this is the worst one, needless to say we 2 shotted it. We cleared the trash that drops $$$ and called it a night.


-

Last night we had a slightly different group composition

Prot Warx3
Warlock
Hunter
Mage
Ret Paly
Myself
Priest
Rogue (Hunter for Maiden)

It took us many attempts but we finally killed Maiden and moved on to Curator. On the way to Curator our lock had to leave and we subbed in a hunter. We only managed to get 2 attempts in before trash respawned but the usual issue came up again - DPS. We just don't have it, granted our group make up was less than perfect for this fight, but on the inital attempt we did very well. Is getting DPS above 400 for DPS classes when initially doing Kara really that difficult because of gear or is it playstyle / spec?

I honestly don't know.

But as of right now my thoughts are thus - The first four will be on farm but Curator is going to pwn us for a while. I know we stubbed our toe on Maiden, but I think that will change.

Any and all help is appreciated.

WWS Kara 11-29

Updates

Well....





Long story short we downed Curator last week. I'll get to how in a sec, but first a rundown.

We picked up a tank that is friends with our GL and PuG'd an Enhancement Shammy to fill out the last DPS spot.

Attumen - 1 shot

Moroes - 1 shot

Opera (Crone) - 1 shot

Maiden - 1 shot

Curator - 3 shot

Edit: Apparently Curator was a 2-shot. In looking at WWS .

I guess we had the strat down the first time but just didn't execute. So basically lump attempts 1 and 2 together.

So how did we down Curator? Well the Enhancement shammy basically doubled our lowest DPS'r and pretty much counted like an extra person. You wouldn't believe what a difference it made. Also, the main tank was very well geared and has a lot of experience. Our first attempt went poorly because we weren't downing the bolts fast enough, and then DPS'ing Curator enough during evocates. The biggest problem with that is healer mana. Myself and the other healer simply ran out.

So, on the second try we had our paly put on the healing gear he has acquired and would be a supplimental healer. We didn't communicate effectively when he should start focusing on healing duty and we died with him at full mana.

Third attempt we stuck to the same strat and called out when we needed help. At this point people were also more comfortable with the fight and Curator dropped like a rock, or I guess you could say, like a brick.

We started at 9:00 server and finished right at midnight. Not bad for 3 hours work for a guild thats been in Kara for less than a month. We were just too tired to go for Chess and because of the holiday haven't had the numbers to get it done yet. We're going to try tonight. We'll probably have to PuG some people just to clear the trash to get to it.

I don't anticipate us going much farther once thats finished. Aside from getting a look at the encounters there isn't much point as we will be without many core group members.

Random notes - our guildie tank came up with a great new strat for moroes that plays to our strengths. We usually roll with 2 locks, to take advantage of this on Moroes we do the following.

The locks save their SS's for when someone is garroted. Healers keep them alive long enough for them to burn down most/all of their mana. At this point they are allowed to die and come back. We have a dwarf priest, a paly with BoP and 2 soul stones. When 2.3.2 comes out our mage will have iceblock as well. This encounter is officially on farm in my opinion.

Maiden died so fast that I wasn't ready for the repent's to come as quickly as they did. I'll be more prepared in the future.

One of our locks is almost ready to complete his Frozen Shadow set, and the other picked up his T4 gloves and his epic engineering headpiece. Almost everyone else has seen gear upgrades in one way or another as well.

We're implementing SWAPS this week. While not a major one, loot has already started to become an issue. We need a consisitent and fair approach to loot if the guild is going to thrive.

I'll have an update on that, and our Tuesday Kara run wednesday.


Also, I was on the PTR for 2.3.2 and the new watershield rocks. Its 50 Mp5, in addition to the 70 or so Mp5 from mana spring (talented). Which is awesome. The only thing that stinks is that right now on live water shield, manaspring, and paladin Blessing of Wisdom stack. Thats a whole lotta mana.

On test Mana spring overrides BoW. So my days of having like 300 Mp5 are numbered.

126 Mp5 unbuffed + 8 from food + 50 from water shield (3 globes*200 mana [procs after 60secs]) + 63 Mana Spring (25 mana every 2 secs) + 45 BoW + 25 Flask of mighty restoration = 317 MP5!!

Oh well, 272 is still pretty good. And not having to refresh water shield every minute will be pretty nice.

Savage Eidolon + Curator =

(this is a brick wall btw)

So, before we get ahead of ourselves. Here is our WWS report from last night.

As you can see our DPS is still sub par.

We stumbled on Maiden and got slowed down on the trash. So we needed to re-clear. We got the strat down and on one attempt we had her down to 4000hp when we wiped. It sucked. Regardless we downed her and i think now that everyone is accustomed to the fight (myself included) it will go much much smoother.

So we trudged on, we had a couple more wipes. Those two mech looking guys on the stairs before curator whooped us. And we Died again pulling some of the trash in Curators room.

There were a few other delays but eventually we got a few attempts off.

What did we learn?

We just don't have the DPS to take down Curator right now. The Arcane adds weren't dying fast enough and during evocates we were only doing around 15-20% damage to him. With how mana intensive the fight is, that just isn't going to cut it.

We had 3 locks with us this time, from what I heard I thought this would be a good thing. Apparently Curse of Doom can do some serious damage to him while he's evocating. I thought 3 of those going off at the same time might help give us an edge. It just didn't work out that way.

Unlike previous bosses there were strats we could try and things we could do differently. And while thats also true here, it was obvious that we just didn't have enough of what we needed to take this guy down. No matter how we changed it up.

One thing we did right, we had everyone make a macro to target flares. (Hopefully everyone did) and we were calling out when the flares popped and when to jump back on to Curator.

Things I'm not sure about.

All mana users should have 10 major mana pots on them. Also they should be using them as soon as they are out however much mana a potion restores to get the cooldown going.

We needed to get better timing on Curse of Doom, I don't think that it was going off at the right time.

Also, we probably need to sub out the second tank during this fight for another DPS. We tried this once, but I think its going to have to be the go to strat. If not another DPS, another healer anyway.

Now that we've had WWS up and running for a bit there are a few things I've noticed.

Compared to the mage, the locks have a very high miss rate. Is this common for locks or would it be worthwhile to have them get some +spell hit gear. What is the magic number for this?

Also, I noticed that 2 of the 3 are "hybrid" specs. They don't have any 41 point talents. For a PVE damage build, which is the most viable? Which is least?

The Paly also has a fairly high miss rate which hurts the cause.

So now the plan is basically to hold off on progression for a bit. We're going to farm the bosses we can do (Attumen, Moroes, Opera, Maiden), collect badges, run heroics, recruit tanks and healers, and get people keyed.

We're going to gear up, I don't think it will take too long and then try to move forward again.

Working With What We Got...

Attumen down, Moroes down, Big Bad Wolf down.....

Yeah I'd say we're improving.

Attumen was a one shot.

Got Moroes on the third attempt. First attempt was quality but it didn't come together. Second attempt wasn't a quality attempt it just didn't come together correctly. (We subbed in a Hunter for a Spriest So we had 3 shackles) Third....well he died so its all good.

Big Bad Wolf - 2 shotted. When half the people had never done the encounter before and the MT gets turned in to the little gnome right off the bat. It was a bit of a learning curve. Second time around the same thing happend but we were a smidge more prepared so it all worked out. Basically we should have laid off all DPS that first time around so when the effect wore off the wolf wouldn't rampage through the DPS'ers because the tank didn't have time to gain any aggro.

The Clothies got beat on a bit the second time around too, but not as badly. Mainly just the Dotting locks.

So, things to notice.

Our DPS is still sub par, but we're finding ways to work around it.

Also, none of the kills would be considered "pretty". Attumen took out our mage fairly early on in the fight, so we had a substantial loss in DPS and no one to clear curses, but we just healed through it.

On the Moroes kill, we slacked on re-shackling mobs a bit. Which lead to some unnecessary deaths and taxed the healers trying to keep everyone up. To further illustrate this point - I was the one who got the killing blow on Moroes. We lost a priest, lost some DPS, shackles started breaking and we lost a tank. I managed to get a frost shock on him and he died. A few more seconds and it would have been a different story.

Ways to improve on this.

1 - One of the priests didn't have a focus target macro. That person trying to find their target, re shackle then go back to DPS just wasn't cutting it.

2-We had a hunter this time around in addition to the 3 priests. What we need is better positioning. Once the shackles are set the priests should run away from them and bunch together. The hunter should be standing next to them in between the shackled mobs and the priests and drop an Ice trap in case something breaks.

I think that would help greatly. Also, for the time being this is the setup we should use. Get the 3 priests in there and one shot Moroes. When we start getting better gear and really have the encounter on farm, then we can try to change it up more as far as group composition goes.

For Big Bad Wolf we just need to throttle back DPS until we know who is going to be turned first. If the tank isn't numero uno and he has enough time to get a good amount of threat then its all good. But until we know who it is, we should hold back on DoTs and such.

We stopped there and are going back on Sunday for Curator. If we can get a pally we'll probably go after Maiden as well.

Wish us luck.

Oh btw, here is our WWS report.