Bad News Boy and Girls
1:46 PM
Posted by Reygahnci on Friday, January 11, 2008
It seems that discipline is finally becoming the pvp healing spec of choice for priests. Why is this a bad thing for druid healers? Mainly because that's just another class out there guaranteed to take bigger hits from my warrior. Additionally, priests are starting to wise-up to the fact that they can burn me while I'm running away from them in cheetah form.
Mana burn isn't a huge deal against priest+hunter, or priest+rogue. P/H boils down to the fact that the hunter can't dps me OR my warrior if my warrior is in his face laying down the pain while I sit in bearform and annoy the priest who's trying tirelessly to keep his hunter alive. When the freezing trap gets laid, I have to move quickly to feral charge the hunter to 1) keep him near my warrior while he's scatter-shot and 2) eat the freezing trap myself. Usually the hunter will have a pet on me and if he isn't careful, freezing trap will get broken from the pet (or from poisons if he's using scorpid). Also, I annoy the priest with lacerate so that when I eat the trap, he still has a bleed on him for a few second while I try to get back on him so he can't drink.
Priest rogue is a lot of the same, except after my warrior gets jumped by the rogue (and my warrior will have sword-n-board out to start hopefully), I come in, toss abolish, lifebloom, and rejuv, the rogue will turn on me. Either the rogue will shadowstep, then get intercepted and pwned while the priest is far away getting cycloned by me, or the rogue will toe-to-toe with my warrior and EVENTUALLY go do because warriors can dish-n-take better than rogues when they're squared up.
HOWEVER, in matches like warrior+priest, warlock+priest, mage+priest, etc. in which the priest is healing, I am forced to run away in cheetah form and eat up the mana burn hits (or worse, drain mana if the lock is in the middle and I need to get past him). All we can do is put warrior on the priest and hope our dps is faster whilst I cyclone their dps and root him behind pillars, etc. Mage is a special case because, given free reign, an icemage will just SPANK my warrior through my heals, but if we put the warrior on the mage, he will get the cc-train run on him while the priest loses little to no mana. We sword-n-board that team and hope spell reflect is awesome.
EDIT: I have been thinking about the problem here, and it really only happens in Nagrand arena when you're trying to run from side A to side B. Going from pillar to pillar in travel form really doesn't give the priest enough time to burn you unless he's REALLY on his game, has great ping, and great angle. This leads me to think about changing my spec to this to try out faster cat form. The differences in mana are pretty low (actually cat form costs about twice as much as travel form), and the difference in speeds are 161% travel form vs. 150% (149.5% really) in cat form. So, while I won't be jetting away like I do in travel form, it may occassionally be worth the ~250 extra mana just to guarantee not losing 1000 mana and 500 hp. Only problem is I would have to give up insect swarm, which may not be awesome against dispelling classes, but it is the defining factor against druid+warrior mirror-matchups since we get an extra 1100 damage dot for 110 mana..... maybe I'll try the catform one out until we get higher in the rankings and start seeing more warrior+druid mirrors.