Restokin
1:16 PM
Posted by Reygahnci on Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Yeah, I spec'd it. I have given up on warrior+druid 2s teams. The play-style is just too luck-based against good teams. Essentially, if you cyclone gets resisted, or they get that lucky mace stun off, etc, then we lose and it takes 10 minutes. Also, rogues chew through me like a drill against wet toilet tissue. It is quite depressing, so we're going to focus on 3s for a while and see how that goes.
Again, this is why I'm restokin. Restokin has longevity in both mana and survivability, but really only when there is another healer; lucky stuns will still beat up on a restokin whereas when there is a secondary healer, I can pop over to moonkin form and soak some damage while getting healed. We tried it with my girlfriend's brother (shamang) who spec'd resto for the first time. He was rocking about 120 resilience and 8k hp... not the greatest start, I'll admit. However, we did reasonably well considering the low-gear. I think that if we could get some more games in we would be doing even better.
Here's the draw for having shamang+druid+warrior: purge and infinite mana on the druid. We played against an amazing warrior+rogue+druid team that we eventually beat, but it really did take some doing. We started out like we normally do, focused on the warrior (since he was the only thing we could see) and tried to dps him down while I shot in heals and wraths from the pillars (we were on Blade's Edge). So, the rogue pops on our shamang and the druid starts to heal the warrior who has started chasing me. Our warrior switches over to the druid and chases him off before he can get a 3x lifebloom stack going on his warrior, so I cycloned the warrior to drop his hots at low (30%) hp, then I busted the hots on him, had him rooted away from my shamang who was healing his best through the rogue's damage, and I wrathed the warrior down to 10% when the druid showed up with my warrior. I cycloned the druid before he got off ns-ht and my warrior executed their warrior ftk.
Now, things got interesting. At this point, our shamang was at 50% hp/mp and my warrior needed some patching up too, so I switched over to healing and kept 'em up. However, their druid was at 80% mana and full s3 versus us, the best geared being me with 3 vengeful, 2 merciless, and 1 gladiator's (lawl... I'm saving for s4) with the s2 mace/oh and vindicator's gear. Also, their rogue and warrior were both in s3 gear (weapons anyway, their shoulders were lacking), so the rogue was doing a mean-beat-down on my shamang. At this point, he didn't have anymore cooldowns and needed support in the healing department, so I really had to stick to him and spam regrowth/ht (Yeah, I actually got a couple HTs off when they weren't looking). Meanwhile, my warrior got back onto the druid and continued the chase hoping a lucky windfury/sword-proc would fire. I decided that my shamang just needed to get away from the rogue or we'd lose, so I rooted and told him to bust his trinket and get to me. Long-story short, or perhaps even too late, there was a 5 minute period where I was healing while out of mana (God, I love dreamstate) and the other druid had ~3k. However, eventually we oom'd the opposing druid and killed the rogue while I R1-moonfired the druid to keep him in combat and, thus, not drinking.
It was a hard-faught battle, but one that really should be easier once our shamang gets better geared and plays a little more. He needs to work on keeping his mana stream totem up all the time, he needs to know when to use tremor totem, he needs to spec into improved ghost-wolf for quick get-aways, he needs to learn about how awesome stoneskin totem, he needs to use earthbind, and he needs to learn not to break LoS on me when he's under heavy damage. I really think that he has quite a bit of potential, but he just needs to learn to think on his toes because we cannot call everything he needs to do out over vent. However, I sympathize as I, too, was once an off-spec dps class that decided to heal one day (for no great reason). I think that once we get him some gear he will be a perfect fit in the team.