All up in my grill!
3:37 PM
We recently made some changes to items that grant stealth detection. We felt these items provided a necessary advantage in competitive PVP and forced players to use lower level equipment even when more powerful items were available to them.
This item can no longer be used in the Arena:
* Ultra-Spectropic Detection Goggles
We have removed stealth detection from the following items:
* All epic engineering goggles
We have reduced the stealth detection of the following items:
* Catseye Ultra Goggles
* Blood Guard's Dragonhide Gauntlets
* Marshal's Dragonhide Gauntlets
* Knight-Lieutenant's Dragonhide Gloves
* General's Dragonhide Gloves
* Bloodvine Lens
* Knight-Lieutenant's Dragonhide Grips
* Blood Guard's Dragonhide Grips
* The Night Watchman
All of these changes are already active and the tooltips will be updated with the next minor patch. (source)
Well, that wasn't the engineering nerf I was expecting to see, but it might actually help a little bit against other engineer rogues. However, I lose my ability to see rogues... time to get a real PvP helm, I suppose.
Anywace, we climbed to 2055 yesterday. We beat a couple of rogue+priest teams, a couple of dk+pally teams (including a random dk+ret which we rofl-stomped if you ignore the fact that guntir hit 100 hp at one point... some people just can't figure out how to interrupt Tranquility... also Cycloning a pally with wings up while you're busting Tranquility and he has Pain Suppression can SOMETIMES win fights), and a couple warrior+healer teams. We lost to a druid+rogue team... which we will NEVER be able to beat no matter what. We also go curbstomped by a hunter+shamang team... there's just not much we can do against that damage. We faced the hunter+shamang team 3 times in a row, and the third time we gave up all hope of winning and I tried to bust the shamang... ended up killing him at the same time I died, then Guntir solo'd the hunter.
Hunters are STILL bullshit. Their damage output is insane, their control is insane, and their mobility is insane... and they have an MS effect. We would have likely won a bit quicker against any other healer than shamang, but this comp is just nasty, and there is next to nothing we can do against Bloodlust except "run like hell" and hope not to get gibbed.
Another bullshit team we faced (and lost to) was Resto Shammy and a Prot Pally. Essentially, the prot pally doesn't do anything except Shield of Righteousness the entire fight and the shammy sits there purging and healing what little damage I can do to a prot pally. If we face this team again (and I suspect we will), I'm just going to Cyclone the Prot pally, tell Guntir to pillar-kite him, and I'll go and train his healer. If the pally comes after me, I'll just cyclone-spam him and Guntir can come in for fears. Essentially, this team should ONLY work against rogue+healer teams, since the damage output of the prot pally is magic instead of physical and neither the prot pally nor the shammy will ever run out of mana.
Anyway, it was a pretty good run. We fought a 2200 druid+warrior team and barely made it out by the skin of our teeth... we might need Guntir to go engineering to get the boots to get away from Bladestorm... but we'll see. This warrior was pretty good too, he made sure that MS was up, made sure Rend was up, interrupted with Overpower, hit hamstring, got a lucky imp hammy proc, and popped bladestorm. If it weren't for the fact that the warrior was ALSO low on HP and his druid was at 3k trying to drink on the other side of the match, we would have likely lost. I ended up popping my CDs and trying to out-dps the warrior while bladestorm was up and killed the warrior on the last tick of BS and Guntir had something like 200 hp left... TRANQUILITY (the druid was running over ready to hit moonfire, I'm sure, and if it's me versus a resto druid, all he has to do is put up Thorns, and stay in ToL form and he'll win).
We still have a lot of climbing to do... we just broke into the top500 on our bg again. We need to probably hit 2100 this week and hopefully hit 2200 next week.
Holy hell... I completely forgot I was writing this yesterday... or maybe the day before. Work has been getting in my way of writing blog posts... sorry about that. Anyway, that's all the news I've got for now.
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May 17, 2009 at 7:48 AM
resto shaman/lock. any thoughts?
May 18, 2009 at 10:33 AM
Plenty, sadly >_<. I wish I could say here's the one strategy that works, but this team (played well) is a REALLY hard comp to take down.
First and foremost, we got a string of these guys from 1800-1900 and had to test them a lot. I even switched my meta to the fear reduction one instead of more critical strike damage. Secondly, this comp is reasonably straight forward, but it depends on the map.
For instance, on Lordaeron, Nagrand, and Ring of Valor, the strategy is pretty straight forward: kill the pet, attack the lock until he insta-summons the pet again; kill the pet, then kill the lock. There really isn't much to do here, he's going to try and take you (as a melee) away from his teleport circle, drop a full duration fear, teleport back, and start summoning his pet again. These three maps are small enough without any LoS issues to let you get back and interrupt it pretty easily. Otherwise, it's just letting the priest's HoTs work their magic. Prayer of Mending is particularly amazing against this team, as is Renew and PW:S.
The hardest maps to beat this comp on are Sewers and Blade's Edge. The reasons for this is applicable size. Essentially, Sewers has the advantage of it being big AND having reasonably good shade for LoS. Most the time, the lock will put his circle next to the stairs on the lower level, and you will fight up top around the pillars. The BIGGEST trick they have is to jump off the top behind the boxes while you follow, then teleport and start summoning, as without Rocket Boots or Dash, you won't get there in time to interrupt. I always try and get an SR+5Rip up before they jump down, then I spend time NOT following him, staying up top removing Curses, and if he starts summoning, you can feral charge interrupt him and start making your way back on top before he can teleport. Sewers is a tricky map, and just make sure to knock Hex off every single time and you SHOULD be golden (as your Priest can use the time it takes the lock to summon a new pet to drink if you Cyclone the shammy).
Blade's Edge is a MUCH nastier map in terms of losing LoS and letting him summon another pet. If he summons too many pets, your healer's mana will eventually run out and the pets are particularly nasty in terms of keeping your healer from drinking... plus warlock damage output is pretty crazy. More than likely, the lock will put his circle on the top of the bridge in the middle, using the same bait method as Sewers (get low, lure you down below, teleport back to the top to get healed to full and pop out a new pet). Essentially, you can cheese this with Feral Charge (Cat) if he is too close to one side or another... but most the time you can't reach a good warlock. Save your Dash and Rocket Boots for these instances, and Feral Charge (Bear) when you get in range for the interrupt. Usually the shammy will drop an Earthbind totem on the ramp that you'll have to run by; if your priest isn't too busy healing/drinking, he can wand it down usually then run off and drink while you distract them.
These matches really are wars of attrition over the mana pools of the healers. Shammies have nigh-infinite mana, but when they get low, they have to either result to BIG burst heals with long periods of nothing in between, or lots of short small heals every now and then. Great shammies will be able to time their big burst heals with fears for maximum efficiency, but Rip just makes it so hard for them to stay effective, particularly as once their mana is low, they can't spam totems any longer. Additionally, you can KEEP the shammy low by spamming mana burn on him at the end if your healer has the mana to do so, but don't let your healer get below 10% mana... ProM needs to stay up basically the entire match, and if you get caught with a Lavablast+SB combo with full dots up and no mana because you burned off the last of it from the shammy... you'll probably lose.
Situational awareness is the key to these matches (and ProM). You need to kill the pet so your healer can drink, you need to know that a lock is only going to start moving away from his demonic circle so that you'll follow him and let him teleport and get the summon off, and you need to know that while shammy's mana pools may seem infinite, their healing efficiency certainly takes a hit when their low (as does their utility).