Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Psst! I found out where all the warlocks hang out!

Last night Wichita and I did our 2v2 Arena matches. We ended up doing 15 matches and I swear, all but like 5 of the matches had a warlock on the team. There was the warlock+warlock team, the warlock+shadow priest team, the warlock+healer team - heck, even a warlock+warrior team! I think the only teams we faced that didn't have a warlock on it was the rogue+enhancement shaman, MS warrior+healer and the ice mage+ice mage team we faced twice. Most of our matches seemed built to destroy us. Multiple fears, chain fears, mana burn, mana drain, silence, interrupts, kiting. I don't know how we ended up with an 8-7 record (I think that's what we ended with).
One thing for sure is that people tend to underestimate us. Yes, we get destroyed by a number of team compositions and those are no contest fights but a good number of other fights we end up cleaning house especially because the competition likely doesn't face our group composition much, if at all. Elemental Shaman + Feral Druid are two of the weakest arena class/specs in the game. However, we're learning just what we're capable of and we're finding that our best matches are against the 1 healer + 1 dps groups. Of course, most of those teams that we beat aren't heavily PvP geared. Any dpser with 9k or less health stands a very good chance of dying within the first 10 secs of the fight. I think when we fight more people with >10k health, things start going downhill for us - that is, unless we're facing an inexperienced team and the dpser tries to dps me down.
You may be laughing to yourself at this point but it happens. A real interesting strategy we've developed is to have me stay 20 or so yards ahead of Wichita and jump the dpser when he comes charging at Wichita. This has a chance of pulling the other team's attention away from Wichita as they see "cat druid" and think "easy kill". However, with like 286 resilience and 10.5k health in cat form this druid isn't going down that fast. And a quick switch to bear form (you can't stop my shapeshifting with counterspell noob mages!) means an even harder job for the enemy. All this time Wichita is free to lay out a ton of damage.

It's a bit disheartening though. We can't get much better than this. Wichita has some more PvP upgrades but I'm near the end for this season. If Blizzard was to freeze all content as it is now, you'd be able to see that we can't really get much higher in our rating than bottom of 1600. It all depends on luck of the type of team we draw and preying on the inexperience of our opponents and/or their lack of equal gear. Don't get me wrong! Wich and I still have plenty to learn from our matches - I'm not saying we're "l33t PvPers who are only limited by our class/spec". However, our gear is maxing out and our skill has improved quite a bit since we first started but we're seeing a barrier in our ability to climb up the ratings. A lot of that comes when we get matches where we just can't do anything to the opposing team. Things like double mana burn on Wich while I'm chain feared or I'm chain CCed while their dps+healer takes Wich down. Basically, smart teams that know what they're doing take us apart pretty easily and it almost doesn't matter if we have someone behind the keyboard or if we're afk.

2 comments:

Ellevis said...

10 of the 15 games we played last night were against warlock + teams. Surprisingly though we won 6 of them. We are definitely stronger against 1 DPS + 1 healer teams, unless of course that 1 DPSer is a MS warrior. I mean the one match against the hunter / Pally ended with the hunter doing 510 damage.

It is still alot of fun, albeit frustrating to know that you have a "ceiling".

Jon said...

You might have a ceiling but you're nowhere close to that yet... you're far too dimensional a team! Now, two melee or two DPS casters have more of a ceiling than I think you two have. First of all, feral druids are so damn versatile. Shamans throw people off because you never can be sure whether they're actually resto or not (sure, you could have that orbitting dirt-clod which is a dead give-away that you ARE resto but it seems half the resto druids we face don't do that so to fool us into thinking they're elemental). Since you're elemental, you have that awesome DPS potential if left alone.

Just keep working on it... don't be discouraged by an apparent ceiling at this point.

How much healing can you two pull off in a game? The fact that you're hybrid healing / DPS is just an added dimension that makes things sticky for other teams. Especially because eating through a feral druid's armor is about as fun as biting into a block of metal.