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Frost Mage/Enhance Shaman
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Post by
Godwolf
^ I'm playing that comp.
I'm the frost mage.
What I'm looking for in this thread is people's thoughts/feelings/concerns about the comp. The problem with the comp is that there is basically -zero- information on it. And everything we've learned has been great, but really we've had no one to bounce ideas off of. So I decided to make a post here and see what the community thought of the comp.
I won't give a huge amount of information on us right at the moment, because I'm looking for a FRESH perspective. If you have any questions, feel free to ask though, and I'll most certainly answer.
I'm also relatively new to arena. So by discussing my comp with more experienced players, I'm hoping to pull away a few tips or ideas.
Questions/comments/concerns/thoughts?
Post by
Lightrain
It's ok, but frost/ele would probably be better just because of the insane burst from a distance. I literally went from 75% to 0% in bear form against frost/ele in 2 seconds. Forced crits from two magic dealers is huge and between off healing, and loads of cc, you can handle quite a few teams.
Enh does work, but it's more annoying than anything.
My advice, play it, use burst and CC at the start and try to keep it up. You want to end fights as quickly as possible, or turn them to 2v1 in a hurry, so you will want to take out dps first, or try to get the priest in priest/rogue as quickly as possible and make sure you interupt heals with ES as much as possible.
Post by
Godwolf
I had considered the elemental idea, but the simple reality was with mage/shaman that it is, right now, brutally hard to keep the shaman up against heavy DPS teams (especially rogues). And enhance shamans have a good few more tools to escape than elemental shamans do. Trying to keep up an elemental shaman... is... a rather daunting prospect.
Also, some food for thought, the comp actually resets fights rather well. While the goal IS to end the fight in the space of Wolves/Bloodlust/firstelemental, if we can't, it's not difficult to get away. We've reset many fights (typically against healer/DPS) and been able to come back and win.
Basically, relying on bloodlust when priest and shaman healers are so popular is dumb. It honestly only seems to be useful against dual DPS.
Post by
Graydust
I'll chime in since I played with an enhance shaman for part of s5, as a balance druid.
My humble opinion is that you should not play with an enhance shaman. The spec is BROKEN. It is ridiculously easy to kite and/or kill an enhance shaman.
However if you really want to suffer through arena with this comp here's some general stuff that might help -
-You'll need to keep things in range for the shaman, as a mage at least you're better at this than a balance druid. Dispel ruins Enhance Shaman's few ways of keeping in range so easily it's not even funny. You have most of the CC in this comp, so sheeping well is very important.
-Against druids, just kill the DPS, if you focus the druid(and it's a decent druid) you will probably never kill him because you're enhance shaman will never be able to stay on him. He'll get kited around and you'll lose.
-Against rogues, you'll probably need to blow CDs to save your shaman. Poly and/or freeze that PITA as soon as you see kidney on your shaman, try to allow your shaman his trinket for something else by wasting kidney. Have the wolves and your ele on the rogue ASAP to slow him down.
-Against priests, have your shaman spam purge on your target until it's got nothing on it at the beginning so you can purge the important stuff w/out the annoying buffers. Sheep priest as much as you can.
-Against other mage teams, um... CC the mage and keep snares on the other target. Your enhance shaman will barely touch a good mage, so as with druid teams you'll likely only have 1 option to burst.
Post by
Godwolf
You made some good points, Gray. He does get kited unreasonably easily alone, but as long as I'm up, I can keep everything but a druid slowed almost constantly.
We're playing this comp for a variety reasons, since I'm sure it'll come up. Mainly, we're really good friends. And we're both pretty darn good players. And we despise cookie cutter/facerolling/Overpowered comps. Not only are they boring, but they seem (this is obviously just my opinion) to compensate for a lack of skill by having two classes meshing well. Though one could -easily- argue that it takes skill to know what classes mesh and play them well together.
Regardless, we play together because we have fun together and other comps bore us.
Now, to your actual points
- Yeah. It's true. But that's never been an actual problem. (Dual DPS should be on the same target, and my main nuke slows, so I hardly have to go out of my way here). I have noticed the sheeping is a nightmare. Half a second late against a well geared rogue and the shaman dies.
- Against druid teams, it's sort of a rofflesauce kind of thing. We don't even have a chance. Our one and only CC (sheep) is totally worthless, earth shock is about as useless, and silence effects don't really hurt a druid as much as I could wish(I basically have to either wait for a cast, which 90% of the time will never come, or wait for them to let lifebloom "bloom" and silence before they restack.) We can kill a resto druids partner if they have less than 24k health or so and no particularly good mitigation. It does occur to me now though that maybe draining their mana would be the way to go.... Hmm...
- Yeah. Rogues are actually one of the easier comps to play against as long as we don't make any mistakes... at all.... Just have to outlast their cooldowns and then prep.
- Priests are frustrating, but not particularly ferocious anymore. Once I learned not to try and sheep the disc priest's rogue/other DPS. Don't ask why I didn't know that....
- Other mage teams are a joke. You forget my slow. I can't CC a mage with Mage Armor, so I CC their partner and just take the mage down. One frostbolt (just one) and it's over.
Post by
79146
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Godwolf
Frost Shock does indeed count towards shatter and, more importantly, doesn't break from a full shatter. So a tactic we use when possible is FS as he closes, shatter from me and a deep freeze as the FS and then shatter again while he whales on them. Throw in a silence before the 2nd shatter and if they don't break any of it, it's over right there. That's obviously very rare though.
You brought up a good point with reseting at wolves. I had always wondered why stealth teams just didn't start running. Same with BL on teams that can't purge it. Why not just go on the defensive? But time after time I see teams rush straight at us and lose a person in the first 30 seconds.
As for M/R reseting, that's pretty difficult on them. The rogue can, yeah, but the mage (if frost, obviously) doesn't have an easy reset. It requires, always, running. And because our team goes for the mage (not CC and wait for rogue), the mage is sort of in a situation where getting close is bad (no clothie wants an enhance shaman whaling on them) but getting too far away opens you up to a frost shock snare and a shatter and if you blink out of that, my elemental's nova and a shatter.
Basically, we try to make reseting as difficult as possible. But I haven't noticed anyone trying to do so. So it's kind of been a lot of effort for nothing in some fights.
Also, since I've got a few responses, I'll go ahead and pose a few questions.
1) Typically, mages stack the heck out of haste. But I'm not sure that's the way I want to go here, mainly because of bloodlust. While it's active, the haste isn't near as useful. But on the other hand, bloodlust isn't up for a LOT of the fight. So I was wondering what people thought of how I should be gearing. Should I be giving crit a bit more attention, or go for massive haste?
2) Wtheck are we supposed to do against Warrior/druid? If the warrior has over 25k HP, it's over. We've yet to win against that comp if the warrior has AT LEAST 25k HP. Anything less and we can work together to get a basic one shot.
3) This is asking a bit much, but I'm wondering if anyone else could do what Open did and say how they would handle our comp. I spent some time considering how other comps would view us, but honestly, I'm not an altoholic and while I know most classes' basic abilities, I do not understand them well enough to break into the 2k+ arena ranking.
PS
If you need more information to answer #1, let me know and I'll see about putting up an armory link to my character.
Post by
79146
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
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