Fisting Melons Makes Your Stormstrike Harder, What Will Bodi Play In Season 7?

A couple of thoughts on this ridiculously named comp
Flexx and crew bringing home the bacon for shaman this past weekend was an interesting ending to an otherwise boring week and brought the advent of the term "beast cleave". Like other annoyingly named comps (shadow play, wizard cleave, shadow cleave) it's a meme that will inevitably result in thousands of copycat teams thinking they can simply roll their faces across their keyboards and people will just die. I would like to use this opportunity to point out that out of all three specs, enhancement has the highest learning curve, the most weaknesses and is the most cooldown and gear dependent.

Yes, you can pop all of your cooldowns at the very beginning of the match and be an unstoppable killing machine for 45 seconds between wolves and Shamanistic Rage. Yes, our Wind Shock being taken off the Shock cooldown and renamed Wind Shear increased our dps significantly. Yes, maelstrom weapon affecting hex is also a huge buff. But of all the specs, totem management is far more important here. This isn't elemental, where you can press 1-4 buttons and do 20k damage. No, you're right in the action 100% of the time and every other melee class will kill you 1v1 if you have no cooldowns up. It's a *****, but there are ways to get around this. Like playing with a Paladin.

Playing with a Paladin takes away those pesky weaknesses that the spec has and makes the learning curve of the spec a little better. He can cleanse fears if you're not able to drop tremor. He can freedom you if it's absolutely necessary to have tremor down. He can cleanse off poisons as well, if for some reason you forget to drop cleansing totem against a DK or rogue team. He makes up for your mistakes and your weaknesses, since Paladins and shaman skills are quite complementary.

Shaman and hunters have always had amazing synergy. While playing elemental, me thunder storming melee over a frost trap has amazing results and it's the same with enhancement. Earthen power making your hunter immune to snares to he can kite willy nilly makes the mobility of your team leaps and bounds above other comps, unless they have a rogue who sticks to you every game like HON did against eMg.

Your BM hunter may not be able to be controlled while he's big and red, but you can be in most cases. Even through freedom, traps, cleansing totem, earthen power, a good rogue will still be a pain in your backside. All he has to do is keep you from getting to your intended target long enough to let it get whatever casts off it needs. This usually takes about 4-5 seconds. This puts a damper on the "blow every cooldown and charge in" strategy because while playing really aggressive, defensively you're exposed. This is why most of the people who will run this comp will fail, because it's a lot harder than it looks, especially if you don't have the gear for it.

There was one game I played post patch where a discipline priest did more damage than I did because I spent way too many GCDs spamming purge to get off the buffs that I wanted to. If you're spamming purge, you're not DPSing and as priests are designed, by the time you get them off, they cast 1-2 spells and the buffs are back up again. Frustrating, to say the least.

If your gear is bad, however, simply DPSing through the shields, prayer of mending and whatever else they have up will result in them laughing at you and casting holy fire at whatever target they're trying to kill. Getting over 3,000 attack power is relatively easy, but you won't see GOOD results until you have 3,500 AP and 28% crit, so that full hateful gear you picked up by being a BG champ will not cut it.

This is fortunate for everyone else. Many shamans who mostly play elemental and restoration don't have an extra set of good enhancement gear lying around unless they took great pains to get it. The true pain in the ***** will be people like this chick, who have been hardcore enhance since the beginning and have stuck with the spec even after the lvl 60 Unbreakable movie days.

For those looking for a good gemming guide, I suggest simply looking at Flexx's armory for the character he set up for MLG: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Major+League+Gaming&n=Flexxz

Rumor has it against warrior teams he and his partner gem for armor penetration. I'm not sure if that's true but I can see how it'd be effective. Keep in mind though, this is an environment where you generally know who you're fighting against, so it's easier to tweak specific things for every match whereas on ladders, you'll have to make something much more generalized, much like Flexx's armory. Here's his armory for his live character so you can see some of the differences.

What will I play in S7 and how will I play it?
This brings me to the question of what I'll play. First day of the season is tomorrow and I have no definite plans. For 3v3 do I run RLS? Do I run Wizard Cleave? How about this Beast Cleave thing I've talked about for 849 words? Not entirely sure, but there are many options.

5v5 will prove the most difficult as the PvP horde community is very small on Tichondrius and there are only 9 teams above 2200. I can hope that I can hop on to whatever team Whiteshadowz is running with Thrrek rumored to be quitting the game, but that's no guarantee.

As my profile on Tichondrius has been raised considerably, it'll be easier finding good people to play with, in theory. But as it stands now I'm searching, not sure what to do. Many participants of the PvP community seem to be in the same boat. Does anyone plan ahead for the new season? People transfer, quit the game, focus on alts. There are so many changes with each season that it makes it difficult for some.

As far as my gear is concerned I can play any variation of resto, elemental and enhancement with a good mix of PvP and PvE gear, so that's taken care of. I'm not sure which is my favorite spec to play with, I'll just see where the chips fall and I'll spec/glyph/gem accordingly.

Many people who PvP have a preferred spec they like to play. Some Paladins have been hardcore retribution since the Dark Edge of Insanity days, and refuse to spec prot or holy, for example. I feel this is a flawed way of thinking. In order to be truly knowledgeable about your class you must know the ins and outs of every spec and be able to play all of them well no matter the situation.

This obviously varies with class. I can't expect mages to play PvE fire in PvP and expect them to do well. But to refuse to play around with the spec at least for fun or just for the sake of knowing your class is a mistake. Azael wrote an excellent article on game knowledge and it's applications about a month ago. I feel that this especially applies to knowing whatever you "Main". If you don't know your own class like the back of your hand, then you most likely don't know the other classes as well.

There really isn't a debate about whether or not this associated knowledge of the various classes and specs of the game is useful. However it should be taken into consideration that there is a such thing as useless knowledge. I don't need to know what Hunter's old lacerate ability actually did, for example. I suppose for those famed historians of World of Warcraft PvP it's just interesting information. But for me, a shaman player first and foremost, I'll stick to knowing when I should shock/ground CC, DPS or Heals in specific situations and how to react to the other player's (non scripted) reactions accordingly. This is why PvP is fun and dragon killing is not. Good luck in season 7, everyone.