PvP stratsFollow

I have been pvping a lot lately and I wanted to share some of my pvp strategies and also here what some of you guys do to better your pvping experience.

My biggest problem in pvp have been melee dps for a while but I am starting to get the hang of how to deal with them.

rogues: I generally start this off with Lightning shield, poison cleanse, earth bind totem, searing totem and apply flame or frost shock depending on the rogues health. I don't bother with lightning bolts on a rogues since they are hitting me too much and interrupt me a lot. At times I find it hard to pull off a heal but you would be surprised how much damage you can pull off on a rogue with our fire totem, lightning shield, and flame shock alone. If it is up i may pop nature's swiftness for either a instant chain lightning or a quick heal. the totems also help to make them lose combo points if they are stupid.

Warriors: I use either lightning shield or water shield depending on if i need mana, and then I either whittle them down with frost shock and searing totem (usually if they are dw) or I dps race them spamming LBs (usually when they use 2h).

Ret pally: I just dps race them with lightning bolts most eat it fast, but you can not let them catch you with low health cause they have good burst. grounding totem helps a lot for them since generally it will eat there stuns.

feral druid: you can burst them down generally I just spam LBs. they can make it a long fight though if they do a lot of running away to heal and then charge to interrupt but they are not too difficult.

enhancement shaman: They where actually my biggest problem for a while but i am getting the hang of them. If you stand still they can burst you down worse then a warrior and they will interrupt you almost as bad as a rogue if you use lightning bolts. Generally I use lightning shield searing totem it will whittle them down and kill their grounding totems, I use flame shock on them and move around a lot, and when I have grounding totem I drop it and shoot out a chain lightning quick. They will generally hold off on shocking you waiting for you to cast so it works out rather well since they will have to follow you around as you kite them.

Ranged: this is where it is a little bit more boring, you throw LBs and CL and earth shock and grounding totem whenever necessary, tremor totem is a must against spriests and warlocks. against hunters I will use nova to kill snakes and poison cleanse totem a lot as well, these fights mostly have more to do with bursting the enemy down first except we have no CC lol.

Healers: I hate fighting healers, they are either good or bad, purge is your friend against healers but a good healer is going to make you oom trying to kill them, trick is when fighting a good healer is to basically catch them off guard at about half life and waste elemental mastery chain lightning and nature's swiftness and lb and maybe a earth shock to take them down as fast as possible. WTB a MS affect blizz.

this I will admit being more of a BG aspect of pvp of coarse where your enemies may not have all cool downs ready, and probably have less team work going on for them.

anyone with there own strategies please share, maybe some good arena strats since I don't arena much.

LOL i thought this was more of a positive way for us to learn from each other, and yes elemental can be quite strong in bgs lol. but that doesn't mean a lot of shaman know how to fight properly in bgs.

I don't play elemental, but I do play feral druid, and it's gonna be tough for any elemental to spam lbs at me. Feral charge, maim, bash and cyclone can interrupt for a couple of minutes solid. When elementals have beaten me it's usually through making me burn mana by frost shock/eb kiting, whittling me down w searing/fire nova then finishing me off w a chain lightning/NS.

I find with Shaman PvP what matters most can be the totems you drop. Water totem is always mana stream except for hunters and rogues. Take this w a grain of salt: 65 enhancer w only BG xperience, but I'll try to contribute to the positive approach:

Mage: Grounding must be up at all times, searing for spell pushback and EB to keep them in range

Warlock: Tremor, natch, searing for pushback, grounding (again natch)

Priest: Ditto

Hunter: Stoneclaw if their pet hasnt attacked (will taunt and stun them) otherwise EB and posion cleansing. If they're any good they'll get out of the range of your fire totem. I find windwall isn't worth the mana.

Pally: Grounding to eat Hammer of Justice, searing, SoE and GoA.

Druid: EB, GoA (unless Balance, then grounding), FN for burst

Warrior: EB, GoA and fire nova. I often kite warriors and drop fire novas along the way, so they are constantly running into high burst damage.

Rogue: EB, Poison Cleansing, GoA and Fire Nova (followed w rank 1 magma to keep them from vanishing or searing to keep em in combat if they blind me). Rogues aren't that bad on me now -- I usually hit SR when I come out of kidney shot and if they don't have evasion up, a SS, ES and FN gets their health down fast. I'm sure that will change and is largely a factor of me facing crappy rogues.

As you see I largely prefer FN over searing on melees for its burst potential. But pally fights are usually so long searing is worthwhile. Anyway, you have to fight them twice.

A good lock and hunter will also destroy totems by siccing their pet on em, so the stoneclaw trick can work there too. But on a lock you would have to sacrifice tremor.

Ya flame shock searing and lightning shield to be my best bet against rogues to be honest i don't even bother kiting them anymore it is just doesn't work, but damage that keeps on hitting even while i am not able to attack works out well.

Ya any smart rogue really only kills searing and poison i just hope when they do they forget to waste there combo points cause i recall someone telling me they lose points if they change target unless that is false.

Feral druids are hit and miss they either do there best to CC me or dps race me, if they dps race me they almost always proc my eye of the storm since they attack so fast so i can spam lightning bolts and in a burst race I will generally beat a feral druid.

As far as hunters and warlock pets i could stone claw them, but atleast in bgs I don't mind the extra mana back from the pet attacking me as well as more chances to proc eye of the storm, then again if this was arena it is a different story.

someone said also always keep grounding down well i disagree, you drop it when it is needed meaning while an enemy is casting something devastating the only time I will drop grounding without a cast already being readied is if I am guarding a base that way i can pull off grounding 2 casts since i will have enough time for cool down to be gone. if you drop grounding without a cast in mind to eat it, it will be wanded or killed by another attack that the caster does not mind wasting.

A wise man once said "In the battleground there's a 99% chance your enemies suck" =P I don't suspect to see rogues who only kill poison cleansing in the higher arena brackets... It's just so easy to destroy shaman totems it's useless NOT to.




Not really no... we only lose combo points if we build up one or more combo points on a different target. I can switch targets without losing my combo's on you. And using abilities to take down totems is plainly retarded. Basically, once I've used a kidney shot on you, all I need to do to get rid of your totems is right-click select them one by one. All I do is lose some melee damage which else would've landed on you... If I'm quick enough I can even throw a quick backstab/shiv/SS/hemo/mutilate at you.
I think you were right at some point though... If I recall correctly rogues did lose combo points when deselecting a target a couple of patches back.




So basically you just eat PoM pyroblasts? I don't have enough Shaman knowledge to give a good opinion on the case, but I think that with the instant CC abilities some classes have, saving your grounding totem isn't always a good idea.

True, you want to make sure it's not wasted on gimpy casts. But what I'm trying to say is, if you drop it while a mage is halfway casting fireball he'll throw a polymorph at you as soon as his cast finishes and you're screwed anyway.

Hey jmfmb,

If you plan to seriously PvP with your shaman, you will need to do the following (assuming you haven't already done this).

1. Totem macros are an absolute must have. There is no way you will have time to hunt and peck specific totems in PvP, you should be running about 4-5 key macros for specific totem drops. For example I have a macro key that drops Grounding/tremor/searing/mana if I see a Warlock/spriest.

2. I'm assuming you're also running a 1 key macro that will cast your trinket, EM, NS + CL so that you can spam your opening/closing CL crit. Also a good idea to run a NS + healing macro for emergency heals.

3. Put watershield on one of your mouse button clicks so that you can constanly spam it as needed.

4. Master strafing/mouse turning, your lack of CC and escape means you need to be as mobile as possible, absolutely do not keyboard turn - far too slow.

5. Get a targeting mod that displays class health, spells being cast and color codes the health bar for the class so you can quickly identify your primary targets and incoming spells.

I have to agree because generally you can get a CL off without getting interrupted. (It being a 1.5 second) Seems like a waste to use both EM and NS one the same spell.

Macros really help defend against this, I almost always get the em+cl off and then i have ns+lb also macro'ed so it procs to fast for them to respond often it is cl instantly followed by a lb as if I where to eS right after, I do get put behind a global cool down after NS but after 2.5 seconds ES hits next, it has worked well for me so far they hit to fast for a healer to react fast enough unless they already where prepared for it (obviously you want to make sure your target has been purged prior though) but to each his own I just like doing it this way I feel I get more use out of NS and EM this way.