Inevitable City Defence

Today we had some awesome RvR, order had something like 40VP while we had none in IC so we decided that we'd do something about it. So we started with a half warband which in the end grew to be about 3 groups big. We lost the first PQ since we got there too late, but we got some awesome fights on the second one and ended up winning, screwing up the lock. I think order got 63VP in the end and they would have made it to stage 2 if we wouldn't have showed up. The fun part is, that I frapsed it all. So I made a short "cinematic style" video of it. I hope you'll enjoy it!

T4 RvR video

This is something I made today, it's my first poor attempt at trying to do some editing and I really need to sort out how to fraps without massive lag, but I hope I'll be able to produce better videos in the future :)

Ding

No frikking Tyrant!

My group just finished TotVL and we didn't get any Tyrant drops the second time in a row, I actually sent an appeal after our last run and asked if the drop rate is bugged, I haven't seen the healer helmet in about 10 runs so I was indeed wondering. They replied:

Dear Customer,

All Loot Drops are random and 'Drop Rates' are not an exact figure for any items.
We apologise for any inconvenience.

Oh well, two runs and no Tyrant, I bet it's working as intended...

Ding RR78

The endless renown farm is soon over and I'm getting closer to 80 every day. I dinged 78 during this week and we killed the king again yesterday, no luck in drops for me though. Jucka got BO shoulders and is only missing two parts now, huge grats to him and I hope he gets one more part soon so he can buy his last one :) He would be the first full Sovereign toon in our guild at least then! If not on the server, some of the Eltharion dudes might have so I can't say for sure :)

Sexy isn't it? :D

Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!

Something I made :)

Tyrant vs Sovereign

I'm sure many of you have been wondering what the best armor for your class is. Before I joined IB I wasn't really planning on farming Tyrant, as ToVL in the end is quite hard and after failing to get full Darkpromise (those damn shoulders never drop...) I wasn't that into starting to farm a new set again. However, to my delight I got into an awesome group and now I'm only missing the chest and helm, I got the glyph cape last run and therefore I've got all 5 bonuses from the glyphs now. Now that I've got some Tyrant and Sovereign I've been thinking about what the best combo is. To my dissapointment, when comparing the two sets I realised that the set bonuses of Tyrant are far superior to Sovereign. Just look at the 5 piece bonus:

Hierophant's Grace - On Hit or Direct Heal: 5% chance to reduce build times by 50% for 10 seconds.

Which practically means that I have a high chance to pop Focused Mind, just do the math, gather around, my AoE heal hits 6 targets, hence it has a 35% chance to proc on every AoE heal. If I know Mythic right there's a high chance that it procs from HoT tics as well which would make it IMBA untill they fix it. The 6 piece bonus is +50AP and that in combination with the 5 piece glyph bonus (+50AP) I'll have +100AP from my gear alone, giving me a total of 400AP (keep in mind that you get +25AP from both RR70 and 75).

Let's take a look at Sovereign.

(6 Piece Bonus) Caretaker - On Hit: 10% chance to heal defensive target for 113 health.

(7 Piece Bonus) Vivacious - On Heal: 10% chance to recover 50 AP.

(8 Piece Bonus) Gain ability: Just a bit mor'

The 6 piece bonus seems to be a lesser version of the Warlord 6 piece bonus:

(6 Piece Bonus) Martyr - On Being Hit: 10% chance to heal group for 192 health over 9 seconds.

In reality the HoT is over 1k so hopefully it's as high on the Sovereign version, which would make it quite good, but atm I've got 4 pieces so I can't test it out yet. The 7 piece Sov bonus is quite good as well, far better than +50AP from full tyrant. But what this set would need to justify it over Tyrant is the Hierophant's Grace proc which simply is too good to not have. What about the 8 piece bonus then? The reward from gathering the entire Sovereign set? I bet you think it's IMBA, but after some research I found out that it's an ability with 2min CD, which adds 20 feet range for 10s. WTF... Is it really that good? I'd say it's crap, 'cause you seldom heal from max range anyway and in RvR it's far more effective to stay as close to each other as possible. I can see its uses though, sometimes when you rush for someone and getting into range would make the difference between life and death, but something tells me that wearing full Sovereign should give something far better.

So for now I gonna farm the entire Tyrant set and wear it with all glyphs, in other words, my endgame character will wear PVE gear. I yet have to see how it works out, perhaps Hierophant's grace isn't that good after all. But I will certainly wear Sovereign just for the looks of it when I get some more parts. I gonna try out a combo with 5 piece Tyrant and the Sovereign shoulders/cape/jewelry as well, which would give me the +85WP bonus but I'd loose 100AP and hell alot of healing power. Doh, I read a comment from Mythic somewhere that they aren't planning on doing big changes on set bonuses but to instead learn of their "mistakes" (I'm sure they used another word for that, perhaps player feedback or something ;) ) and make better and more balanced sets in the future. Time will tell, ha, I didn't even know they were planning on adding content to the game after seeing them removing some from time to time! :D

Playing a Shaman - Oberheim style

Playing a Shaman - Oberheim style

I'm not trying to be anyone, or nor do I think that what I'm going to share with you is by any means the best way of playing, it's just how I play.

So anyway, I'm going to try to cover as much as possible of the class so if you other shamans out there have any opinions or matters to discuss, please share! 'Cause that's why I'm writing this, to help not you but myself to become a better player.

RvR playstyle
I believe in survivability rather than strongest possible heals there are when playing PvP, so my gear focuses alot on Wounds and to some extent toughness, currently i have slotted wounds talismans in all slots in my pvp gear, which makes me able to kite and outstand meleetrains. Which brings me to the most important point in this thread:
A shaman never heals stationary!
Alot of slayers and witch hunters will give you their attention, how i react depends strongly on the situation, but generally I:
1) LEG IT
2) AoE Detaunt (depends on threat, don't want to waste it)
3) Use Sticky feets a few feet in front of me and run directly in it, since it takes about 1-2s for it to be cast I should have ran across it and have the meleetrain struggling behind.
4) HoT up/Don't feel nuthin/Shrug it off

Eeeek! is sometimes handy, but it's strongly situational since people usually are immune to it. An Odjira is of course essential for kiting, I don't think that the tactic "Run away!" is needed when you have the talisman slotted.

Toughness/crit reduction is also an interesting combo, I tried out with equipping "reduction in being critically hit" gear and jewelry and in combination with the -5% crit/T liniment I got my crit chance to 0%. That in combination with stacking toughness and Do Sumfin Usefull is indeed a powerfull combo. I haven't evaluated what I think is the best set up yet though, I'm still farming for more gear to try stuff out with,

Morale

Morale 1:
I usually slot Gork Sez Stop since Divine favor isn't strong enough anyway to waste your morale, and I always bring potions with me to give myself two nice instant heals. This ability is mainly for having fun, sometimes it might save your ass when kiting a WH, but when healing a group I'd prefer to save up to M2.
Morale 2:
Focused Mind situationally your best morale ability, makes you immune to CC (which btw means you can use your instant ress without getting the 3s stun), unable to be setback while casting a spell and increases buildtime with 50%. This is Shamans Godmode for spamming AoE or extremly good focus heals.
Morale 3:
Divine Protection though I rarely use it, I prefer to pop M2 and spam AoE instead, but might come in handy when I simply don't have time for that. I could slot You Weren't using Dat, but then again, I could just drink an AP pot instead if Yer Not So Bad isn't doing its job.
Morale 4: Feelz No Pain A really nice ability, though it's a bit too short. I usually use it when bombing since the damage reduction with the HoT gives some heavy support, and you're able to focusheal meanwhile.

Tactics

I usually use:

Slot 1:Dat Makes me dissy Shamans are somewhat expected to use instant ress in either RvR, but when playing scenarios i usually use Whazat Behind You? which gives a chance to detaunt stunties when they hit =) Really good for survivability!
Slot 2: Restorative Burst Is AP management a problem? Slot this tactic! Makes life alot easier, especially concidering that shamans have a heavy critical chance which basically means that this tactic procs constantly.
Slot 3: Discipline gives 160WP.
Slot 4: Extra Special Mushroom Essential! 10% extra crit doesn't hurt =)

Addons/UI
I want as much essential data as possible taking as little room as possible on my screen. Most healers have a similiar set up but I wanted to cover as much as possible so here's my set up:

Squared,
Takes extremly little room and works really well, it's easy to see when someone is out of range (especially in comparison to Healgrid) and doesn't cause any lag.

DuffTimer
A really handy addon, i've configured it so that it only shows spells cast by me, to make it easier to keep track on them. This is usefull for HoTs, mainly Ey quit bleeding and Do sumfin' useful. You get separate "bars" for friendly target, yourself and hostile target. If you don't have anything like this make sure to try it out.



Calling
This isn't a healing specific addon, but it's really handy if your premade or even WB is using it. It's an evolution of Main Assist. It makes every player able to call and target hostiles with macros you drag to you spellbar. In addition to that you get a notification on the screen of who called and who the target is. Healing takes alot of focus so this helps out alot if you want to cast a healing debuff or something since you don't have to browse for a specific target on the screen.

In addition to these I use partyhelper, paint the leader, followmylead, Minmap (nice custom minimap) and alot more, but yeah, it's all about personal preference.

Spellbar/abilities

I know this is all about how everyone prefers to play or which keys you prefer to use. I just thought I'd comment some points.

If you're looking for a new mouse I'd strongly recommend Razer Naga, it has a total of 17 buttons of which 12 are on the side easily accessable with your thumb. Which basically means that if you configure all your spells right you'll never have to click on your spells again.

What you want is that your two detaunts, Healing spells including shrug it off and Don't feel nuthing and two healing potions are easily accessible. In case you didn't know you can use both a "normal" pot and a renown pot simultaneoslu since they have separate cooldown. I put a picture below in case you want to study my layout.


I can easily access 1-5, alt 1-5 and all 12 abilitiws bound to the Naga.

Spec

Here's a link to my current 19/10/0 spec
This one is RvR/Sc oriented, I basically want the 50% Healing debuff from the Gork tree, but if you want to max out healing more you could put points in the Da Green tree and perhaps take the tactic "Gork Fix'd it" from the Mork tree (it's actually really good, but I had to sacrifice one point in favour to the healing debuff, and I'm using the detaunt/instant ress tactic instead).

Last words
I'm sure I don't have to comment on gear, since it's pretty straight forward. However I'd like to remind that hitpoints are important, so there's no point in maxing out healing if you got 4,5k HP (according to me). At current state I play with 7k HP and 320T, but with a nice combination with invader (W bonus) and other jewelry I can get up to 9k HP, which in the other hand is kind of overkill since healing is so gimped at that state. However my point is that if you have always ran around with WP talisman in your gear just try with switching to W talismans instead and see how much more focus you're able to withstand. Save your WP gear for PVE instead =)

EDIT:
I also made this video guide as a complement to this one so feel free to watch it for additional tips & tricks!

The journey continues

So I've finally dinged RR77 and this friday we went for the Emperor Karl Franz as well. I have to say that I was lucky, the sovereign belt dropped and now i've got a total of four pieces. I was actually quite close to buy it, but I guess yesterday was another proof of that greed pays back. However, I really want the shoulders, since they're basically the best individual Shaman part and they look cool as well. I should afford to buy them in about a week, but of course they'll drop if I fall for the temptation.

I'm happy to say that my ToVL group is doing pretty well, we usually oneshot all bosses now (and yet we wipe on trash sometimes lol), I'm only one part away from the Amazing 5 piece bonus which gives a 5% proc chance to pop Focused Mind, it'll never be as good as the DoK equivalent, but at least it's as good as a Shaman can be. In the end I'll probably be running with 5 pieces of Tyrant and rest sovereign, I.E sov shoulders + jewelry. I haven't looked to much

into it but I think that's the best setup as the game is now. We tried out with a new tank in ToVL so my group wanted me to optimize my gear for healing since I usually just use my T/W RvR gear with decent PVE healing capability, I tried it out in a few Scenarios but I just can't live with being squishy, however I'll try to be a bit liberal when I get the entire tyrant set and try different stuff out, there's nothing more satisfying than seeing those big crits when needed the most!

All I do is complain

It's been a while since I wrote here last time, time has passed and I'd like to say that alot has happened in Warhammer, we can indeed look forward to 1.3.4 and even try it out on the PTS, but is it that much really?

In 1.3.3 basically what we got was the new "Ooooh, Shiny!" graphics, underdog system ( which all in all is just a static point system) and the War Report. Not much, but hey, Mythic surely was working on something bigger. And now, when we all can read the 1.3.4 patch notes I can't say I'm satisfied.

As usual there's three major changes, or updates. They promised us a scenario revamp, which results in that when 1.3.4 goes live, we only have 6 scenarios in T4. I mean, WTF? Isn't there like 26 scenarios in the game and they narrowed it to only 6? Mythic is indeed the only company that removes content from their games, first fortresses and now scenarios? We want more content, not less, and weren't we asking for a premade vs premade mode?

Anyhow, it's not the full story. The scenarios will be online at all times, so no more waiting for Battle For Praag, and they introduced a big bunch of new weapons as well which will be obtainable with new insignias that you get from participating in scenarios and some RvR events. So I'd say that's the 2nd improvement with the patch, new weapons.

3rd then? Last time they gave us the underdog system, this time they thought that what we need is an even more open RvR lake, WAR is everywhere you know? Well, whenever a city goes to stage 2 in a siege the RvR lakes will open up again. It'll probably be just PVE but it's a nice thing since there's nothing to do if your city gets captured.

This makes me wonder what Mythic is working on really, for me this feels like maintenance mode and the fact that they aren't announcing anything more far away than a few weeks at the time just supports the statement. Perhaps they have 80% of the staff working on 1.4.0 or even an expansion, LotD went live last summer so I really hope they're working on something for 2010 as well, but that's all I can do, hope. I'm getting closer to rr80 every day, it's going well with farming Tyrant and I've got several sovereign pieces so my time in the game is coming to it's end soon if they don't make it more interesting. Ah well, the scenario farming starts as 1.3.4 goes live...