Secrets of Shadowbolting

In a highlight of Blizzard of Oz history, we 2 shotted high king, 1 shot Gruul and then did a “oh. ok. Now what?”
Realizing we didn’t have the group makeup for mag’s (Vuur is a wonder lock but can not do Mag’s on her own), we decide to go exploring SSC. We do amazingly well considering this is a random idea and make it to Morogrim. He was oh so scary and if the Murloc’s hadn’t eaten the warlocks after the waterfall incidents, we may have even made it further. The fact we got him down to 83% on our first try into SSC at 1am was pretty impressive, the group was humming along, it was just getting late. Sleepy people make silly mistakes. But we found a new boss, oohed and ahhhhed at Hydross as we passed him by (our tanks were totally not ready to take him on) and worked our way to new and uncharted territory. It was a good day.

Now why our guild can only get 25 people available on a monday night at 9pm to do 25 mans is beyond me….

In the Officer post mortem we went over many important things that had come up during the raid such as:
1. Loot council – while rolling has been working for people so far through Gruul because certain people have sunwell badge loot that is better, we’re getting to a point where we’re going to have to start making some tough choices. We don’t want to be a DKP guild, but truth of the matter is, we’re going to need to find someway to give the purple items to people who need it most. Instead of hearing whining – we’re making a loot council of the officers and they get to decide. This means more research on the guildies we have running to know who needs what, but should hopefully cut down on arguments and anger in the future.

2. WE NEED MORE WARLOCKS. I am unfortunately the only main warlock character in our guild at this time. While that has been fantastic so far, it’s unfeasible to run Magtheridon with 1 warlock and 4 hunters when the warlock and one of those hunters are the top dpsers as well. We have a few warlock’s as alts, but we need a few more mains.

3. Raiding times – always hotly contested, unfortunately we have so many problems getting 25 people online at any given time aside from monday nights. Half the healers are not available until 9pm due to family constraints and this can be a bit of a raid killer. So far, we’re sticking with monday, but that could change at any time.

4. The morale boost – we’ve been stuck in a rut for a while. We’ve been struggling on the high king pull, but things are finally clicking. Between Kara, ZA and Gruul, we haven’t done anything new in months. The breath of fresh air that was SSC released a lot of tension that has been building as we were able to see new content AND the raid was able to listen and adapt on the fly. Not all decisions went over as well as others, but this was managed to be discussed privately or in officer chat so as not to detract from the raid.

5. the raid leading group – the core is getting stronger. We have the tank main RL, the warlock with her 2 cents in the back on DPS, the 2 healers keeping everyone calm and a few others tossing in comments here and there on best ideas. Honestly, as far as leading goes, we have a fairly painless raid leadership model that seems to be working out well. There’s still tweaking that needs to be done, but for where we are and where we’ve come from, this is huge.

Arena has always been a side hobby of mine. I like it, but it kicks my butt regularly. Monday night is prime arena night so we get a 5 man together after I choose competent people who are willing to lose an hour of sleep to the pain of arenas. Since season 4 started I havent played much. My gear has gotten a bit better, I have a full gladiator set with a few pieces of vengeful thrown in but overall, I just havent played much.
The biggest challenge of arena and getting good is really two-fold.
Knowing your character and skills
Knowing your oppositions skills
and of course team bonding and teamwork.
A team that has 2 of the 3 can be mildly successful around the 1500 range but a team that has all 3 will excel. Our team had about 2 of those down, we knew what our players and our team could do, we have a pretty good idea of what the other team can do but we’re missing some of that teamwork aspect. We started to bond and gel after a few losses until we got into a bit of a rhythm at the end.

The group was: 1 destro warlock, 2 BM hunters, 1 holy pally and 1 ice mage

Talk about crowd control and damage central. We got sheeps, fears, ice traps, pets and a healer.
The most important thing is finding targets and focus-firing. We needed to improve our crowd control a bit but the general trapping and draining was working pretty nicely. Priests and mages with no mana are very squishy. Hunters get dotted or some damage and then break LoS.

The dual healing groups were a little tougher as we only had one healer, we needed to protect our pally, but cc one, burn one, and knock out a dps and you’re in much better shape. We had a few issues with a holy priest, restro shaman, shadowstepping rogue, BM hunter and warlock.
The shaman’s chain heals were the most destructive to our group makeup. The warlock’s felhound was easily banished, the ice trap slowed the rogue down, one of our hunters kited the other hunter around the bridge. First target was the holy priest – curse of tongues, arcane shots, spell lock from fel puppy, counterspell from mage. While all dps was on priest, i was able to fear the shaman since he had no fear ward totem up. Priest go squish. Meanwhile the rogue is beating on our paladin and the hunter is chipping away at us. The rogue is the next to go to get the interrupts off the pally. While we’re beating him down, we’re keeping the hunter occupied and trying to keep the shaman running. The mage freezes the other team for a few seconds but we don’t spread out fast enough. We get the mage down, the rogue is at 2% when he shadowsteps away and grabs a heal. at this point we’re down a hunter, the mage is just about down and warlock is almost done. A few well timed shots on their part, a chain heal or 2, and we lose to the hunter, shaman, rogue still left standing.

In actuality, Arena can be easy, the problem is the sheer amount of time and effort getting to your your character and the abilities of all the other classes and how best to combat them can prove to be long and best and frustrating at worst.

More on strategy in a later post