Sunwell Dailies: Enhancement Tactics

While doing your Shattered Sun Offensive dailies around the island and in Outland, you get to face a wide range of mobs that are best fought using varying tactics - so in the span of 40 minutes you'll get to employ almost every trick in your toolkit. Err totem sack. Err wha? Uhm yeah. Here's a breakdown of the tactics I use:

Mana Remnant Dudes
Run up in Ghost Wolf and fire off a Flame Shock as you approach, so when they start that nasty channeling spell your Earth Shock should be ready. Sometimes they come in pairs, so Stoneclaw totem helps keep the beating to a minimum. Also since they steal mana, I tend to use Shamanistic Rage to keep my mana topped off.

Rockem Sockem Robots
Just beat 'em down with a heavy DPS rotation.

Sunfury Archers
Open with a Flame Shock, run up and pew pew. Pretty straightforward.

Sunfury Knights
Open with a Flame Shock to quickly tag your mob, but hold off on the Earth Shock until they begin healing themselves.

Sunfury Warlocks
Drop a Grounding totem on approach, if you're lucky it'll swallow both spells by the imp and the 'lock. Usually a stormstrike takes care of the annoying imp, leaving my Earth Shock to interrupt the warlock's second spell. Dispel Magic to cleanse the armor off.

Demon Casters
Drop a Grounding totem on approach, use Earth Shock to interrupt subsequent Fireballs.

Other Demons
I tend to use Lightning Shield around these guys, as the winged ones like to do the stun/fire shower trick. This way they can beat themselves to death even while I'm incapacitated.

Naga Casters
Grounding Totem, Earth Shocks for interrupts and Dispel to clear their Frost Shields.

Naga Warriors
Heavy DPS rotation, sometimes with Lightning Shield and Shamanistic Rage since they hit fairly hard. Stormstrike, Flame Shock, Earth Shock. By the way, worst drop rate evar on those stupid keys. :\

Sunfury Reservists
Just like the Archers, usually open with Flame Shock and beat 'em down. Getting between boats is made much easier with Water Walking!

Now on to Outland...!

Fel Armament Orcs
Usually a mix of casters and melee, just employ the best-practice techniques here: Grounding totem/Earth Shock for casters, Flame Shock dots and mass DPS on the meleers. Dispel the Bloodlust effect. If you aggro one of the big elites, Ghost Wolf is very handy for running away.

Sunfury Attack Plans
Also a mix of casters and melee - you know what to do here.

Mana Cells
Those Mana Worms are extremely annoying, especially since you can't loot the mana cells while being beat on. Early on I used to get ninja'd a lot while busily defending myself. The trick is to drop Stoneclaw as you approach the cell - it should last long enough for one (maybe two) gathers of mana cells. Then you can worry about downing the worms. I use Lightning Shield and Searing totem here just to make the fights go faster.

I know there are other SSO dailies (Hellfire Peninsula, etc.), but I usually just do the rounds as shown above, seems to be fairly efficient time-wise and yields a ton of gold. Don't forget to vendor excess bandages - it's an easy 6g per stack!

2.4 First Impressions

After last night's Kara run I had a chance to run up to Quel'Danas (aka Sunwell Isle) and poke around a bit. Having never seen Blood Elf architecture firsthand before, it was really cool to experience fresh content and new quests.

Getting There
Alliance have a flight point at Ironforge which will get you there pretty quickly via a loading screen while in-flight. Unfortunately, flying back to IF does not seem to work the same way, where you hit all those flight points in Eastern Plaguelands, etc. on the way back. So use your hearthstone to get back if possible (until the Shat portal gets unlocked). Tip: if you log out mid-flight, you'll land at the next flight point along your original route.

The Isle
Aside from being graphically beautiful, the storytellers at Blizzard did a great job of making it feel like you've landed in a warzone and need to get to work right away. The place was still a zoo at 1am server time, lots of folks running around - some looking very lost, which added to the realism of the storyline. :) When I started out, the quest givers reported 39% progress, but 30 mins later they were at 41%, so no doubt by now phase 1 is close to being over. At this point the island basically has nothing available other than a flight point, quartermaster and quest givers. Over time more facilities will be unlocked.

Other highlights:

Dailies
It looks like there are lots of new options for dailies, which is fantastic. I find the bombing run quest extremely annoying and the Simon Says one mind-numbing, so it's good to have other things to try. There are both PvP and PvE dailies, scattered over Shattrath and the new Isle.

Teleport to Caverns of Time
There's now a representative from the CoT in the lower city who can teleport you directly there. Genius! Now they just need one for Sunwell Isle, maybe that will come later?

Marks for Honor
A new repeatable quest allows you to turn in 1 of each BG mark (AB, AV, EOTS and WSG) for ~300 honor. This is all win, except for needing the EOTS ones. Bleh.

Black War Elekk
This thing is way hotter in-person (in-game?). After the Season 1 helm, the elekk may be my next PvP goal: only 30 marks each from AB, AV and WSG.

Reputation PvP Armor
I went around and collected all the Seer's Linked pieces but as I tried to mix/match them into my current set, I only found that the chest and legs integrated well in my setup. RatingBuster FTW. I mostly gem'ed up with strength and crit, and now feel like I've got a decent setup as far as a hybrid PvP/PvE set goes.

Last night in Kara we had too many melee DPS for (Iron) Maiden, so I was rotated out to help heal - I'll likely go buy a set of Seer's healer gear to help in those situations. It's nice to have the option of a premade gear set for trying out alternate specs! Now just have to Learn2Healz.

Patch 2.4 Notes

With patch 2.4 dropping today, I was going to start a post about Shaman-specific updates, but Matthew Rossi over at Wowinsider beat me to the punch with an excellent write-up.

Things We Like:

• Ghost Wolf cast time down to 2 seconds, instant-cast if talented - handy for PvP or PvE grinding.
• Totem global cooldown reduced to 1 second - great for instances/grouping.
• Integrated Totem Timer icons in default UI - with individually dispellable totems! (begone, Searing Totem)
  
• Toughness for PvP viability - not that I'll be re-spec'ing for PvP (I'm stubborn that way), but it's good to know this option is available.
• Tremor Totem now ticks every 3 instead of 5 seconds.
• PvP Reputation Armor

Things We Don't Like:

• Shamanistic Rage nerf - now only 15 seconds of incoming damage reduction. Boo PvE nerfz.
  

Now just hoping my mods still work for tonight's Kara run!

UPDATE: looks like Omen has a 2.4 update, and DamageMeters is out, so going to try Recap tonight instead.

Melee Rotations

Goeben from Chain Heal recently posted a comment about trying out Enhancement for grinding, so here are some melee rotation ideas for those looking to give dual-wielding pew-pew a go.

Soloing
If you can pick a spot between a large number of mobs, you'll want to set up with a few totems, in this order of importance: Grace of Air (for crit), Strength of Earth (attack power), Searing Totem (extra DPS) and if needed, either Healing or Mana totems. For maximum mana efficiency, pull using rank 1 or 2 lightning bolts. Then the basic melee rotation then goes:

• Stormstrike and auto-attack
  
• wait for Shamanistic Focus, then Flame Shock
• wait for another Focus
  
• Stormstrike again if it's up
  
• Earth Shock
• repeat
  

Don't forget to use Shamanistic Rage when you're low on mana or are taking big hits, it restores mana on every hit and also reduces all forms of incoming damage. With some discipline and waiting for Focus procs, you should be relatively downtime-free as far as mana is concerned.

If you've pulled more than one mob, drop a Stoneclaw totem for a few seconds of crowd control, or Earth Elemental if you're in big trouble.

Groups
The rotation is pretty similar here, but with mana preservation being less of an issue in groups with managed pulls, the need to wait for Focus procs is eliminated - you just want to do maximum sustained DPS:

• Stormstrike
• Flame Shock
• Earth Shock
• repeat

PvP
Player vs. player is an entirely different animal, where your primary goal is to slow your opponent, then start melee. My typical PvP rotation is:

• Frost Shock
  
• Earth Bind totem (if there's time/appropriate)
• Stormstrike (and thereafter anytime it's up)
  
• Either Earth Shock for burst or Frost Shock again

Using a combination of Frost Shocks and Earth Bind, you should be able to keep them slowed and within range. My advice would also be to avoid going 1-on-1 against rogues, since you'll be lucky to get a shock off before being paralyzed into oblivion. :)

Ding 70

I thought reaching level 70 would be somewhat anti-climactic, but I was wrong. I managed to do it in Blade's Edge Mountains, leaving several unexplored zones ahead of me. Plus, my log is still half-full of skipped Outland instance quests. I'm starting to get the feeling like there's a whole new game opening up to me because...

...ZOMG I CAN FREAKIN' FLY.

With some frugality and discipline I managed to save enough to buy my regular flyer straight away, so the first thing I did was run over to Wildhammer Keep and pick up a badass Ebon Griffon. It even has that new griffon smell. Err, ok maybe not. A quick edit to BaudMount (auto-equipping Riding Crop FTW) and after setting up a new hotkey (Shift-F), I was airborne. Weeeee!

So Close

Once I dinged 69 I was happy to find I had a full bar of blue XP left. Most of you probably know this means I'll be earning double XP for every mob I down. Then it dawned on me, I was almost done. :(

Now, I know there's a ton left to do post-70: PvP, raiding, helping guildees, more raiding, saving for teh epix mount, but I'm still feeling weird about it.

Time to roll another alt!

UPDATE: six bubbles to go!