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!

Magister's Terrace

Last week we had a chance to visit Magister's Terrace, the new 5-man instance on Sunwell Isle. Having read so much about it's high crowd-control requirements and general melee-DPS unfriendliness, I wanted to wait until I could enter with mostly guildees.

Our party consisted of a Feral Tank, Mage, Hunter, Holy Priest and myself. A pretty solid group, geared mostly from Karazhan and PvP rewards. Nothing extraordinary, but no slackers either. :) We took it generally slow, and had relatively smooth-sailing up until the infamous final trash pull, more on that later.

Trash
Pulls were usually a mix of casters and melee'rs, easily-controlled encounters by using the usual best practice methods (CC, marking kill order). As a Shaman, it's important to use Earth Shock against the Blood Knights as they heal as well as DPS. Against Physicians, use Poison cleanse totem. For encounters with too many casters to fully CC, Grounding Totem is very effective.

Selin Fireheart
First thing's first: get everyone into the room at the same time! A magic forcefield locks players out who don't immediately come into the room. We wiped here not knowing that, as only our tank and one other made it into the room. Even on the second attempt, full well knowing about the forcefield, the hunter still got locked-out. Heh. Cannot emphasize this enough: all in right away. Other than that, it's pretty easy. We managed to down him with only 2 DPS. Same story as the final Steamvaults boss, destroy the crystal power things as soon as they're attackable.

Vexallus
Similar to Karazhan's Curator, this guy sends blobs of Pure Energy into the room that need to be burned down ASAFP. (like that? I just came up with that last week, been using it ever since!) It was hard to locate them, so spamming this macro (hotkeyed to your keyboard, just like Cartman recommends) might help:

/target Pure

Our tank managed to down Vexallus himself after everyone else wiped around 1%. See? Bare durid iz 4 fite 2! :)

Princess Delrissa
The infamous 5v5 PvP fight. Everything you've read is true, there is no attack table, so tanking does basically nothing here. In fact, kill order didn't seem much help either as it was pretty chaotic. We wiped a few times but manged it in the end. It seems good to start with a CC strategy, then just be prepared to go with the flow of the fight. Glance at the party's health every now and again, backup healing can be helpful here. (that means you, Shaman!)

After Delrissa came the seven mob pull that we just couldn't manage. /sigh. Maybe if I had been replaced with another DPS/CC, we could've tied up another mob, but it just didn't work out. We even replaced the Feral Tank with a Protection Paladin, but the seemingly random targeting of the Ethereal Smuggler and his nasty AOE proved too difficult to contend with. I probably spent too much time running after him, should have been dropping more Grounding Totems and interrupting casters, me thinks.

Can't wait to take another shot at this one. :) Bottom line for Enhancement Shaman though, don't be shy, you can be very effective here. Just adjust your tactics a bit. More grounding, more interrupts.

The Attack Table

On more than one occasion, I've read that Enhancement Shaman should value critical hit chance over standard "to hit" bonuses. This advice always seemed counter-intuitive to me... "If you don't hit, you can't crit, right?"

Wrong-o.

It appears that WoW uses a single-roll system to determine hits/crits/misses, rather than a two-roll system (first to see if you hit, second to see if you crit). And for those born in the 90's: this "roll" refers to pen & paper RPGs where you physically rolled oddly-shaped dice. Anyone remember THAC0 and the insta-crit natural 20 roll? I digress...

MaxDPS.com has a nice Enhancement worksheet for examining this single-roll attack table. Notice that all possible scenarios are accounted for as a percentage: hits/crits, misses/parries/dodges, etc. If you fiddle around with Crit %, you'll see that having more crit improves the quality of your landed hits by taking percentage points away from regular hits.

Since so many Enhancement abilities (Flurry, Shamanistic Focus, Unleashed Rage) are triggered by crits - not to mention raw DPS - it's important to be crit'ing as much as possible. Sure, having more +hit is nice, but having more crit impacts your overall DPS significantly more.

Note that you can also remove Dodge/Parry misses from the attack table by positioning, so always try to attack from behind!

Prince Pwnd

This past week in Karazhan has been unusual for me - unusual in that I was actually able to attend all three nights and "finish" the instance (at least from a quest perspective). Woot! Last night we picked up at Chess, continued on to Prince, then back-tracked for an attempt on Netherspite. Again, some notes from an Enhancement Shaman's perspective:

The Chess Event
I've read strategy notes, seen the videos, but it makes much more sense after having done it once. This is a fun encounter where you basically choose a chess piece to "become," then you do battle against Medivh's pieces. (It reminded me of the quest The Fel and the Furious, where you become a Fel Reaver for a bit and your action bars get replaced with Fel Reaver-specific actions.) I chose a pawn, simply because I didn't really know what to expect - and thankfully it was pretty simple: move or attack. Funny thing is you can move sideways, so don't expect strict chess rules here. My pawn died, so after 30 seconds I ran back to the board and chose another to control. Pretty straightforward, nothing Shaman-specific here.

Prince Malchezaar
Mean Mr. Malchezaar is the objective of A Demonic Presence, so I was pretty excited to get to him and have a chance to finish the quest line. We wiped a few times due to unlucky Infernal drop locations, but in the end got him down. Being a melee DPS'er, the thing to watch for is his Enfeeble ability, which drops you to 1 hit point for seven seconds (during which you are unhealable). The strategy here is to run away from the Prince immediately as he follows up with an AOE (you'll also want to avoid the infernals). I found that facing the direction to run was the best approach while I fought, so I didn't waste any time turning before running.

The 2nd phase is when things get hairy for the tank, as the Prince summons axes increasing his melee damage and applies Sunder Armor's. This is the phase when I chose to pop Heroism and Fire Elemental, for faster heals and increased DPS - getting past this phase ASAP seemed pretty critical. The third and final phase is pretty much a DPS race, as the rate of infernals dropping increases.

Netherspite
Probably the most gadgety of all gadget fights I've seen, this encounter was pretty wild. Netherspite is a big ol' dragon that calls three portals which shoot buffing beams at him. A red beam that tanks should intercept (by simply standing in front of), a blue beam that DPS'ers should interecept and a green beam that pretty much anyone available should intercept PDQ, since it heals Netherspite at some insane rate. We didn't actually get him down, but it was clear that having beam assignments (with backups for each assignment) was the thing to do. More research is warranted, but it seems like any non-mana-dependent class would be good for the green beams since you lose mana while in it - but Enhancement Shaman are also good since we can regain more than half our mana within 15 seconds by using Shamanistic Rage.

Hopefully in some future post I'll be able to report on downing Netherspite and a few other bosses that I've yet to see/finish (Nightbane, Big Bad Wolf), but it's been great to get this far and I'm definitely feeling like any future Kara runs I get to go on will be gravy. :)

Beyond Curator

Tonight was the first chance I've had to participate in the 2nd night of a Karazhan run, thanks to some raiding schedule rearrangements. :) Being able to finally experience Kara content beyond Curator was great: tonight we downed Shade of Aran and Illhoof. These fights seem a little more melee-DPS friendly than others, and here are some notes from the Enhancement perspective:

Shade of Aran
First of all, this guy is just plain tough. He's a caster who does crazy damage if you let him - we actually wiped three times before finally downing him. As a Shaman you'll be on spell interrupt duty for either his fireballs or frost bolts. The funny thing is, it seems like his casting frequency goes up if you interrupt too much, so we actually tried interrupting every other cast on the final attempt. This seemed to go better, but more research is warranted...

Flame Wreath seems to have the potential for being the biggest wiper, but with DeadlyBossMods you'll get plenty of warning beforehand. As melee DPS, you need to make sure you're in range of Aran before FW lands - afterwards everyone must temporarily stay put or very bad things will happen. If you get stuck out of melee range, throw a few heals or lightning bolts in the meantime. Take your hand off the keyboard so you don't accidentally move.

Another nasty trick is the pull-in followed by a huge AOE blast. You must run immediately to a wall after being pulled-in and wait for the AOE to go off (similar to Murmur's sonic blast). If you don't make it and die, just make sure you don't attempt to reincarnate in the middle of his blizzard spell... wait until it passes. -_-

I'd also recommend waiting to pop Heroism and Fire Elemental until at least 1/3 the way into the fight - just to make sure things are going pretty well before blowing your long-cooldown abilities.

In summary: interrupt spells, stay in melee range, avoid the nasty AOE, reincarnate wisely.

Illhoof
This satyr boss and his imp have some interesting dynamics, as you'll be switching targets often. The best scenario for melee DPS seems to be tanking them just on the edge of the green circle, so you can minimize running around between targets.

First, it's important to have a "/target Demon" macro hotkeyed to your keyboard (do I sound like Cartman?). I used the letter V as it's very easy to hit during a hectic fight. Periodically Illy will target a random raid member and shackle them in Demonic Chains, rapidly draining their health. ALL DPS must burn down the shackle ASAP or the shacklee will die (exceptions are Paladins and Mages who can bubble/ice block to escape). It's reminiscent of the final boss in Steamvault where you have to burn down the water tanks as soon as they're attackable. Melee DPS is made for stuff like this, so make sure you're in range for a quick re-target, use that macro and Stormstrike/Earth Shock for burst DPS.

Other than that, hopefully you have a kickass raid leader who will call out the current focus, as it changes frequently between the Imp, Illhoof and the shackled person. We two-shotted this fight, a nice change after Aran's beating. :) Hopefully I can finagle my way into a 3rd followup night, as I believe Chess is up next!

In other news, I tried Recount as a replacement for DamageMeters tonight. Way more options than DM had, and it reported an astonishing 1,000 ZOMGDPS for our first-place Warlock. My DPS seemed to be neck-and-neck with the mage, around 600 DPS. Fun stuffs. :)