06-25-2007, 07:30 PM
Since not many people have added much here, here is my experience from our first night of 5v5 arena PvP.
Our group composition was two healers (resto shaman and raid healer priest), two DPS (warrior and rogue) and me on my feral druid. Fortunately, my raiding group has made some good progress in Karazhan, Gruul and Magtheridon, so my druid had 4 pieces of Malorne which makes for very nice, well-rounded gear. Otherwise, I stuck with mostly my standard cat gear, though I used my healer trinkets for the +40 intellect for some extra longevity and some mana regeneration.
Going in, I was not real sure what my role would be, but I knew that a druid can be a very disruptive force through use of cyclone, entangling roots, feral charge, bash and maim. As we started out, I was primarily trying to disrupt the other team's healers to prevent them from healing the primary targets. This worked out ok, but we kept finding that if no one did anything to stop the other team's warrior (which was almost invariably present), it would tear our priest apart. Thus, after 6 or so matches I switched from disrupting the healers, primarily, to trying to make sure I keep the warrior in a state of perma-cyclone/roots where he basically can't do anything. In between applications, I would offen go charge a healer in cat form and mangle/shred them a couple times for combo points and then maim them for a nice stun. This worked particularly well against paladins who would often bubble out of the maim (or low life if I got some crits), making it so they did not have their bubble available later in the fight. Then I would deshift and re-CC the warrior.
I quickly decided that my UI could use some changes from how it is set up for raiding: 1. I needed larger unit frames for my teammates (so I knew how much life they had) because I normally stick with a smallish version of grid, mostly for situational awareness. 2. Setting the warrior as my focus target made CC'ing him substantially faster. 3. I needed a mod so I could see how the other team is doing (and Arena Master seemed to do the job for that).
With those changes to strategy and UI, things went much more smoothly. My favorite moment of the night was a match-up against a team with two warriors where I kept cycloning one warrior then rooting the other until diminishing returns kicked in and I switched the cyclone/root targets. After a minute or so of that, the warriors immediately turned to charge me when they got loose so I switched to bearform and "tanked" them for a while until they realized that trying to kill me when I have 14k life and 23k armor wasn't going to happen, and so they ran off. But by that time the diminishing returns for CC had worn off on them, so I repeated the whole process again. Owned.
Overall, I am not sure that I really gained very much by being a feral druid versus another type of druid. Certainly, I have more armor in bear form, I am more resistant to stuns, AoE's, and fears, but most of the time I was bouncing in and out of forms to cause as much disruption as possible. In hindsight, it might have been more effective to be a Moonkin spec since they can apply CC, have good armor (though not as good as me, due to the massive +armor I have on my leather) and nuke all from the same form. However, that isn't going to happen with me since I have basically zero moonkin gear and awesome feral gear. :) On the bright side, there were only two or three matches out of 27 where I ran out of mana and had to stop shifting/deshifting, so maybe that wasn't a big deal.
So here's a summary of lessons learned from the first night of PvP:
1. Playing to cause maximum disruption (with focus on classes that are a threat to our healers) was effective.
2. Setting up the UI to support /focus for Cyclone targetting worked well.
3. Having a good sized mana pool is a definite plus since I was shifting and deshifting very frequently.
4. I was rarely focus fired until the other healers were targetted, so I was usually free to do as I pleased.
5. I should remember to use Remove Curse in the future (in hindsight, I realized I had neglected this)
Our group composition was two healers (resto shaman and raid healer priest), two DPS (warrior and rogue) and me on my feral druid. Fortunately, my raiding group has made some good progress in Karazhan, Gruul and Magtheridon, so my druid had 4 pieces of Malorne which makes for very nice, well-rounded gear. Otherwise, I stuck with mostly my standard cat gear, though I used my healer trinkets for the +40 intellect for some extra longevity and some mana regeneration.
Going in, I was not real sure what my role would be, but I knew that a druid can be a very disruptive force through use of cyclone, entangling roots, feral charge, bash and maim. As we started out, I was primarily trying to disrupt the other team's healers to prevent them from healing the primary targets. This worked out ok, but we kept finding that if no one did anything to stop the other team's warrior (which was almost invariably present), it would tear our priest apart. Thus, after 6 or so matches I switched from disrupting the healers, primarily, to trying to make sure I keep the warrior in a state of perma-cyclone/roots where he basically can't do anything. In between applications, I would offen go charge a healer in cat form and mangle/shred them a couple times for combo points and then maim them for a nice stun. This worked particularly well against paladins who would often bubble out of the maim (or low life if I got some crits), making it so they did not have their bubble available later in the fight. Then I would deshift and re-CC the warrior.
I quickly decided that my UI could use some changes from how it is set up for raiding: 1. I needed larger unit frames for my teammates (so I knew how much life they had) because I normally stick with a smallish version of grid, mostly for situational awareness. 2. Setting the warrior as my focus target made CC'ing him substantially faster. 3. I needed a mod so I could see how the other team is doing (and Arena Master seemed to do the job for that).
With those changes to strategy and UI, things went much more smoothly. My favorite moment of the night was a match-up against a team with two warriors where I kept cycloning one warrior then rooting the other until diminishing returns kicked in and I switched the cyclone/root targets. After a minute or so of that, the warriors immediately turned to charge me when they got loose so I switched to bearform and "tanked" them for a while until they realized that trying to kill me when I have 14k life and 23k armor wasn't going to happen, and so they ran off. But by that time the diminishing returns for CC had worn off on them, so I repeated the whole process again. Owned.
Overall, I am not sure that I really gained very much by being a feral druid versus another type of druid. Certainly, I have more armor in bear form, I am more resistant to stuns, AoE's, and fears, but most of the time I was bouncing in and out of forms to cause as much disruption as possible. In hindsight, it might have been more effective to be a Moonkin spec since they can apply CC, have good armor (though not as good as me, due to the massive +armor I have on my leather) and nuke all from the same form. However, that isn't going to happen with me since I have basically zero moonkin gear and awesome feral gear. :) On the bright side, there were only two or three matches out of 27 where I ran out of mana and had to stop shifting/deshifting, so maybe that wasn't a big deal.
So here's a summary of lessons learned from the first night of PvP:
1. Playing to cause maximum disruption (with focus on classes that are a threat to our healers) was effective.
2. Setting up the UI to support /focus for Cyclone targetting worked well.
3. Having a good sized mana pool is a definite plus since I was shifting and deshifting very frequently.
4. I was rarely focus fired until the other healers were targetted, so I was usually free to do as I pleased.
5. I should remember to use Remove Curse in the future (in hindsight, I realized I had neglected this)
-TheDragoon