Priest Healing PvP

[Kevin]

Interestingly enough, most groups so far tend to go for the Shaman first and leave me alone.

To explain that phenomenon, let me use another quote that I ran across.

Sometimes you're just destined to die. If the other team wants you dead, it's going to happen. In that situation, how long you live determines whether or not your group wins. The reason Priests don't get focus-fired sometimes is because, like Paladins, it can just take too long to get the kill.

The best thing is when it takes them forever to kill you, they finally take you out, and Spirit of Redemption pops up to give you an additional 15 seconds of absolute free healing. All too often that winds up turning the tide of a fight. Take that, you bastards. :)

Shaman die faster (just as susceptible to interrupts and stuns), have few things they can insta cast to keep the purge bots busy, have less resistance to push back and only have earthshield and NS as instants (both can be purged, even macro'd I've had NS heals stopped because the NS gets purged before it is used or I get stunned before the heal goes off). Yes they have a bit more armor, but armor means nothing vs warlocks, priests, mages, some druids, and some shaman, and doesn't mean as much vs a hunter (arcane shot is magic damage and any hunter will use it as part of the burst rotation). I've mentioned it elsewhere, the only healers easier to kill in arenas (or at least neutralize) are resto druids who can be purged away just like a priest but have fewer tricks (go bear form eating mana and removing the ability to heal party mates at all).



The reason to leave a shaman alone and kill the priest or pally that takes longer to kill first, is that the shaman is the only class that can you can just interrupt away all the heals. The paladin can bubble and heal for a bit without fear and they can spec to make it harder to interrupt them. The shaman you can just shock, CS, kick any heal they can cast on a party member. If you have good interrupts you nullify the shaman that way and take longer to kill the priest who will almost always last longer because you use the same method to kill both classes and the priest has more tricks to survive it.

I play a shaman and a hunter in 3v3 (crap level for both teams and the hunter just joined a 5v5 team where I am by far the most geared in my 2 BG pieces and 1 arena piece) and the advantage my shaman has is that I can use deception. I go in with all visual indicators showing healing/casting. But I'm enh. So after I get hit and stunned and get my first heal interrupted (and I will generally give the big 2.5s cast healing wave as enticement) I go dual wield and suddenly throw out 700+ DPS on our target. The interrupt was used on me and that means the priest didn't get hit with it and can heal. I really thought a enh shaman (21 in resto for NS heal) would be a big liability in arenas, but in 3v3 I think it could prove to be very helpful. Now we just need to get some gear on that team (most of us don't have any arena gear yet and only 1 or 2 pieces of battleground gear as well as no PvE raid gear) to see. But without gear I don't care how good you are getting past 1600 in end game PvE blues (not purples) isn't gonna happen. You can still be flat out, out geared in arenas.