An Ode to Treants

As we hit 70 and actually enter arena, I’ll blog the details of what has worked and what hasn’t.  Here is my initial strategy:

All stealth and try to stay close together to minimize anyone finding us.  We select our focus fire (FF) target, my druids target (SC for Simoncowell) and Vindisiel’s target (VD).

From stealth, release treants onto FF target.  This should shock the opposing team and cause them to look for a split second.  This will give time for the rogue to start the stun lock.  Both druids change into moonkin, put insect swarm (IS) and moonfire (MF) on FF.  Then, both druids cyclone thier target.  Go back to FF target for a quick wrath, and then start the cyclone spamming on their target again.  Hopefully, by this time our FF target is pretty much dead.  It had treants, 4 dots, and a rogue beating on it with minimal heals (since its healer was cycloned).

Now, that’s in a perfect situation.  Obviously it will not go nearly as smoothly as that.  Here are a few things that would change our strategy:

1.)  One, or more, of the targets is stealthed.  We will not be able to set up our targets as easily, but we can still assign one of the moonkins to cycloning the stealthed target.

2.)  Mages & Pally’s.  These both have immunity which means they can’t be burst down (since they’ll iceblock or bubble).  Mages will have to be cycloned and hope the FF target is down before we need to deal with them.  Their counterspell will hurt, but we do have 2 classes of spells (arcane and nature) and we can’t be sheeped.  Pally’s will be bad because after the first cyclone they will bubble allowing for heals.  My initial solution is that when we see the pally bubble, then cyclone our FF target causing none of the heals to get through!  This will take some testing.

3.) AoE on our Treants.  For the most part I don’t see this as a bad thing.  They’re there to deal some damage, but mostly as a distraction.  If a player is wasting 3-5 seconds dealing with the Treants, then that is a win in my book… those buggers did their job well.

4.) Druid healers.  They’ll be in stealth longer than us, most likely, which means they’ll get the first cyclone off.  However, we’ll see about that.  Any druid who stays in stealth too long, or takes time to cyclone us, may not have the time to heal up the FF target… remember, we’re putting a ton of DPS on that guy and a healer is going to be ruining their pants.

5.) Warriors. That damn charge/intercept.  Luckily most warriors seem to roll with druids, which means the warrior can be rooted (no defensive dispell).  However, it may prove better to just rage starve them (if you never hit a warrior, they can’t hit you very hard… believe me, I know.  It’s near impossible to take out a priest or druid bear if you’re trying to burst through their PW:Shield or ridiculous high armor).

6.) Hunters.  Holy crap I’ve got my ass kicked by hunters during leveling.  Granted, I usually can’t use LOS of them and I don’t yet have cyclone, but a beast master hunter scares me.  They will likely be a FF target to get them out of there!

Many more problems to come…

Since I can’t play at work I am relegated to thinking about optimal builds and strategies.  We are going to try a 2 moonkin, 1 rogue 3v3 team.  My hope, which may be totally unrealistic, is to reach 2k before season 4 comes out.  I have experience in PvP, but Seacrestout (rogue) and Vindisiel (moonkin) are relatively inexperienced.  However, both are very good raiders so I think there is hope.

I’m thinking my build will be 42/11/8.  This will allow for feral charge (escape mechanism and an additional way to lock down a healer) and cheap shapeshifting.  However, since I’m only level 62, I have not had a chance to use feral charge in PvP.  There is going to be quite a bit of learning during the next few weeks.  I’d be very happy if we could reach 1650 next weekend.

My problem is that I don’t know where to allocate my 42 points in the balance tree.  Can I avoid “Balance of Power”?  I don’t know if the 4% to hit is used in PvP… I think that’s +hit instead of spell penetration.  Granted, I think it gives me 4% defense against incoming spells, but I’m not sure that’s worth the talent points.  Also, in my current thought I can’t max out “Wrath of Cenarius” which may be gimping my DPS.

I’m spending a ton of points to get this feral charge… I’ll need to truly test it out to see if it’s worth it.

I hear blogging is addictive, so I figured it would fit my personality and I’d give it a shot!  Treants will be dedicated, at least initially, to my World of Warcraft experience.

A bit of history:

Played WoW since release.  I took a break for about 1 year and returned after TBC was released.

I have ran a guild that, at the time of my departure, had downed 4/6 SSC and 2/4 TK.  I quit the guild because I just didn’t have the time to dedicate to raiding 4 nights out of the week.  I still play a ton, but it’s not required that I’m there… it’s actually a game again that I just log on when I want to, not when I have to.

Myself and a few guildees decided to reroll on a horde PvP server (we were on an alliance PvE server for raiding).  Originally I leveled my ret pally, Johntesh, to 59 before I had an epiphany: roll a moonkin and try 3v3 with two moonkins and one rogue.

So, I stopped leveling my pally and immediately created my moonkin, Simoncowell.  My druid is now 62 and getting ready for arena.  My friends, Seacrestout and Vindisiel, are the moonkin and rogue that will make up the 3v3.  Hopefully we’ll all be lvl 70 by next weekend (Feb 9) and we’ll start the arena dream.

I do have a bit of arena experience.  My warrior, who was my main in the raiding guild (fury spec), reached 1950 with a resto shammy and disc priest 3v3.  However, I have now realized I really wasn’t that good of a warrior.  I didn’t use intervene to get back to safety, I didn’t have all my abilities keybinded, I turned using keys instead of the mouse, etc.  I hope that I’m able to do better as a moonkin.  I think I will since I’m not raiding anymore and I’ll have much more time dedicated to arena/PvP.

Anyway, stick around, read the blog if it interests you, and drop some comments here and there!  For now it’s not blocked at my work, which means I’ll be posting often!