With the keying requirement for Kara gone, some interesting groups are making their way to deadwind pass. Last night, I went along on Ep to do healing. We had 3 healers, and at 1350 healing, I had far and away the highest healing bonus. I suspect that the other folks aside from healers were geared similarly, though I didn’t do any inspects. It was a wipe-fest. The healing was falling behind all over the group, and it looked like the DPS was pretty low judging from my damage meter. I had main tank heal duties, which shaman aren’t the best at, because of my “high” heal bonus. I’m pretty sure that if a shaman wants to man tank heal in kara in the early stages, +1500 healing and +120 mp5 is the minimum gearing necessary. In my opinion, the keying process was a great way to get folks geared up, and get the grouping skills tuned. By the end of keying, Og the hunter was ready to step into kara with 8500 hp, 6500 mana, and 1400 rap. These days, any 70 can get in and it’s going to make it hard to find good pugs.
If one wants to be effective in kara, one should go through the keying process to get the gear and skills necessary to do a good job. I posted a list of links to recommended pre-kara gear on my main’s guild website and I think it’s worth posting here. It’s a little dated, as there is some new badge gear, and a whole new reputation grind with Shattered Hand, but one should be able to tell what is important in kara from this list:
hunter:
mm/bm: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=305511530&sid=1
warrior:
prot: http://www.wow-pro.com/node/1198
shaman:
enhancement: http://shammy.wikispaces.com/Enhancement+Pre-Raid+Gear
elemental: http://shammy.wikispaces.com/Elemental+Pre-Raid+Gear
restoration: http://shammy.wikispaces.com/Restoration+Pre-Raid+Gear
druid:
feral: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t17794-feral_druid_preraid_tank_gear_guide/
priest
holy: http://www.worldofmatticus.com/2007/08/28/gearing-your-fresh-70-holy-priest-my-recommendations/
paladin:
general: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=14101412&sid=1
holy: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=97751255
mage:
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=302171544&sid=1
warlock:
http://www.epic-warcraft.com/warlockbestpreraid.php
http://www.soaraid.com/forums/showthread.php?t=685
rogue:
http://shadowpanther.net/starter-pve.htm
Along with gear, one needs good enchants and augments. There is a fairly old site that lists the needed stats to walk in the door of karazhan. Personally, I think some of the healer numbers are really low. The short is that most of your gear should be level appropriate blues with maybe a couple of greenies depending on your class.
Mercury and I made a 2v2 team to see what arena is like. I’ve never done much PvP, so I completely sucked. Our team is me, the resto shaman, and a feral druid. We lost all ten of our matches. Here are things I noticed:
- I am always immediately the first target.
- I can’t seem to mash buttons fast enough to keep up with the damage.
- If there is a way to keep me from casting spells, the other teams do it to me as soon as possible.
- Earth Shield on the druid helps very little. Earth Shield on me helps a lot. I didn’t see ES get dispelled, which was unexpected.
- The matches are really fast. Most lasted less then 2 minutes. The queues on a Saturday nght are short, so you can knock off 10 matches pretty quick.
So even though I am a noob at pvp and completely suck, I still suggest getting in on arenas. 10 matches took about 40 minutes. I will get points toward some season 2 gear. S3 is out of the question until I can figure out how to pvp.
The other night I healed regular underbog, which was the most difficult healing I’ve done. The party makeup was: holy paladin tank, rogue, mage, DPS warrior, and Ep the resto shaman. The tank had some problems keeping agro (holy spec and all), but did well over all. The DPS folks seemed to madly apply DPS before the tank had a lot of threat. I think that’s probably typical. On my hunter, I have to practice restraint. It’s hard to wait a few seconds when the tank is taking hits, so I can’t fault the DPS much. We had no wipes, but we did have some serious adds at times. I don’t know who agro’d them, but I learned some tricks because of it. First off, coming up off the ramp into the naga area, we ended up pulling 2 groups of mobs somehow. I just spammed chain heal and kept earth shield on the tank. One of the DPS died. I tried out Earth Elemental at that point (with a yell in the same macro). All of the mobs headed straight for it and the tank had time to collect all of the mobs and restore order. No one complained, and we avoided a wipe. I used up my fire elemental in a similar manner, but it is more of a DPS tool then an emergency tank. The Black Stalker (last boss in UB) randomly lifts people in the air and suspends them for a few seconds. That seemed to happen to me just before a chain heal would go off, and by the time I got to the ground, folks were at pretty low health. Toward the end of the battle, we were down 2 people. I used my nature’s swiftness/healing wave macro to get the tank back in shape, and wished at that point that I had a NS/chain heal macro. We finished off the boss soon after that, and everyone was happy. Things I learned:
- healbot is a great addon.
- I need more macros.
- I need more +healing. I never had a mana issue, but I did have a problem with the strength of my heals at +1300.
- Healing with a shaman is a lot more fun then it sounds. I have a pretty big bag o tricks to help avoid wipes.
- The healer and tank probably both need to ask the DPS to back off until the tank has solid agro. I know my job was made harder when everyone pew-pewed thither and yon without regard to anything, drawing hate and damage from anything within range.
- I need to drop my totems closer to where the tank pulls the mobs. This should be a simple matter of asking where the tank will drag the mobs.