vom shaman board

[madtom]

There are times during your career as a shaman that you'll find yourself grouped with those crazy melee type classes. I offer the following tips for working with the gate-inhibited:

Melees are poor at math and don't understand that 20 mana is less than 100 mana, thus they keep pulling. You can help the tank visualize your mana bar by keeping his health bar at the same level. Some warriors cannot comprehend this either and pull anyway. This is called natural selection.

Paladins get a very annoying ability called Lay of Hands that they carry around like a personal get out of death free card. They will happily pull Venril Sathir to your right courtyard group confident that LoH will save the day. It's imperative that you "fizzle" a few heals, forcing them to burn this right away. Now, your group is relatively safe from your pally for one game day.

Monks get a similar ability called Mend. They tend to be more selfish in its use, so make a hotkey saying “Monk, please cast MEND on %t.” and click it every two minutes. If they try to claim they can’t, tell them your brother’s 16 monk can Group Mend. Then accuse them of being ebayed.

Tanks think all casters med at something like 500 mana a tick. When you report your current mana they, despite being poor at math, mentally tack on another 30% to compensate for .003 second delay your message spent traversing the internet. To correct for this, subtract 30% from all mana reports. This is called the "Scotty Principle”.

Rogue twinks are your enemy. They join the group with 15 hit points left dual wielding 10/10 weapons that proc Insidious Taunt and immediately demand haste. You cannot afford to heal rogues. Give them something with a boot icon -- Scale of Wolf for instance.

Many people do not understand the Ranger class and think they are like that dirty, unshaven guy from Lord of the Rings. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Rangers actually follow very strict principals of honor like Shaolin priests. Under their Bushido-like code, nothing brings more shame than being healed by another. Pat Morita explained this all at the last Fan Fair. He did say they were kinda dirty.

Keep your pet alive over all other group members. You can justify this by explaining that your 55 pet costs 50 mana more than Reviviscence. Be warned, they will try to confuse the issue by pointing out that you can’t even cast Reviviscence. Go into a long dissertation regarding the concept of “community mana” and the respect thereof.

If melees ask for strength say something like, "Yeah, that would be sweet -- maybe this drolvarg will drop it?" [Optional] Then cast Maniacal Strength on your pet.

Some shaman suggest casting buffs on yourself or a pet as timers so you know when to refresh. While this may sound good on paper, it does not factor in the warrior who clicks off each buff every few minutes trying to check the names.

Don't get angry at the tank who responds to your "OOM" with "haste plz". What they really mean is, "Hastily get thyself to the zone while I buy you precious seconds with my unworthy life's blood, Good Priest." It's just hard to type all that between the crunching sounds. Respect the dying request of this proud roleplayer.


Cheers,

Barm McLir,
Ancient Council -- Saryrn


( Fast forward two years for Barm's Tips for Melee Management, Part 2 )


There are times during your career as a shaman that you'll find yourself grouped with those crazy melee type classes. I offer the following *new and improved* tips for working with the gate-inhibited:

Paladins can somehow stun and melee simultaneously. They can stun anything for the entire fight which means slowing for them is a waste of mana. They can also snatch aggro instantly so if you actually die around a paladin – he didn’t like you. They melee like Stephen Hawking so don’t waste ferine avatar on them.

Monks carry residual aggro from every mob they’ve ever fought. The only time it’s safe to cast spells on a monk is when he’s naked with rez effects and even then you risk silent faction hits that you’ll never comprehend like barbarian vendors who tell you they have something for barbarians – the door! The monk will be dead before ferine avatar refreshes so don’t bother.

Bards - Casting anything on a bard is just inviting them to ‘explain’ how bards can do it better by truenote-twisting-swarm-overstacking blah blah blah. A talking bard is a non-manasong playing bard. Be warned that bard songbooks are like the jukebox in a biker bar … don’t ever consider suggesting what to play.

Warriors are always asking for shammy loving – but sometimes they’ll accept buffs instead. Their simplistic minds enjoy all the pretty icons stacked across the screen. Cast anything that lasts a long time. Just as before; don’t ask what buffs they have or they’ll click them off trying to check the names.

Rogues are always trouble. There’s a 60% chance that any given rogue will have a shaman alt. The other 40% have a shaman bot. They know enough to ask for the spells that matter but not enough to not ask for the spells that don’t. Your best bet is to lie and say you don’t have FA. Once this paid off for me when the rogue handed me a copy of FA which I later sold to some rogue’s alt.

Shadowknights always have names that are words cobbled together and misspelled with extra letters, like ‘Remeedial Stuudent’. Buffing them is just promoting illiteracy. Damn, now I have to spell check this. If they start making too much noise about their aggro skills get a paladin into the group.

Rangers are sneaky. You never know when the druid is going to ask for haste and you finally notice they have a bow. Our melee buffs will not take hold on rangers in outdoor zones so don’t even bother. Once you have runspeed 3 all zones become outdoors.

Beastlords – N/A. Any group that has a beastlord is not going to pick up a shaman.

Berserkers – One time I saw this really cool glowy axe with a vah shir attached to it. That sums up my experience with ‘zerks.

By now, you’ve detected the running theme to avoid casting ferine avatar. You may think this is simply because avatar has always been a royal pain but not so – the truth is avatar has a proc. An ultra rare and ultra secret proc. It was this very proc that destroyed the long lost Darkpaw Server. This is the reason the developers have always treated avatar like it did it something special. For the safety of all, never memorize it.

Your current role may seem sorta light on ... everything but the dev team realized that we shaman spent our first 64 levels basically power-levelling every other class. They've lowered our tax bracket and now it's our turn to coast along. Rest on those laurels, Brothers and Sisters. You earned them.

[kthxbye]

"They can also snatch aggro instantly so if you actually die around a paladin – he didn’t like you."

So true. !

[madtom]

mein favorite:

"They melee like Stephen Hawking so don’t waste ferine avatar on them."