Natural gamers, unnatural gamers, and just damn fools

Poor mabd has finally begun end content, running SL for the first time. It was a blast, and utilizing many of the fine techniques preached by the BRK, Mabd proved the utility and lethality of the greatest of races and classes.

Two wipes, one when our healer got feared through a wall and outta the universe, and another on a disasterous pull (warrior was pulling.)

Did the run with the guild of guilds best healer (a truly rightous cat who dropped his raiding rogue to level up a pally for Kara), one of their best tanks, magebert, and melvin's shammy. I think I impressed everyone, I damn sure impressed myself. The best part came with murmur, where the party decided that the poor hunter pet would keep murmer in melee during the arcane blasts to avoid wipetude. The pet was expected to die.

The pet didn't. (They come to kill the kitty... but he ain't gonna die, no he ain't gonna die!)

*resist*
*resist*
Pally:"Jesus, what is he made of?"
Mabd:"90% arcane resist, and half damage from AoE. Oh and a LOTTA damn fish."

Mabd and fleabag topped the damage chart, natch, even tho magebert is uber equipped... heh. Melvin's shammy wasn't even in the running.

So, some fun observations... on shammys. There will be a long long post upcoming on beloved Unbound, and the history of the shammy in the Blizz battle/viability pantheon, but that's a painful subject, so not today.

The run started because after work I called melvin and talked him through a shammy talent build using the WoW community site talent generator. (Which neither he nor magebert were familiar with... I talked magebert through a similar talent exercise when I convinced him to switch from a 21/40/0 mage build to a 33/28/0 one.)

Now melvin suffers from extreme noobitude. And the problem with noobitude and talent builds (we've all done this with our first few characters) is that you spend point by point, instead of planning where you are going, and more importantly... where you want to end up.

So, melvin has an elemental shammy with around 48 points in the elemental tree, and the rest, 13, in resto. Since the 9th and ultimate talent tier in elemental is one of the most useless in the game (I'm told the warrior fury tree has something just as useless, but that's from Armsandfury, and he never stops whining about how tough warriors have it...) I've been pushing melvin to go 40/0/21, and get that sweet sweet nature's swiftness.

Instacast chain lightning (or healing wave). And the 5 points before it give another 5% crit chance to lightning and healing spells... And presto! Uber raiding/pvp spec. Now... one of the major bones of contention with melvin and his shammy... melvin simply doesn't understand the way elemental shammies were set up, nor the basic issues plaguing the class/build. To wit... mana efficiency...

In a nutshell. All shammy builds are pretty damn useless till about level 40 or so, when you start getting to the cream of the talent tree. For enhance, this is stormstrike. For elemental, you get massive decreases to the casting time of lightning spells... for resto... well, why bother talking bout something that hypothetical? Like anyone plays resto before 70... Anyway, shammies tend to be insanely mana inefficient casters. You correct this with talents. Enhance shammys get a 9th tier talent that allows a 25-35% regen of mana every 2 minutes. Elemental shammies, OTOH (much earlier on, but pointless until you get the +crit talents,) get a 60% discount on spell mana costs after crits. So, in order to maintain a lightning barrage of any real duration... you gotta crit. Like a damn fiend. More so than any other caster class (with the possible exception of holy pals, and for the same bloody reasons...)

Melvin doesn't quite understand this. He is too used to his mage, and thinks that a point of crit for a shammy means the same as for a mage, especially since he plays them the same damn way....

Sigh... eventually he will learn. We all did.

But it takes him longer than others... like, say ArmsandFury.
That ms foo and I go way way back. I was the bastard that first talked him into WoW. (He used to play on a system that would rarely top 8fps... it was surreal watching it...)

My rogue used to pwn his first warrior. Yep, got that right... a warrior walking round in terror of rogues...

But we gamed together before that... namely... HE got ME into warcraft 3, so he'd have decent competition...

"The local crew just aint cuttin it. I'm too good. I'm just a natural gamer."

Oh well... we can't have THAT can we?

So I go online, and read every guide on warcraft 3. What works, what kills, and "what to do if"... Then we play. And the problem is... ArmsandFury really is a natural gamer. He has reflexes like a rattlesnake dropped on hot cement. But, at this point... he didn't understand the concept of the metagame... he won the first two. And nothing after that.

The lesson children?

Age and treachery will beat youth and beauty every time.

And if youth and beauty wants to live to be nasty and old... youth will listen and learn, oh yes...