dgks

dG Killshot Notifier - It was Dusky the other night who said over Ventrillo, "If I had to have only one addon, this would be it".

There's no other addon that I've found that adds so much fun to the game.

I'm at a loss for words on how awesome it is. It's really, really simple. For everyone who runs the addon, you get a voice notification and big text notification whenever someone gets a killing blow. The Unreal Tournament sounds are used.

It adds so much fun to any premade group as you hear "Killing spree!", "Unstoppable!", "Double kill!" and "GODLIKE!" amongst others. While as a healer, you rarely get killing blows yourself, it's still fun hearing others in your group get the kills.

BUT WAIT! There's more!!!! If you act now...

I've found that besides being fun, the mod actually helps me in arenas (especially 5v5), by increasing my situational awareness. I'm running around trying to keep opponents cycloned, rooted and teammates healed. I'm paying little, if any, attention to enemy health bars. When I hear the killshot notification go off, I get an update on how we're progressing, I get a heads up that DPS is looking for a new target. It's surprisingly useful.

You can get different voice packs here. I recommend sticking with the original voicepack.

5v5 FTW?

New 5v5 team makeup: warrior x 2 (arms - no mace spec), elemental shammy, disc/holy priest and myself.

Wow, what a change. We went 8-2 for the night before it got too late and we stopped.

What worked:
- The priest main healed; this freed me up to always keep someone cycloned, helping spot heal between cyclone casts.
- The other team focused fire on the Shammy (~350 resilience, tons of armor w/ shield) or on the Priest (~350 resilience, pain suppression, fear). Those two can taking quite a bit of a beating.

What could be better:
- Mace spec! Mace spec! Two warriors and no mace spec, WTF? Those mace spec stuns, are in the words of the dgks mod, GODLIKE! (note to self: write post on DGKS). It's really because neither of them has a halfway decent mace or the honor points or arena points to buy one.
- Roots! I should cast roots in addition to cyclone. More CC ftw.

Monday night blues

I posted a few days ago, pondering if Arena queue times are fixed. They're not.

Note to self: get at least 10 arena games in BEFORE Monday night.

13 minute 2v2 queues. 4 minute 5v5 queues.

However, if you're stuck trying to squeeze some games in on Monday night to earn some points, see if you can wait until 11pm Pacific Time. 5v5 queue times dropped from 4 minutes down to 1 minute in pretty short order. I'm sure 2v2 times were still north of 5 minutes at that time, but I was fortunate this last Monday to get 4 others for 5v5 action.

Druid healing in 5v5's

Last night, I tried my hand at 5v5 as the only healer with 4 dps (warrior x 2, mage, hunter).

It did not work out well - 3 wins, 7 losses and about a 1450 rating.

A druid healer's strengths in 2v2 (and to a little bit lesser extent, 3v3) do not work well in 5v5. You can't play the LOS game in 5v5 - there's too many people, and you need to be constantly healing someone - especially if you're the only healer. HOTs take time to ramp up - 6 seconds for Rejuv + 3 x Lifebloom, plus another 2 seconds for Regrowth. Your healing target is long since dead by that point. Sure, you could skip a couple of lifeblooms and go straight for the Regrowth - but either way you're not going to outheal the combined DPS of 3 or 4 opponents.

I admit I did not play well in a number of the matches. I got caught out in the open and killed in seconds (even with 256 resilience & 9K HP). I did not cyclone nearly as much as I should have.

Our wins came when we adopted the following strategy:
- All DPS charges in, and tries to nuke the holy living hell out of a single target (preferably a healer)
- Mage attempts to sheep a DPS (then goes to nuking)
- I attempt to Cyclone a DPS, stay out of sight, and heal + cyclone.

I learned a lot on what NOT to do in 5v5's. That being said, I don't think that particular team makeup is sustainable beyond perhaps a 1600 rating. I'd prefer to swap out a DPS for a disc/holy priest. The priest could main heal, I could support heal and do a better job of keeping someone constantly cycloned.