Serious question, as I don’t have much experience in TBC PvP, and especially arenas.
I know what makes Paladins and Shaman lesser quality arena healers is their inability to heal on the move, but what is the counter to dispel/purge? Obviously Lifebloom has a heal effect when dispelled, but if HoT’s are dispelled instantly, how do Druids actually manage to keep up with healing on their team? Is the dispel effect on Lifebloom alone enough to keep people alive?
I only ask, because after dueling a BiS Druid on my blue geared Shaman, I managed to win just by purging his HoTs and getting some nasty Windfury procs. Plus resisting warstomp lol. It just kindof got me thinking about the counter to dispel/purge in arenas.
In general they have a few good things going for them:
(1) they don’t have to hard cast heals. That means high mobility and low chance of getting interrupted/locked
(2) high mobility and root breaks
(3) dat cyclone
(4) can start in stealth
Edit: sorry, just realized I didn’t answer your question. I think it’s because there’s still enough heals going off to count, and if the enemy is dispelling they’re also not healing/DPS’ing. It’s kind of a losing battle for the dispeller.
Yes but this is also what I’m curious about. What’s the counter to constant dispelling of HoTs? If you focus their DPS and instantly dispel their HoTs, how do they manage to keep someone alive? Is lifeblooms dispel proc enough to keep up health and/or their own mana?
Edit to respond to your edit: That’s true, but an Enhance Shaman for instance has most of their abilities on a pretty significant cool down, which leaves plenty of time to smash that purge button. I realize there’s some reason they’re godlike, I just can’t figure out how or why.
Maybe purge removes 2 buffs but i know from experience mage’s spellsteal isn’t reliable versus a druid to purge hots, lifebloom stacks up to 3 and even if it does grab one of the heals it will only grab 1 of the stacks of lifebloom leaving the other 2 on the druid still, and spellsteal costs like 20% base mana. It’s not worth it, the only way i know to deal with a druid as a POM Pyro Arcane Power mage is to just get an opener on the druid like a fireball to take him to 50-70% health, counterspell silence for 4 sec pom pyro fireblast spam instant casts like AE. I haven’t done any arenas on a lvl 70 but it works in battlegrounds. Oh yeah, don’t use your DPS cds on a druid if it has 3 stacks of lifebloom, the point of lifebloom as that when it goes off it heals for a big amount at once like a nature’s swiftness insta heal when it ticks, so if a druid has 3 stacks of lifebloom it will heal it nearly 40-70% of it’s health back and you missed your chance to kill it. that’s why i try to use my cds while i has none already rolling.
They are mobile, offer good damage, offer good CC, are somewhat immune to mana burning effects, and offer high healing throughput
purge spamming does work against druids who fail to prehot, and that is actually one big way to counter them. Hard swap targets aggressively and sporadically so they are forced to blanket hots and go OOM
and a duel isn’t exactly arena where line of sight and peels exist. A druid can easily stay up spamming lifebloom and travel forming around a pillar unless you can coordinate CC with a partner
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gotta catch the druid slippin so to speak
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To answer your question about why druid though, Cyclone mainly is the reason. aside from the other aforementioned reasons, druids can heal more members more quickly in such a skirmish as arena at once with tossing rejuve insta casts on several players regardless of their actual position as long as they are in range to receive it, whereas a shaman’s chain heal requires the members to be somewhat close spatially which makes it an impractical spell for arenas.
I think lifebloom also plays well with two other things:
What I’ve seen is just blow up their partner and when the druid comes out of stealth just fear/cc them and it’s GG. I think that’s why people cry about shaman sometime since they don’t have any real hard CC.
You’re not a good R Druid if you aren’t maintaining Rank 1 MOTW and Thorns to eat dispels
But as for what makes them OP? Cyclone man . The most broken CC in the game. A CC that can block heals to setup burst on low targets = gg
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oh yeah, as mage, i also recommend polymorph on druid, it’s not as impractical as it sounds hear me out, poly costs us low mana, druid shapeshift to all forms besides travel form costs them a sizeable amount of mana, so it’s essentially a mana drain, and while they are in their form they aren’t casting heals so it’s a temporary silence as well. A lot of druids will actually go bearform which will eat a decent chunk of their mana, if you’re loading a spell like fireball or pyro on them they will go bearform to try to prepare themselves to take big dmg in their tank form + perhaps try to get off a feral charge to interupt you. The correct play for the druid however is to simply go travel form becuz it costs less mana and try to range the mage, but not all druids do it and it is situational, you might be fighting in WSG flag room which is indoors and you can’t use travel form indoors.
He shouldn’t let you in range of him to dispel his hots tbh. He can travel form away from you root, starfire, insect swarm etc
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Yea, but I wasn’t talking about the Druid. I said if you’re targeting his DPS. Like just insta-purging his teammates HoTs the second they land. Everyone has made some interesting points though.
Druids have some pretty strong dispel resistance, 30% through the subtlety talent on every hot they cast and lifeblooms also burst if they get dispelled, you can’t dispel spam them like you can right now, not as easily anyway
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Shouldn’t be much of an issue. If his dps is ranged he should create distance from you. If it’s melee it should be able to stun and deal enough damage to force you to spend gcds elsewhere.
Regrowths main source of healing is the initial flat amount.
Hots n dots n reflective damage to boot. An inconvenient fact about PvP is that any healer should be able to outheal a single DPS source. The druid’s toolkit allows them to do that in a much more mobile fashion and not having to hardly use - let alone rely on - hard casts makes them a bit trickier to deal with. Even when the druid is focused on they can still deal out more damage than you’d expect while being very slippery. Also sometimes they turn into a bear and stun you a couple times.
They’re very flexible so it takes a while to learn all their dirty tricks.
stealth
cyclone
cast while moving
cyclone
tank mode and stun
cyclone
pillar humping while fully healing with hots
cyclone
immune to poly
cyclone
cant be froze into place
cyclone
immune to mana burn on bear mode
cyclone
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Oh okay, nice! I didn’t even consider this. See this is why I made this post. You fine people always have the answers. How ironic that one of the answers came from someone named Dispelme
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Pretty much this.
Openers are really important for getting tempo in TBC so being able to avoid openers and get a pounce stun into a cyclone on yours is huge.
Cyclone, busted af ability.
Shapeshifting too often to avoid polys can sometimes run you oom but if mage is just poly spamming hes not doing much else.
Going into bear form to negate mana burns is huge too; as well as having feral charge for mobility/aggro play and bash.
One thing not mentioned is abolish poison. Can get rid of Viper sting and also helps deal with wound poison from rogues, which means realistically the only mortal strike effect you have to deal with is…mortal strike. And warriors have nightmares dealing with druids in general so…
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At one point (on my rogue) I was actually using Wound/Deadly poison with a macro to switch my offhand to a dagger with crippling and use Shiv to apply it, just because I was so sick of druids. I was never gonna get crippling to stay on a druid anyway but the extra stacks of deadly gave a decent buffer for the Wound poison. And then I could just cripple on demand for non-druids.
Most high end rogues do this in general actually for crippling on demand. The only issue I’d see with using deadly is that it could mess up your blind. You’d prolly be better off using mind numbing to slow down cyclones/roots and the odd regrowth