Casual Raid Leader

In my previous guild, people just hated the Faction Champions fight.  I can understand their frustration.  They viewed it as a PVP fight in a PVE game.  I will admit my first impression was somewhat similar.  As I’ve grown in the game, I’ve found that overall it is one of my FAVORITE encounters in this expansion. 

Let me explain why after the break.

But there is PVP in my PVE!!!!

The number one complaint I hear over and over about the Faction Champions is that the fight is a PVP fight.  Let me be clear.  I’ve completed it almost 10 times at this point successfully.  Its NOT a PVP fight.  Its a PVE raid fight with SOME PVP rules.

Everyone remember the Moroes fight?  That fight had 10 people fighting 5.  3 were usually CC’d.  One was burned down and one off tanked.  The theory is similar, but it takes it one step further.  Your CC is only so effective.  You have to swap your CC if you want it to remain consistent.  The AI is a lot smarter about how it picks its targets.

Yes… its frustrating, but its a FUN mechanic.  The fight entails basically learning on the fly to prioritize targets and avoid damage.  The difference is… the damage follows you.  The damage will gang bang you if you aren’t paying attention.

Lions and Bears and Casters Oh MY!!!

Druids are in my opinion one of the most versatile of the “hybrid” classes.  If your spec is tank, you still have access to 90% of the spells and abilities of the other two specs.  Are you as effective?  No, but you have them.  That means you have options.

As a tanking druid with a healer off spec, I don’t have a whole hell of a lot of options to do OMG damage during the PVP fight.  I’m going to do respectable damage, but I make my goal a bit different than a lot of people.  My goal in that fight is to control… lock down and prevent damage.

Let me explain.  In the 10 man fight, you’ll almost always have….

2 Healer mobs.
2 Melee Mobs.
2 Ranged Mobs.

For the start of the fight, we always pick a priority list of things to kill.  It typically looks like this.

1. Kill one of the healer mobs
2. Lock down the second healer mob.
3. Kill ANY pets.
4. Kill the second healer.
5. Kill some squishy, but annoying caster (typically mage or warlock due to CC ability)
6. Kill second caster
7. Clean up melee

For my role, I typically chose to lock down the secondary healer as soon as the initial wave of CC wears off.  For instance… we’ll have a hunter or boomkin CC the caster for the first 10-15 seconds of the fight.  After that passes, I take over.

This is where being a druid is fun… with a capital F.  When you tank, you have one basical role… keep the bad man angry.  You do your threat rotation.  You don’t stand in bad things and generally… you stay somewhat static.  You see ankles or crotch.  That’s basically the extent of what you get to see.

In this fight, you are free to use every damned trick in the book.

Opening up the book of tricks

Ok… lets look at why I think this is so much fun.  Lets walk through a typical fight.  Picking on our fight from last night, we had the following set up.

Healer Priest
Healer Pally
Mage
Boomkin
Shaman
Rogue

So the general gameplan was as follows.  We decided to kill the priest first.  The trick here is that you don’t want to let the pally stay active.  So you need to control the pally while you’re dealing with the priest.  Otherwise the pally bubbles the priest and you waste a whole boatload of time.  So we wanted to CC the pally and “keep them busy” while we hard burned the priest.  Once the priest was dead, move on to the pally.  Then the mage, boomkin, shaman then rogue.

My first job when I set up for this fight is to set the secondary healer as my focus target.  This lets me keep track of how their CC is holding up and what they are casting if anything.  We had our boomkin prep to CC the pally right out of the gate.

Once we pull, then things get fun for me.  I make sure the secondary healer is being CC’d and then we hard burn on the first target.  Once the CC expires on the secondary healer, I go into full CC mode.  For a feral druid I have the following tools available to interrupt spell casting:

• Cyclone
• Feral Charge (bear)
• Bash (bear)
• Maim (cat)

That’s four possible methods of locking out a caster at least temporarily.  And that’s the fun part.  Since I know I won’t be able to crank out as much DPS as the rest of my crew, I can play fielder and pick up mobs that need controlling and lock them down.

It becomes a fun game to try to watch the field at a frantic pace and then control mobs that need to be grabbed.  You start to almost instinctively swap forms to perform your various tasks.  If you see your group has a couple of people getting low on health, you shift out, pop tranquility and then move on.

If you see that your ranged are getting mauled by a melee, you can shift bear, taunt the mob to you, and then lock it on your for 5-10 seconds.  After that you can pull any one of your CC abilities out of your hat and give you healers and casters a little breathing room.  Have an annoying mob that keeps CCing?  Lock it down using your multiple CC abilities and keep it from casting.

For me, this fight was almost custom built for druids.  It gives you all of the flexiblity of your class for the perfect fight.  You can literally just make the best use of your abilities to flow with the heat of battle.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 11:14 am and is filed under Raiding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.