Monday, September 10, 2007

Kill the Healers

I did quite a bit of PVP over the weekend, and it got me thinking about all the tools that are available to a mage. Sure, I've known about the Frost Nova/Blink trick since first gaining those two spells. That works great for the melee targets. But what about the casters? What do we do against them?

In most of my PVP adventures this weekend, there was a lot of healing going on. In a few pre-made Warsong Gulch battles, both teams had so much healing that even having all the DPS focus on one person, we still couldn't kill them. The same thing happened with our Arena team, but on our side. By luck of who was online, we had 3 healers in our 5 vs 5 group. While some of the fights took a long time (6 minutes by one fight), we were almost unbeatable.

So, how do you stop those casters? Or more specifically, how do you stop the healers? Two spells immediately came to mind. The first is obviously Counterspell. A well-timed Counterspell can stop literally thousands of health being replenished to your enemies. If you have improved Counterspell through talents, it means a total lockdown of all spells for 4 seconds. Plus, this spell is not a part of the global cooldown recieved after casting a spell, so it's always ready for your use. The 24-second cooldown means you can't spam it all over the place, but that would be a little too over-powered anyway, wouldn't it?

The second spell that came to my mind was that of Polymorph. The 1.5 second cast takes a bit longer, especially when you're in the heat of a battle, but elliminating the enemy from any interaction for 20 seconds (which is what I believe polymorph is in PVP) is just great. Downsides of polymorph is that it heals your target, any damage will break the polymorph, and it can be cleansed by paladins or dispelled by priests. Paladins can also bubble out of the polymorph for themselves. But there's also no cooldown on polymorph, so you can pretty much chain poly somebody, but deminishing returns come into play real quick in PVP.

Then one of the best spells for this comes out of the fire tree. While it is a 41-point talent, Dragon's Breath is just a really great spell. With my +/- 1000 spell damage, Dragon's Breath hits for about 1100 damage. And then the targets are disoriented for 3 seconds. But more importantly than the damage, is that it stopped the heal from being completed. So, sure... not as effective as the Counterspell, but it's not like you have to choose one or the other... you choose both! It's really a great spell to have around to help deal with those pesky healers (and provide some

So, what do you do when you get hit with an improved counterspell or silence? I'm still trying to figure this one out. Sure, you can wand. But I think my personal favorite is to run around screaming like a little girl. Well... you are silenced... so maybe it's one of those too-terrified-to-make-a-sound screams.

3 comments:

Relmstein said...

Playing as a healing paladin in arenas makes counter spell my arch nemesis. The only trick a paladin has for dealing with counterspell is to use Holy Shield proactively so they can get 12 seconds of heavy duty healing in without risk.

The important thing is to make sure a healer doesn't get caught by counterspell in the middle of casting a heal else someone will probably die. The trick to avoiding this I've found is to only use instant spells when the arena first starts. Counterspell classes get bored of waiting for you to start casting pretty quick and stop focusing on you.

Leiandra said...

Relmstein said, "Counterspell classes get bored of waiting..." Yep, that's so me. Bah... he's not casting, I'll just polymorph him to burn his bubble instead. lol.

Anonymous said...

Ok, I know the article is old but, the running and screaming like a little girl option sounds great when you've been silenced.

I was level 41 mage (PVP server) and got totally owned by a 36 level priest who silenced me. I thought the silence was suppose to last only 5 seconds, it seem to last for 30. I couldn't even hit the guy with my staff before I was dead. Of course he ran away by the time I rezed so I couldn't exact any revenge on him. I kept thinking, "I should have done this or that", but really when your silenced what can you do except run around screaming "not in the face! not in the face!"