Before TBC came out for World of Warcraft, the Shaman class was very limited in its spec when it came to the scene of battlegrounds. Most specced enhancement, and just went around swinging their big two-handed weapons hoping for wind-fury procs, then screaming out “Oh my god, that wind-fury crit was insane” after walking up to a mage and dropping them in one swing. The few other shamans were specced restoration for pvp, and that was only because they had to be restoration if they wanted to raid at all. And Elemental shamans were few to be found, simply because mail gear did not add enough spell damage to make them effective. The shaman class was very limited and because of this, it became less popular.

Since TBC however, shamans have been able to choose from several valuable specs for both pvp and pve. Restoration brought some very nice pvp talents such as Nature’s Guardian and Enhancement introduced the use of duel-wielding on shamans and made it useful for pve raiding as well with talents such as Unleashed Rage. The third tree however, Elemental, was given the largest upgrade out the three, and as weeks passed since the release of TBC, more and more shamans began to realize this. Read More

Tags: Shaman · Articles

To understand which method of practice yields the best result, we have to understand the basics of how ‘execution’ works. Often times your execution skills will be called upon. While this game doesn’t require insane amount of accuracy or timing, it is still important to be able to land those spell interruptions and escape spells on demand. The only way to build up your execution skill is via practice.

Humans have a very useful function called muscle memory. After you repeated certain patterns of actions enough times and spent enough hours on them, your muscle will start remembering these actions for you. Once your muscle memory is working, instead of having to tell yourself to press certain button to interrupt a spell, you will just do it automatically upon seeing that spell being casted. This is the very same reason why when people switch their key bindings, it takes quite sometime to get used to them. Not because they have a difficult time pressing the new keys, it is more due to the fact they’re unable to discard their previous muscle memory for their old key bindings. Read More

Tags: General · Articles

When asked, most average players can only tell you the surface of what they see after observing a match. They look for the obvious and only see things like class makeup, basic strategy execution. This is one of the main reasons why a lot of players can actually watch a world class team play, such as Pandemic or TFO, then walk away saying things like “They were lucky”, “They had easy competition”, “They didn’t do anything I couldn’t have done”, or the worst of them all “They just had better partners”. Hearing these amateur comments are quite disappointing. These ignorant comments only show how little most players understand the game in-depth. Instead of actually learning from these skilled players and taking advantage of this opportunity to improve themselves, they end up making excuses for why they weren’t the one that was in their places instead.

So what exactly separates top of the line arena players and the average PvPers? Read More

Tags: General · Articles