Quote:
Originally Posted by BlackBellamy
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When I played my shaman back in the day I stopped melee altogether in my teens. I just couldn't stand listening to that swish; it was psychologically damaging. Until I got my pet and soloing was fun again I would just rent a pair of fists by having every near-level monk on the friends list and I would just /follow them from mob to mob as their personal buffer.
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At lower levels, I spent a fair amount of time in melee because it was easy to throw a drowsy for cheap-but-minimal slowing, disease dot, poison dot, then melee for at least a while. Maybe I do so until poison needs refresh, then root, back off, med for the rest of the kill. Maybe I get lucky with melee and kill it without getting beat up or needing more mana spent. Maybe it is crushing my troll ass and I have to root and use spells for the whole fight. I saw all of it.
Getting pet at 34 is far from a "well no point in meleeing now!" moment, imo. Your pet is mana-free DPS, right? Well, kinda. If he is tanking, he often is going to get killed unless you're using your highest-level slow. And that slow is expensive. Plus you need to be rooting to keep aggro on him. Or you'll be pulling him off and relying on dot recasts to finish the mob off, and those recasts will quite likely break roots needing recasts and maybe getting you swatted and then getting your pet on the target again... etc. The wolfie does regen fast though, so if he doesn't die, he'll probably be full life by the time you're ready for another mob.
But compare that to casting maybe walking sleep just for some slow but at much lower mana cost, your two dots, and meleeing while your pet attacks from behind (therefore doing somewhat more damage than it would when attacking a mob it is tanking). You're not medding, you're losing hp to melee damage that can't be canni'd, but you're getting more damage from your pet and damage from your melee and you're not using as much mana on slow or roots. You still can root once at 60 or 50% if you want and back off to med until the mob is down low enough when root wears off that it starts running and your pet isn't horribly wounded. Or maybe you're having a good fight as sometimes happens and you don't need a second poison dot, you barely get scratched, at the mob is dead.
They're a wash to me still at 37 fighting level 30s, ime. Maybe it'll change at 39 when I've got VOTS to use instead of EB.