Shaman Meleeing?

[Estu]

You guys might remember a thread I made a while ago about whether to go with a druid or a shaman for a soloing character. Well, I chose the shaman, and he's now level 26, having leveled almost exclusively solo (though I've been grouping on other characters; soloing can get monotonous (then again, so can grouping)). I'm pretty sure he's going to be the first of my characters to hit 50; he's the highest character by 11 levels.

Anyway, to the point: I've been wondering about the usefulness of meleeing as a solo shaman. So far I've been root-dotting since level 14, and though a bit slow, it's pretty effective, and I can reliably take down yellows with it, even a low red something like half the time (resists are a bitch). I've heard varying opinions on whether shamen should melee, and I'd like to know if and when it becomes a useful alternative to root-dotting. I don't have my pet yet, so I'm not sure how exactly it changes the soloing dynamic, but I saw a shaman who conned red running around with a pet that conned blue to me at 26, so I can't imagine the pet is nearly as 1337 as a mage or necro pet. Obviously the pet would be useful crowd control, but let's say I hit 50 and I'm soloing an even-con mob: do I root-rot? Do I have the pet tank? Do I tank myself?

Right now, as you might imagine with this being my highest character, my gear is nothing special: a full set of large banded except for the gorget which is a collar of undead protection, some +2 wisdom earrings and rings, a gloomwater harpoon (a recent purchase, for 300pp), a bark shield, and a preserved split paw eye for that sweet +2 sv poison. When I got the harpoon, I thought I'd give meleeing a whirl, so I hit up old Travis Two Tone in Neriak, a level 25 mob when I was 26, buffed myself up with all of my melee buffs except the 18-second one, dotted him with my two best dots, slowed him, and cast the strength/ac/etc. debuff. And went to town.

And guess what? I sucked. I did some DPS with my spear, but he did a lot of damage to me and I had to heal myself a couple of times to avoid dying (this is a fight I entered with full HP and MP). Root-dotting was way more effective. Now, it is true that my gear is nothing special, and my offense/defense/piercing skills are somewhat underdeveloped for my level, but nevertheless, the contrast between that and root-dotting was pretty sharp.

So, anyone who's had high level shaman experience - how does it work? I also need to think about this to decide what kind of gear to go for: if I'm going to be meleeing, I obviously want AC, strength, dex, and the like, so I take down mobs quicker and take less damage, since I want to maximize the number of mobs I can kill over time; if I'm going to be root-dotting, I want WIS, MP, and HP so I can take on tougher mobs without running out of resources, since there is then no way to increase the number of mobs killed over time.

[Parz]

unless your twinked meleeing isnt a viable option IMO until the very end if you choose to. root-rot is best till 34, at 34 you get a pet, while not as powerful as other classes, still useful. from 34 on youll either be letting your pet tank (blues mostly)or, the option I went with, the SoW-kite, your dots are gonna out aggro your pet so just SoW yourself and pet. pick your mob, dot it up, sick pet, and run it around and let your dots and pet destroy the mob. theres other options, but those 2 are your best bets

[Estu]

Aha. I think I've seen shamen doing that - thanks for the tip, definitely sounds viable. I'm a bit worried about taking hits when I have to stop and reapply dots (this was an issue 9-13 after I got sow but before I got root, at which point I was sow-kiting as well), but the pet should add a good deal of DPS. I'll see how that goes.

Nevertheless, I still am interested in to what extent meleeing is useful, even if it's at the very end. I am an ogre, by the way, so using the snare necklace to enhance kiting is not an option.

[Wizerud]

If your melee skills are underdeveloped that would have had a lot to do with it. Try lower con but still dark blue mobs to max out all your offense/defense/melee skills and that will make a huge difference. Maxing your defense is reccommended even if you dont plan to melee in your future and low dark blues are the safest way to do it.

[Kender]

i used to melee tank in velious basically using the pet and a manaless dot. i did have my epic spear though so it would go pull with spear, slow, add 2 dots, then melee tank till dead. worked quite well but i had reasonable armour

[quido]

One consideration that is probably easy to overlook is the amount of regeneration a shaman can get at the higher levels. I would probably tank a lot less mobs if I had to blow a bunch of mana healing myself because I regen 5 life per tick. Luckily, popping a squat for a minute with chloro + rage will usually do the trick.

So I guess what I'm saying is I would be more willing to put up with the perils of tanking mobs if it's not a colossal waste of time. Obvious, right? Considering your gear, I wouldn't give it any serious attempt at this point. But it's definitely something to start thinking about if you want to break free from the classic shaman role.

Also, shammies usually spend a lot of time medding/cannying. I spend a lot of canny time meleeing, but I also have a manastone I can click off when the canny isn't the best choice. I usually use my stone if I can. So I guess it's true, even at higher levels, that the value of shaman melee is very gear-dependent. I honestly wouldn't even bother with my melee-getup or swinging at all if it wasn't for the CT hammer, not even for the Naggy hammer.

[Noselacri]

Without great gear, meleeing stops being a viable choice around level 20. Once mobs start doubling for 50+, tanking them isn't efficient unless you're sporting full totemic or better, and even then I wouldn't always do it. You end up having to heal yourself after every fight, and since you won't be medding at all, your killing pace becomes horrible. You also don't do any real damage unless you have one of those high-end 2hb weapons, all of which are pretty expensive.

Just root-rot from 20 to 34. It's not that bad, really; most blue mobs will straight up die to your Affliction+E-breath. Once you get your pet, you can try a few other approaches such as letting it tank or kiting around with it. Also note that Affliction appears to be bugged, or rather hasn't been reverted to its classic stats, so it deals more damage than it should. It currently ticks for as much as Envenomed Breath, lasts twice as long, and costs half the mana. I was gonna report this but I forgot about it until now.

Finally, forget about mana/wisdom. It's not important to a shaman. You'll eventually get some from your gear, which is fine, but don't go out of your way to get it at all. Your first major purchase should be two 5ac 55hp rings, and you should consider getting your totemic set as well. AC and HP are much more important, even if you don't actively tank your mobs all the time. Shamans tank fairly well, it's just that it isn't very effective when soloing for exp because you won't get much mana back and you'll have to spend it on healing yourself. A geared shaman can even tank alright for groups using Drowsy for aggro and with someone else to heal him. You can take the hits, you just can't keep up your damage output and self-healing while doing it until Kunark and Torpor.

[skorge]

And guess what? I sucked. I did some DPS with my spear, but he did a lot of damage to me and I had to heal myself a couple of times to avoid dying (this is a fight I entered with full HP and MP).

The reason: you've been root rotting since level 14. Your defense skills are seriously lacking therefore giving your character low AC.

The remedy: keep your defense skill maxed at each and every level. Fight low blues.

[Skope]

I've said time and time again that shammy is gear dependent and this is one of the reasons for it. Your melee damage sucks, and unless you plan on getting a weapon that procs a decent DD or DoT (barb spiritist's hammer or blight, hammer of the scourge) you won't be doing much damage with auto attack on. The kicker, though, is that you're not meant to and you don't really have to. Shammy tanking with a slowed mob is used to maintain 100% DoT damage on a mob that won't be running or moving because it's busy trying to put you on the ground, but with a 70% slow and incapacitate/malise you should be able to take a quite a few hits before it goes down from DoT and pet DPS. You should steer away from shammy tanking until level 34 (pet) or 39 (best slow) if you can't manage buying the lvl 30 proc weapons (barb hammer/blight).

In full rune-etched and ~230 dex after pot I take down seafuries with practically zero downtime and absolutely no sitting down to med thru rage/chloro/cannibalize. Pull with slow, sick the pet and barb hammer it down. These things have ~5k hp and hit for near 80 double, but the HP i lose from damage is less than the health i chew up via cannibalize. Once you've equipped yourself fairly well you can even off-tank slowed planar mobs (minus posky, really) and then it starts to feel like a real shaman again :)

[Estu]

If your melee skills are underdeveloped that would have had a lot to do with it. Try lower con but still dark blue mobs to max out all your offense/defense/melee skills and that will make a huge difference. Maxing your defense is reccommended even if you dont plan to melee in your future and low dark blues are the safest way to do it.

What about light blues? Do they raise skill too slowly to be worth it?


Once you get your pet, you can try a few other approaches such as letting it tank or kiting around with it.
...
Finally, forget about mana/wisdom. It's not important to a shaman.

On the first point: how is it better to let the pet tank if it's so much lower level than I am? Presumably if I'm letting the pet tank I'd be better off tanking myself, even if I had mediocre gear, right? Or do you mean only letting it tank when it's regenned up its HP, so I never actually have to heal it? Or perhaps only letting it tank when I'm dealing with adds or the like?

On the second point: people say this a lot, but I wish they would justify it. If I'm soloing and I'm not tanking, I'm presumably not too worried about taking large amounts of HP damage at a time. With canni, I get about 1 mana for 2 hp, so if I want to maximize my overall amount of mana, it seems far more efficient to go for WIS and MP than to go for STA and HP (especially since casters get low returns for STA). I'm willing to buy that HP is more important, but you've got to give me some reasoning for it, and this reasoning has got to take into account that I'm going to be soloing and presumably (according to this thread, at least) not tanking until I've been 50 for a while and gotten myself the best gear. I might also start raiding at 50, at which point maybe I can see HP being more important, if I'm worried about pulling aggro from really powerful mobs with my slows, but I'd like clarification on this as well, because unless I'm in danger of getting killed by these mobs for the presumably short amount of time they're wailing on me, MP still seems to be the better choice.

Shammy tanking with a slowed mob is used to maintain 100% DoT damage
...
You should steer away from shammy tanking until level 34 (pet) or 39 (best slow) if you can't manage buying the lvl 30 proc weapons (barb hammer/blight).

What do you mean by 100% DoT damage? Are you counting your weapon or its proc as a DoT?

Why should I start tanking at 34 when I get my pet? It seems like it would be just as inefficient as it was pre-pet.

---

The overall message I'm getting from the replies here (thanks for them, of course) is that I shouldn't be tanking until I hit 50 and get 1337 gear. I'm going to make sure I max my melee skills every level, though. What do they cap at? Is it just level*5 for offense/defense/dodge and level*5+5 for weapons? I plan to resume SoW kiting once I get the pet, unless it has really good regen and can handle tanking once in a while; if I continue root-rotting without letting the pet attack the mob, I'm not really making any use of it.

[Noselacri]

On the second point: people say this a lot, but I wish they would justify it. If I'm soloing and I'm not tanking, I'm presumably not too worried about taking large amounts of HP damage at a time. With canni, I get about 1 mana for 2 hp, so if I want to maximize my overall amount of mana, it seems far more efficient to go for WIS and MP than to go for STA and HP (especially since casters get low returns for STA). I'm willing to buy that HP is more important, but you've got to give me some reasoning for it, and this reasoning has got to take into account that I'm going to be soloing and presumably (according to this thread, at least) not tanking until I've been 50 for a while and gotten myself the best gear. I might also start raiding at 50, at which point maybe I can see HP being more important, if I'm worried about pulling aggro from really powerful mobs with my slows, but I'd like clarification on this as well, because unless I'm in danger of getting killed by these mobs for the presumably short amount of time they're wailing on me, MP still seems to be the better choice.

There's two reasons, really.

1) Mana pool, and the classic caster itemization in general, is shit. It's worthless 90% of the time. The only thing is that most other non-melee classes have nothing else to go for; a wizard can't focus on other stats to any significant extent, for example, so he'll get that great big mana pool simply because nothing else helps him much. At this point in the game, you can't get raw HP in very many slots as a caster, so while that's worth getting, it's not something you can "build" for, and stamina to HP ratios are terrible for casters. Look at how you solo; if you're like most people, you med up to the amount of mana it takes to kill a mob and then you do so, rinse, repeat. You don't med to full between every single kill, and even if you do, you don't use all that mana except perhaps if you're quad kiting. In any group situation, you probably fluctuate between 0 and 50% mana. In other words, that extra mana pool size means absolutely nothing the great majority of the time.

2) You will get hit as a shaman, you can't snare or really CC in any way besides root, and of all the traditional solo classes, you're the one that ends up getting beat on the most. This makes AC/HP more valuable to you than to, say, a druid or a magician. You're also the only caster class that can actually go in and tank a mob for any length of time, so making yourself capable of doing so is a good thing. It gives you an extra option that others don't really have. On top of that, your health translates directly into mana whenever you need it, so that makes health worth more to you than it does to most other classes. And finally, again unlike the other solo classes, you can actually build up an amount of AC that makes a significant difference in survivability. An enchanter can't do it, so he ignores AC altogether because sacrificing anything for the absolutely tiny amount he might gain from going for the few cloth items with decent AC makes no difference. Again it's a matter of having an option that you can strive for, at the expense of very little.

[Extunarian]

Just a couple quick things:

- You can skill up on anything light blue, or even greens that give experience. AFAIK you won't get more skillups because you are fighting something thats db/even/yellow/red. When I got my blued 2-handed hammer I skilled up on the gnolls outside splitpaw since they were green/lb to me and got plenty of skillups. Dex buffs are your friend.

- With the crazy amount of regen you get with chloro+fury/rage, and racial regen if you're a troll, you'll find yourself ending up with full HP a lot more often than full mana if you aren't CONSTANTLY canni'ing. Therefore I like to let that HP have as high a ceiling as possible on my shaman.

- Last, the thing about full DoT damage only being realized while meleeing is from an old mechanic on Live that dictated DoT's would only do something like 2/3rds of the damage if the mob is chasing you. In order to get 100% damage the mob had to be either standing still or running away from you. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe this mechanic has been implemented on p1999.

[Skope]

Just a couple quick things:

- Last, the thing about full DoT damage only being realized while meleeing is from an old mechanic on Live that dictated DoT's would only do something like 2/3rds of the damage if the mob is chasing you. In order to get 100% damage the mob had to be either standing still or running away from you. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe this mechanic has been implemented on p1999.

no, it hasn't.

[RandonActs]

I mele'd a lot in groups when I was leveling, mostly if I was canni-ing anyway, you can get a swing in most the times when canni is on CD. As far as soloing, rooting or kiting are better options than meleing, except that last 5% when the mob is running away from you, you should get some swings in.

[Estu]

There's two reasons, really.

1) Mana pool, and the classic caster itemization in general, is shit. It's worthless 90% of the time. The only thing is that most other non-melee classes have nothing else to go for; a wizard can't focus on other stats to any significant extent, for example, so he'll get that great big mana pool simply because nothing else helps him much. At this point in the game, you can't get raw HP in very many slots as a caster, so while that's worth getting, it's not something you can "build" for, and stamina to HP ratios are terrible for casters. Look at how you solo; if you're like most people, you med up to the amount of mana it takes to kill a mob and then you do so, rinse, repeat. You don't med to full between every single kill, and even if you do, you don't use all that mana except perhaps if you're quad kiting. In any group situation, you probably fluctuate between 0 and 50% mana. In other words, that extra mana pool size means absolutely nothing the great majority of the time.

2) You will get hit as a shaman, you can't snare or really CC in any way besides root, and of all the traditional solo classes, you're the one that ends up getting beat on the most. This makes AC/HP more valuable to you than to, say, a druid or a magician. You're also the only caster class that can actually go in and tank a mob for any length of time, so making yourself capable of doing so is a good thing. It gives you an extra option that others don't really have. On top of that, your health translates directly into mana whenever you need it, so that makes health worth more to you than it does to most other classes. And finally, again unlike the other solo classes, you can actually build up an amount of AC that makes a significant difference in survivability. An enchanter can't do it, so he ignores AC altogether because sacrificing anything for the absolutely tiny amount he might gain from going for the few cloth items with decent AC makes no difference. Again it's a matter of having an option that you can strive for, at the expense of very little.

Excellent reply. Actually, I med up until I'm full mana and HP, or nearly so, because you never know when a mob will resist you an abnormal number of times, or you get an add, or something. I thought everyone did this. But yes, unless I'm taking on yellows or reds, having a large mana or HP pool doesn't generally make a difference. I think, then, my gear goal will be AC first, HP second, and MP/Wis third, until I start grouping in earnest or start regularly taking on tough mobs that require large mana pools (at which point I'll need mana/wis gear).