Shaman Questions

Leviticus

Good (Insert Time of Day),
     I have some questions for shaman I would love to see what some of the solutions you guys found out there. 

How do you manage curse, blight, swiftcurse, jinx.

I currently have the L3 swiftcurse artie so I figured I would:

curse target curse invoke whatever

Jinx Timer

Now I can get off 4 swiftcurses before I HAVE to jinx or lose it

Is that the recommended path? Or are invokes > swiftcurse

I haven’t done a lot of testing (not a lot of people to test on when I am on) with curse/swiftcurse/jinx to see what is the best path, so I don’t even know if I should even do 4 swiftcurses or mix it up.

In what scenarios would you use blight? I feel like it has its part in the whole cycle but I am assuming invokes are more important than that. Could be a bad assumption, unless I am trying to get a quick Tzinstantkill off or hide some critical affliction. But when I tested curse and blight, I didn’t notice a difference in how fast someone cured. I felt like it was the same.

Do you guys code your offense using aliases,  or keys?

Script for conditional affliction tracker

Aliases:

^(c|s|j)(whatever kill path you want)$

call script

If then elseif then else?

Currently I am using the keys. But I am thinking of switching it to the aliases 

Leviticus

Also how in the hell do you bash as Shaman?? I tried curse/jinx and swiftcurse. I felt like it was one of the slower classes at bashing.

Solnir

As for bashing, curse/jinx is the best way to bash as shaman. It feels slow at first, but the crits taking away massive chunks on such a low balance add up pretty quick.

I prioritize invokes over swiftcurse (barring soulrend, since it has no cd). So I'll curse invoke, jinx, curse invoke, jinx, curse invoke, jinx, etc until all my invokes are on cooldown, then switch to swift until the cooldowns are up, or the enemy is locked. Generally swifting pre-ano/slick coag is the way to go, since you can keep near constant uptime on para.
As for blight, I use it very sparingly, but I'm also not the best shaman to ever play. But I feel the same way you do - in most cases, it doesn't seem to slow their curing much, but it slows your aff output quite a bit from how it feels.
And to the last question about aliases or keys, I use aliases for literally everything. I have maybe two keys made (partially because I'm bad about accidentally hitting keys I don't mean to, so aliases let me fix that before hitting enter).

Armali

Curse + invoke generally gives you about the same level of aff pressure as swiftcurse, and swiftcurse is a limited resource, so curse+invoke/jinx if you can, and swifties otherwise, unless you need to lock their curing down until an important CD comes off or something, and then swifties can hold things in place.

Blight's basically cheese. Use it a few times at select moments to doublecheck if the opponent handles it properly, otherwise forget about it. It either pays off huge (they don't detect manaleech or asthma at all), or it's functionally worthless (they execute hidden aff checks on blight). If an opponent doesn't, you can build an offense around it, if they do, you can pretty much forget about it unless like, you're blighting them in aeon or something (when they can't execute hidden aff checks).

Aliases, too many keys.

Farrah

Blight has potential uses for less "checkable" affs. Impatience, asthma, anorexia (and all focusables really), haemophilia, and manaleech are all easy to check for and thus not so good for blight unless your opponent doesn't use checks. Clumsiness can be okay (though should be detected on symptoms eventually). Weariness might be okay.

Leviticus

Thanks for all the good information

Sayenna

Farrah said:

Clumsiness can be okay (though should be detected on symptoms eventually).

Quite a number of things which serverside doesn't pick up, I noticed... Like if a curse fails because of clumsiness, it won't realise you have clumsiness if it was given as a hidden affliction... Bugged it like 2-3 months ago. Same with reap.

Farrah

Sayenna said:

Farrah said:

Clumsiness can be okay (though should be detected on symptoms eventually).

Quite a number of things which serverside doesn't pick up, I noticed... Like if a curse fails because of clumsiness, it won't realise you have clumsiness if it was given as a hidden affliction... Bugged it like 2-3 months ago. Same with reap.

It doesn't on its own, but you can add triggers for it.

Sayenna

Yeah I made triggers for it, if I miss and system doesn't know I have it... Seems odd though, it's like the only affliction I've seen that does that. Paralysis is picked up when hidden, as is asthma, weariness (as well as all the cure-blocking abilities). Even stupidity is

Austere

Loki epteth preventing curses doesn't pickup either. 

Mindshell

Swiftcurse and jinx share the same affliction rate, 1sec 1 aff vs 2sec 2 aff, so holding back jinx only helps if you're using the double aff for something specific, not using it interferes with timing out further invokes and threatens losing it. The skull pendant does give you more room to fit some unique timings in, being able to vodun and have jinx up to follow it with will add to your toolkit. Personally I let curse/invoke + jinx do the grunt work and burn swiftcurse on closers.

I would setup your offense in the way that's most comfortable for you, as long as your output is getting the job done. The way anyone else works will give you ideas, but you're not obliged to replicate their offense.