Hey guys, Librarian Husky here. In today’s, there are three core concepts to master as a caster in the arena: damage CC and positioning. Most players will find it difficult to succeed at all three, which is understandable. Sometimes, you can get away with mastering only one of these concepts.
But when your class excels at everything, you might as well master it all to code uncle ben. If you are a boomkin finding it hard to balance all three, no pun intended, then look no further. This guide is all about control and how broken a Cyclone can be when done correctly. Unfortunately, many low-rated boomkins aren’t using it to its full potential, but luckily that can be fixed through four core concepts.
Concepts
Cyclone as a CC starter, as a follow-up, to peel, and to create insane pressure. We’re gonna go over each concept one by one, showcasing a low-rated player failing and a high-rated player succeeding. To show you how and why you should be using your Cyclone. Sounds good. Let’s get into it, then.
Cyclone
Today let’s start things off by discussing the Cyclone itself. You could argue that it’s the best CC in the game. Please don’t believe me; let’s break it down. It can’t be dispelled, has no cooldown, and makes the target immune to healing and damage. But it has a cast time, right? Well, what if I told you that there’s a PVP talent that makes Saicon almost instant? Surely that would be unbalanced because that would mean that the spell would have no downsides.
Cyclone’s cast
Surely blizzard would never add that into the game. Not exactly how can adapt causes your outcome frenzy to stack up to two times as well as causing your Cyclone’s cast time to be halved. This means hitting cyclones is easier than ever, and therefore, it’s a must that you master how to use it. But enough talking, let’s see some action. In this first example, we’ll take a look at a scenario where a Druid doesn’t change Cyclone, resulting in a loss of pressure.
Boomi hits
Our Boomi hits an amazing cone onto the priest, which is made easy due to Alkane Adept. However, since we didn’t chain it into another cone straight away, the following Cyclone gets faded. Starting a CC chain is the hardest part since the cc target can use various methods of avoiding it. You have to remember that continuing a chain is easy since the CC target can’t use any methods of avoiding it because, well, they’re CC’d.
Boomkin lands
The next game is a similar example: the Boomkin lands a successful cone onto the enemy healer. But instead of camping next to the Druid, our Boomkin starts to move away, making it impossible to change CC. Positioning is one key element in chaining CC because, as we already established. When you hit CC on a healer, you generally want to follow it up with more CC.
Thus moving away from the healer is not the move. Instead, you’ll want to camp next to them, chaining your Cyclones together to take complete control of the game. Positioning is important when it comes to chaining cyclones. As Waz pushes for a Cyclone onto the enemy, priests take note of the positioning. He’s slowly moving towards the enemy priest, forcing them to either move, meaning they can’t cast, which is a CC in and of itself, or cast and get hit by the Cyclone.
Waz pops
Once the Cyclone hits, Waz pops offensive CDs, and as a response, the enemy rogue puts him in a Shadowy duel. Even though Waz cannot re-cone the priest due to the duel, he still moves towards the priest. So that once he’s out of the duel, he can instantly get the spam coming again, putting pressure on the enemy priest. And while chaining the Cyclones, notice the damage he’s able to put out. This is due to how boomkin damage works.
Strategy
It’s all instant, meaning you can easily weave star surges in between Cyclone casts. But the key point here is how much pressure is created by camping near the enemy healer as a Boomkin. The effectiveness of the camp is showcased brilliantly in the following clip from Waz.
Take note of how much pressure he creates when the enemy team doesn’t move away from him, unlike in the previous clip. He pushes for a Cyclone, and once it hits camps, the priests continuously CC. The positioning is important to point out here. Waz is in range to clone the healer and kill targets, giving a clear advantage.
Reliable CC
Forcing the turtle from the hunter and being out of reliable CC on the priest, Waz sees an opportunity to Cyclone the hunter low. Made possible by the position we highlighted earlier, creating a ton of pressure. Now, if we go back to the previous low-rated example and take a look at a situation, we’ll quickly notice that the hunter is extremely low and will die if the Druid doesn’t get to heal him. But since the Boomkin is out of clone range due to the prior mistake of not camping the enemy Druid and knowing what you now know from the Waz example, what else do you think the Boomkin could have done? Cyclone?
To salvage the situation. If your answer was too psycho and the hunter low giving his team more time to get cc onto the healer, you would have been correct. Our low-rated Boomkin had two options Cyclone the healer and Cyclone the hunter low, but they didn’t either. This is an incredibly common mistake we see low-rated Boomkins make. This is insane to think about when you realize how broken Cyclone can be. It literally prevents all healing from being taken, making it an indirect CC on the enemy healer since it locks them out from healing their partner. If you think these are uncommon mistakes, think again.
Different Boomkin
Here, we have a different Boomkin forcing every defensive cooldown known to man. Barkskin Frenzied Regeneration and Anti-Magic Zone made the enemy team practically immortal. Ideally, we would want to use Cyclone on either the kill target while it’s low or on the healer. But instead, our Boonkin casts wrath and star surges, trying to damage through a huge wall of defensives unsuccessfully. To showcase the importance of Cycloning low on defensive CDs, let’s take a look at this game from west fighting turbo.
With a successful Cyclone onto the enemy healer, Waz’s team forces the enemy healer’s trinket and ironbark. Knowing the enemy warrior won’t die through ironbark, Waz attempts to Cyclone, the warrior. The enemy Shaman realizes this and uses a Grounding Totem to stop him.
Grounding Totem
Having Grounding Totem killed and an outcome frenzy proc Was a successful cone onto the warrior. Notice how much pressure is being made simply by denying the enemy healer from topping the low warrior. This is why you mustn’t just use Cyclone as a means of CC’ing the healer. For the guide’s final mistake, we will focus on peeling and cc’ing offensive CDs. Our Boomkin gets hit by the leg sweep with their healer, which isn’t ideal.
Offensive cooldown
The enemy team pops every offensive cooldown in their arsenal during this sweep. We would ideally want to start casting Cyclone to help out our shamans as soon as possible. However, our Boomkin doesn’t recognize this and starts to spread the dots, resulting in the poor Shaman getting hit with the grey screen.
A similar concept of CC’ing on offensive CDs is showcased in this game, where our Boomkin is the kill target, and clear indicators of an offensive go are being made. In this instance, Root Beam and Kirian empowerment. Instead of attempting to Cyclonec into cooldowns, our boom can cast Starfire, not realizing he’s about to die. Cyclone is such an amazing peel for two reasons.
Reasons
For one, it’s a spamming CC meaning it has no cooldown. For two and the most important reason, it cannot be dispelled. There are only a few ways to get out of Cyclone. Trinket it massive, dispel it, or use major cooldowns like ice block or Divine Shield, which would be an insane trade for you since the enemy team would blow their major defensive cd not to have to deal with you annoying them with Cyclones.
Opie showcase
To showcase how Opie peels are, let’s take a look at the following game. Where was he notices his healer is in a kidney shot which is a clear indicator of a go, and therefore starts moving closer to the mage in preparation for peels?
Once the mage used combustion, their main burst ability was chained war stomp into a Cyclone onto the mage. Resulting in Shaman not having to commit any major defensive cooldowns. Now the mage could have ice blocked the Cyclone in this situation. But that would mean trading their biggest defensive CDs, which would be an unfavorable trade.
Recap
So to recap, using Cyclone as a CC starter is incredibly easy due to the talent that can adapt, which makes our psycho nearly instant cast. The first CC is the hardest one to land follow-up CC; therefore incredibly important to do. Whenever the enemy team has to kill pressure due to offensive cooldowns like combustion avenging wrath or Vendetta, we must use cc to save our teammates and us from dying or using valuable defensive CDs.
And finally, when we do our kill setups and force defensive CDs using Cyclone to freeze the HP of our kill target on their defensives creates the most pressure possible. Thank you for reading. I hope this information will be helpful to you. Please check our WoW Guides to learn even more! It was Librarian Husky. Good luck!