But he has a bubble that absorbs ~1k of damage on a much shorter cooldown, which he can follow up with a 1.5-second heal that has significant strength to it. Once DS is spent, the paladin's self-preservation options are essentially limited to a 2.5-second heal.

Understand that I'm not disputing the value of Divine Shield; even in its current state where it's occasionally dispellable under very particular circumstances, it's still fantastic, and I can certainly agree that it's the strongest survival ability available to any class. Nor am I disputing that a paladin's overall survivability in PvP is higher than a priest's.

But Divine Shield is on a four minute cooldown at best (five minutes for most paladins) which means that there are going to be large stretches of time where it's unavailable. When Divine Shield is down and you're under attack, your next heal is 2.5 seconds away. There's no damage shield, no fast-casting heal of any significance in PvP, and no HoT. When Divine Shield is down and you're under attack, you are not getting healed for 2.5 seconds. Longer than that if you need to pump-fake to draw out interrupts or anything of that nature. So yes, for 3.8 minutes out of every four, you really do need as much stamina as you can get.

Does a Paladin need it more/less than a priest? I don't know, I don't care, and -- I mean no offense by this -- I think it's a waste of time to even be discussing that, because it's never going to bear on a real-world decision anyone's going to have to make. ("Gosh, should I equip this BoE stamina trinket, or send it to my priest buddy?")

My initial post in this thread (and Thelyna's as well) was in response to someone who said he didn't expect paladins to be stacking stamina in PvP, which is something I certainly do and will continue doing, and which frankly I think I would be foolish not to do, because stacking stamina does in fact make a huge difference for a Paladin in PvP, which is why I will continue to stack it in preference to anything else. And that is really all I'm saying.

EDIT: Also, what Juli said.

I keep seeing people in this thead saying paladins are so survivable they dont need survivability stats. HAH.

People frequently assume paladins are super survivable because they wear plate, but it doesnt do as much as most seem to think. Sure it helps, but paladins are not really any more survivable than a priest and need survivability stats as much as anyone else. If you don't have enough stam to afford cancelling your first heal to fake out that counterspell/kick/pummel (or if your opponent is better than you, the 4-10 second full spell lockout from it landing) and land a followup heal, you're pretty screwed. Paladins dont have an AE fear or ranged silence on a different spell school to save themselves nor their teammate when that happens. Their only heal with enough hp/sec to keep up with top of the line DPS is also 2.5s casting time, 2.0 with talents (if you holy light rank 1'd someone prior to their needing a heal to proc light's grace); not too hard to land an interrupt on that compared to 1.5s flash/binding heal or instants like the rage-starving PW:S. Holy shock is too low hp/sec to really do much of anything healing-wise unless you can't stop moving to cast.

As far as gear goes, a lot depends on what itemization allows. Most of the time there is a clear-cut best item for your playstyle that you are capable of acquiring. If given the choice between a highly specialized item and a more balanced item, I almost always go for the more balanced item. As long as all the stats on the item are important, you gain more from a balanced item because item budget is wasted by a single item being highly specialized. It doesn't make sense to take specialized survivability items in some slots and specialized healing items in others when you could take balanced items in all of them and have more total stats. Why get 40 stam from one item and 40 int from another when you could get 25 of each on both?

People have already covered why stamina is the best PvP stat. I'm not so sure resilence is overvalued, especially when stacked with various anti-crit talents and abilities (molten armor, blessed resilence, etc). Full arena set on your opponent is ~15% crit removed from your character. That's huge.

In regards to healer gear choice, do you take the healing or spell dmg/healing (or even the hybridish stuff for shamans/paladins/druids) set? I figure in 2v2s, you're going to want to have a healer with some offensive capabilities, but the only healer in a 5v5 is going to want to be straight heal. Now what about when you have two healers in that 5 man team? Does one go for the spell damage and one for straight heal?

I've found playing around in the garubashi arena that a group setup like priest/mage/lock/hunter/war (high DPS / Low survivability) will thrash war/mage/druid/priest/shaman (low DPS / huge survivability with all 3 healers heal specced), so the team will end up needing to find a balance between healing and DPS.

The reason resilience is good is that in a competent 5 man group (I choose 5 man simply because IMO its the only really balanced arena tier) with good healers, its the bursts that kill you. Slow and steady damage is relatively easy to heal through, as any PVE encounter could tell you.

This is also why priests need stam so much more than paladins. Simply having less armor means they are suceptible to burst from more classes. Sure the paladin could be hit for 3k (or whatever) by the opposing team's mage, but the priest is vulnerable to that same mage plus the rogue and warrior and hunter. Obviously that doesn't mean the pally shouldn't get +stam, I just feel that priests probably need it the most out of any class.

Well, that's the difference between getting one or two shotted and having time to heal. That doesn't so much suggest to me that stamina is 2x as important as any other stat as it shows that the value of stamina is liminal - that is, that it's crucial to have "enough" health, but that more health beyond that point doesn't necessarily have similar value. I'm not convinced that with the universal increase in health (both in base stats and in gear) it'll be all that hard to have "enough", which really changes the evaluation. It's all relative. If you could stat damage stats enough that you'd regularly one shot people, that would pretty clearly be the proper direction, but because that's not possible, we want enough health to give us windows of opportunity to use our various skills before we die. The marginal value of 1000 health changes significantly depending on whether you have 3500 health or 7000 health, and whether you're expecting to take packets of 500 damage or 2000 damage.

But as others have said - we all know stamina is good in PVP. I actually think the question of the impact of resiliance is more interesting one - traditionally many people tend to stack crit in PVP for burst damage, and while burst damage is obviously still important, will the introduction of resiliance have impact on how you allocate your DPS stats (which is especially interesting now with gems and slotting...)

Damage/healing, generally speaking. The only situation where I could see going pure +healing is when you can make the most out of the difference - I'm thinking of a Druid with 6 HOTs out there, multiplying his benefit from from +healing gear. The smaller the group gets, the more important it is that everyone be able to deal respectable damage. After all, you can't heal someone to death.

Defensively oriented teams can work. How well they work depends on just how much burst damage people end up doing. Like Beef said on the previous page, 5k used to be a "healable" amount of HP; at 5k, give or take, you don't die before a heal can land. In 2.0 WoW, particularly for people in middling stamina raid sets, safe numbers are out of reach. To succeed as a defensive team, you've got to channel the enemy attacks onto someone who can take them, break up their assist train, then wear them down. Surviving the initial attack of an alpha strike team defeats them.

edit: included the post I was replying to.

In a 1v1, yes, there's a point at which you have enough health. When you start talking about winning 1v2, even 1v3 situations, however, it is stamina that makes victory possible. Most classes are based around short cooldown abilities; each additional cycle of abilities earned through not running out of hit points is as valuable as the last when you're trying to chew through an arbitrary amount of hitpoints.

Obviously more health is better than less health. But you're not getting the extra health for free - for every stamina gem or enchant you put on, that's attack power/spell damage/whatever you don't have. There is an amount of health relative to damage output at which you'd rather other stats, clearly. I'm suggesting this amount of health might be more attainable in the expansion, and the wisdom of stacking stamina may change.

Especially after the 2.0 patch, we are getting instagibbed from 6k hp easily; and this is with most of the best pvp plates. I believe stacking stamina will be even more famous, people are realizing that surviving is more important than killing.

That reminds me of dota, somehow :) A typical new dota player's favorite hero is possibly one of the high dps nukers(lich), then they get owned by some paper agility heroes and tend to play those more(clinkz). After some time, nukes are not enough, dps is not enough; they realize that they have to be capable of tanking some damage, and they either shift to high hp strenth based heroes, or shift their items to more defensive.

Unfortunately almost all of a priest's "utility" is subject to dispelling or purging including now the much maligned psychic scream. Plus, almost no priest is going to be healing as a shadow spec, so silence and blackout are not really things to worry about. Shadow priests are a whole different animal compared to healing priests (which is what I assume we're talking about), and you can't mix the two together.

IMO simply having uninterruptible heals with conc aura on gives pallies more than enough "utility". In a battle against a smart opponent that knows to purge, a priest can feel very helpless. In fact I would venture to say that in a situation against a purge happy shaman (or felhunter or other myriad of things that can remove my defenses), a priest is simply a pally that heals for more with their 1.5 second heal but dies quicker.

Actually the whole Plate thing and Shield is a HUGE deal.

When we're talking about stacking a stat we're talking about taking it and nothing else (pretty much). Priests will probably have to stack stamina jewels. Warlocks will want to stack stamina and a bit of damage.

Pallies? While I think they will get some stamina it's not going to be more than the average. Insofar as everyone is stacking stamina then they are too, but they're not going beyond that.

People will want to instagib the one they can instagib. Because of the shield and plate it will take more coordination and effort to instagib a pally than many other classes (plus, a pally can't do too much on his own, so you can afford to ignore him a bit more), thus they are less likely to be the focus, thus the are less likely to need to stack stamina.

Or so goes my reasoning.

If we're still talking about Paladins in arena, then I don't really see that as likely. Even in a 2v2 match, the focused fire that an enemy team can bring to bear is going to make it difficult to ever have "enough" stamina. In anything 3v3 or bigger I don't see a limit on useful stamina being within reach.

What else would we stack for a group?

Adding damage stats doesn't make a noticeable difference in the group's damage output.

Adding +healing doesn't make much of a difference on Holy Light, which is 98% of PvP healing from paladins.

Adding intellect only helps if you burn enough mana to actually need the extra. The only intellect I have in PvP is what comes on my T2 set. My PvP rings, cape, and neck are chosen for stamina. All my enchants are +stam or +hp in any slot where those are available. I spend 75% of my time in PvP healing or otherwise keeping my teammates alive. And I still die ten times more often than I go OOM.

Yeah, they ignore you up until they discover that you're the one keeping them from killing everyone else. After that, any smart team goes after the healer. Once the shield is on cooldown, your lifespan is directly proportional to your health pool (assuming the other team is skilled enough to interrupt heals). Sure, it takes longer because of the plate, but that's only a factor for physical dps.

(Repeated disclaimer: I'm not denying that paladins are more survivable than other classes, so let's please not revisit the silly discussion of who needs stamina "more".)

Also, I can't help but notice that all the paladins in this discussion seem to be on the same side. ;)

We're talking about classes in the arena in general, despite the "who needs stamina more" argument that seems to be going back and forth. :-P

And again, it's not a limit on useful stamina we're talking about - it's a point of diminishing marginal value compared to other stats. Obviously if you had 100k health and 1k mana, you'd rather have Int than Stam because the relative value of additional mana is greater than additional health.

Yes purge and offensive dispel are very powerful against a priest, much like a paladin and interrupt effects (only 1 spell school for EVERYTHING and heals are not super-fast). Horde priests are going to get a wakeup call when alliance get shamans since most priests are pretty freaking terrible at offensive dispelling. Purge/dispel absolutely wrecks priests when used properly with an assist train. Keep in mind though, that shaman or priest dispelling you basically has to focus all his attention on you. That player is not going to be outputting their full dps and can't heal if they're keeping you locked down with purge. And they're still going to need assisting to kill you, this is where teamwork comes in - plus you've still got fear and possibly silence to pop at a key moment to mitigate simultaneous burst damage from multiple players. Even if the fear gets trinketed or dispelled, that ~1 second of reaction time plus turning back to face you is generally enoguh time to either land a flash heal, get out of melee range, or recieve a heal from another group member. It's more than a paladin can do thats for sure, and on a short cooldown. Also, even if they're focusing on you with purges, a good player can pay attention to his opponent and shield himself when the purger starts casting a heal, or right as a projectile lands on you. If you pop a shield right as that mage completes his fireball or hunter completes his aimed shot and time it right, it will still absorb its damage before the shaman/priest can get off another purge on you.

Silence is a very very viable option for a PVP spec'd healbot priest, so I think you're very shortsighted to throw it out the window since "nobody heals as shadow spec". In fact, prior to 2.0 talents, I would contend that the single best pvp healing spec was a tri spec that included spell warding, silence, blackout, imp psy scream and the lower tier goodies up to about imp inner fire in disc. I spent several hundred gold respecing before I settled on that spec and used it to rank up to rank11 once I did - I was very satisfied with it. Blackout is really nice with shadowguard or touch of weakness for horde too when abused properly. This is still probably one of the best pvp healing specs (I haven't played my priest since the new 41 pt talents were added) even after the changes at 60. Silence and blackout add a ridiculous amount of survivablity not only for yourself, but for the people you're oh so desperately trying to keep alive - if you're any good with them.

And what's this about only paladins having uninterruptable heals? It doesnt apply to interrupt effects. You realize priest heals are 70% uninterruptable, plus martyrdom is going to be up almost all the time if someone is actually hitting you. So you've effectively got what, roughly a 5% chance to actually lose casting time at any given point? And if you're referring to imp conc aura, its only 15% chance to resist interrupts. Martyrdom is 20%.

edit: to clarify on the shadow priest/silence thing, I assume you are spec'd specifically for healing in pvp. If you're spec'd for pve healing, expect to get destroyed. Just like you should expect to get destroyed if your gear is pve oriented. Sadly there is no great pve+pvp priest spec that I ever found; same with gear. It's a big reason I no longer play priest as my main.

Silence is an excellent offensive tool, but there is no way going 21 shadow is a better defensively than deeper disc/holy talents like pain suppression and blessed resilence, and the way you'd have to abandon disc or holy to get into shadow like that. I don't think it was worth it prior to new talents either, but I'm not going to argue since that doesn't matter anymore. I'm not a troll, so maybe blackout + shadowguard has some potential, but as undead dumping 5 pts into blackout to give you a 10% chance on an immedietly consumed-on-hit buff is crazy, even if you're recasting as much as possible.

Silence is for a build that also wants some shadow-based offense, or for specific team builds (trying to stack interrupts, low on interrupts, etc).

Offensive dispelling in no way takes a player's full attention. I agree on PW:S though, damage is going to break it significantly more often than dispel.

The second or so until the fear gets zerked and trinketed by the melee on your does have the *potential* to save your life -- you're not running away from good warriors or rogues, or getting much healing off, but it does give a short window for your group to save your ass. The vast majority of the time, it's going to do very little. If arena fights at 70 last long enough to get multiple fears off, it could end up being effective again.

Against a good team, Silence is a very viable option instead of Pain Suppression, because against a good team Pain Suppression is just going to be purged/dispelled, silence will cancel that incoming pyro on you, and if that mage blew AP, you'll dispell that for even more survivability.

I disagree about Rank1 SWP though, takes too much time and too unreliable for arena's in my opinion, but again, it depends on your team and the opposition, i'm sure there are instances where its useful, and if you're getting silence, balck-out is a better option than spirit tap for Arena's.

Just realised thats a bit off-topic, talking gear not spec:

As a priest, i really need to survive the burst dmg, any team can do 5-6k dmg to me in a matter of seconds, but if a team is doing 10k+ dmg to me, then there is a problem with my team and my support, and its likely they can just keep on doing the dmg if my team isn't supporting me. At that point once i have enough to survive that upfront burst, i'd rather have gear that reduces that burst, from resilience and armour. +heal is a very secondary consideration for me at the moment, but i imagine that if teams play me often enough, they could very well work that out, and start targetting other people in my group, knowing i can't really keep them up against good solid dmg.

I think at the really top levels the same teams will be playing each other on at least a semi-regular basis, and they will work out the weaknesses in your gear choices and how you play. At that point a balanced set of gear is probably your safest bet, but then if you come up against a stacked team, you're not as effective.

I just noticed that the Priest Healing PvP set (the honor one, will check the arena one later) not only has healing instead of +damage, but it also has some int instead of stamina which is a major let down.

I didn't mean to imply that rank1 SW:P blackouts was a reason to spec that route, its just another tool in the toolbox. Mind flay is actually more useful as a snare to prevent damage as described earlier. Theyre just nice things you get on the way to silence/imp psy scream/shadow weaving that make the spec really good. Like you said, blackout is just a more attractive option than spirit tap and icing on the cake. I also experienced similar things on my priest where I would mostly be ignored when people realized I was geared/spec'd for survivability. I would usually just put on my pve healing suit with itemrack once I noticed they were ignoring me.

Another thing a lot of people dont take into consideration regarding armor on priests, is the whole PW:S applied after armor thing. 10% more damage reduction also means your PW:S lasts 10% longer. That's 10% longer your warrior pal has to beat on you before he can get any rage from hitting you, and 10% longer for you to cast uninterrupted.

I think you're right regarding the top teams. It is probably a good idea to just learn who your strong opponents are and build teams tailored more toward being able to beat them. If your top rivals are caster heavy, spec for silence and maybe consider more sta/+healing gear. If they're physical damage heavy, pain sup and armor gear. No sense in tailoring your gear to beat teams that you can beat with your eyes closed anyway.

Blessed resilience specced Armor/Stam heavy priests with the ZG 2000 AC trinket are a rogues/warriors worst nightmare.

For warriors, once you get beyond a reasonable level of AP/crit, and we don't yet have a good idea what that is for lv70, stacking stam and def was the most practical thing to do. I've seen a bunch of people complaining that resilience lowering my chance to get crit and therefore Enrage is somehow a problem, but honestly I'm more likely to die from eating a crit fireball, than I am to die from someone I would have killed a second earlier with enrage finishing me off. Both happen, but the former is largely out of my control, the later I can use tactics and positioning to try and minimize.

I'll aim for reasonable offensive stats, then maximise survivability. Deathwish is on tap for the instant you get free of CC and stick to the target.

Some classes are considered either naturally 'hard to crack', or lesser threats, and can prob be effective with a little less focus on staying alive. Paladins, Shamans with shields, Druids. Warlocks are a huge threat but can be damn tough to take down and often get skipped as being the primary target.

Mages and Priests tend to be the logical first strike option in a 5man.

I’m Affliction and obviously the main stats will be stamina -> damage -> resilience. But I think I’m going to be placing more of an emphasis on resilience than most, just to see how it pans out. I’ve been spending a lot of my time since 2.0.1. release making myself more survivable and I definitely enjoy PvP more even if the numbers are less, and I imagine 5v5 Arena’s strategies will mainly be about CC, focus fire and /assist followed by /train.

I’ve been looking at some of the gear for PvP, since that’s what I’ll be doing come the expansion. Not just Arena and not just at level 70, however. So I’ll mention stuff like Netherweave, in fact I’ll do that first to get it out of the way. Its only statistics are stamina and damage, and it has a comfortable amount of both despite being green. The blue Imbued Netherweave (3 +1 pieces) set is terrible though. Very expensive, stamina and damage downgrades. Hurrah.

Anyway, for the level 70 the Battlecast Garb and The Unyielding are crafted items whose recipes haven’t dropped yet (but I’m sure their whereabouts will be known before your 1000th Halaa kill). But are pretty insane for survivability, especially The Unyielding when you consider it’s a Belt and Bracers with all that stamina and resilience on them, and is compatible with the Arena set. The Resolute Cape has ton of survivability too, but again the recipe hasn’t been given a drop location yet. I know the Power Amplification Goggles schematic drops in a 5 man instance and is moderately sexy.

Also looked a bit at the gems, I know you don’t have to colour-match them but I think I’ll abide before I start getting creative. As far as I can make for Affliction these are the ones to look out for. The Halaa one might be impractical though. Then you’ve got the meta-gems, I think the stun one is the best for me, even though the thought of an instant Soul Fire is quite pleasing.

Sublime Mystic Dawnstone (Yellow) +10 resilience (Halaa reward, 500 kills)
Runed Ornate Ruby (Red) +12 damage (PvP honour reward)
Glowing Tanzanite (Red/Blue) +6 damage, +6 stamina (drop from a 5-man instance)
Solid Start of Elune (Blue) + 12 stamina (crafted, pattern drops in Karazhan)
Earthstorm Diamond (Meta) 5% stun resist, +18 stamina
Mystical Skyfire Diamond (Meta) 2% on spellcast - next spell instant cast
Swift Starfire Diamond (Meta) +12 damage, minor run speed increase

i agree that stam is great for pvp but as far as hunters go having a balance between high stam and ap should be top priority with crit being a close 2nd. with so many people mindset on stacking stam and resilience it's going to be tough for hunters to put out some lethal burst dps.

a bit off-topic: what i noticed was that the arena set for hunters lacks hit rating so i hope our other slots can fill in that hole in the hit rating department. i just can't stand seeing 'Miss' on one of my shots, especially on a clutch moment.

btw, what's the hit rating required for ranged to not miss at all (without debuffs, i.e. insect swarm, scorpid sting) for lvl 60 and 70 in pvp?