Melnor

Hey, thanks for the detailed reply. The insight on deadly poison is interesting, I will try that out this week. Yea, double dps teams really aren't a problem for us it's the endless streams of warrior/healer teams or druid/lock teams we'll see and making our winning % a little bit better would help tremendously.

 

Melnor

I'm suprised that him being SL/SL didn't net you guys any gains. The Resto/SL combo is not meant to be a DPS combo at all. It's strictly an outlast team and is very good at accomplishing that. His dps will be terrible yes, but he is so resilient that he shouldn't get bursted by a rogue even with you feared and blinded. For a rogue/lock team, let the warlocks duel each other and cyclone the rogue when he pops out. If you can keep the rogue's dps contribution low via cyclone and roots and feral charge/bash, your lock will survive against another lock with just your hots and drain life. You really have to have a defensive mindset when pairing with a lock. Prepare for the long matches and mana drains from your warlock. I didn't check your armory but is Resto not your default spec?

 

Shadowed

If he didn't have much in terms of Resto gear that'd probably be why, didn't really have whats required to outlast. Make sure the Warlock DoTs up both team mates, eventually you'll get someone down low enough to finish them off in the case of Warlock/Rogue you'll probably end up finishing off the Rogue since he can only heal himself every 45 seconds where as at least the Warlock has Life Tap.

Drink is your friend, make sure you carry a lot of Arena water and whenever you're able to get a free chance to drink do so. One of the tricks that can be used is to wait 2-3 seconds and cast Regrowth or Healing Touch and spam drink while casting, this lets you get the heal off and then start drinking due to the 0.3s-0.5s window before entering combat after the heal is sent to the server.

 

Zeero

I have had a good experience so far with shaman/war combo. However lately we have run into some paly/war combos that we can't seem to beat. Paladins are so much more efficient with their mana and take less dmg than me. Combine that with their bubble it's a very hard match-up for us.

My normal strat vs. other war/healer teams has been to kite and LoS the warrior as much as possible while dropping WF and BL for my warrior and snaring as much as possible to help burn the other healer down. This has worked up to about 1700 rating but doesn't seem to be working well beyond that. What strats should/could we employ to improve our rating and do better against these teams?

Here is my armory if that helps. I'm missing a shield (which is my next item to pick up) but otherwise have pretty good gear. (also replace the winter hat with S1 gladiator helm...)

10,450 HP 349 Res

 

AriasImmortal

Against paladins, don't even try to kite. Stay near the paladin and keep him dispelled so he can't kite your warrior, and earthshock his heals. Make sure you and your warrior aren't interrupting at the same time though. Eventually, he'll get behind enough and have to bubble, and once bubble is down blow heroism and keep interrupting the heals.

 

Duncan

If you face Pala/Warrior be ready to immediately purge Blessing of Freedom every time!

1.) Drop earthbind all the time and kite the enemy warrior around a pillar or something similar, but most important stay on the pala to be able to interrupt him.
2.) Help your warrior to interrupt (rank1 earthshock) the Paladin.
3.) Your warrior should mainly focus on keeping MS up (most important) and to have enough rage to pummel/intercept whenever it's available. Keep Harmstring up if they tend to kill you earthbind totem every time you drop it.
4.) Water shield is your friend. It will restore a lot of mana in this fight, with the warrior on you. Even if you kite him really good.
5.) And last but not least, make him sunder the paladin and keep it stacked (17k armor is common on a paladin without sunder armor). Sunder will help alot in the long run.

Keeping Deathwish and some rage for burst situations (aka paladins health below ~40% with 5 sunder stacks) also helps.

 

Zeero

Typically the warrior is on me the whole time. Your saying I should use water shield as apposed to using earth shield? Wouldn't the mana regen from water shield in turn be used up more often from having to heal myself more? Earth shield is a big help when taking focus fire from a warrior it seems.

Currently I only use Earth Shield.

 

◊ Praetorian

Use WS if you can get away with it without dying, basically. It's much much more mana efficient in terms of longevity. A decked-out S3 war with a mace, though, is going to be doing too much damage to permit that, when you factor in pushback. If you fail to juke a pummel, and then you get a mace stun or two while pummel is cooling down, then get pummeled again, you're probably dead if you didn't have Earth Shield up.

 

Xurec

I'm wondering what you guys think of dealing with Warrior/Moonkin. It seems like an odd combo to say the least, and it was only one team we faced that was this combo, but I simply couldn't think of a "best" way to do with them, and we lost three times after having won about 25 games straight. I was on my druid, specced resto, paired with a warrior friend.

The opposing druid was specced Moonkin but obviously wearing healing gear, or at least a mix. He would hot up his warrior and their team would begin to lay some serious dps on my warrior. The first game it caught me off guard and we probably lost simply due to that reason, losing any type of strategy while figuring out what to do. The second game was longer, I focused on controlling the opposing warrior with roots/cyclone as normal, but still had to heal much more than normal games. Whenever the opposing druid needed to back off they would cyclone/root and their warrior would sword and board it and keep my warrior from catching him. He would shadowmeld+drink until ready to start it over again, and basically they ran me out of mana by the constant pressure. Both the first game and second game my warrior was killed with full hots on and a 1h+shield equipped, they really did seem to have a ton of dps. The third game they started with the pressure on him but switched early to me and killed me fairly quickly.

As far as strategy, I obviously know to drink as often as possible and try to cc one of them. The problem is they have too much burst to really run to the other side of the map and kite the warrior all day, or to get a full drink. The moonkin still has barkskin/NG/cyclone etc to give him some escape abilities. They also have the possibility of sticking the warrior on me when mine is low and letting the druid finish him off. Or, like what happened the third game, if I get too close and try to play offensively they have the option to turn that dps on me. I think without shadowmeld it would be a different game, but I'm left wondering if warr/moonkin is better than anyone thought, as neither of us is geared or skilled particularly poorly and they worked us.

Interested in you all's thoughts...

 

hugh1130

Considering that a Moonkin/warrior combo is essential a mirror match, trading longevity and healing power for some addition dps and some timely burst, i would play it as such, capitalizing on the moonkins weak spots.

Play a cc game with the opposing druid, they don't have a defensive dispell between cyclone, roots, interevene + fear( on trinket) there warrior should be good and CC'ed, while a moonkin should not be able to do dps above what your hots are capable of while your warrior is on him.
"There is no Boom in Oom" the objective of this is to run the druid out of mana, while CC'ing the warrior, make sure the opposing druid cant drink.

If the oomkin decided just to kite your winning a game of attrition because of greater efficiency.

 

Lazi

Balance is my default spec (415 Res, about 950 Damage) and yeah we pretty much knew the basic idea of outlasting but it wasn't working out very well. He recently specced 7/43/11 and that seems to be working well, we still have strong DPS and he's pretty resilient so my average healing can usually keep him up. Sitting at 1800 for this week and going to try to reach 1875 or so next week at least. We haven't really played enough games with this spec to see where our weaknesses lie yet, but it seems to be doing well thus far with no glaring weaknesses other than longevity on my part which is prevalent regardless of partner.

This is how you beat Moonkin/Warrior. I played with a Rogue the majority of the time and occasionally a Warrior last season and whenever we played against a Resto/X combination, it came down to killing the Resto Druid really fast because there is no way I could outlast him. Anytime they try to regroup, just do the same thing rather than try to catch them. I could try and lock down a Resto as best as I could while my partner wailed on their DPS and really we only won when they messed up or we got really lucky. A few times it came down to the absurd situation of me chasing somebody wielding my Stranglestaff with both of us oom, a Lifebloom on him against my Insect Swarm; trying to smack them while we ran around a pillar.

 

Xurec

I armoried the team in question, the druid really is in full healing gear but specced Moonkin, they aren't coming out the gates playing like a double-dps team. The whole efficiency thing goes kind of out of the door if someone can drink more than you. Like I said, I know how it should be played, but unfortunately didn't work out that way. Obviously a druid can get away from a warrior long enough to get out of combat to get behind a pillar, and with shadowmeld, he's drinking instantly while my warrior still has the opposing warrior on him. Considering I have to continue healing him or me pretty much the whole fight, I have less chance to drink, don't have shadowmeld, don't have Dreamstate(about 50 mp/5). If I play offensively to keep the other druid in combat I'm also not drinking as well, and putting myself in a position to get focused instead. The second game we were looking to do precisely what you said, cc the warrior and stay on the druid, easier said than done but we'll see again soon I'm sure.

 

ragereaver

Anyone have any experience with this combintation? I've been doing some arena with this team but Druid with rogue/warrior and double cc dps teams Rogue/Mage are giving us a hella trouble. Any advice would be great.

 

Mosh

As an SL/SL Lock looking to do some more 2v2s, what DPS class would work the best to team up with for high (2k+) ratings?

I've already decided I can't stand playing with a healer 2v2, but I'd like to try something like Frost Mage or Rogue, but I'm not sure what would work the best.

 

Greyeye

Any suggestions on stragedies for S-priest/BM hunter combo? We are a bit new to Arena and would like some suggetions. So far it does seem to be a paper/rock/scissors fight on many occasions as some have suggested.

 

Stoical

Having not taken pally/warrior seriously since season 1, I've recently (as in, this past week) picked it up again with the warrior from my 5s. Obviously, I expect things to be much harder now, and I've picked up some great tips from this thread - especially using HoJ on a rogue to eliminate his avoidance at the start and force the other healer to heal heavy on rogue-healer teams, or sundering rogues and locks (I'm pretty sure my warrior never sunders in 2s) on 1 dps teams.

The biggest problems I anticipate that I haven't figured out how to work around yet are warrior/druid, hunter/druid, and demo lock/healer. So for those in the know, I have these questions: Against a demo lock, killing the pet twice, would you bother sundering the pet up? Against a hunter, do you bother killing the scorpid? In the games we messed around with here and there over the past few weeks, this felt nearly impossible through mend pet + druid heals, but maybe with sunder+MS it could be done.

 

◊ Greenexile

Warrior / Pally actually has a semi ok chance against War / Druid. The key is getting judgement of justice on the druid. I cant really give any specific advice, but the teams that beat me (admitedly, I'm a pretty poor drood so skilled ones will make it hard) wait till I pop to heal, warrior intercepts me and begins the beating, then the pally positions himself so that while I'm kiting away from the warrior he can get justice on me. So for example on ruins , he stands just forward of the tomb and I cant really find a way past him without getting hit with justice.

Some really annoying tricks include intercept stun + pally stun into judgement of justice. Or intimidating shout into judgement of justice. Once that judgment is on then the druid will most likely panic and you will be able to force out a win.

 

Soulrave

Yea destro is really gimped in arenas but I've heard that this combo works.
I've been SL/SL and got really bored with it (with a resto druid) and I'm very intrigued to try this dps/dps line up, I don't know if there are any other class that would be a good partner for a destro...

Any thoughts about this team?

 

◊ Vectivus

A Warlock's best bet in 2DPS is either a Shadow Priest or a Warrior.

 

Nadagast

Lock/Rogue is way way better than Lock/Mage. Lock Mage has serious problems against a lot of the popular setups right now

 

doogless

SL/SL works with Rogues as well, and in fact in most high-rated Warlock/Rogue teams the Warlock is SL/SL.

 

ice.cream

I know this is true, and have tried playing with a warlock for quite sometime now, but we cannot break 1800, and sometimes lose a lot in a row.

May I ask what is the general strategy to execute this combo? Common sense would be to CC 1 target while we dps on the other, but I'm not really sure. We are both pretty well geared. Full merciless with some pieces of vengeful.

 

doogless

I haven't played it personally, but I run into the combo fairly often. The good ones give us (Warlock/Druid) a run for our money, the bad ones just get destroyed. The success of the combo (as with pretty much all double DPS combos) relies entirely on your ability to coordinate CCs. For example: you Fear the healer, they trinket it, Rogue Blinds the healer (full duration since they used their trinket), Rogue Vanishes as Blind is about to wear off and Saps the healer, you Fear when Sap is about to wear off. Recognize the abilities of the classes you're up against and which of the two you can CC better, blow up the other one, and communicate well.

ed: replace pronouns for the Rogue to be you and Warlock to be he, since apparently I can't read.

 

ice.cream

Thanks for the advise. This is what we have been doing, and I suppose the hard part is to coordinate and communicate quickly.

Now let's say we have the other target CC'd, while focusing on the main target, should I focus more on damage, or stunning the target so the warlock can live? (Most of the time the warlock is their target.)

 

Blazingwater

Enhance shaman/Resto shaman


Anyone have advice for a resto shaman/enhance shaman setup for a 2v2? I was in a 2v2 with one, but he stop playing a while back, and I found myself teaming with another resto shaman, fully epicced. My gear is close to being fully epicced (about 12 epics, PvP set).

The setup has some good qualities, but also some fundemental flaws. Sure, double grounding totem/earthbind totem/poison cleansing totem/bloodlust...etc. is nice, but we lack dispelling power (removing debuffs) and strong kiting/CC mechanics. My last partner and I only had difficulties with a few teams...

1. rogue/rogue-The only chance we really had at that was finding one of the rogues before we were sapped/stunlocked.
2. warrior/healadin-Well, plate + plate + melee dps= long, hard battle. The best we could do is focus fire on the warrior, and hit the healadin with every earth shock we could on heal and hope not to double earth shock the pally.
3. rogue/resto druid-Stunlocked, try to own the rogue, but to many heals (mainly life bloom, not good to purge), so switch over to the druid, who (of course) HoTs himself up, and run, while my partner gets owned.
4. druid/pally-Well, one has a lot of armor and can bubble, the other one runs and kites. Both able to heal through whatever I do.

Surprisingly, we could beat most setups with a frost mage or a lock in it. Usually, and team with a mage=win (sooo squishy with a 2h in the lower brackets), and we're usually able to heal through the DoTs and interrupt, also curse of tongues can get nasty.


There were a couple of other setups that were pretty nasty, but it's been a while since I've done arena. Most other losses were either luck, or they out-geared us greatly. I shouldn't have that problem much now. With all that crap being said...Anyone have advice? Specific or general, I'll take it.