About the only thing I can offer you is to have great communication with your rogue. If you can prolong the battle after Deathwish is used, you can have your rogue bait zerker rage with a gouge, to which you can then take advantage of a fear after it has worn off (if you last that long). I'm sure I don't have to tell you it's a super tough matchup where your cloth/leather vs plate/plate team's biggest strengths are fears and the stealth opener - which are both severely handicapped via bubble and zerker rage.

Gunning for the paladin bubble is a must in my opinion. As you just won't be able to burst a warrior who decides to jump into defensive with a shield while his healer is CC'd or not CC'd. With your rogue BoF'd, you can manage some deadzone kiting of the warrior if you care to try manaburning the Paladin...

My plan of attack was always force the bubble, frantically kite while immunity wears, then attempt to use evasion/blind/sprint+latency to survive as the rogue tries to burn the paladin down from full.

Started to play in 2vs2 with a Disc Priest on a Rogue about a week ago. Paladins are annoying in general since most of the time it gets down to a question of who dies first, if the Priest doesn't need to spam heal himself you're best bet as Tower said is to force a bubble and try to dispel it or kite and stall for time.

Can't speak about it personally, but Panda/Trance posted a thread about the matchup on the official priest forums. Here's the link:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...913081&sid=1#0

I played a fair bit of 2 vs 2 with an affliction warlock when I was disc/holy and it went rather well - we went up to 1800, the harder matchups were MS Warrior + anything, as the warriors could randomly burst someone down due to lack of proper resilience gear on my end.

I spec'd to shadow back for raiding, and the results were disastrous. Lock/Shadow priest might be one of the worst 2 vs 2 teams, we lack burst and healing so we pretty much not pvping till I respec.

Wow, I donno what you're doing wrong, but in 2v2s, shadow Priest/UA Warlock combos are absolutely brutal. It's one of the very best teams for this bracket, up there with Paladin/Warrior IMO. Can you share with us what you tried to do? It might not just be gear. I think you guys aren't CC'ing very well. The level of damage output and synergy involved between these classes makes for some pretty nasty games. I believe two teams are above us (2200+) in Shadowburn and run this combo effectively. Both of them rush right off the start and burn an AOE fear, immediately jumping their first target and locking down a healer. Just seems odd that you mention a "lack of burst" when you can stack Shadoweaving with what, 6-7 DOTs? Who needs burst when people are melting to death.

Sure. The problem seems to be for example death-wish warriors backed up by a paladin. The warrior is just straight up immune to fears, and just starts killing me very fast, and I have no means of healing myself beyond pws/healthstone. I cannot get any spell off at all beyond the instant spells, and the warlock takes much longer to kill the paladin while the warrior is working on me. If we both try focusing on the warrior, the paladin just heals the warrior with bubble, and by the time bubble expires I am already nearly dead.

What kinda counters can you pull off versus paladin/warrior for example? Death-wish just means that one of us will die.

Edit:
Warlock usually uses a felhunter. Should we use a succubus instead?

Kill the Warrior first. If their Warrior is on you (the Priest), your UA Warlock should have complete control of their Paladin with Fears, Tongues and Spell Lock. (Really bad teams would assist a shadow Priest first.. just an aweful idea.. never ever let a UA Warlock have free reign to do whatever he wants) You never ever try and kill the Paladin first with this setup. It's just not gunna happen. Like you said, the DW Warrior will burn through you too fast. Get the Warrior down, and keep their healer CC'd.

Even if you do absolutely nothing at all to the paladin (other than Curse of Tongues), you and your partner can burn through the warrior's hp faster than the paladin can replenish it chaincasting heals. It's pretty absurd how deadly warlock + SP are.

Not to mention, up against a 2x caster team yourself? Throw dots up and do the pole dance.

The problem is that the warrior kills me faster than me and the warlock can kill the paladin. I suppose I just recently started doing arenas so my HP is insufficient, I am barely over 8kHP unbuffed and only have one piece of arena gear.

Currently running Human Rogue/Dwarf Priest, my friend having full glad, well geared overall and great talent spec. I'm using Drakefist/Glad OH as 23/38/0 Quick Recovery Combat with 206 Resilience as of now. His regular setup has been with a Mage but since I've had time to gear up(after starting post-tbc) we decided to go to our original plan of 2v2. Played for 2 days on a borrowed team going from 1453-1950, learning a lot and finding warr/pal combos easy, only games we lost ~4 were due to Leave Queues, major fuckups and major lucks.

Now switched to the 2300 team and been practicing against Pal/Warr which has been the only major issue aside from a few games vs lock/dwarf priest. After talking to some other rogues they said they went on the pally but I just don't see that being feasible. After initial stunlock and possible shiv cripplings after freedom is instantly dispelled, mace stuns, intercept and tornados basicly mean forced kiting by the pally. We've been progressing by practicing our strategy of separating the warrior/paladin so my friend is free to mana burn.

For example in Nagrand they start at one pillar, I start dragging the warrior across diagonally and the paladin has to come out to heal, paladin gets burned, we hide behind the opposite pillar, burn a cold blood and paladin runs round, gets feared then we use a combination of all interrupts to stop him healing(this is very tense with commanding shout abuse :|), so kick/fear/mind control/blind, yesterday I blinded a dwarf paladin just to delay and with another kick and fear we finished it thank god. We are now considering to properly time zerker rage bait with gouge for a fear and I'm going to work on some deadzone kiting but with freedom on the warrior this will get hard. I'll use evasion during a deathwish but I'm wondering how priest/rogue teams are consistently beating warr/paladin teams? Most of the 2200+ warriors can't be left on priest or he just gets raped so I don't understand how anyone could go on the pally. Any suggestions are welcome, we want this combo down!

I've been playing Rogue+Mage for about a month or two, and we've been up and down at 1950-2000 rating for a while. Two days ago I leveled my alt-druid up to 70, and started playing 2vs2 with him a warrior. My druid is extremely gimp and has about 8k hp with 8 stamina gems and 8k mana + 720 healing. It took us a night to get above the rating I had with my rogue, we went from 1600 to 2002.

Not only was this a easier setup to play with overall, but we finally got to kill those annoying paladin+warrior setups easily. I have very little experience as druid really (What I'm doing in arena is mostly textbook), and my gear is horrible - though already I've gone further with my druid in 1 night than I have with my rogue in 1-2 months. It seems like for us to get higher as mage+rogue we don't only need to be good, but we have to be far better than any other setup we face.

Now I can't wait to continue playing 2vs2 with the warrior, as we didn't really meet any super challenge yet. (We probably will meet it soon). I'm considering just dropping my rogue for the druid. (Not only because of 2vs2 of course, but our 3vs3 rating has increased - I also find myself much more useful). It is true that warrior+druid is a vastly easier setup to play with, but even with 2 months of practice we couldn't achieve what we did in 1 night as druid+warrior.

If you attack a warrior like this all they do is switch to you and your dps drops to nearly nothing as a warlock. It is very easy to outheal a warlock when you are being attacked by a warrior rogue or shaman.

Huh? Have you ever seen what this looks like on a Warrior in Berserker stance?

5/5 Shadoweaving
Unstable Affliction
Curse of Agony
Corruption
Immolate
Siphon Life
Shadow Word: Pain

..all you do is melt the Warrior to death and throw out Fears / Spell Lock the Paladin and this team dies incredibly fast. You're not going to dispel those DOTs. Not even if the Warlock can't get UA off, would you try and spam Cleanse. Paladins absolutely must heal. Which means a Warlock can just stand there and spam Drain life which is 70% uninterruptable from damage. So what if the Warrior uses Pummel. It lasts 4 seconds and you go right back to spamming Drain Life while the Priest does whatever he wants including Silence, Fear, Mana Burn, Mind Control.

You have to assist the Warlock, but to imply that having a Warrior on you "stops your DPS" is absurd.

Edit: Oh wow.. you're full Destruction. Yeah, that's a horrible, horrible build for 2v2s. Maybe if you ran with an AP/Pyro "blow up" team, it might make for an interesting team. But your makeup has no survivability. You aren't putting pressure on healers to multi-task at all. Setups which include any Shaman at all just destroy Destruction Warlocks in arena PVP. It sucks, but a PVE build like this just doesn't really work for 95% of group setups in high-end play.

One of the key strengths of locks in 2v2 arena is their mobility. Having a warrior/rogue/whatever on you once you've placed your dots up shouldnt effect your dps much at all.

Lock/S.priest is one of the most effective 2v2 combos right up there, if not more so, with war/pala. Cant remember the site which listed global rankings, but for 2v2 there is heaps of lock/s.priest combos in the 2200+ ratings with 85%+ win ratios.

I haven't gotten further than 2100, but so far I've never seen it necessary to kill the paladin at all. The strategy is pretty textbook, you just keep the paladin cycloned until he uses DS. When he's using DS you switch cyclone to the warrior so he can't heal him up. I don't know of the warriors we're facing is undergeared, but the warrior I'm playing with has some insane damage, if i get the paladin to stay in cyclone for 10 seconds, the enemy warrior is usually dead. And if he isn't dead, just keep the warrior cycloned for a while. I've specced for improved bash and feral charge, which gives me two extra possibilities to stop him from casting.(Arena greatsword and so on). Most warriors try to focus on me, I end up kiting them and leading them away from their healer behind the pillars. What they could do to get me down is to have the paladin hamstringed, then use judgement of justice on me. (However, the warrior never uses hamstring because of this reason). And yes, he can resnare me, but with nature's grasp, bash, charge and constantly warrior helping me out while i'm healing myself, I don't see myself dying.

Usually turns out like this:
- I chaincyclone paladin, warrior dies.
- Chain breaks due to DS, so I throw cyclone on the warrior instead.
- Warrior doesn't attack me at all, I'm constantly interrupting the paladin while instanthealing the warrior.
- The warrior does attack me, I'm kiting him behind the pillars. As the paladin only has holy shock as his only instanthealing spell (i believe?), he won't be able to heal up the warrior if he's 30%, ms'ed and behind the pillar.

Paladin + Warrior is rather easy, double warlocks or shadowpriest + warlock is harder.

I don't run with our shadowpriest in 2v2, but I do in 3v3, and for the one who said we have no burst cause it's a DoT setup is completely off base.

Curse of Shadows + Shadowweaving + Misery and Corruption starts ticking for 700+, same for UA. SW:P for 800+. Furthermore, we completely disregard the resilience stat.

The deadliest part about it is that the damage starts out slow as we apply DoT's, in which case, enemy healers become a bit lax, not realizing they have to start healing very early. Once all the DoT's are up, and we switch over to Mind Flay/Mind Blasts/Shadowbolts, the warrior goes from 90% hp to 0 in about 3 seconds. We simply spell-lock/silence the healers, death coil the warrior, and unload on him as he's horrified (and we make sure to burn his charge in the beginning so his intercept is on cooldown). Combined with 2 AOE fears, single target fear, curse of tongues, 5-sec silence and a spell-lock, it's very easy to control a healer even if our initial burst fails. And even if it does, we have 5+ DoT's ticking away, dealing about 2k damage every 3 seconds. In our 3v3, if there's ever a warrior on the opposing team, it's an instant-win for us, as we can turn it into a 3v2 rather quickly.

Our bane though are rogues, frost-mages, and nether-protection warlocks. Priest/Rogue/Frost mage is easily our most feared matchup in 3v3, and I'd assume it's the same for Priest/Rogue in 2v2.

See my most above, basicly going on the paladin isnt an option, with Freedom + Hamstring + Tornadoes(thanks blizz). Pal/Warr matchup is superior in all ways really, after more practice we've come close a few more times vs the 2200+ pal/warr teams that are actually decent but as my friend says, there is no way to beat that combo unless we execute everything perfectly and they don't get lucky.

I've started running as a Resto Shaman/Destro Lock combination, since my 2v2 team's MS Warrior hasn't been able to play much. I really like it and I think the two builds mesh very well with each other for numerical reasons.

First, the two big weaknesses of the Shaman class: dealing with CC, and survivability. These were serious issues with an MS Warrior, it basically came down to me staying alive until my bloodlusted/windfuried partner could drop the bad guys. With CCs in the equation we had a really hard time...if he got sheeped/cycloned I'd have 2 people on me and I'd either run OOM very fast or just die. With the Destro Lock, this is far less of an issue. His Felhunter is able to clear any magical CCs off me in a hurry, and between Tremor Totem and Poison Cleansing Totem I can take care of most of the others.

The other serious Shaman weakness, survivability under fire, is a non-issue with a Destro Lock. He is perhaps the only class available that's squishier than myself. In practice, I take very little damage because the other team goes for him EVERY GAME. In large part, they can't afford not to...his burst DPS/CC potential if left alone is just too great. So, if he's under attack I can not only heal him unhindered, but also focus my Earth Shocks on the opposing casters.

Now for the numbers: in particular, this set-up is ideal for the dreaded Warrior/Paladin teams. With an Earth Shield on my Warlock partner, he has 100% pushback resistance (70% from Intensity, 30% from Earth Shield). This addresses a major weakness of the Warlock class, and means that his burst damage stays about the same even if somebody's beating on him. Meanwhile, his Curse of Tongues on opposing Paladins really opens up the interrupt game for me. Assuming a Paladin has Light's Grace, his Holy Light with Curse of Tongues is a 4 second cast. Add in 2 seconds from an Earth Shock interrupt, and I get 6 seconds between when I shock and when his next heal could potentially go off. This is the exact cooldown on Earth Shock, and between the Paladin moving and latency/reaction time, I am able to interrupt 90% of Paladin heals. Shadowfury can be used on the heals I can't get, and between the two (plus Shadowfury/War Stomp "stunlock") we can force a bubble very early.

Except the team has the option to ignore the warlock, and rush you down with the paladin shielding to ensure that his heals don't get interrupted. I'd be wary about getting on the warlock anyway since attacking a destruction lock can provoke a highly dangerous amount of burst from backlash. Without earthshield you'll be hard pressed to keep yourself up against a DW/enraged warrior. Also, before you mention the damage due to bloodlust, with a non-UA warlock as soon as you bloodlust'd we'd just run away and LoS for the 40 seconds, since there's really no penalty for us resetting the fight.

Started doing arenas for fun with the disc priest from my 3v3s, and we're up to the mid 1900s after our first day. We generally destroy pallie/warlock and pallie/warrior teams due to counterspell and mana burn, but we're having alot of trouble with rogue teams. Bad part is, in the Ruin battlegroup, most of the top 2v2 teams are running a rogue.

I just don't see anything we can do against a well geared rogue. It usually boils down to a dps race between me and the rogue to see who can burn down their target first, and most of the time my priest ends up dying before I can kill the rogue due to the immunity from CoS.

We have an especially hard time in Blade's Edge, because the majority of my nukes (frostbolt) have a 2.5s cast time, and the numerous LoS obstructions really destroys most of my damage output.

Other than that, 2v2s seem to be a good place to arena for fun.

If your WE spec you got a great counter for a rogue, aside from blazing speed fire which can be a bitch. With the amount of roots you got with your WE you can prevent a lot of dmg, a foolish rogue will blow vanish too early and cloak of shadows just to remove roots.

Yesterday we played a new ranking team and we were both at the mid 2300's, shaman/mage. The fight was outlast and their team and I played on a very high level of skill. DPSing the rogue isn't a solution but you do need to put healing pressure on for both players, most of your time has to be spent on kiting and abusing the healers los. Force the rogue to be distanced and NEVER run in his melee range, whether passing or not, 90% of mages do that and it gives me an easy shiv crippling. Distance yourself as much as possible aswell as the priest, aim to always be in-front of their team and abusing their healer, if you continue to kite when they must run back you can easily drink.

It's really hard to explain what would counter myself best but all I can say is practice and distance as frost mages have little reliable burst dmg.

We've seen this setup before. They all involve trying to kill my Paladin first.

It's about playing LOS games and using Blessing of Freedom defensively to keep the freezing effect off of herself. Most of the Mages we've seen in these 2v2 setups are horrible at de-cursing. Which means the Priest almost never has a chance to heal. I keep him totally locked down with Fear / Spell Lock. It's made a little more annoying with Undead, but not that bad.

..and the DOTs just eat away at both. If our Paladin eats a CS, I switch to Deathcoil on him, and Fear, letting her get out of it. Usually the Mage runs OOM at some point. Sometimes I'll even spam Drain Mana on the Mage just to get him there faster. Priests can't get the debuff off fast enough because he has to get through a sea of DOTs.

Alot depends on some really lucky crits too. Not saying we haven't lost to 2v2s with a frost Mage, but it depended alot more on 2-3 crits in a row. That's not really skill at that point. Sometimes the other team just gets lucky. Happens to us when a healer eats a tornado or something in Nagrand.