◊ Gwaihir

Get 280+ shadow resist gear in the form of greens- Yea, it's painful putting expensive enchants on it, but when you reduce that combo's normally murderous damage to a mere trickle, it is 100% worth the loss in AP/crit. It's really helpful to regain some of your lost dps stats by using pure PvE damage gear in your non-SR slots as well, and overall you should would still maintain a pretty respectable HP pool. It's not like all the resilience on your nice PvP set is helping you against this team anyhow...

 

Zorac

Ah ok yeah thats what I figured.

Our occasional wins are when pally shield preinterrupt and I manage to get some insane burst on the sp, not really a viable tac though. Ill start gathering sr, thanks for the help.

 

Currylaksa

Storm herald/Deep Thunder is extremely devastating when coupled with mace spec and 15 sec intercepts.

As a healer, having back to back stun procs right after an intercept is almost a good game. I'd much rather you crit me more often than stun me for a good chunk of time.

 

nfw

Don't forget you can also taunt, mocking blow, challenging shout the felhunter to give your healer some relief.

 

valner

is that really viable? I have not had the time to really pvp much this season but that tactic only worked against stupid teams. (teams we would beat anyway because they were idiots). Usually the good locks get the pet back on my paladin so fast it was not worth the rage loss. Also, usually I end up against shadowpriest/warlock teams which means the shadowpriest is running and PWS like mad so I am very very rage starved.

Having been obliterated by stormherald too many times, I finally decided to say fuck it and go smtihing. Stormherald SHOULD be roughly 1ppm proc. In wow, innate weapon procs are not normalized on ppm which means the proc is really a 1 in 16 swings proc which is 6% or so per hit. This means you should have a 6% chance of a mace proc and 6% chance of the innate smith proc per attack. This means you have three stuns on seperate diminishing returns timers. This is THE best weapon hands down and kicks the shit out of the gladiator mace. No one uses the mace for "damage". Sword spec is better for burst damage and axe is better for getting the most from controlled bursts ( WW/MS/execute). You pick mace spec for control over casters.The BS mace doubles your chance of stunning your opponent. There is no other weapon on par with this one not even close. Also, many classes stack stun resistance but typically the classes which are most problematic for a warrior do not have a strong stun resistance.

http://ctprofiles.net/talents.ct?cid=550342

 

Samurro

Iam totaly undetermined what gladiator weap i should take. Browsing through much armory profiles of warrios some realy use the gladi season 2 maul, some use gladi s2 axe and just a few use sword.

My current team is a 3on3 warlock / shaman / warrior combo, so what do you think would be the best option for me?

PS:
I can't get stormherald...

 

Tiiki

Is that a trick question?

THE GLADIATOR MACE!

 

Misha

Im actually also curios about this. I leveled up my warrior to start gearing it out over this season, and I'm going for a gladiator weapon. Is mace still the best choise when you can't get one that has its own stun proc?

 

Shadowed

Yes it is, I did most of S1 using the Mace and it was fine even without having the BS T2.

 

Theldon

As far as Gladiator weapons are concerned, I'd pick the Gladiator Sword (due to the burst of sword spec). The Blacksmithing sword isn't that great as its too fast (low top end).

But the luxury of having such a powerful weapon that you can make (Blacksmith Mace/Axe) is that you can spend your points on gear. Your choice really. A Deep Thunder/Mooncleaver isn't that tough to make as it just requires 8+ heroic runs.

 

Samurro

Going as a warrior with mooncleaver into battle against a team with stormherald warri, is a 100% loose, if they aren't totaly retarded.

 

• Fogbug

only on 1/7th of their crits or thereabouts

 

gia

Can I have some more opinions on the savagery vs mongoose topic? I have savagery on my Deep Thunder atm and I'm trying to figure out what enchant to go for on a Stormherald. I currently have 1650 ap and 31% crit(battle stance) unbuffed. My focus is the arena of course, pve dps I don't care about.

I used to think savagery was best but I'm seeing mongoose everywhere so this is giving me second thoughts.

Also depending on how I gem my gear I gain either 28str or 28crit rating, I'm gemmed for crit currently but does anyone have a definitive say on this too?

Both of these questions are probably linked in a general ap vs crit debate, I wish there was a spreadsheet focused towards pvp arms warriors, but even then I'd be torn regarding burst dps vs sustained dps.

Thoughts?

 

Hoonboof

You do realise that the Gladiator Sword and Lionheart Exectioner both have the exact same speed and top end, right?

:goon2:

 

nfw

After the arena reset my shaman friend and I decided to do get more serious about arena. We were 6-4 the first week, 3 of the losses were against double stealth teams(rogue/druid, or rogue/rogue)

Any hints against these sorts of set up?

 

Randor

Go into zerker stance right away so you can use Zerker rage to get out of any stuns. Burn the druid down as quick as possible. Hamstring, thunderclap, Piercing Howl, fear the rogues awy till you burn the druid.

Also, stay clumped together and use sweeping strikes/cleave/WW to do damage on both. Demo shout as well.

This is a computer-generated message and needs no signature.

 

◊ Gwaihir

How geared is your shaman friend? I play a warr/sham 2v2 that went to 2220 last season, and those double stealth teams were one of our easier matchups. Make sure that your shaman has plenty of hp/resil, pvp trink, and a poison cleansing totem down at all times. As soon as you see it's a double stealth team, bloodrage and have him rank one heal you to get in combat to avoid an early sap.

Rogue/Rogue is the easiest by far, basically, if they sap shaman and go for the warr, he can ismply put on his shield and turtle up untill the shaman is out of the sap. The shaman needs to make sure to spam poison cleansing totem no matter where you go on the map, so you don't get caught out of range of it and are vulnerable to blind. Two rogues are going to have a very hard time killing a warr with 12k HP and a shield on before they simply run out of CC on the shaman. All the shaman needs is one second to break and NS Heal the warr, and the rogues are done. Once the initial stunlock/CC wears off, the rogues eat it in the face from a WF/Bloodlusted warr. It's even easier if the rogues go for the shaman, since your warr can zerk rage a sap, and then the shaman can simply dispel any blind.

If the shaman is undergeared, he might have some problems, but in good pvp gear with 10k+ hp, 280+ resil, and 11k AC, he should have no issue at all surviving. Make sure he uses full healing gear + spellpower totem + clicky trinkets to earthshield himself before the match starts and then swaps in to his PvP gear- Doing this means you can get flat earth shield ticks for 1100 instead of the 6-700 you might get from an earth shield cast in PvP gear.

Druid/rogue is by far the tougher matchup. A great deal in this matchup depends on how good the druid is at either kiting the warr, or using roots and cyclone to keep the warr off the rogue. If the rogue goes for the warr, you should win handily. With the shaman shocking all the druid's direct heals, the rogue will not last long. The cyclones he can throw on you will not be long enough for one rogue to kill a warrior, not even close. This match will for sure be a mana war though, so having the shaman use a good deal of regen gear is a good idea. The only way this will end fast is if the warr gets a large number of good WF crits on the rogue, and forces the druid to abandon any cyclone/root spam to heal or let the rogue die.

Basically, you can't let the match turn in to a rogue vs shaman + warr vs druid. A druid will last *much* longer while kiting a warr than a shaman can last against a good rogue. Deep Thunder/Stormherald can really do a ton to turn it in your favor, thanks to mace stuns on the druid, but it's still a loosing task to chase a druid down. Essentially just keep your warrior on the rogue, while the shaman tries to keep in range to shock the druid's heals/cyclones, and run the druid OOM from healing the rogue.

The addition of WF, Purge, and Earthshock really make the sham/warr matchup better here than the usual pala/warr. You loose BoF, but really BoF is not that needed. If the warr gets rooted, the shaman stands on the warr to let him attack the rogue. If the shaman is rooted, the warr is free to act. Cyclone will not last long enough on either of you for a rogue to burst down, and with poison cleansing you don't really have to worry about blinds. So long as you don't let the your warr get baited in to endless chasing the running druid while the rogue runs the shaman oom, you should have a very good chance against this combo.

 

nfw

Thanks for the hints. Neither of us are that geared (we are in the 1500s), I have around 10k hp and he's got 7.5k, I think. We each have 1 piece of S2 gladiator and 1 piece S2 PvP, since we didn't start serious PvP until very recently, we are using mostly PvE gear. (so are most of our opponents, I suspect, but the teams that crush us probably farmed the arena system a lot more).

I just slapped my forehead when I read the part about standing on top of each other, I never thought of that.

 

lordofzedance

I too was on a warrior / shaman team that went to the 2200s last season - and currently ranked 13 on bg9.

We find that rogue/ druid is actually a lot harder then you make it out to be - against a good rogue / druid team (a good example would be xecks and secretive, who are topping bg9 atm) it is exceedingly difficult for the warrior to keep MS up on the rogue. This problem gets even worse if the rogue is combat maces like xecks is.

Basically if the rogue and druid have good coordination the rogue can chain a 5 second kidney shot into a 6 second cyclone from the druid - running MS out and allowing a rejuv + swiftmend to heal the rogue to full while my warrior is sitting in cyclone with 5 stacks of wounding on him at half hp. Not to mention the rogue has a fairly good chance of just straight parrying or dodging an MS which tips the mana war firmly in the favor of the druid / rogue. This is exactly how xecks / secretive played it when we went against them for the first time - and they beat us handily since i went oom ridiculously quickly trying to spam heal through 5 stack wound poison while my warrior sat there stunned unable to keep ms up or even do any damage.

On another note, another druid /rogue team (deep/trukilla) tried the novel concept of bursting me down from the start. trukilla is prep and rolls around with tk /ssc gear, meaning he hits a lot harder then the average gladiator geared rogue. At the start when me and my partner realised it was a stealth team we did our normal routine - totem forest + berserker stance and ghost wolf to avoid the sap. Seconds later - deep and trukilla open on me simultaneously - both popping their ap trinkets. I literally went from 11000 hp to 3000 in about 3 seconds. Prep allowed trukilla to double CB for burst then vanish into a garrote to keep me locked down after the initial stun. Somehow, i managed to get loose and NS heal while my warrior worked on the rogue. I managed to earthshock some heals while my warrior was sitting in cyclone and eventually the rogue was downed and we won.

I mention this because this is about the first time ive seen a team so well coordinate their burst - and just the fact that they almost killed me when im sporting 11k armour and 300 resilience in the intial seconds is quite the eye opener. i can only say that i feel sorry for the double dps caster teams that go up against deep/trukilla.

 

◊ Gwaihir

Yea, rogue + Druid teams can really be deadly if they have great coordination. It is a combo that takes really good skills and teamwork to make work, but it really does have pretty massive potential. I would say that the number of teams that can really pull it off are a relative minority, but when they do it leaves you smashing your face against the wall in frustration >.<

 

Colan

I've been in a 2v2 for a bit with my pally friend and I noticed that the one team we really have any trouble with is frost mage/rogue teams. The entire fight tends to follow this pattern-

Paladin gets jumped and then stun locked by the rogue while I get constantly frost bolted, frost nova'd, and sheeped. Cleanse is usually out of the question due to being kicked/counter spelled every time he tries to heal himself to stay alive. Paladin bubbles, heals himself to full while I struggle to stay out of CC and kill the rogue. After bubble goes down, paladin dies easy, I usually finish off the rogue, then the frost mage kills me.

I was wondering if anybody had any advice against this combo? It's been frustrating me to no end and I know that if we didn't have so much trouble with them than our rating would be higher than it is now.

 

◊ Gwaihir

Seems like a bubble + BoF/cleanse spam would be more than enough time to let you stay on the rogue, since they don't have either heals, their own bof, or offensive dispels, they don't have a counter. You are probably best off waiting until right after the rogue drops a kidney shot on the pally, then having him bubble, BoF you, and you intercept-> smack rogue in the face. By the time the bubble drops you should have been able to put out more than dps on the rogue than they can recover from.

 

Crossbones

Have the paladin chain cleanse/BoF the warrior while he attacks the rogue and let the rogue beat on the paladin until he's low (don't even try and heal aside from holy shock) and then bubble. This is a good 20+ seconds where a rogue without a healer has to deal with a warrior (and a HoJ from the paladin) and he'll often either die or panic and try to sprint/vanish off whereupon you can now put huge pressure on the mage and often re-reveal the rogue since he won't have time to finesse his opener though consecration/war aoes/etc.

Or you have the paladin BoF himself and kite the rogue while cleansing/BoF'ing the warrior (who may or may not switch to his shield if he can't keep range). Double DPS teams are all about surviving the initial encounter and then cleaning it up.

I find most just open on the war and hope for a counterspell, and using bubble early to keep the momentum in the warrior's favor is key. Your biggest problem other than eating the CS is having the rogue sprint vanish off and the mage iceblock and wait until bubble is over in an attempt to reset the fight with their cds intact but without yours.

 

Nethris

Hmm, don't think I've been in such a matchup recently, but a fully healed warr with BoF, intercept, and a PvP trinket all available should have a pretty good shot at taking a frost mage down before they can use iceblock again, right? Or do you have problems with the mage spellstealing BoF?


Been wondering about this myself, just got Stormherald made and need to decide on an enchant...

Seen a lot of people using Mongoose, and I like the look better, but it just doesn't seem to be worth it when I try to figure out what I'd actually get from it...

The 70 AP from savagery is about 20 weapon damage on auto attacks and 17-18 on specials with a 3.8 speed weapon, right? Forgotten the exact numbers on agi per crit for warrs at 70, but I think it's around 30, which puts Mongoose as +4% crit or so and a minor haste boost for 15 seconds... in 15 seconds, on a stationary target, I'll get 3-4 auto attacks, 2-3 MS attacks, and 1-2 whirlwinds off given enough rage... so using bad statistics (ignoring the possibility of multiple extra crits), that's 24-36% chance per proc that I'll get a crit I wouldn't have without mongoose, and the guarantee of some fraction of an additional auto attack. That doesn't sound like much when I'm likely to have auto attacks delayed frequently by being temporarily out of range =/

From another angle, since both hits and crits are mitigated the same amount from armor, on a target with just enough resilience to offset the impale bonus (not much resilience), if 70 AP is giving an average of 18 weapon damage across all attacks, I need roughly 18/0.04 = 450 buffed weapon damage for mongoose to be better if it was up all the time, 900 buffed weapon damage if it was up half the time, and 1350 if it was up 1/3 of the time. I definately have over 1k buffed weapon damage before mitigation, but not 1350... and higher resilience will favor savagery more.

So just how often does mongoose tend to be up during arena combat? 1/3 of the time? more? less? Is the haste benefit worth it on a 2-hander in PvP where most targets won't be in range 100% of the time? Do people try to use imp slam when mongoose is up to get more attacks in/hope it procs in a rage dump situation?

 

Shadowed

It's ( AP / 14 ) * speed if I recall, so yes around 20 weapon damage on auto attacks and 17-18 on specials, it's something like 33.333 AGI per 1% crit at level 70.