I believe Spoh's team and Sad Panda's team have done very well in building very anti melee teams that excel in Shadowburn's battlegroup because we have a lot of melee centered teams. I don't think it's fair to judge Spoh's team as a good or bad setup as I know they have fought all the teams we have. And we do have some very good caster heavy teams in the battlegroup. It would of been interesting if the WoW tournament hadn't been setup so poorly to see the true top teams queue. Hopefully next season we will be able to see how a top 2warrior/2paladin/druid team fairs against the rest of the battlegroups.

I think the future of arena will revolve around balanced teams such as warrior/paladin/priest/mage/ with a hunter a elemental shaman subbing out for each other depending on the match up. From my experiences switching out one member to better suit you for a match up can grant you a win. But having a balanced team with classes to sub in and out for each other is the best way to stay on top in any battlegroup.

Absolutely the truth.

People ran Warrior/Druid/Paladin/Shaman mixed teams because casters didn't have the Resilience to stand up to a melee assist-train. Next season you're going to see Priests/Warlocks/Mages with 12k HP and 350-400 Resilience. This will make those three classes a TON better overall than they were to start season one. I can tell you that I've noticed a massive difference in how long I live from the first week of arenas (where a Rogue/Warrior combo killed me in like.. 5 seconds with Heroism up) to now, where I can stand there with two melee on me and be healed effectively. It just took some time for casters to get what they needed to become more viable and less friendly as assist targets. These cookie-cutter high armor teams aren't going to cut it next season. It's a quick and easy way to 2k rating (with people who aren't total morons) but I firmly believe in season 2, any teams who really try and keep their 3 class arena team makeups are going to notice how cloth has caught up.

It's not just the melee assist train. These classes do massively more damage against cloth regardless of resilience, and can go forever without mana, making them extremely good for attrition battles. What's going to get hurt is the burst instagib teams.

No I agree with you.. I'm just saying that before, cloth were dying like instantly.. lol..

It was like throwing a match on a pile of cloth soaked in gasoline. Blow Heroism and put 2 melee on any cloth during week one. He just blows up. We had no survivability (unless you were an ice Mage) initially. Mana matters over the course of a longer game but the bigger issue was caster classes like a UA Warlock dying before he even gets a chance to empty one full mana bar without Lifetapping. At that point it had nothing to do with mana or attrition. The guy just couldn't take a beating.

I have some experience on a druid in 5on5. Its not "top end" arena, since our peak is on 1960 rating and we have lost and gained alot of players that have distrupted our playstyle and process.

We run a warrior mage(with slow/frost) rogue(me, combat fist) priest and druid setup.
We had a streak of 9games wins aroudn 1800. (Our battlegroup is kinda competative, or thats what ppl have told me atleast.) And just recently lost like 7games in a row.

So after some dicussion with the group we have more or less analized whats working and whats not.
As everyone of u guys know, druids ace are Cyclone. So, the earlier wins, we got from running a 1vs1 setup in 5on5. Trying to drag the game out and minimize dmg taken to open up for our priest to manaburn enemy paladins. (Everyone knows a oomed paladin is game over.) A example start would be Warrior on enemy hunter, i would go vs enemy rogue/shaman/warlock/warrior, mage could simply sheep anything that nukes me or the priest(excluding the target im doing my best to kite/stunlock.), while the druid does the same thing, aka assisting in crowdcontroling/interrupting their dps. Now, since we run mage priest druid, we got CC, we have water, we have manaburn. It works very well, the teams thats hardest are easyplay gimmick teams with 2x warriors and bloodlust/pala. But with massdispell, mage on TF totems Cyclone, its doable but it really puts some pressure on us.

The best use of this strategy would be to replace me with a hunter for viper sting and more CC. But hey, we try it this way.
The games we lost we tried to CC and nuke one target down Asap. Which only resulsts in our priest dying and their users staying alive due to Bop/Bof(since our priets will be busy struggeling vs their assist train). No matter how hard we tried it just didnt work. We got some 2vs3 games but with enemy pala/warrior/random alive in the end we just didnt cut it.

So.

druid+priest+more CC and water and go for long games, works.

I'm curious what happens when that teams priest gets sheeped and then feared and then sheeped. Or just fear priest, sheep warrior and eat up the druid. Having only 1 defensive dispel is scary especially as a priest. A paladin can sort of get away with it by using blessing of sacrafice, but a priest magic cced is just out of the fight after their trinket is down.

Now you're just being ridiculous. You said yourself that you swap out your Priest/Shaman. What is your team going to do when the Priest (yourself) isn't there? And where are you finding the time to get these mana burns off with a BOF'd Warrior on your ass 24/7? They're going to put their Warriors on the biggest threats (always have, always will), with the absolute intention of interrupting the living hell out of everything you try to cast and you say you're going to go for the Druid? Well godamn, have fun with that one while the Paladins spam heal him, the Warriors snare you all and you waste a ton of mana and time trying to kill him. I'm willing to bet they wouldn't give two shits about your rank 1 frostbolting Mage, nor your Warrior. They're more likely to laugh at them for chasing after Spoh.

Again: They WANT you to go for Spoh. Instead of mana burning you they play decoy and make you waste your own time and mana.

Now I'm not saying they're unbeatable, but for goodness sakes show at least a little bit of respect for the opinions of people in top teams of other battlegroups who play against teams like these on a weekly basis.

If you were to come up to me 3 weeks ago and tell me that an all-caster, mana-dependent, 3+ clothie team could perform amazingly well in the arenas I'd have called you a frigging lunatic. Having played Clan Hex on the tournament realm and other newly rising all-caster teams in our own battlegroup, my opinion has changed.

Cyclone is nice in 5v5 (unless you run a single healer setup like we do - but hey we got to 1700 with that), but it is godly in 2v2. I just started playing 2s, but after a 17-4 start I must say it is very satisfying to be on par with the classes that just completely outshine me in 5v5. A druid/warrior combo can actually outlast pally/X in 2v2 while I could never, ever, hope to outlast a pally in 5v5. And it is also nice to see other classes that are shunned in 5v5 (eg warlocks) do well.

Surprisingly though, the 100th highest rated druid in 2v2 is still over 100 points lower than the 100th highest rated warrior or pally or priest or whatever.

Just have a Paladin put JoJ up on the druid, and he can't kite at all. Its quite amusing, and as long as you are putting dots up on the Druid, won't be dispelled anytime soon.

I currently run with an Affliction Lock, and we do okay. (2250ish - it comes and goes depending what matchups we get every saturday) Ideally we'd like to shoot for top 20, but we don't have the gear yet (at least I don't, no time for honor farming ) but hopefully soon we can get there and play with the big boys.

The only teams we consistently have problems with are anything with a Priest, or Rogue. Priest/Rogue together is just ugh, if its a Rogue and any other healer we might win depending entirely on how good the rogue is (does he kick fire spells, etc.)

Same story for Elemental Shaman/Warlock - ugh. Too many interrupts and too much damage for any healer to deal with, they just burst myself or my partner down very, very quickly.

The only thing that's amazing is that people haven't discovered this insanely strong setup earlier considering how well it performs in 2on2 and 3on3 (lock/spriest/paladin).

I don't see Clan Hex beeing at a disadvantage running this setup, in fact it's probably the opposite due to the incredible scaling and synergy between warlocks and spriests. Add the fact that resilience doesn't affect dots and you have a setup that will only get stronger the better geared their opponents gets.

I'm assuming you are talking about 2v2. What I would do vs the priest rogue is make sure you are out of los of that priest. Getting mana burned even once can cause you to lose. I would think the bop would allow your warlock to put at least full dots on the priest before the rogue starts to stunlock him again. Also I looked at your partner's profile. He could use the rest of his gladiator set and offsets from honor grinding. It has been my experience that gladiator gear and resilience in general scales very well with casters. Plus all your dps is unmitigated dots and the rogue has to go through your lock's resilience. But I would avoid focusing on the rogue for sure due to cloak of shadows.

As for the Elemental shaman Warlock I would just DoT then los. run around the pillar with freedom on whoever they are trying to kill and run the shaman out of mana from healing through the dots.

I queue with druid warrior right now and any team with a good mage gives us trouble as they just sheep me and nuke my druid. Mage Warlock give us the most trouble. I do my best not to get sheeped but between two iceblocks and pom the mage can choose to sheep me anytime he wants really. I found getting the gem in the arenas that puts the 2% dot on myself works very well but I would like to find a more permanent solution.

Druid warrior is a nice combo because people don't know how to deal with it and we can beat a lot of the copycat teams(Warrior/Paladin, Warlock/Priest, Rogue/Druid) But mage and warlock definatly give me a lot of trouble.

Its okay, you should see how bad they do vs War/Paladin.

Actually I think I am going to dig up my +damage gear from the bank (almost 700) and instead of trying to just heal the lock (which is a losing battle) I'll heal and as soon as I BOP, go all out nuke and go after the Rogue - force him to spam heal his partner, and hopefully with the Felhunter, and maybe some luck we can pull a -W- off.

I can do some pretty mean damage to a rogue, and I rarely if ever have to bubble vs that team anyways, so I could just AW and see if I can pop off a 2k HS + 1700 JoR or JoB... Possibly *right* after a CoS I could see this working, along with a well-timed HOJ/DC on the Priest.

Priest/Rogue we actually do better against than Rogue/Paladin - since we can CoEx the Rogue and it just becomes a kite game then, and my Partner has essentially unlimited mana. We just mercilessly go after the Priest and can win maybe 60% of the time.

It depends what cooldowns he's burning, I could see that working a couple of times by suprising them, but all the Rogue would have to do is save a cooldown and burn it when you're about to nuke him, Gouge you, sprint away, vanish, CLoS, blind, whatever.

How is the Rogue letting you kite him though with CoEx? He can always snare/stun you and the Priest could dispel BoF.

I see the problem with the rogue stunlocking you. Maybe a differnt spec is in order. Backlash while a rogue is hitting you that fast could be nice. Also shadowfury is some time for some damage. I think affliction works very well with a shadow priest. But other than that I think it's a better 5v5 spec than a 2v2 spec as you are the target in 2v2 and in 5v5 you are still most likely the target I would think you would be able to live a lot longer. I don't play a warlock but I have fought against them and even swinging a 2her backlash procs a lot and throwing out an instant shadowbolt in my face is pretty annoying. Although I am not stunlocking you like a rogue would so I can't be sure as to how effective destruction would be instead of affliction vs that setup

dispelling bop seems to never work for me. When I queue with a shaman in 3v3 I call for pruge and it seems to always get resisted just enough for the player to do something inside the bop and the healer to land a big heal on the target. I have just gotten used to intercepting the healer after the bop goes out and prevent as much healing as I can.

With cloak being such a small timer I can't really see a warlock paladin being able to zerg down a rogue with a healer and no healing debuff on him. That matchup seems pretty one sided for them though which seems to be the case for a lot of 2v2 match ups. Druid/rogue beats shadowpriest/warlock but loses to warrior/paladin. Warrior paladin loses to shadowpriest/warlock though. Like a big game of rock paper scissors. I'm not saying that those match ups can't win against an equally skilled/geared counterparts. But it requires a bit of luck to do it in my experience.

... They have played against it, rememer? The whole bit for bit thing I did with you a couple pages back? Yeah, it's all explained right there. Why do you keep bringing up BOF? It's like you don't have an offensive dispeller in your battlegroup or something. Really though, Warriors just don't do the kind of damage people think they do without Shamans. Sure they're on top, but not when they're completely at the mercy of another team because their Paladins are FORCED to spam heal someone. Although you'll probably come back and suggest that I should be removing CoT and healing myself... things like that. And I'll follow up your post by responding with, "DEATHCOIL COUNTERSPELL AP POM KABLOOEY!" Oh, but I almost got that COT off!

Alas, the good old theorycraft vs experience debate continues. If you want to continue in your little delusion that the only reason a team like that is at the top of our battlegroup, is that the rest of our battlegroup is terrible at PVP and continue being emo about how Druids are the most worthless class in the universe, go for it. That pride of yours just might fill up enough of the arena that their Druid has nowhere to run to.

Warlock could work, but considering how many dual warrior teams there is in our battlegroup i would much rather have an entrapment hunter instead of me. That would increase our survivability to the edge of silly. Debuffs aint that big problem really, we have priest and mage that are free most of the time, remember running a rogue makes him focus fierd. Alot.