Curious to the thoughts of the people here on the chain mana burning tactic thats featured so prominently in any 5v5 arena match with a priest... there is nothing more devastating to PvP mana pools. Leave a priest momentarily unchecked and one of your mana users can be stripped bare of mana. The tactic is so important that lately I'm seeing some priests attempt to bait your interrupts with heals so they can squeeze out as many mana burns as they can.

Question is: Is this tactic a little too important?

No, i like the idea that each class brings something unique to the table and manaburn is a really good example of it. Its not THAT hard to keep them from doing it and it brings something more than dps and healing into the game.

Today was our first day of 5v5 arenas, When we ran into a bloodlusted priest chaining drain mana on our paladin and priest we were devastated. Let's just say we learned our lesson and now priests are our second focus fire target, after warlocks.

It's not really a solution to focus the Priest in question. Keeping an eye on him, interrupt regularly - MNP and CoT also help a lot. Depending an your team makeup, focusing the priest may be that worse of all options.

Our core is three physical dps classes, just made sense to us to focus clothies.

Shh, don't do anything to stop the flood of posts about how every healer should always be replaced by a paladin! Paladins do everything a priest can do, only better! Shhh!

Scorpid Poison + Viper Sting + Silencing Shot on a mana-burning priest shuts them up and makes them lose ground in the mana burn war.

Yeah in 5v5 at least we found that killing pets first is a must against some teams. The amount of problems a scorpid or felhunter can cause is astounding if left unchecked.

Scorpids seem really harmless until you realize it has a 5 stack of poison on your healer with viper sting on him.

Call me an arena noob, but what does the scorpid sting have to do with it?

Makes cleansing viper stings/other poisons a pain because of global cooldown.

They are talking about the pet skill scorpid poison which is a stackable poison.

You can actually purify the viper sting off a UA'd target, but I imagine the majority of paladins don't have that on their bars.

a team with a hunter and an affliction warlock sounds pretty squishy though

Hunters are anything but squishy.

They seem pretty squishy to me... mail armor is their only real defense if they get someone beating on them.. and that doesn't help against casters. Most other classes have some form of avoidance they can use without having to spec for it (ie: deterrence).

They're definitely "squishy", but with Blessing of Freedom and Entrapment Frost Traps, your melee will be lucky to even touch them-- Especially on Blade's Edge. Even if you do Purge off BoF, they've already got you running through their traps and their Hamstring/Crippling is gone. We ran into this problem last night vs. an EJ team with Hau.

Ahh... Druids and shaman would have less of a problem with that.

So should warlocks be mana draining as well?

Figure if you throw a CoS up on your target you'll get 10% extra, plus reduce their chance to resist it - which works out to 1100 mana returned (I'm forgetting if it's affected by +dmg / trinkets, etc) - so as long as you get a solid 3 sec of the 5 sec channel you break even on mana spent (assuming no effect from +dmg) for the drain, and if you get the full 5 sec, you basically get back the cost of the CoS as well.

As opposed to a priest who has a cast time, can get CoT'd, and has a net loss of 500+ mana each cast... plus are resists treated differently b/c the priest mana drain also deals damage?

CoS doesn't affect mana drained other than being an affliction effect for soul siphon.

Bummer. Wowheads got it as a shadow spell.

http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=30908

Mana burn and mind control are probably overpowered in 2v2/3v3, it's pretty impossible to counter unless you try to dps the priest which with full arena gear, resilience and with an arena spec while they are running around a pylon is an exercise in futility.

I've already started to collect a shadow resist set but of course there's no healing shadow resist crafted stuff and very little good plate.

My experience in 5v5 is that the shaman or pally does the bulk of the healing while the priest mainly mass dispells, pw: shields and mana burns. I can't imagine warlocks having time to mana burn between CoT'ing every caster and trying to stay alive.

5 seconds for 1k mana is just so much slower than 2 seconds for 1k mana and 500 damage though. Plus, a warlock is much better suited doing other things (cc'ing and dotting mostly). Personally, though, I'm almost never able to mana burn because I always have a warrior on me pretty much from the start of the arena til the end (or I die), because my team doesn't really have an anti-warrior class (we have a hunter, but he's usually not enough). Having a mage or even druid helps free the priest up alot for mana burn.

Speaking of mages, I personally thing that mages are underrated in 5v5 as well. Their water goes a long way to counter mana burn, and sheeps to peel melee or interrupt healers are amazing in 5v5. Add to that some decent burst if specced, and pretty much the best survivability of any clothie and you've got a very well rounded class for 5v5.